Mortality and art
“Religious faith does indeed serve to assuage concerns about death. Strong faith in God is associated with emotional well-being and low death anxiety. Additionally, after a reminder of their mortality, people report being more religious and having a stronger belief in God.”
-- Sheldon Solomon et al. (2015). The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, pp. 87-8
“Once children understand that they, as well as their mothers and fathers, are perpetually vulnerable and ultimately finite, they shift from their parents to their culture as their primary source of psychological equanimity. Deities and social authorities and institutions now appear to be more stable and enduring than our all-too-mortal and therefore all-too-vulnerable parents, grandparents, and pets.”
-- Sheldon Solomon et al. (2015). The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, p. 28
“We humans all manage the problem of knowing we are mortal by calling on two basic psychological resources. First, we need to sustain faith in our cultural worldview, which imbues our sense of reality with order, meaning, and permanence…. Since we’re constantly on the brink of realizing that our existence is precarious, we cling to our culture’s governmental, educational, and religious institutions and rituals that buttress our view of human life as uniquely significant and eternal.
“The paths to literal and symbolic immortality laid out by our worldviews require us to feel that we are valuable members of our cultures. Hence, the second vital resource for managing terror is a feeling of personal significance, commonly known as self-esteem.”
-- Sheldon Solomon et al. (2015). The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, p. 9
“From a biblical standpoint, the knowledge Adam and Eve gained by partaking of the apple made them mortal. From a scientific standpoint, the development of the human neocortex spawned… the capacity to anticipate the future, and the knowledge of our own mortality.
“The knowledge of death, rather than death per se, is the worm at the core of the biblical apple. It is that knowledge that made us human and initiated our unrelenting quest for immortality – a quest that profoundly influenced the course of human history and persists to this day.”