What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThe dead will rise bodily — death is not the end of the body's story.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Transhumanism are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
Travels across5 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderTerasem · 2004 CE
Turns up as13 tenets · 6 storys · 4 rites · 3 figures
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 12 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 7 faiths of this family hold it
The resurrection defeated death.
The tomb was empty — the claim on which Paul stakes the entire faith.
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The body rises. Not the soul only.
The creed says resurrection of the body and it means the body. That is why Christians buried rather than burned for most of their history, why the catacombs exist, and why the Orthodox still resist cremation — Rome permitted it in 1963, with conditions about where the ashes may end up.
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The dead will rise.
Techiyat hametim sits in the second blessing of the Amidah, said standing, three times a day: who revives the dead. Orthodox Jews say it as written. Classical Reform changed the line to who gives life to all, and recent Reform prayer books print both and let the congregation choose.
held by most
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There is a world to come, and Judaism will not describe it.
Olam haba is promised constantly and pictured almost never. Gehinnom is capped at twelve months in rabbinic law, which is exactly why a child says kaddish for a parent for eleven — nobody implies their parent needed the full sentence.
held by most
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The twenty-one on the beach.
In February 2015 Islamic State published a video of twenty-one men in orange jumpsuits beheaded on a Libyan shore; twenty were Egyptian Copts working as labourers, and the twenty-first, Matthew Ayariga, was Ghanaian and would not separate himself from them. The Coptic Synod added them to the Synaxarium within a week. In 2023 the Catholic Church put them in the Roman Martyrology — the first saints the two churches have recognised together since the fifth century.
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Our Lady of Deliverance, 31 October 2010.
Gunmen took the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Sayidat al-Nejat in Baghdad during Sunday evening Mass and held the congregation for hours; the assault that ended it left fifty-eight dead, including two priests, and around seventy-eight wounded. The Islamic State of Iraq claimed it. It remains the deadliest single attack on Iraqi Christians on record, and it accelerated the emptying of Baghdad's Christian quarters.
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You do not have an immortal soul, so there is nowhere to torment you.
The dead are unconscious and know nothing until the resurrection. Immortality is not a possession but a gift given at judgment to those found faithful; the rejected are destroyed rather than punished forever. There is no devil as a person — the diabolos of Scripture is read as human sinful nature.
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The Second Coming already happened, and the church has been living in it since.
Shakers hold that the Christ Spirit appeared a second time in Ann Lee, which means the millennium is not awaited but inhabited. Everything else follows: if this is the resurrection life, then people neither marry nor are given in marriage, and the community is heaven's order tried out on earth.
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The church will be taken out before the tribulation begins.
Darby worked out in the 1830s that Christ's coming has two stages — a secret removal of the church, then a public appearing seven years later — and that Israel and the church are two separate peoples with separate destinies. Almost every rapture novel, prophecy chart and end-times film of the last century runs on his scheme.
held by most
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Transhumanism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Death is optional.
The second of the four Truths, and the operative one: if a person is a pattern, then recording the pattern now and running it later is a survival strategy rather than a memorial.
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Building a mindfile.
The actual daily practice: uploading video, writing, photographs and questionnaire answers into a personal archive, continuously, for decades, against the possibility of later reinstantiation.
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Signing up to be frozen.
It is paperwork, not a ceremony: membership, a life insurance policy assigned to the provider, and a bracelet so the standby team is called in time. It is nevertheless the one thing transhumanists do that costs money every month and marks them out.
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Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
The grave is not empty waiting.
Between death and resurrection lies the barzakh, and it opens with two angels, Munkar and Nakir, and three questions: who is your Lord, what is your religion, who is this man. The grave then widens into garden or closes in. Modernist scholars and some Salafis read the scene as figurative; the funeral liturgy does not.
held by most
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The People of the Cave.
Young men who hid in a cave rather than give up their faith and woke three centuries later, sending one of them into town with a coin nobody would take. The sura is recited by many Muslims every Friday, and the story is shared with Christianity, where it is the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
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Russian Cosmism
— one faith of this family holds it
Death is not a law of nature but a failure of coordination.
Fyodorov called it a manifestation of our immaturity and our incapacity for mutual support — a description of a species that has not yet organised itself, rather than of the universe.
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The task is to raise the fathers, atom by atom.
Not resurrection in memory or in spirit. Fyodorov meant the physical reassembly of every human being who has died, performed by their descendants using science, and he called it the common task because there is no other.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The end is renovation.
Frashokereti: evil defeated finally, the dead raised, the world made fresh — the template later apocalypses inherited.
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In the end everyone is saved.
The developed eschatology has the dead raised, the whole of creation passed through a flood of molten metal — pleasant as warm milk to the good, agonising to the wicked — and then all souls, including those in hell, restored. Evil is not merely defeated but abolished, and hell empties.
held by most
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