“It is not rational arguments, but emotions, that cause belief in a future life. The most important of these emotions is fear of death.”
"Why I am not a Christian" by Bertrand Russell, p74
Child psychologists say that 'there is no death' in the world of most childen. Others in history, such as Freud, have explained that "dealing" with the learned idea of death is one of the greatest challenges of adulthood. Many, of course, "deal" with it by imagining that death is not real. That, in fact, we somehow survive death, despite that the self is the brain, and the brain dies.
The fear of death has got to be one of the biggest causes, in history, of religious beliefs. The difficulty in imagining the discontinuance of thought and the loss of all motivations, memories, life, to some seeming void, has lent itself in history to the idea that somehow we don't actually die. These "spiritual pipe dreams" (in the words of Anton LaVey) fuel irrational religious beliefs.
I've added the quote by Bertrand Russell to my page, "The Causes of Religion" by Vexen Crabtree (2007).
2007-01-04
Vexen Crabtree's New Pages in 2005
Archive of Vexen Crabtree's Live Journal entries in 2005
2007-01-01
The Taboo of Death
I have added the following text to "Death and Satanism" by Vexen Crabtree:
“We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.”
"The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James, p103
The psychologist William James, above, spoke 100 years ago that normal Human beings hide death away. We clinicalize death, so that only trained professionals have anything to do with the practical side of slaughter, bodies, funerals and burials [Clark, 1993]. This denial of reality extends far and wide amongst the masses. Dead bodies do not litter the floor of battlefields in films, in computer games also corpses fade away majestically, and one's future death is hardly featured in public angst, except where the subconscious, desperate, finds expression in dreams.
The invisibility of death, the taboo of it, and the strong (largely) subconscious desire to avoid it during our reproductive years, fuels popular religion. The major religions of the world do, and always have, denied death and comforted people with the lie that we survive death. Hades, Heaven, Paradise and Nirvana are all names for the afterlife, despite the theological and philosophical impossibilities that arise.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
