If you mention religion and Aztecs to some people, they will probably picture comely maidens in chains being hauled up to mountaintop altars by burly men dressed in leather. Then, if you ask someone who isn't a pervert, they'll probably tell you the Aztecs liked sacrificing people as offerings to their Gods. Particularly women and kids.

There was, however, more to Aztec religion than just gods who demanded the regular offing of children. According to experts, the Aztecs believed there were three different afterlives, one hell-like realm called Mictlan and two places which are quite nice, Tlalocan, and Tonatiuh.

So What's the Problem?

The Aztecs did not believe your fate was based on whether or not you lived a moral life. Instead, they believed that whichever of the three afterlives you got depended largely on your role in society and the manner of your death. So you could be a total shit who spent their adult life breaking into blind people's houses to move their furniture around, and depending on how you died, you could still find yourself sitting by the side of some god in the late afternoon sun, eating cheese and drinking wine with your feet in the pool.

To end up in the hellish realm of Mictlan, you had to die either from old age or from a disease (with a couple of exceptions). So, if your syphilitic Grandpa kicked the bucket, he'd be cremated along with a dog, which would serve as his guide along the dangerous, treacherous, four-year path to Mictlan.

However, to reach the decidedly nicer realm of Tlalocan, a region of abundance, eternal spring and cuddles, you'd need to be taken out either by lightning or drowning or one of the few diseases which wouldn't take you to Mictlan (pustules, dropsy or gout).

Finally, there's a celestial paradise which is ruled over by the sun god, Tonatiuh. This last afterlife is reserved for warriors or sacrifices who died in the Sun God's name, as well as women dying in childbirth (pregnant women were considered warrior-like in Aztec culture).

This is one of the good ones.

All this leaves a rather pressing question - what happened to those who don't die of old age, disease or combat, but instead expired about ten seconds after betting their mate they could jump across that chasm over there? No one is sure, but we like to think they basically hung around a waiting room until they finally decided to just tell the gods they died in a war.

As slaves the Rastafarians were taken from their homeland in Africa and dispersed around the world (particularly Jamaica and the Caribbean). Hence, Jamaica is considered to be a hell on earth. Now, we think that's a bit harsh. We've seen Cool Runnings - Jamaica doesn't look that bad.

But of course what's stranger is the presence of "Ethiopia" and "heaven" in the same string of thought. It's nothing against the people who live there, but it's fallen on some pretty hard times. Let us explain with this handy comparison:

Yeah, when Belinda Carlisle sang "Heaven is a Place On Earth", we don't think she was picturing Ethiopia. We can't imagine how it must feel to work hard all your life and live a good, moral existence, then to die peacefully, secure in the knowledge that you're heading to a better place, and then find yourself on the streets of Addis Ababa.

Couldn't they have declared someone like Morgan Freeman to be their deity, as seen in Bruce Almighty? If nothing else, it'd have been a lot easier because he was born in Memphis, and air fares from Jamaica to Memphis start at a spiritually affordable $554.

Above: Heaven.

Ancient Egyptian religions were polytheistic, with as many as two thousand deities, ranging from such luminaries as Geb (the God of the earth who appeared as a man with a goose on his head), and Amun (the King of the Gods, who has a splendid hat based on Marge Simpson's hairdo) to somewhat less significant deities such as (and these are real) Amsit , the God of embalmed livers, and Kebechsenef , the God of things below the waist and above the knees. More often than not, their Gods were half-human, half-animal, making their civilization a prime example of what might happen if Furries get their way.

Egyptians believed death was temporary, and that life would resume if one was faithful to the gods. That's why the body was preserved through mummification and they had a load of great shit chucked into their tomb upon death.

So What's the Problem?

The Egyptians believed that mummification was an essential part of a journey towards a good afterlife, and mummification was expensive. It took seventy days, and after that, you had to be buried in a tomb which was acceptable in the eyes of the Gods. Which was, again, expensive. Basically, if you were a horrible little poor person, the Gods extended a middle finger in your direction and packed you on your way to eternal oblivion.

Even if you could afford all of that, you could still get screwed by their complicated-as-hell judgment process. The following picture details what happens in the Hall of Two Truths, where the souls are judged.

Firstly, the deceased heart is weighed on the scales - it's there on the left. On the right is a feather, the Shu feather of Truth and Justice, taken from the headdress of the goddess Ma'at . If the heart weighed less than the feather, then the soul was deemed to have lived a good life. If it was heavier, then it was full of sin. The heart, and the heart's owner, we then devoured by the Demon Ammit, a part-hippo, part-crocodile, part-lion and the complete Furry wet-dream. She's there under the scales.

We don't think we need to tell you about the unfairness of this, but we will. The average human heart weighs in at about ten ounces. A feather (depending on species of bird) is about 0.02 ounces. You don't have to be an ivy league mathematician to realize you're fucked. In some pictures though, the Goddess Ma'at herself sits on the tray, instead of a feather. That's Ma'at's head on the crown of the scale. Even if that's to, er, scale, she's probably a fair bit heavier than the heart and in those cases, you're good to go.

So, if you're lucky enough to have Ma'at on the scales, you're presented to Osiris, who's there on the throne to the right, wrapped up in white with a KKK-esque hat. He, along with the sexually aroused fourteen judges at the top, decide your ultimate fate, even though Ma'at's feather is supposed to have done that. Perhaps Osiris just works out how much your mummification and tomb cost.

Basically it appears to be a bureaucratic clusterfuck designed so that they could pretty much let in whoever they damned well pleased. If you find yourself in the Egyptian afterlife, we suggest having a bribe ready.