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Comment by walleeee | Hacker News Reader

I would contest the notion that a lack of religiosity must magnify discontent with death. Also it remains rather difficult to "opt out" of a protracted, likely intubated decline, at least in the US. Moreover there is no opting out of modernity writ large. This is the nature of multi-polar traps: choosing not to join an arms race is a local, temporary reprieve.

The optionality modernity seems determined to optimize for is narrow at best. At worst it threatens its own end

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>I would contest the notion that a lack of religiosity must magnify discontent with death

It’s the other way around. Lack of religiosity is the default state and with it you get the default discontent with death, but a religion with an afterlife could reduce discontent with death.

> Lack of religiosity is the default state

On the contrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligio...

> and with it you get the default discontent with death

That is a huge assumption. There is a huge variety of ways in which societies, cultures and individuals relate and have related with death.

Popular or widespread doesn't mean it’s default. Religion is part of culture and that’s something that’s passed down person to person. A blank culture or no culture has no religion. Tabula rasa.

I’m not assuming anything, I’m not pegging the default discontent with death to a particular value, I don’t know what it is and it’s irrelevant. I’m just saying the some religions, with certain concepts of afterlife, like catholicism, would reduce that discontent.

Why do you assume a tabula rasa person would assume that consciousness ceases to continue on death? I don't think there's anything obvious that would suggest this goes one way or the other and that different people could end up settling for different conclusions. An obvious natural guess would be that it'd be similar to sleeping, as in, you would see dreams

Why would you assume that I assume a tabula rasa person assumes that consciousness ceases to continue with on death? I assume that they wouldn’t know what happens and have some baseline level of feelings about death.

Because why would consciousness continue after death when it didn't continue before birth?

What's different about the post-birth state compared to post-death?

isn't it more that people cleave to magical thinking, archaic though it is, because they have trouble dealing with the despair of poor health and final death?

one big support for this is the gradual decline of religiosity in areas of the world where life is improving. conflated, of course, with the hegemonistic aspect of organized religion.

Possibility remains that adverse conditions are not being masked by psychological devices, rather that these conditions are conducive to heightened spirituality (which may be present in varying degree in all humans).

one big support for this is the fact that many saints came from affluent backgrounds and chose the device of asceticism ("harsh life", "corporal despair", "terminal denial of certain pleasures", "dying to earthly life") to heighten their experience of spiritual communion and worship.

One argument is that we simply replaced the archaic (religion-focused) dogma with a modern (consumerist, individualist, hyperpoliticized) one, but their function is the same, to serve as complex death denial rituals.

That doesn't sound likely to be a compelling argument.

Hm, consider it the flaw of my botched paraphrasing/summarizing/application of it, and maybe give it another chance in a better form:

https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-158-the-cre... (the URL is misleading, it's about Ernest Becker's ideas, there's a transcript too ... if for some reason that link doesn't work, you can listen to it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ )

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