I used to be a christian and the way I understood it was that if you died while actually doing the work of the lord, you would go straight to heaven to rule with christ, but everyone else would have to wait until judgement day.

Listen buddy, call us CHRISTians, or I swear to God I'll start calling you a 0theist and see how you like it. WE DON'T WORSHIP THE CROSS. What you are doing is blatantly disrespectful and offensive. Anyways, that's because it's pretty clear in the Bible that Christian's go to heaven when they die, but it also talks about judgement day sorting things out, so assumably you couldn't go in either direction until you are judged. The split is largely down Mainstream Christians and Christianesque religions like Jehovah's Witnesses, with some of the more fundamentalist Christians thrown in for fun. At any rate, those who believe that you wait until judgement day also believe that you're soul is unconcious during the wait, so you wouldn't even notice it. It's not the biggest theological issue in the world, so people just let the differences stand.

The old saying about money being the root of evil is very true in many cases including churches and religions. Now, stay with me and I'll relate this to your question. The different religions are constantly telling people that God requires they give 10% of their income or wealth to the church. This is say is dictated in the Bible. Well, that is bogus. The Bible only states that a person should give what they can afford. They are only to give to the church after they have taken care of all their other responsibilities. The end result is that the different religions get hugh amounts of money from their members. Now, here is how this is related. In the late 60's and 70's the churches started losing large numbers of members due that young people were not going to church after leaving home. One of the main reasons given was that they were tired of hearing that everything they did was a sin. Young people didn't see any way of going to heaven because the preachers and priests made it appear they could never be perfect enough. Their preaching also made God appear to be vengful and never satisfied with man, so, why bother going to church. The fire and brimstone fear tactics didn't work anymore. The Churches could not stand the loss of money and started changing their preaching to attract the lost sheep. So, to get these lost sheep and new members the converted to teaching 'Appeasment Theology'. Now they preach about God being all forgiving and will forgive them all their sins at their asking. They also started preaching that as soon as you died your soul would go to heaven. This was done to appease the 'I want what I want and I want it now' young generations even though the Bible clearly states you won't go to heaven until Christ returns. So, it all boils down to money. Say whatever is needed to satisify the 'Narcissistic' so they will gladly and continually give 10% of their money to the church.

The Bible can't even agree with itself about the entry criterion for heaven let alone when a dead human will arrive their. I personally think it would require too much rocket fuel to get to heaven.