Egyptian religion: “There is an afterlife, and this is what it’s like.”
Roman religion: “Uhhh idk”
(By contrast to the effective motivator of Egyptian religion, weighing your soul’s sins against a feather and all that jazz, Roman religion never had a very clear conception of the afterlife; various ideas are floated in Roman texts, ranging from reincarnation, to joining the spirits of the ancestors, to Hades and the Elysian Fields, to oneness with the divine - hard to make a coherent argument for spiritual benefits when you can’t even decide what benefit that is!)
The whole idea of religion with the Romans is interesting for sure … I think they were very practical about the whole idea along with the way they saw everything else. I think they just realized life and death in a very practical way … that we are born, we live and then we die - full stop. There was nothing beforehand, there is something now, and there is nothing after. And I think it is stuff like that that made it very hard for late period Romans to appreciate … why would you fight for a system that doesn’t have any promises for an afterlife, let alone the life you are currently living? And I think it was one of the driving forces behind why everything shifted towards Christianity … it was a promise to non-believers and those not born to a religion to gain access to some mystical afterlife and also a threat to any non-believer that they would burn in everlasting hell and damnation. It’s easy to make these promises and threats to uneducated masses … it’s basically still happening today.
Egyptian religion: “There is an afterlife, and this is what it’s like.”
Roman religion: “Uhhh idk”
(By contrast to the effective motivator of Egyptian religion, weighing your soul’s sins against a feather and all that jazz, Roman religion never had a very clear conception of the afterlife; various ideas are floated in Roman texts, ranging from reincarnation, to joining the spirits of the ancestors, to Hades and the Elysian Fields, to oneness with the divine - hard to make a coherent argument for spiritual benefits when you can’t even decide what benefit that is!)
The whole idea of religion with the Romans is interesting for sure … I think they were very practical about the whole idea along with the way they saw everything else. I think they just realized life and death in a very practical way … that we are born, we live and then we die - full stop. There was nothing beforehand, there is something now, and there is nothing after. And I think it is stuff like that that made it very hard for late period Romans to appreciate … why would you fight for a system that doesn’t have any promises for an afterlife, let alone the life you are currently living? And I think it was one of the driving forces behind why everything shifted towards Christianity … it was a promise to non-believers and those not born to a religion to gain access to some mystical afterlife and also a threat to any non-believer that they would burn in everlasting hell and damnation. It’s easy to make these promises and threats to uneducated masses … it’s basically still happening today.