Against you I will fling myself,
unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
A principal building-block of religion is fear. It has always
been so. Our ancient ancestors’ fears–fear of the dark, fear of rain and wind
and thunder, fear of predators, both animal and human—crystallized into a
belief in gods, gods that were to be propitiated, flattered, cajoled. Modern
man’s fears may be more sophisticated, but they are no less numerous, and they
are all, at bottom, an aspect of the fear of the unknown.
What are heaven and hell but manifestations of the fear of
death?
A woman quoted in a recent article in our daily paper, on
the subject of fear and one local pastor’s attempts to allay it within his
congregation, said that our mundane and irrational fears—such as the fear of
terrorists among us—should give way to only one fear—the fear of God.
Gimme that old-time religion, indeed—the one concocted by
savages living in caves, whereby the multitude of fears assailing them were
consolidated into one—the fear of the bogeyman who was the author of all their
woes.
Also in a recent Tennessean, the paper's religion columnist's topic was fear. “When religious practices fade,
so does the doctrine of hope,” he wrote, “—hope in God’s providence, or hope of
heaven.” Faith in God is replaced by faith in technology, he said, and a
religion based on such faith has proven to be threadbare, so that “a new
anxiety lodges in the heart.”
Given that death is the only certainty (taxes, we now know,
are not inescapable for everyone), why shouldn’t we embrace that? We’ll all
die; therefore we should be, not fearful, but, in the words of poet Phillip
Larkin, “careful /Of each other, we
should be kind/While there is still time.”
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