2007-01-28

The Fear of Death is a Cause of Irrational Beliefs

“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


2005 Dec 28"Christian Prayer" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Dec 24"Satanism: The Natural Religion (Forget the New Age!)" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Dec 18"Blasphemy Laws in the UK" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Dec 11"Christmas: The Multicultural Celebration" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Aug 29"The Goodguy Badge": Vexen's page on LaVey's term describing the shallow things people do to look and feel 'good'
2005 Aug 16The International Date Format (ISO-8601): Vexen's appraisal of the YYYY MMM DD date format
2005 Aug 15Doubled size of ""If there is a God, it Must be an Evil God" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Aug 14"Satanism as the Worship of Truth and Reality", according to Vexen
2005 Aug 13How does Acupuncture Work? Scientific studies included. Summary by Vexen
2005 Aug 07"Military Drill: Its Theory & Purpose" by Vexen Crabtree
Vexen Sociology: The Importance of Current Events is Amplified by our Egos
2005 Jul 20Pornography: Vexen on the porn industry
2005 Jul 20Hellraiser films; Reviews and Commentary on Hellraiser, the Cenobites, Pinhead. By Vexen Crabtree
2005 Jun 04If Vexen Crabtree was God, what would he do? And why doesn't God do these things?
2005 May 28"Cultural Religion and Scholarly Religion" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 May 03Vexen shows that Biblical Christianity Completely And Specifically Denies All Free Will
2005 May 01"Satanism is a Different Religion to Christianity!" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Apr 24New website on politics and countries, including new essay "Which Country Sets the Best Examples in the World?" by Vexen
2005 Apr 10God never needs to "test" us, it already knows what we'll do
2005 Mar 22"Prayer is useless and satanic, not godly" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Mar 20New dream pages: Dream Interpretation, The Biology of Dreams and Nightmares and Night Terrors
2005 Mar 19New page on "Homosexuality" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Jan 31"Fascism and Satanism" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Jan 27"Equality, Egalitarianism and Social Stratification in Satanism" by Vexen Crabtree
2005 Jan 25Friedrich Nietzsche on Vexen's A to Z of Satanism page
2005 Jan 06List of pages on Buddhism by Vexen
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.