There are essentially two views of the afterlife: the Western, in which we are given a single lifetime during which we must find the faith and attain the righteousness necessary to spend eternity with God i.e. in Paradise. If we do not do this during our lifetime, our eternity will be spent in Hell, the place of punishment. Then there is the Eastern view, in which we are chained to a wheel of endless rebirths as long as we continue to be attached to the things of this world. The only way to end this is to end these ego-cravings and attain samadhi (in Hinduism) or Nirvana (in Buddhism) so that we will be liberated. Paradise is less a place we are sent to than a state we achieve. Hell is experienced during these many lifetimes, or in some Buddhist schools of thought, in between lifetimes.
Views of the afterlife are intimately connected to beliefs about the existance and nature of the soul. Some Christian sects , such as Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, deny the notion of a "soul" at all. If one attains eternal life, one does so physically, on Judgement Day when all the dead are resurrected. Both of these religous communities deny the notion of Hell, saying that what faces the unbeliever is extinction. Islam also sees the "soul" as essentially sleeping in the grave until the Last Day, but the unbeliever is sent to Hell.
Another idea one finds among Christians is the idea that the soul returns to God for its just reward, but that the body is raised on the Last Day, and the two are somehow joined. It's an idea that I've never completely understood. If the soul returns to God, what do you need a body for? Yet the three great Western traditions are largely insistent on the need for physical resurrection at the end of time.
Hinduism sees the soul as trapped in the material world going through life after life before finding a way out. The logical problem with reincarnation is that it requires an almost physical concept of the soul, as if it were air in a balloon. Otherwise, if the soul is entirely spiritual, it would have to exist in Eternity, and it would make no sense to say that it existed in this or that time and place. Another, less esoteric argument against the notion of reincarnation is that 90% of the people that have ever lived on this planet are living here now, because of the vast increase in population in the last century or so. Even if reincarnation exists, most of us are on our first life as a human being. Reincarnation is an appealing idea from the standpoint of justice, though. Most human beings don't really seem good enough for heaven or bad enough for hell, but if they are born again into a human life they can get exactly what they deserve.
The most interesting perspective on the soul comes from Buddhism. Most Buddhist schools insist that the "soul" as an intact, ongoing entity does not exist at all. Just as our physical selves are a combination of ever-changing elements and processes, so are our souls. This is a rather difficult concept to understand, especially since Buddhists also believe in reincarnation, or more accurately "remanifestation." The elements that made up the inner person come together again, but it is not exactly the same "soul" that existed before, just as I do not have the same body that I did at age 20.
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