Last Sunday, I was listening to a sermon by a lay minister at a Unitarian service, and he pointed out something that I wished he would have talked about more. A lot more.

He observed, and correctly so, that every pre-modern religion that is still practiced today - in other words, all the major religions - have in common the fact that they are all "death centered." Meaning that they devote a great deal of their belief system to the hereafter. By contrast, religions that are "life centered," without any doctrine about the hereafter, are relatively recent phenomena. Although Eastern religions are not quite as death-centered as Western ones, they still have much to say about death and its other aspects, such as reincarnation.

Which begs a couple of obvious questions: (1) WHY is there so much obsession with death in organized religion, and - perhaps even more interesting - (2) Why do people STILL turn to religion to answer these questions? After all, even after so many people have researched death in so many ways, we still know nothing about any kind of afterlife, so why continue to believe in something that has no shred of empirical support?

This lay minister went on to say that the hereafter has proved to be a valuable selling point for many religions: you're promised a sweet reward if you follow their teachings, and you might also be threatened with punishment if you don't. There are a number of obvious flaws here, though. Not the least of which is: if I'm behaving like a good "X" so that I can be rewarded in the afterlife, am I really becoming a better person, or am I just selfishly racking up points on my scorecard?

Your thoughts?

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Wow - are we on the same wavelegnth. Please check out what I wrote in the Judeo - Xtian/Muslim thread. I would not say Judaism is death centered, but I definitely believe the offshoots are.

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And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it." --George W. Bush, Jan. 29, 2007

Really, I think some obsession with death is only natural to any person who wants to continue existing and realizes that "life" isn't going to allow that permanently. Since religion is one of the few things that even pretends to address the issue, people go there to ponder possible answers.


I think you answered your own question there. People go to religion for answers because research has failed to provide any.

No, religion is not a result of the failure of science.

I agree with you, up to a point, in connecting religion with 'The Search'. The absence of answers to our questions about origins creates a void which some people find painful. 'G-d' fills that void. Gods fill many voids.

That's not to say that 'The Search' drives all religious people , of course.

False 'leaders' are common in religions, those that claim a knowledge of that which is essentially unknowable. Indeed, the 'unknown' is a quality in itself. Those that offer 'answers' are just stripping 'The Search' of its value.

I find these people particularly damaging to children, filling their young minds with pre-tailored prejudices and 'answers', thus closing the ways to spiritual discovery and adventure. Closing them to originality, the lifeblood of 'The Search'.

Science hasn't failed us . It's an ongoing quest and religions , useful ones, serve to blunt the impatience.

I think that there's more to it than just curiosity/comfort regarding the afterlife for oneself. Many such religions also introduce the concept of "Divine Judgment" for everyone in the eyes of God. This is pleasing to us because it allows us to reconcile the sight of a spoiled, rich glutton for whom everything seems to go right - "well, he'll get his when God judges us".

It preserves the sense of justice (poetic/divine justice), without which we might have to accept that the universe is inherently unfair and that some will never get rewarded, positively or negatively. An offshoot of this is that "death centered" religions have been historically useful for keeping the rank and file pacified (do your duty as a serf and you will be rewarded in heaven). While there is ceratinly more social/economic mobility in most societies today than back then, you still see some of the same line of thinking - "if I lead a chaste, austere and hard-working life, I'll be rewarded in heaven"

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