“The sense that we will live forever somewhere has shaped every civilization in human history. Australian Aborigenes pictured Heaven as a distant island beyond the western horizon. The early Finns thought it was an island in the faraway east. Mexicans, Peruvians, and Polynesians believed that they went to the sun or the moon after death. Native Americans believed that in the afterlife their spirits would hunt the spirits of the buffalo. In the pyramids of Egypt, the embalmed bodies had maps placed beside them as guides to the future world. The Romans believed that the righteous would picnic in the Elysian fields while their horses grazed nearby. Anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal – that this world is not all there is.”

“The fear of death gripped me for years, and there are still moments when I wake up at night in a cold sweat.”

“Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.”

“People often talk about an epidemic of suicide, but the real epidemic is the increasing rejection of a robust belief in the afterlife. That’s what is miring more and more people in hopelessness.”