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Comment by telmo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

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