[kitotik]

Another perspective on such topics is to not take them so literally.

The texts can be extremely useful not just for the friends and family of the deceased, but also for when there is no literal loss of life and just intense life changes (‘ego death’, ‘rebirth’).

Regarding judgement, you could look at this as simple data analysis to make decisions on one’s life - did the efforts achieve the desired outcomes? We’re the efforts insufficient? Was the impact of prior life choices as expected?

With esoteric teachings, assuming they can only be useful when followed religiously would be akin to reading programming tutorials and assuming they are only for creating todo lists and chat apps(even if they may be!)