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Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
I remember enjoying reading the book "After Lives" byJohn Casey, about different conceptions of the afterlife. Obviously, the only possibility of living eternally would be some kind of "biological uploading" carried out across time by a future altruistic civilization, something that seems highly improbable to us today (but which would trump Pascal's wager, by the way).
In any case, these fantasies are above all revealing of the culture of each era. Why did the Egyptians believe in the afterlife and not the Babylonians? Many consider that this belief in divine benevolence implied a certain progression in earthly benevolence.