"Devine, James" wrote:
>
> As long as people die, the survivors will need some sort of religion.
>
I don't think this proposition holds water historically, because so much religion over time and space has _not_ offered any consolation for or even spoken to the fact of death. Homeric religion would have tended, in fact, to make death _more_ horrible. (Odysseus meets Achilles in the afterworld, and Achilles tells him he would rather be a slave of a landless man and alive than foremost in Hades.) And from what I've read about China & Chinese history immortality has never been significant in Chinese thought and feeling. (According to polls, if I remember correctly, only 20% of the population of Japan believes in life after death.)
And of course Lucretius thought that religion was the _cause_ of the fear of death, and that by disproving life after death he made death less frightful. Ancient judaism didn't seem to posit a personal afterlife either, its 'promises' being more for the tribe than for individuals within the tribe.
Carrol