Decoding Fear: Death

Welcome back to what I your resident imaginary philosopher like to call decoding fear.  If this is your first time reading then this is where I ask questions about why we fear things and give you an answer.  Anyway today's fear is something we all know to well.  Death.

Why are we so frightened of this inescapable thing called death?  A better question rather is what is death exactly?  Where do we even go after we finally drop dead of natural causes or other means of dying?  I believe that we fear death because it is yet another one of those things that we do not understand.  For centuries people have been dropping dead yet we never did know why.  We didn't even know what happened after death other than a few accounts by people who died and came back.  People all over the world ask these questions and some discover answers through religion.  According to the Christians after you die you go to something like a grand courtroom. When your there you get judged for your sins by god.  Then you get sent to either a wonderful place called heaven or one with fire and brimstone called hell.  Yet, to the Buddhists after you die you will keep getting reincarnated.  This happens until you can finally break the eternal cycle and go to nirvana.  Then there are a few people who see death as being only nothingness where you sit for eternity. The only thing you can do is think about all that you have done in your life.  The true question is how will we ever figure out which of the many afterlives is the real thing without dying.

Unfortunately there is no way to figure out what happens in the afterlife until we die.  There is just no way to know what happens after death and that's why i believe we fear it.  As humans we don't want to die yet. We want assurance that afterwards we'll go to a beautiful paradise or some other type of heaven.  What about people with near death experiences? They saw what happens in the afterlife.  That may be true but how do we know their brain didn't just make up these images of what the viewer wanted to see.  To put it in simple terms the world will never know