You know, #Christianity gets a lot of flak these days, and often for good reasons.
But one aspect of Christian religious belief that I have only come to appreciate after reading lots of German folk tales is:
"The souls of the dead should bugger off to the afterlife, and not bother the living!"
I mean, contemplate how many problems young people have with trying to please living ancestors. Then consider what you'd have to do to please the ghosts of ancestors of even earlier generations, whose personal views and convictions were even more divorced from ours. Most Germans alive today likely have at least one Nazi among their ancestors, for instance.
Christian folk tales make clear that if any ghosts linger around to haunt their living relatives, then that's a THEM problem, and the living relatives are fully justified in doing whatever they want to get rid of those haunts.
