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Afterlife beliefs are the defining feature of religions (IMHO). So it is no surprise to find that religious people fear death.
Another fact, brought out in some detail in Gananath Obeyesekere's book on rebirth eschatologies "Imagining Karma", is that once we introduce morality into the picture then at a minimum the afterlife bifurcates: good people (however defined) go to a good afterlife; and bad people go to a bad afterlife. We see this in Egyptian religion and in Zoroastrianism and all their successors - including the Abrahamic religions. We see it in Indian religions with rebirth eschatologies as well.
So religious people not only fear death more, but have more reason to fear death. Since none of us is perfectly moral, perfectly good, we have reason to fear that our imperfections will condemn us to an unpleasant afterlife - and judgement in the afterlife tends to be inescapable unlike judgement in this life.
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Muslims seem to be more likely to believe in a vindictive god, and less likely to believe in a forgiving god. The authors put this down to fundamental differences in Islamic and Christian religions.
That's possible, but I'm also inclined to think that Christianity has reinvented itself over the past 100 years. As social structures have evolved, the idea of god as a punisher has fallen out of fashion - indeed, many modern Christians don't have any meaningful belief in Hell at all. -
the observation that the non-religious have a very low fear of death. Other studies have also shown that the non-religious have a higher suicide rate. Could these two observations be linked?
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one of the most common misunderstandings about scientific studies is the critical difference between correlation and causation.
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Last December, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a public Drug Safety Communication about results from a large study conducted in France – the Santé Adulte GH Enfant, or SAGhE, study – which found an increased risk for death with biosynthetic human growth hormone therapy relative to the general French population. There were 93 deaths in the treated group, compared with the 70 expected from a statistical calculation.
One news article reported the study and FDA alert with this headline, “Are children dying for an inch or two?” – language guaranteed to terrify the tens of thousands of patients (and the innumerable body-builders and athletes who use the drug off-label) who have taken the hormone over the past 26 years.
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The French study compared all patients who took growth hormone to the general population. But the two groups are not at all comparable: kids who receive the drug are far from normal.
Growth hormone is given to children for various kinds of short stature. These include growth-hormone deficiency of unknown cause or as a result of impairment of the pituitary gland’s ability to produce the hormone, owing to traumatic injury or irradiation to treat cancer.
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According to researchers from the University of Bonn, non-smokers thinking of taking up the habit might think twice when they look at those pictures, but it’s going to require more than scare tactics to change the ways of chronic smokers.
Catholic countries were more fearful than Protestant - Greece, the only Orthodox country analysed, was more fearful still.
But more important that religious affiliation (or, indeed, virtually anything else) was belief in Heaven and Hell. Belief in Heaven tended to lower fear somewhat, but belief in Hell had a dramatic and opposite effect.
Those countries where a lot of people believed in Hell were more fearful across the range of potential threats. In fact, much of the apparent relationship between religious traditions and fear could be explained by the degree of hell-belief.
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putting the fear of god into people actually makes them more fearful of everything else - and that, of course, has a number of interesting political and social ramifications!
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