Death Anxiety and Religious Belief
eBook - PDF

Death Anxiety and Religious Belief

An Existential Psychology of Religion

  1. 192 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Death Anxiety and Religious Belief

An Existential Psychology of Religion

About this book

There are no atheists in foxholes; or so we hear. The thought that the fear of death motivates religious belief has been around since the earliest speculations about the origins of religion. There are hints of this idea in the ancient world, but the theory achieves prominence in the works of Enlightenment critics and Victorian theorists of religion, and has been further developed by contemporary cognitive scientists. Why do people believe in gods? Because they fear death. Yet despite the abiding appeal of this simple hypothesis, there has not been a systematic attempt to evaluate its central claims and the assumptions underlying them. Do human beings fear death? If so, who fears death more, religious or nonreligious people? Do reminders of our mortality really motivate religious belief? Do religious beliefs actually provide comfort against the inevitability of death? In Death Anxiety and Religious Belief, Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt begin to answer these questions, drawing on the extensive literature on the psychology of death anxiety and religious belief, from childhood to the point of death, as well as their own experimental research on conscious and unconscious fear and faith. In the course of their investigations, they consider the history of ideas about religion's origins, challenges of psychological measurement, and the very nature of emotion and belief.

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Yes, you can access Death Anxiety and Religious Belief by Jonathan Jong, Jamin Halberstadt in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Psychology of Religion. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Bloomsbury Academic
Year
2016
Print ISBN
9781350061606
eBook ISBN
9781472571632
Edition
1
Topic
Theology & Religion
Subtopic
Psychology of Religion
e 
Whats 
and 
Whys 
of 
Religious Belief 
25
2012), 
which 
is 
the 
central 
concern 
of 
this 
book. 
As 
we 
shall 
see, 
the 
thought 
that 
death 
and 
religion 
are 
intimately 
connected 
is 
one 
that 
has 
occurred 
to 
many 
theorists 
of 
religion, 
including 
most 
of 
those 
we 
have 
already 
met 
in 
this 
chapter. 
ere 
has, 
since 
the 
very 
beginning 
of 
our 
theorizing 
about 
religion, 
been 
speculation 
about 
how 
religion 
is 
somehow, 
at 
least 
in 
part, 
about 
death
, 
about 
our 
inability 
to 
really 
conceptualize 
it 
despite 
its 
looming 
inevitability, 
about 
our 
ambivalent 
relationships 
with 
corpses 
and 
those 
who 
have 
leſt
them 
behind, 
about 
our 
multifarious 
fears 
and 
worries 
surrounding 
that 
most 
certain 
of 
human 
fates. 
Gods 
are, 
so 
many 
have 
thought, 
ultimately 
about 
mortals. 

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-title
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. List of Illustrations
  8. Preface
  9. Acknowledgments
  10. 1. The Whats and Whys of Religious Belief
  11. 2. A History of Thanatocentric Theories of Religion
  12. 3. Measuring Faith and Fear
  13. 4. Are People Afraid of Death?
  14. 5. The Religious Correlates of Death Anxiety
  15. 6. Death Anxiety and Religion: Causes and Consequences
  16. 7. The Future of Immortality, Literal and Symbolic
  17. Notes
  18. References
  19. Index