City Fan....I try to do that a lot, but I got caught up in writing it (as I found some good Hellenistic sources that shed light on expressions in Paul and 2 Peter on the subject of leaving the body at death), and I was sooo close to finishing and just wanted to insert a comment to AlmostAtheist about not confusing the biblical belief in the resurrection with the Society's mongrel "recreation" doctrine when the silly puter crashed. I will have to save the posts as I'm writing them more often, I guess, tho it's a pain because I have to save them in HTML format (otherwise the formatting of the Word or Wordpad gets inserted into the text).
Rather than try to reconstruct what I just wrote, I think I'll start start a separate thread on death, the afterlife, and immortality in the Bible instead, but prolly not anytime right away. Meanwhile, I'll just ask Schizm to explain 2 Corinthians 5:1-9, 12:2-4, Philippians 1:21-24, and 2 Peter 1:13-14, particularly how does one "depart" the body or go "out of the body" if the person is just an animated body, and especially the implication in 2 Corinthians 5:1-9 that Christians go to heaven to "be with the Lord" right at death, since one is "in the body absent from the Lord" during life while at death one is "absent from the body and with the Lord". There's more....the metaphor of the "tent" that Paul and the author of 2 Peter uses is commonplace in Hellenistic writings to refer to the body as the recepticle of the soul (cf. Democritus, Sextus the Pythagorean, etc.), and strongly suggests influence from Hellenistic philosophy -- tho Paul still refrains from using the word psukhé "soul" (which refers to the whole person, as it does in Hellenistic gnosticism, which instead uses the word pneuma to refer to the immortal divine spark inside people) and appears to hold to a form of conditional immortality (through the resurrection, which is a gift of God) rather than the inherent immortality of Platonism. Anyway, I think Merle had sufficient reason to expect what she expected from the Bible, which of course as a disparate collection of writings embraces a multiplicity of anthropologies and beliefs about personal eschatology.