Who gave us hell, heaven, purgatory?

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighiere

By Alex P. Vidal

NEW YORK CITY -- Is there really a hell, heaven and purgatory litterally?
Religion tells us they exist.
Many independent thinkers and philosophers believe they don't exist literally.
One of them is lawyer-philosopher Ernie J. Dayot of Dingle, Iloilo who exhorted this writer to read more about Italian poet Dante Alighiere or simply called "Dante." 

LAWYER-PHILOSOPHER Ernie J. Dayot and Alex P. Vidal

In the book, Who's Who In The Middle Ages by Dr. John Fines I acquired from Barnes and Noble in Manhattan for $7.98, Dante was described as "a voracious reader of vernacular as well as classical literature, and he claimed to know the Aeneid by heart. He also studied painting and music."
Fines describes Dante further: "By 1287, he was at Bologna--possibly at the university, but his whole heart was set on poetry, and at this young age he dared to submit a sonnet for criticism to the leading poet of the age, Guido Cavalcanti. At the same time he led a rich social life, and (as was normal for young nobles of the time) twice appearing on the field of battle."

MAJOR WORK

Born in Florence in 1265, Dante's first major work was the Vita Nuova, a striking piece of self-psychologizing, set in the form of a critical exposition of his sonnets.
"These were concerned with his strange relationship with Beatrice, with whom he fell in love at the age of nine (she was only eigth). With all the devotion of Courtly Love that demanded purification through a kind of self-denial and worship usually accorded to the Divine, he pursued Beatrice with adoring glances, being rewarded with one famous salutation on the bridge," narrates Fines.
Dante's devotion, however, was obviously real, Fines adds, "for when she died in 1290 he changed his mode of life considerably in reaction."
Dante married and had children, and indulged in a certain amount of dissipation and free-thinking, which he much regretted in later years, according to Fines.
Dayot says religion copied the theory of hell, heaven and purgatory in Dante's long narrative poem, Divine Comedy,  "to instill fears in the hearts of the faithful."

CANTICAS

The Divine Comedy is composed of 14,233 lines that are divided into three canticas (Italian plural cantiche) – Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) – each consisting of 33 canots (Italian plural canti). An initial canor, serving as an introduction to the poem and generally considered to be part of the first cantica, brings the total number of cantos to 100.
It is generally accepted, however, that the first two cantos serve as a unitary prologue to the entire epic, and that the opening two cantos of each cantica serve as prologues to each of the three canticas
The Roman Catholic Church bases its belief on heaven, purgatory and hell on some main biblical passages in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures (Old and New Testaments) and the 14 books of the Apocrypha, supplemented by church wisdom and teaching down through the centuries.
Conservative and mainline Protestant denominations tend to base their belief on their literal interpretation of certain passages of the Bible, and their symbolic interpretations of others. They arrive at very different beliefs from the Roman Catholics because both groups select different passages to read literally. They also reach different conclusions based on how they interpret key passages.

BELIEFS

Liberal Christians generally believe that the beliefs of the authors of the Bible evolved greatly over the approximately one millennia during which the Bible was written. Thus, there is little internal consistency in the Bible about the afterlife. Some liberals remain undecided on the existence and nature of any form of afterlife.
Humanists, Atheists, Agnostics, etc. are generally skeptical about the existence of an afterlife. Most see no evidence for any form of human consciousness existing after death. Findings of research into the internal workings of the brain seem to support this theory. However, a person's influence does live on in their children and in other lives that they have touched.
According to Fines, Dante attended the Mendicant's schools and learnt philosophy; he was sufficiently impressed by Aristotle to quote him some 300 times in his own works, and he became more deeply interested in science and logic.