Death Anxiety and Religious Belief An Existential Psychology of Religion

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.

Jamin Halberstadt is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is author or co-author of over 100 publications and conference presentations in social and cognitive psychology.

Jonathan Jong is an experimental psychologist at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, at the University of Oxford, UK.

1. Explaining Religion
2. A Brief Intellectual History to Thanatocentric Theories of Religion
3. Death and Religion in Current Research
4. The Dying Animal
5. Atheists in Foxholes?
6. Death and Deities in Social Cognitive Perspective
7. Conclusion: The Incorrigible Inconsistency of Being Human
Bibliography
Index

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.