Could how you live affect how you die?
I've always been standoffish with religion, believing we're too insignificant to ever know what is going on. Claiming to know the answers to life's mysteries is as preposterous as an ant in the crack of a pavement on Times Square looking up and assuming to understand everything about the infrastructure and economy of New York City.
I even find it slightly arrogant that people think they sincerely know the answers. "There's a god who made people and if you sin he punishes you..." you can't know that! "When you die you go to heaven..." but someone over there said I could come back as something else and they're also very certain.
It's all an assumption based on some-one else's assumption based on someone else's assumption dating back to when people were more ignorant than we are now, if you believe that's possible. But every religion is preached with imperious conviction rather than admitting, "I don't know for sure, but I think it might be this..." I say if you want to have faith in something, why subscribe to a conventional ideology, it's more fun and equally as credible if you make up your own beliefs.
When I die I think I'm going to be presented with an interface that gives me all the statistics of my life and provides me with action replays from any moment, synthesising the happiness achieved by watching all the fun I had, feeling the love by watching toddler-Kai playing in the garden with his granddad on a summers day. This is an afterlife I'd be thrilled with and it inspires me to do more cool activities while I'm alive so I can relive them over and over when I die. I'd watch that winning goal I scored in the 120th minute of a cup game, I'd celebrate the day I met and won the affections of my now girlfriend, I'd relive the moment I saved that man's life and perhaps even check out that time my friend saved mine - I was face-down unconscious in the North Sea at the time, I can't remember it too well - although I might only watch that one once.
Of course this isn't what I truly believe is going to happen, but if I'm going to make something up I might as well fabricate something I can look forward to and build towards.
However. What I'm actually inclined to believe is this:
You may or may not know that we all trip from a potent hallucinogen called "Dimethyltryptamine" (DMT) every night when we sleep, it's secreted from a gland in our brain, it's what makes us dream. You can inhale this compound too, or ingest it orally. Having a waking DMT trip gives you a vivid psychedelic, spiritual experience. Picture a dream that you are entirely aware of, as much as you are aware of reality right now. When you come back from these experiences you feel like you've been on a journey into your mind for an abstract amount of time, you lose the concept of time completely, but in the physical realm the clock may move 5-15 minutes. Here's the kicker, when you die, just before you die, the pineal gland (the third eye) in your brain has a massive dump of DMT flooding your brain with this molecule.
So. My theory is that in this moment of death you have a lucid spiritual trip into your own mind that lasts for what feels like eternity at the very same time that your final meagre seconds in the physical realm come to an end. What happens in this suspended infinity that you are held in largely depends on how you've lived your life; how at peace (or at war) you are with yourself in your final moments. If you've been kind, compassionate, loving, loved, moral, HAPPY; this is probably going to be a favourable existence, where your imagination will conjure the very images and feelings of people, friendships and experiences which have flavoured your life. You'll be in your very own heaven. On the flip side, if you're a spiteful, jealous, insincere, hateful, miserable, malevolent individual; the debauched conscience and deep-rooted anxieties which come as a by-product of doing the wrong thing and being a BAD PERSON, will be there with you in the tomb of your infinity. It will be a haunting, torrid nightmare of a DMT trip. Fire and Brimstones.
Now I'm not a real scientist, and I'm basing my suggestion on documentaries I've watched, books I've read and experiences I've had. This is no different to a vicar suggesting (declaring) that Christianity is the truth just because they've read a book. The irony of my theory being that if you go to church and truly believe in your religion, chances are when you have your DMT trip you may see your deities whom you've spent a life worshipping in your mind's eye, and there might even be pearly gates. Because it's your heaven. I'm personally going to be lost in a dream about statistics and replays, and probably Game of Thrones.
To think you have all of the answers just means you aren't asking enough questions.