The Duchess of Zeon wrote: Well, I had in one section I wrote for Stu, a lady who whose parents and family were taken with the Message when she wasn't, who was deeply embittered and openly hateful of them for abandoning her like that, and had legally inheirited all of their property. I suspect that the courts will rule that, without a will granting property to yourself, the will you did issue granting it to someone else, or the judgement of the courts without a will, is permanently binding, to avoid total chaos. Furthermore it also avoids the horrible number of violent confrontations that could come about if the dead from the message try to reclaim their property from their psychologically traumatized close relatives who were not called into the Message. I really think the only result is an irreconciliable loathing and disgust on the part of the living toward those who laid down and died, which would frequently despite the best efforts of their relatives to make them get up and function before they starved to death. I'm sure people did everything up to and including stabbing their hands in a desperate attempt to try and provoke some kind of response to get them out of the catatonic state... And they just laid there and died. Traitors.
That's pretty much spot on. The simplest way around the legal problems is that people write wills leaving everything to themselves. the executor's job is to convert those assets into cash that can then be transferred to the enw resident of Hell. Of course, people can leave their assets to their undeceased kin but I doubt if many would actually think of doing that. One aspect of this, there's going to be a massive transfer of assets from Earth to Hell and that brings problems all of its own.
I'd also agree on the attitude towards those who died on order. They're going to be despised as traitors on Earth and ridiculed (and impoverished) in Hell. That affects all the rescued people by the way, there's very rapidly going to be a class difference arising with the newly-dead who are rich with the assets that they brought from Earth and the dead rescued from the Hell-Pit who will be destitute. The social implications of that change will be quite interesting and suggests that a new aristocracy/peasantry divide is in the making. By the way, don't succumb to the temptation to overstate the death toll from laying down and dying, particularly in America. In Western Europe the number would be very low and I don't think it would be that much greater in America. You might be surprised by the number of people who appear quite devout in public but in private admit that its all a load of codswallop and they're just going along with the flow so they can enjoy the social side of things. Then there's the "screw you" response engrained in the American body public to unreasonable demands from self-appointed authorities. Add in the "this can't be real" and the "Humph, not OUR God" cadres and the number falls quite significantly. Some groups (like the Quakers in Armageddon) will just turn around and argue that such commands could not possibly come from their God. They'd argue that they don't know what is going on but they're happy to wait and find out before doing anything drastic.
It'll come out shortly but the current situation is - General of the Armies David Petraeus is now commander of the Human Expeditionary Army (Five Army Groups, one Russian, one Chinese, one American with British, Canadian and Australian contributions, one European/South American/Middle Eastern with a French commander and one Asian/African with an Indian Commander. This gives Petraeus a "Council of War" that consists of one Russian, one Chinese, one American, one Indian and one French General. That "council of war" effectively runs Hell. LTG Stanley McChrystal commands First Army Group (US). General Ivan Semenovich Dorokhov commands Second Army Group (Russian).
The question of what happens to the various genuinely evil but dead humans when they turn up hasn't been decided, fortunately the matter hasn't arisen with any urgency. Mossad though wants to interview quite a few of them.
If one burns money, one ends up with worthless ashes and some outraged ancestors on the other side. Currency transfer requires intact specie. As the merchants there put it "in gold we trust, all others restricted to window-shopping".