If denial is no longer possible, we can attempt to master death by challenging it. If we can drive the highways at rapid speed, if we can come back home from Vietnam, we must indeed feel immune to death. We have killed ten times the number of enemies compared to our own losses—we hear on the news almost daily. Is this our wishful thinking, our projection of our infantile wish for omnipotence and immortality? If a whole nation, a whole society suffers from such fear and denial of death, it has to use defenses which can only be destructive. Wars, riots, and increasing numbers of murders and other crimes may be indicators of our decreasing ability to face death with acceptance and dignity. Perhaps we have to come back to the individual human being and start from scratch, to attempt to conceive our own death and learn to face this tragic but inevitable happening with less irrationality and fear.
What role has religion played in these changing times? In the old days more people seemed to believe in God unquestionably; they believed in a hereafter, which was to relieve people of their suffering and their pain. There was a reward in heaven, and if we had suffered much here on earth we would be rewarded after death depending on the courage and grace, patience and dignity with which we had carried our burden. Suffering was more common, as childbirth was a more natural, long and painful event—but the mother was awake when the child was born. There was a purpose and future reward in the suffering. Now we sedate mothers, try to avoid pain and agony; we may even induce labor to have a birth occur on a relative's birthday or to avoid interference with another important event. Many mothers only wake up hours after the babies are born, too drugged and sleepy to rejoice the birth of their children. There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.
But with this change, also, fewer people really believe in life after death, in itself perhaps a denial of our mortality. Well, if we cannot anticipate life after death, then we have to consider death. If we are no longer rewarded in heaven for our suffering, then suffering becomes purposeless in itself. If we take part in church activities in order to socialize or to go to a dance, then we are deprived of the church's former purpose, namely, to give hope, a purpose in tragedies here on earth, and an attempt to understand and bring meaning to otherwise inacceptable painful occurrences in our life.
Paradoxical as it may sound, while society has contributed to our denial of death, religion has lost many of its believers in a life after death, i.e., immortality, and thus has decreased the denial of death in that respect. In terms of the patient, this has been a poor exchange. While the religious denial, i.e., the belief in the meaning of suffering here on earth and reward in heaven after death, has offered hope and purpose, the denial of society has given neither hope nor purpose but has only increased our anxiety and contributed to our destructiveness and aggressiveness—to kill in order to avoid the reality and facing of our own death.