Ancient Babylonian mythology was basically that that there is a hell and everybody goes there - you eat dust, drink mud, and you have wings that just kind drag on the ground. Oh except for the Noah predecessor and family. [Forgot the name - begins with L.] They were granted bodily immortality and live forever in a beautiful garden somewhere on earth. But everyone else goes to hell.

You don't hear the "If there's a heaven, there must be a hell" argument as much. (At least I don't.)

Yeah, I was trying to think if I'd heard it like that before, and how much more or less sense it would make.

I have a hard time buying that some souls just dissipate and some don't. Give me a reason or an action, yeah -- burning bones, e.g. -- but independent of that action? A soul is a soul is a soul, or else you're working in a universe that requires a lot of explanation.

And if everybody has a soul, and the vast majority of people don't get stranded dead on earth like Hook Man, then where do they all go? If you want to posit a neutral/drab/empty underworld, that's fine -- and that may be what the reaper was alluding to in the season opener. But the demon last night didn't say "underworld" and she didn't say "drab" -- she said "Hell" and "screaming," and that it was something exceptional being applied to John and not to any Tom Dick or Harry who dies. That's kind of specific, and I wish I had some idea whether she was exaggerating for effect, telling the bare truth, or completely making shit up just to get a good look at Dean's angst-face.

FYI, the Bablyonian name for the Noah-figure, according to Gilgamesh, is Utnapishtim. And Gar is right -- only he lives forever; even Gilgamesh, who learns the secret of immortality, is doomed to forget it by the time he gets home.

Strega, I don't see any reason to believe he doesn't think those tropes are overused and it pisses him off now when he sees them. I've also got no reason to assume he hasn't seen movies with them in that he's enjoyed.

Call it a misapplication of Ockham's razor, call me an unsophisticated reader, but that's where I'm at.

if there's a hellish realm, even if it's called Shrimplessness, it kind of has to be balanced out by an opposite, don't you think?

No in the big picture, and for the Winchesterverse, also no. And at the very least in the Winchesterverse it might very well exist and it be something that this family, or even most hunters give no thought to, because of who they are, how they look at things, and the choices they made.

eta: About the actual show I just watched...I was so very creeped out by Hudson's wife's face getting all stretchy. That was nasty. Strength of my reaction took me by surprise too.

Nutty, there's more than a few religions that don't necessarily believe in a life after death. For instance, the Navajo believe that the bad parts of your personality remain hanging around as ghosts, but otherwise gone is gone. Some religions believe in an eventual resurrection, which means that the good souls might get saved in memory (so to speak) until Judgment Day which doesn't preclude Hellish torment until such time.

The fact that there's a Reaper doing something with souls argues that yes, there is an equal-and-opposite fate for good souls....

This is all prefaced by a lack of memory for the details of the Reaper episode.

The fact that there's a Reaper doing something with souls argues that yes, there is an equal-and-opposite fate for good souls....

Why does it argue for equal and opposite? Why does it argue for more than different?

Would "tend to support a suppostion that" read better to you?

I don't think it tends to support anything other than different, myself. I think if we didn't come from such a culture of duality, we wouldn't be assuming that different implied opposite.

Naturally, the writers come from the same culture--that's why I might argue for 180°, but they may also be working to mix things up a little.

I think we'd be subconsciously (at the very least) dissatisfied with the idea that there's no large reward in a system that has such large penalties. But that's entirely metatextual reasoning for me.

Doctor Who: I'm looking forward to the creature. I hope it's a balrog -- you know given the digging too deep aspect of things.