Sigmund Freud claimed that religion will continue to have relevance to humankind as long as they fear of death. Death is our shared, inevitable end, but how individuals and communities think about death are widely varied. Some 55 million people die each year in the world. The ways individuals and religious communities conceive of death, how they mourn and remember their dead, are heavily influenced by religion belief and practice.
To learn more about how people think about and deal with death, I will review five different religious faiths — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Naturally, there is variability of beliefs and traditions within each of these religions. Nonetheless, these major world religious traditions give us insight into how billions of people conceptualize death.
