Essence, problems and attitudes towards death in various religions. Death and immortality in world religions Death and immortality in different religions

“The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).

According to the teachings of Christian saints, death is bodily (cessation of the body's vital activity) and mental (not the sensation of the soul with a living body). In addition, for the immortal soul, death is also the border between earthly life and heavenly life. Therefore, many Christian martyrs (St. Ignatius the God-bearer and others) accepted their death with joy - for them the day of death on earth became their birthday in heaven. In the Revelation of the Apostle John the Theologian it is written that death will end after the Last Judgment in the future, during the reign of the Kingdom of God: “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will no longer be; there will be no more crying, no outcry, no sickness. (Rev.21: 4) ". R. Moody Life after Life, Minsk, 1996, p. ten

In our society, the Bible is the most read and discussed book dealing with questions about the spiritual essence of a person and his life after death. But in general, the Bible says very little about the events that occur after death and about the nature of the afterlife. This applies mainly to the Old Testament. “According to some Old Testament scholars, only two texts in the entire document speak of life after death.

“Isaiah 26, 19:“ Your dead will revive, your dead bodies will rise! Rise up, triumph those who are defeated in the dust: for your dew is the dew of plants, and the earth will vomit out the dead. "

Acts 12, 2: "And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some for eternal life, others for eternal reproach and shame." R. Moody Life after Life, Minsk, 1996, p. eleven

Thus, in Christianity, death is regarded as a dream of the physical body, while the soul is immortal.

Immortality in Christianity is destined for all souls without limitation: righteous and sinful, but everyone will have it differently. Eternity is prepared for the righteous in paradise, in heaven, where there is neither pain nor suffering. For sinners - eternal torment in hell, payment for sins and crimes. There is also the so-called "purgatory" where all unbelievers go. But no one has the right to judge where the soul will spend "the rest of its eternal life," except for Jesus Christ himself, who will announce his verdict at the Last Judgment. Consequently, immortality in Christianity is the eternal existence of the soul in another world, which depends on the actions of a person during life.

Buddhism

According to Buddhist teachings, existence is a cycle of birth, death and rebirth, proceeding in accordance with the quality of the actions of the reincarnating being. The process of becoming stops when one reaches enlightenment (bodhi), after which the enlightened one (buddha), who is no longer subject to the law of karma, enters a state called “immortality” by Buddha Gautama (amata).

"Buddhism says that every new convert should be" shown the path to amata, "on which the liberation of the mind is achieved through the deepening of wisdom and meditative practices (sati, samadhi)." http://www.ordodeus.ru/Ordo_Deus1_d.html#Immortality in Buddhism

Consequently, the aspiration of the soul or ego (atman) to eternal individual existence is the immediate cause of all suffering and the basis of the cycle of reincarnation (samsara).

Buddhism views the search for eternal life as a deliberately doomed path leading away from enlightenment: even gods who live unimaginably long, in the end, die.

Despite the proclamation of the inevitability of irreversible destruction of the unique individual personality of a person, after death, Buddhism makes a concession to the natural human desire to gain immortality. This concession consists in the inclusion in the canon of Buddhism of the teaching that before the final attainment of nirvana, a righteous believer must necessarily go through a series of heavenly or hellish kingdoms, in accordance with his merits or sins before the Bodhisattva.

Buddha said: "Be your own lamps", "All my teaching has only one taste of salvation."

To achieve nirvana, a Buddhist must follow an eightfold path in life: correct views, intentions, speech, actions, lifestyle, effort, awareness and concentration. Observe the five rules of behavior in your life: do not kill, do not take someone else's, do not commit adultery, do not lie, do not intoxicate yourself. Be wise in your decisions and actions. Observe the middle Way and not go to extremes.

To explain what nirvana is, the Buddha makes the following comparison: “The happiness of an ordinary person is comparable to the pleasure experienced by a leper from scratching his own wounds, the happiness of nirvana is comparable to the cure of leprosy. Talking about nirvana is comparable to a fruitless attempt to explain to a leper what the pleasure of healthy people is.

In heaven is the paradise of Tushita, its name means "satisfied, joyful". This is one of the areas where the gods dwell. It is located above the summit of Mount Sumeru, the center of the world. The garden of joy and the world of desires and passions are extinguished. In the paradise of Tushita, souls who have observed the five commandments are reincarnated: do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not lie, do not intoxicate yourself - as well as those who have nurtured immense states of consciousness with good deeds and meditation: a loving heart, compassion, impartiality - in other words, those qualities that make up the essence of the awakened mind. In this heavenly world, the souls of bodhisattvas are reborn. The Buddha of the future, before his condescension to earth, dwells in a heavenly paradise.

So, in Buddhism, death is considered as - physical death, that is, the death of the body, the existence of which is a cycle of births, deaths and repeated births, proceeding in accordance with the quality of the actions of the reborn being, and immortality is nothing more than immersion in nirvana with complete dissolution of the human "I" in it

Islam

In Islam, “between death and the Day of Judgment, when Allah will finally decide the fate of all people, an intermediate state is supposed to be“ barzah ”(barrier). In this interval, the bodies of the dead are still able to feel, although they are in the graves, and the souls of the dead go either to heaven (the souls of Muslims) or to the well of Barakhut in Hadramaut (the souls of the infidels). In Islam, there is a "grave punishment" - a small trial over people immediately after death, a kind of preliminary investigation. The grave in this regard is purgatory, where preventive retribution is determined - punishment or reward. As in Christianity, before the Day of Judgment, all the dead will be resurrected and appear before God. The righteous will find eternal bliss in paradise - al-Jannah "http://dvo.sut.ru/libr/filosofi/i197rodu/13.htm

Immortality in Islam differs from immortality in other religions in that warriors who died in the battle for the faith immediately gain immortality in paradise. Therefore, in Islam it is believed that death is an integral attribute of life, its component. After death, everyone except non-Muslims is equal in the face of Allah. Immortality in Islam exists, as in other religions, its only hallmark is that the warriors who fought in the name of Allah gain immediate immortality in paradise.

Introduction

"The fear of death comes from the fact that people take for life one small, limited by their own false idea, a part of it."

(L.N. Tolstoy)

What is death? Few of us seriously think about the nature of this phenomenon. More often than not, we avoid not only conversations, but also thoughts about death, because this topic seems to us very much joyless and scary. After all, every child from an early age knows that life is good, and death is something terrible and unknown. We grow up, learn, gain knowledge and experience in various fields, but our judgments about death remain at the same level - the level of a small child who is afraid of the dark.

Uncertainty is terrible, and therefore, even for an adult, death will always remain the same unknown, frightening darkness, until he tries to understand its nature. Sooner or later, death comes to every home, and every year the number of relatives and friends who have gone into this unknown is growing. People leave - we grieve and suffer from parting with them, but even during these periods we do not always try to figure out and understand: what is this death after all? How to take it? How incomparable loss and injustice of life, or is it possible and a completely different perception of it?

In fact, it will be about life - death - immortality. The greatest attention is paid here to death and the attainment of immortality in another life, while human life is a moment given to a person so that he can adequately prepare for death and subsequent immortality.

Often all peoples have always spoken negatively about life: “Life is suffering” (Buddha, Schopenhauer); "Life is a dream" (Plato, Pascal); “Life is an abyss of evil” (Ancient Egypt); “Life is a struggle and a wandering in a foreign land” (Marcus Aurelius); “Life is the story of a fool, told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, but devoid of meaning” (Shakespeare); “All human life is deeply immersed in untruth” (Nietzsche), etc.
The Greek sage Epicurus said: "Accustom yourself to the idea that death has nothing to do with us. When we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist."

Reflecting on this, you begin to understand that death is perhaps the only thing before which everyone is equal: rich and poor, smart and stupid, loved and unloved.

Many of us are asked "would you like to live forever?" will answer in the affirmative. But only a few are ready to do a lot to achieve this goal. What do we lose by directing our efforts to the search for immortality? Nothing. What do we lose if we sit idly by? Everything!

1. The concept of death and immortality

What exactly are death and immortality? It's no secret that all religions are based on teachings that describe what happens to a person after his death. Since most religions recognize the existence of an immaterial soul, they basically believe that death is just the death of the body, thus they describe various options for the further existence of a person in the form of a spirit. There are many options, the most famous of them are: rebirth in a new body, ending with the achievement of nirvana, or eternal life.

Death is almost an absolute powerful limiter for a person. She frightens him, which naturally seems to be omnipotent, but, as in the issue of freedom, it is important to understand: facets give life a certain meaningful content, meaning, since they make human life definite and complete. Only when trying to understand death, not only in a negative way, is the mystery of immortality determined. If we were immortal, we could calmly postpone each of our actions for an unlimited time, but in the face of death as an inevitable end, as the boundaries of our capabilities, we must make the most of the time allotted to us and not lose a single opportunity to fill life with meaning and content. Thus, we can say that “death is needed in order to truly appreciate the significance of life” L.Ye. Balashov Life, death, immortality. 2009, p. 89 ..

“Death,” writes Yu. V. Sogomonov, “is capable of performing a useful role. She is a powerful catalyst for life. After all, if eternity awaited a person, then it would be worthwhile to hurry, would it be necessary to strain one's strength and will, should one fight for earthly happiness? In this case, a person would have the ability to ossify ... A clear awareness that life is not infinite does not terrorize morally resistant people at all. Consciousness of "time trouble" teaches a person to value time, not to waste it on insignificant deeds and strive to live life in such a way that later "it would not be excruciatingly painful for the years spent aimlessly." A person, realizing that death will come inevitably, is in a hurry to live, and in a hurry to feel ”. L.E. Balashov Life, death, immortality. 2009, p. 91 (Sogomonov Y. V. About the meaning of life. Baku, 1964. p. 10, 14).

Arguing about the concept of death, the question arises: what is its nature? There are two conflicting answers to this question, both of which have ancient origins and are still widespread today.

The first says that death is the disappearance of consciousness, eternal sleep. Often, having lost someone close to us, we calm ourselves down, saying that he just fell asleep. This kind of expression occurs in our everyday language and thinking, as well as in the literature of many centuries and cultures.

“Obviously, such expressions were common in Ancient Greece... For example, in the Iliad, Homer calls sleep "the brother of death", and Plato in his dialogue "Apology" puts the following words into the mouth of his teacher Socrates, who was sentenced to death by the Athenian court: "And if death is the absence of any sensation, it is something like a dream when the sleeper does not see any further dreams, then it would be surprisingly beneficial. In fact, I think, if someone had to choose a night on which he slept so that he did not even dream and, comparing with that night all the other nights and days of his life, he would realize how many days and nights he lived better and more pleasant in comparison with all other nights and days, it is easy to count. So, if death is such, then I, at least, consider it beneficial, because all subsequent time (from the moment of death) turns out to be nothing more than one night "" R. Moody Life after Life, Minsk, 1996, p. 7

On the other hand, death is the transition of the soul or mind to another dimension of reality. According to this second, possibly even more ancient concept, “a certain part of the human being continues to live even after the physical body ceases to function and is completely destroyed. This constantly existing part has received many names - psyche, soul, mind, "I", essence, consciousness. But no matter how it is called, the idea that a person passes into some other world after physical death is one of the most ancient human beliefs. " R. Moody Life after Life, Minsk, 1996, p. eight

From this concept follows the concept of immortality - the eternal existence of the individual ("I", soul, monad), individual will. The idea of immortality is found, in one form or another, among all ancient peoples. Among the Greeks and Jews, immortality was understood as a ghostly existence in the kingdom of shadows ("Hades" - for the Greeks, "Sheol" - for the Jews). In India and Egypt, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls prevailed.

According to Herodotus, “The Egyptians were the first to teach about the immortality of the human soul. When the body dies, the soul passes into another being, just being born at that moment. "

Later, in Judaism, the doctrine of immortality was already associated with "the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead and the afterlife"; in this form it was converted to Christianity and Islam.

It turns out that different nations, religions have their own, individual idea of death and immortality.

christianity islam buddhism immortality

2. Death and immortality in world religions

2.1 Christianity

“The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).

Acts 12, 2: "And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some for eternal life, others for eternal reproach and shame." R. Moody Life after Life, Minsk, 1996, p. eleven

Thus, in Christianity, death is regarded as a dream of the physical body, while the soul is immortal.

2.2 Buddhism

Consequently, the aspiration of the soul or ego (atman) to eternal individual existence is the immediate cause of all suffering and the basis of the cycle of reincarnation (samsara).

Buddhism views the search for eternal life as a deliberately doomed path leading away from enlightenment: even gods who live unimaginably long, in the end, die.

Buddha said: "Be your own lamps", "All my teaching has only one taste of salvation."

Immortality in Islam differs from immortality in other religions in that warriors who died in the battle for the faith immediately gain immortality in paradise. Therefore, in Islam it is believed that death is an integral attribute of life, its component. After death, everyone except non-Muslims is equal in the face of Allah. Immortality in Islam exists, as in other religions, its only distinguishing feature is that the warriors who fought in the name of Allah gain immediate immortality in paradise.

3. Death and immortality in different cultures

3.1 Ancient Greece

The question of death is one of the eternal questions that man has been asking himself since the time of his appearance on earth. Death is the problem that a person inevitably faces, being a temporary being. Each epoch develops its own attitude to death, its own understanding of death. In Ancient Greece, it was believed that "death is not the destruction of life, but a simple change of being" Fustel de Coulanges Numa Denis, Ancient civil community: A study on the cult, law, institutions of Greece and Rome., Moscow: 2011, p. 5.

In ancient Greece, mythology was one of the ways to make it easier for a person to lose his loved ones or to realize the nearness of his own death. She explained what would happen to the soul of the deceased after his death. The person does not know about the time of death; the time and place of death is appointed by moira - the goddess of Fate. After death, a person goes to the underworld, where God Hades (better known as Hades) rules, who judged the souls of dead people, i.e. disposed of their lives after death. Another, the god of Death - Thanatos, carried out the death sentence of Fate and met the soul of the deceased.

After death, the soul of the deceased could go either to the gloomy dungeon of Hades, or to the Island of the Blessed V.S. Polikarpov, The Life After Death Phenomenon. Rostov-on-Don, 1995, p. 61, depending on the nature of the earthly life of the deceased and the favor of the gods to him. One way or another, the death of a person did not at all mean a complete cessation of life. Man simply changed his place of existence. The souls of dead people are nowhere in the underworld burdened with terrible suffering, their torment is spiritual: they miss the sun, yearn for relatives, for their native place.

Ancient mythology was one of the first to formulate the idea of the judgment of the soul after the death of a person. The soul of the dead three judges are waiting in the underworld - "Minos, Eak and Radamant" V.S. Polikarpov, The Life After Death Phenomenon. Rostov-on-Don, 1995, p. 60. They weigh on the scales the bad and good deeds of the deceased standing in front of them, after which they assign him a place of permanent residence.

The views of the ancient Greek philosophers on the problem of the immortality of the soul are different.

Plato believed that the soul is immortal only due to the fact that it is rational and connected with the world of ideas. “There is a divine element in the human soul, and it must be freed from the power of matter. Then a person conquers immortality for himself. But gaining immortality means leaving the lower material world, not its transformation. " ON. Berdyaev, Experience of paradoxical ethics, Moscow: 2003, p. 371 It turns out that Plato believed that immortality is real, but not in physical form, only the human soul is immortal, and it acquires it only by getting rid of the bodily shell, i.e. due to the death of the physical body.

“Another great philosopher, Aristotle, who was a student of Paton, believed that the soul dies with the body and that there is no immortality of the soul. According to Aristotle, the soul is a form that organizes and animates the matter of which a person is composed, that is, that which gives integrity to the body. " http://www.ordodeus.ru/Ordo_Deus1_b.html#Immortality in Ancient Greece Plants and animals also have a soul. The soul of plants is associated with nutrition and reproduction, the soul of animals, in addition to these two functions, has the ability to sense and the ability to move in space. In addition to these abilities, the human soul also possesses the ability to think. Reason is what distinguishes humans from plants and animals. Mind is that part of the soul that does not perish with the body, but returns to its original, the highest principle, according to which the cosmos was created.

Another famous philosopher of Ancient Greece - Democritus - did not recognize the immortality of the soul. He believed that there is nothing but the material world, which we perceive through our senses. And in this world, in his opinion, there is nothing but atoms and emptiness. Like everything else, the soul is made of atoms, and like all other things, with the death of the body, it disintegrates into atoms and ceases to exist. True, death, in the mind of Democritus, is still not the absolute end of life, because warmth and sensitivity are inherent in the smallest indivisible particles, which means that these properties are indestructible, like atoms. The existence of a concrete individual soul ceases, but its "immortal" atoms can enter into the composition of a new soul.

So, in Ancient Greece, man was reconciled with the inevitability of death, he did not have immortality for a long time, which belonged entirely to the gods. The fate of a person after death is life in the underworld, and whether he will live on the Island of the Blessed or in the kingdom of Shadows depends on his deeds during his lifetime.

3.2 Ancient Egypt

In human history, two cultures have shown a particularly keen interest in death and the process of dying: the cultures of the Egyptians and the Tibetans. They shared a deep belief in the continuation of life after death. Therefore, the burial rituals in these cultures are very detailed and followed with special diligence. Funeral rituals helped the soul of the deceased to pass into a new state as easily as possible, drew complex diagrams in which they reflected the wanderings of the soul.

After death, the soul of a person does not die; according to religious beliefs in ancient Egypt, the deceased will be resurrected. In order to provide the deceased with a new, already eternal life, it is necessary to preserve his body and provide in the grave with everything he could use during his life, so that the spirit, returning to the body, could not die of hunger and thirst.

It means that the body must be embalmed, turned into a mummy. And in case the mummification turns out to be imperfect, it is necessary to create a semblance of the body of the deceased - his statue. And that is why in ancient Egypt the sculptor was called "sanh", which means "who creates life." By recreating the image of the deceased, he seemed to be recreating life itself.

“In the view of the ancient Egyptians, a person consists of the body“ Hett ”, the soul of“ Ba ”, the shadow of“ Hybet ”, the name“ Ren ”and, finally, each person has his own invisible double, the guardian angel -“ Ka ”. V.S. Polikarpov, The Life After Death Phenomenon. Rostov-on-Don, 1995, p. 74 Ka is born together with a person, relentlessly follows him everywhere, is an integral part of his personality; Ka does not die with the death of a person. He continues to live next to the human body in the place of his burial, which is therefore called "the house of Ka". The life of Ka depends on the degree of preservation of the body and is closely related to the latter. Therefore, funeral rites were performed with great care. The corpse was turned into a mummy and carefully hidden in the closed room of the tomb; the possibility of accidental destruction of the mummy was also provided for: in this case, the statues, which conveyed as closely as possible the features of the deceased, could replace the mummy and become the seat of Ka.

Along with Ka in the religion of Ancient Egypt, much attention is paid to the truth soul - Ba, depicted as a bird with a human head and a lamp with vegetable oil... According to the pyramidal inscriptions, the deceased flies up into the sky in the form of a bird; he sometimes also takes the form of a grasshopper, since the Egyptians considered the grasshopper to be a bird, and in this form it reaches the sky.

In ancient Egypt, the god-lord of the kingdom of the dead, the judge of the dead was Osiris. According to legend, “Osiris was a legendary king whose rule in Egypt was famous for strength and justice. One day, his brother Seth tricked Osiris into a trap and killed him. Osiris' wife, Isis, managed to become pregnant from the dead Osiris. After burying his body, she fled to the Delta; there, hiding in a thicket of papyrus, she gave birth to a son, Horus. When Horus grew up, he decided to avenge his father. " V.S. Polikarpov, The Life After Death Phenomenon. Rostov-on-Don, 1995, p. 74

Pharaoh's death is gradually identified with the death of Osiris. Since the time of the First Interregnum, images of Osiris began to be found on the walls of the tombs of the nobility and in the burial places of ordinary Egyptians. There is a kind of "democratization" of the myth; now every Egyptian, regardless of his social status, is assimilated in his death to Osiris and thereby attains resurrection.

Immortality in ancient Egypt was the ideological basis on which the Egyptian empire existed for 4 millennia.

For the first time, the idea of the personal immortality of each person was formulated in Egyptian culture, the earliest description of the way to achieve personal immortality is the ancient Egyptian cult of Osiris with its promise of eternal life in the afterlife. The texts of the pyramids suggest that already 2400 years BC in ancient Egypt there was a complex system of secret knowledge and rituals associated with the divine reign of the pharaohs, which, according to the priests, made it possible to gain immortality after death.

Gradually, the cult of Osiris, the rituals associated with it and the idea of immortality become available to all strata of society. By 1400 BC, this teaching turns into a complex system of secret religious knowledge, with the help of which all who could pay for its execution could hope to gain the immortality offered by this rite.

One of the most important parts of the cult of Osiris and the rituals associated with it was the embalming ritual, the purpose of which was to prevent the physical decay of the body, without which the resurrection from the dead was considered impossible.

After the embalming and burial of the body that guaranteed the safety of the body, the final stage of gaining immortality began. The deceased, guided by the instructions of the "book of the dead", the text of which was either carved on the sarcophagus itself or embedded in it written on parchment, with the help of hymns, prayers and spells had to appear before the judgment of Osiris and 42 gods. Before the court, the deceased had to make two exculpatory speeches recorded in chapter 125 of the "Book of the Dead".

In the first speech of excuse, the deceased turns directly to Osiris. In the second - to each of the 42 gods-judges, each of whom pronounces its own sentence:

And only if a person led a righteous life on earth, corresponding to these two justifying speeches, Osiris granted him immortality and sent him to paradise. If a person's life did not correspond to these two justifying speeches, then he was deprived of the right to immortality, and the sinner was eaten by the monster Amat (a lion with the head of a crocodile), which became his final and irrevocable death.

3.3 Ancient Israel

Jewish culture is one of the most interesting cultures of the ancient world. Judaism became the forerunner of Christianity, formulated ethical values and religious ideas that remain relevant for modern man and to this day.

One of the most important moments in the religious life of Israel was the problem of death. The ancient Jews were realistic about death and were able to come to terms with the idea of ending individual life. The death of a person did not mean the death of his soul; after death, the soul fell into the kingdom of the dead - sheol. Death itself is temporary, with the coming of the Messiah, the dead must be resurrected, and already receive eternal life in the kingdom of God, which should come about 700-1000 years after the coming of the Messiah.

Death was not present in the world immediately after its creation; death came into the world together with the fall of man. After creating the earth, God created the first man, Adam and Eve, his wife; He settled them in the East in the Garden of Eden, in paradise. “God commanded man:“ ... from every tree in the garden you will eat. And from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, do not eat from it; for on the day you eat of it, you will die ”(Gen. 2: 16-17)” http://skorbim.com/. However, the snake manages to tempt Eve. Eve succumbs to the snake's persuasion, agrees to taste the fruit and gives Adam to taste it. Man thereby falls into "original sin", caused by his own pride, the desire to compare with God. For this, God expels Adam and Eve from paradise; henceforth, a person must get his own bread, and also a person becomes mortal. Death, therefore, is an unnatural state of the world, it is its temporary state, it is a kind of illness that every creature is subject to before the judgment of humanity and the onset of the kingdom of God.

The nature of man is twofold: on the one hand, he was created in the image and likeness of God, God breathed breath or spirit into him, and on the other hand, man was created from dust and will return to dust. “Experiencing one's own greatness and, at the same time, one's own mortality is one of the tense and insoluble contradictions inherent in any culture. Biblical texts speak of the vanity of human existence; The book of Job is a prime example of this. " ON. Berdyaev, Experience of paradoxical ethics, Moscow: 2003, p. 370 Long life is the greatest good for man. As in many traditional cultures, death is humiliating: it reduces a person to the state of a worm in the grave or sheol - a dark and terrible area in the depths of the earth. God has no power over Sheol, because death is essentially a denial of his work. Therefore, the dead are deprived of communion with God, and for believers this is the most powerful test. But God is stronger than death: He can raise a person from the dead, if His will.

An important place in the culture of Judaism is given to the expectation of the resurrection of the dead after the coming of the Messiah. According to some ideas, there will be two resurrections: first, after the coming of the Messiah, only the saints and the righteous will be resurrected, and before the Last Judgment, when God descends to earth to judge mankind, all people, including the Gentiles, will be resurrected. This will be the second - universal - resurrection. The Hebrew people were alien to the idea of personal immortality, they were characterized by the consciousness of the immortality of the people, i.e. kind, species, not personality.

Thus, the ideas about the life of the soul after death in Jewish culture are quite diverse. Death in Jewish culture is experienced as an inevitability for every person, life is very short, and all the benefits that a person uses in this life are transient. In general, the attitude towards death is rather pessimistic, but on the other hand, there is always hope for the mercy of God, for the resurrection of the dead and eternal life in the future, for the resurrection of the whole people. A person, as it were, lives with the hope of overcoming death, death is a temporary state of the human soul.

3.4 Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a historical era that began after the fall of the Roman Empire and lasted until the beginning of the 15th century, it is a special type of culture that determined all areas of human life: from religious to everyday life.

One of the main characteristics of the Middle Ages is theocentrism of understanding God as the source of any good. At the same time, human activity is not self-worth, not self-sufficient, but entirely dependent on God. Religious norms are designed to regulate all aspects of human activity, they were decisive for literature and art of that time. Moreover, death was realized through the system of Christian values; we can say that the Middle Ages is one of the few historical eras when a person found a way to come to terms with the fact that he is mortal, when death was perceived as something natural, and in no way an idea that exists on the periphery of culture.

The ideas about why a person is mortal, about the posthumous existence of the soul, were Christian, biblical. Man becomes mortal as a result of the Fall. Evil is a person's distance from God, when a person does evil, he is not with God, but acts on his own.

At the same time, death was understood as a temporary state of a person, after the end of the world, the resurrection of the dead and Last judgment the righteous will gain eternal life in paradise, where there will be no sorrows and diseases that a person is forced to endure on earth. The hope of eternal life and eternal bliss, on the one hand, is the basis of moral choice, and on the other hand, a consolation for a person facing death. After all, death is only temporary; only the body dies, the soul is immortal.

It is characteristic that in the Middle Ages, children from an early age were taught to think about death, in contrast to subsequent eras, when the topic of death became one of the least discussed, practically marginal. So, a dying person gathers around him his relatives, relatives, not excluding children, to say goodbye to them. The child is not protected from death, but, on the contrary, is taught to think about it.

The other side of this attitude towards death was the clear separation of the world of the living and the world of the dead; the dead now seem to be unable to enter the world of the living, world of the dead turns out to be closed, inaccessible to the living. Material evidence of this was that the cemetery began to be built outside the medieval cities.

Medieval culture is a Christian culture, practically devoid of a secular principle; all aspects of human life were imbued with religiosity. However, medieval culture also absorbed some elements of pagan cultures that existed before it, which were deeply rooted in human consciousness... So in the medieval attitude to death, we can trace the intertwining of Christian and pagan ideas. For example, in Germany it was believed that the shadow of a man without a head on the wall announced the imminent death of someone close to him. In Scotland, a warning of imminent death was dreams in which the sleeper saw the burial of a still living person. Fortune-telling about the onset of death was widespread in Europe: it was believed that death was foreshadowed by certain outlines of drops of wax thrown into cold water.

Thus, in medieval culture, death is universal, inevitable. From an early age, children were prepared for death, taught to take it for granted. Despite the fact that the people of the Middle Ages clearly divided the world of the living and the dead, they still believed in the existence of life after death, but in a different world: heaven and hell.

Conclusion

Despite the existence of a huge number of beliefs, peoples and their different perceptions of the world, they all recognize the existence of death and "life after life."

All teachings about immortality and death are somewhat different from each other. Some believe that death is a dream, others - the transition of the soul to another world, or simply the death of the material body. But they all agree on one thing: death is inevitable, it limits the capabilities of our material body, creating facets that fill life with meaning.

There is also life after death - the immortality of the soul, namely of the soul, and not of the person as a whole, for it is impossible to achieve bodily immortality, as the alchemists tried to achieve. The concept of immortality is also understood in different ways: life in heaven or hell, chaol; the cycle of life and death, the rebirth of the soul in another body; life in the world of ancestral spirits.

But there is no definite knowledge about what death is and whether there is life after it. Therefore, each person has the right to choose for himself what to believe in and what to expect from life. Death will come sooner or later anyway, and knowing this fact, you should use every second of your life to enjoy it to the fullest.

Literature

1. Balandin R.K., Life, death, immortality. M., 1992.

2. Balashov LE, Life, death, immortality. 2009

3. Berdyaev N.A., Experience of paradoxical ethics, M., 2003

4. Moody R., Life after Life: a study of the phenomenon of continuing life after the death of the body, Minsk, 1996.

5. Polikarpov VS, The Phenomenon "Life after Death", Rostov-on-Don, 1995.

6. Fustel de Coulanges Numa Denis, Ancient Civil Society: A Study of the Cult, Law and Institutions of Greece and Rome, M., 1996

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2. Attitude towards death, problems of life, death and immortality

Problems of life and death and attitudes towards death
in different historical eras and in different religions.

Introduction.
Life and death are eternal themes of the spiritual culture of mankind in all its subdivisions. Prophets and founders of religions, philosophers and moralists, figures of art and literature, teachers and doctors thought about them. There is hardly an adult who, sooner or later, would not think about the meaning of his existence, impending death and the achievement of immortality. These thoughts come to the minds of children and very young people, about which poetry and prose, dramas and tragedies, letters and diaries speak. Only early childhood or senile insanity relieve a person from the need to solve these problems.
In fact, we are talking about a triad: life - death - immortality because all the spiritual systems of mankind proceeded from the idea of the contradictory unity of these phenomena. The greatest attention was paid here to death and the attainment of immortality in another life, and human life itself was interpreted as a moment given to a person so that he could adequately prepare for death and immortality.
With few exceptions, all times and peoples spoke quite negatively about life, Life is suffering (Buddha: Schopenhauer, etc.); life is a dream (Plato, Pascal); life is an abyss of evil (Ancient Egypt); "Life is a struggle and a wandering in a foreign land" (Marcus Aurelius); "Life is the story of a fool, told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, but devoid of meaning" (Shakespeare); "All human life is deeply immersed in untruth" (Nietzsche), etc.
Proverbs and sayings of different peoples like "Life is a penny" speak about this. Ortega y Gasset defined man not as a body or spirit, but as a specifically human drama. Indeed, in this sense, the life of every person is dramatic and tragic: no matter how well life develops, no matter how long it is, its end is inevitable. The Greek sage Epicurus said: "Accustom yourself to the idea that death has nothing to do with us. When we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist."
Death and potential immortality are the strongest bait for the philosophical mind, for all our life affairs must, in one way or another, be commensurate with the eternal. Man is doomed to think about life and death, and this is his difference from the animal, which is mortal, but does not know about it. Death in general is a payback for the complication of the biological system. Unicellular organisms are practically immortal and the amoeba in this sense is a happy creature.
When an organism becomes multicellular, a mechanism of self-destruction is built into it at a certain stage of development, associated with the genome.
For centuries, the best minds of mankind have been trying at least theoretically to refute this thesis, to prove, and then to realize real immortality. However, the ideal of such immortality is not the existence of an amoeba and not an angelic life in a better world. From this point of view, a person should live forever, being in a constant bloom. A person cannot come to terms with the fact that it is he who will have to leave this magnificent world where life is in full swing. To be an eternal spectator of this grandiose picture of the Universe, not to feel “full of days” like the biblical prophets - could anything be more tempting?

But thinking about this, you begin to understand that death is perhaps the only thing before which everyone is equal: rich and poor, dirty and clean, loved and unloved. Although both in antiquity and in our days, attempts were and are constantly being made to convince the world that there are people who have been "there" and returned back, but common sense refuses to believe this. Faith is required, a miracle is required, which was performed by the Gospel Christ, "trampling down death by death." It is noticed that the wisdom of a person is often expressed in a calm attitude towards life and death. As Mahatma Gandhi said: "We do not know which is better - to live or die. Therefore, we should neither over-admire life, nor tremble at the thought of death. We should treat both of them equally. This is ideal." And long before that, the Bhagavad Gita said: "Indeed, death is meant for the one who is born, and birth is inevitable for the deceased. There is no sorrow about the inevitable."
At the same time, many great people realized this problem in tragic tones. Outstanding Russian biologist I.I. Mechnikov, reflecting on the possibility of "educating the instinct of natural death," wrote about Leo Tolstoy: that this is a vain hope. Why, he asked himself, raise children who will soon find themselves in the same critical condition as their father? Why should I love them, raise them and watch them? For the same despair that is in me, or for stupidity? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them - every step leads them to the knowledge of this truth. And truth is death. "

1. Measurements of the problem of life, death and immortality.

1. 1. The first dimension of the problem of life, death and immortality is biological, for these states are essentially different sides of one phenomenon. The hypothesis of panspermia, the constant presence of life and death in the Universe, their constant reproduction in suitable conditions has long been expressed. The definition of F. Engels is known: "Life is a way of existence of protein bodies, and this way of existence consists essentially in the constant self-renewal of the chemical constituent parts of these bodies", emphasizes the cosmic aspect of life.
Stars, nebulae, planets, comets and other cosmic bodies are born, live and die, and in this sense nobody and nothing disappears. This aspect is most developed in Eastern philosophy and mystical teachings, proceeding from the fundamental impossibility of understanding the meaning of this universal circulation only by reason. Materialistic concepts are based on the phenomenon of self-generation of life and self-infliction, when, according to F. Engels, life and a thinking spirit are generated “with iron necessity” in one place of the Universe, if in another it disappears.
Awareness of the unity of the life of man and mankind with all life on the planet, with its biosphere, as well as potential forms of life in the Universe, is of great ideological significance.
This idea of the sanctity of life, the right to life for any living being, by virtue of the very fact of birth, belongs to the eternal ideals of mankind. In the limit, the entire Universe and the Earth are considered as living beings, and interference in the still poorly understood laws of their life is fraught with an ecological crisis. Man appears as a small particle of this living Universe, a microcosm that has absorbed all the wealth of the macrocosm. Feelings of "reverence for life", a sense of belonging to wonderful world living to one degree or another is inherent in any worldview system. Even if biological, bodily life is considered an inauthentic, transitory form of human existence, then in these cases (for example, in Christianity) human flesh can and should acquire a different, flourishing state.

1.2. The second dimension of the problem of life, death and immortality is associated with an understanding of the specifics of human life and its differences from the life of all living things. For more than thirty centuries sages, prophets and philosophers different countries and peoples are trying to find this divide. Most often, it is believed that the whole thing is in the awareness of the fact of impending death: we know that we will die and are frantically looking for a way to immortality. All other living things quietly and peacefully completes their path, having managed to reproduce new life or to fertilize the soil for another life. A person is doomed to painful lifelong contemplations about the meaning of life or its meaninglessness, torments himself, and often others, and is forced to drown these damned questions in wine or drugs. This is partly true, but the question arises: what about the death of a newborn child who has not yet had time to understand anything, or a mentally retarded person who is unable to understand anything? Whether to consider the moment of conception (which cannot be accurately determined in most cases) or the moment of birth as the beginning of a person's life.

It is known that the dying Leo Tolstoy, referring to those around him, said,
so that they turn their gaze to millions of other people, and not look at one
lion. The unknown death that does not touch anyone except the mother, the death of a small creature from hunger somewhere in Africa and the magnificent funeral of world famous leaders in the face of eternity do not differ. In this sense, the English poet D. Donn is deeply right, who said that the death of each person belittles all of humanity and therefore "never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you."
It is obvious that the specifics of human life, death and immortality are directly related to reason and its manifestations, with the success and achievements of a person during his life, with the assessment of his contemporaries and descendants. The death of many geniuses at a young age is undoubtedly tragic, but there is no reason to believe that their subsequent life, if it took place, would give the world something even more brilliant. Some not quite clear, but empirically obvious regularity is at work here, expressed by the Christian thesis: "God first of all chooses the best."
In this sense, life and death are not covered by the categories of rational knowledge, do not fit into the framework of a rigid deterministic model of the world and man. You can talk about these concepts in cold blood up to a certain limit. It is due to the personal interest of each person and his ability to intuitively comprehend the ultimate foundations of human existence. In this respect, everyone is like a swimmer jumping into the waves in the middle of the open sea. You need to rely only on yourself, despite human solidarity, faith in God, the Highest reason, etc. The uniqueness of a person, the uniqueness of the personality is manifested here in the highest degree. Geneticists have calculated that the probability of this particular person being born from these parents is one chance in one hundred trillion cases. If this has already happened, then what an amazing variety human meanings of being appears before a person when he thinks about life and death?

1.3. The third dimension of this problem is associated with the idea of gaining immortality, which sooner or later becomes the focus of a person's attention, especially if he has reached adulthood.
There are several types of immortality associated with the fact that after a person remains his business, children, grandchildren, etc., the products of his activities and personal belongings, as well as the fruits of spiritual production (ideas, images, etc.).

The first type of immortality is in the genes of offspring, is close to most people. In addition to the principled opponents of marriage and family and misogynists, many seek to perpetuate themselves in this way. One of the most powerful drives of a person is the desire to see their own features in children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In the royal dynasties of Europe, the transmission of certain features (for example, the nose of the Habsburgs) has been traced over several generations. This is associated with the inheritance of not only physical traits, but also the moral principles of family occupation or craft, etc. Historians have established that many prominent figures of Russian culture of the 19th century were related (albeit distant) to each other. One century includes four generations.
Thus, over two thousand years, 80 generations have changed, and the 80th ancestor of each of us was a contemporary Ancient Rome, and the 130th - a contemporary of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II.

The second type of immortality is the mummification of the body with the expectation of its eternal preservation. The experience of the Egyptian pharaohs, the practice of modern embalming (V.I.Lenin, Mao-Zedong, etc.) suggests that in a number of civilizations this is considered accepted. Technological advances at the end of the 20th century made it possible to cryogenesis (deep freezing) of the bodies of the dead, with the expectation that physicians of the future will revive and cure incurable diseases. Such a fetishization of human corporeality is characteristic mainly of totalitarian societies, where gerontocracy (the power of the old) becomes the basis of the stability of the state.

The third type of immortality is the hope for the "dissolution" of the body and spirit of the deceased in the Universe, the entry them into the cosmic "body", into the eternal circulation of matter. This is typical for a number of Eastern civilizations, especially Japanese. The Islamic model of the relationship to life and death and various materialistic or, more precisely, naturalistic concepts are close to such a solution. Here we are talking about the loss of personal qualities and the preservation of particles of the former body that can enter into the composition of other organisms. This highly abstract kind of immortality is unacceptable to most people and is emotionally rejected.

The fourth path to immortality is associated with the results of human creativity. It is not for nothing that members of various academies are awarded the title "immortals." Scientific discovery, the creation of an ingenious work of literature and art, showing the way to humanity in a new faith, the creation of a philosophical text, an outstanding military victory and a demonstration of statesmanship - all this leaves the name of a person in the memory of noble descendants. Heroes and prophets, passion-bearers and saints, architects and inventors are immortalized. The names of the most cruel tyrants and the greatest criminals are forever preserved in the memory of mankind. This raises the question of the ambiguity of assessing the scale of a person's personality. It seems that the more human lives and broken human destinies lie on the conscience of this or that historical character, the more chances he has to get into history and gain immortality there. The ability to influence the lives of hundreds of millions of people, the "charisma" of power evokes in many a state of mystical horror mixed with reverence. Legends and traditions are composed about such people, which are passed down from generation to generation.

We can say that the meaning of death and immortality, as well as the ways to achieve it, are reverse side the problem of the meaning of life. Obviously, these issues are resolved in different ways, depending on the leading spiritual setting of a particular civilization.

2. Attitude towards death, problems of life, death and immortality in the religions of the world.

Let us consider these problems in relation to three world religions - Christianity, Islam and Buddhism and civilizations based on them.

2.1. Christian understanding of the meaning of life, death and immortality comes from the Old Testament provision: "The day of death better than the day birth "and the New Testament commandment of Christ" ... I have the keys to hell and death. " the sphere of mystery and miracle, for man is withdrawn from the sphere of action of natural-cosmic forces and elements and is placed as a person face to face with God, who is also a person.
Thus, the goal of human life is deification, movement towards eternal life. Without realizing this, earthly life turns into a dream, an empty and idle dream, a soap bubble. In essence, it is only a preparation for eternal life, which is not far off for everyone. That is why it is said in the Gospel: "Be ready: for at an hour you do not think, the Son of Man will come." So that life does not turn, according to M.Yu. Lermontov, "into an empty and stupid joke", one must always remember about the hour of death. This is not a tragedy, but a transition to another world, where myriads of souls, good and evil, already live, and where each new one enters for joy or torment. According to the figurative expression of one of the moral hierarchs: "A dying person is a setting sun, the dawn of which is already shining over the other world." Death destroys not the body, but its corruption, and therefore it is not the end, but the beginning of eternal life.
Christianity connected a different understanding of immortality with the image of the "Eternal Jew" Ahasuerus. When Jesus, exhausted under the weight of the cross, went to Golgotha and wanted to rest, Ahasfer, who was standing among the others, said: “Go, go,” for which he was punished - he was forever denied the rest of the grave. From century to century, he is doomed to wander around the world, waiting for the second coming of Christ, which alone can deprive him of his hateful immortality.
The image of "mountain" Jerusalem is associated with the absence of disease, death, hunger, cold, poverty, enmity, hatred, anger and other evils there. There is life without labor and joy without sorrow, health without weakness and honor without danger. All in the blossoming youth and age of Christ are comforted by bliss, partake of the fruits of peace, love, joy and joy, and "love each other as themselves." The Evangelist Luke defined the essence of the Christian approach to life and death in this way: "God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. For with him all are alive." Christianity categorically condemns suicide, since a person does not belong to himself, his life and death are "in the will of God."

2.2. Another world religion - Islam - proceeds from the fact that man was created by the will of Almighty Allah, who is above all merciful. To the question of a person: "Is it when I die, will I be known alive?", Allah gives the answer: "Does not man remember that we created him before, and he was nothing?" Unlike Christianity, earthly life in Islam is highly regarded. However, on the Last Day, everything will be destroyed, and the dead will be resurrected and brought before Allah for final judgment. Belief in an afterlife is essential
because in this case a person will evaluate his actions and deeds not from the point of view of personal interest, but in the sense of an eternal perspective.
The destruction of the entire universe on the day of the Just Judgment presupposes the creation of a completely new world. A "record" of deeds and thoughts, even the most secret, will be presented about each person, and an appropriate sentence will be passed. Thus, the principle of the supremacy of the laws of morality and reason over physical laws will triumph. A morally pure person cannot be in a humiliated position, as is the case in the real world. Islam categorically prohibits suicide.
The description of heaven and hell in the Qur'an is full of vivid details, so that the righteous can be completely satisfied, and the sinners get what they deserve. Paradise is the beautiful "gardens of eternity, below which rivers of water, milk and wine flow"; there are also "pure spouses", "full-breasted peers", as well as "black-eyed and big-eyed, adorned with bracelets of gold and pearls." Those sitting on carpets and leaning on green pillows are bypassed by "boys forever young" who offer "bird meat" on dishes made of gold. Hell for sinners is fire and boiling water, pus and slops, the fruits of the "zakkum" tree, similar to the head of the devil, and their lot is "cries and roars." It is impossible to ask Allah about the hour of death, since the knowledge about it is only with him, and "what is given to you to know, perhaps the hour is already at hand."

2.3. Attitudes towards death and immortality in Buddhism significantly different from Christian and Muslim. Buddha himself refused to answer the questions: "Is he who knows the truth immortal or is he mortal?" And also: can he who knows be mortal and immortal at the same time? In essence, only one type of "wondrous immortality" is recognized - nirvana, as the embodiment of the transcendent Superexistence, the Absolute Beginning, which has no attributes.
Buddhism did not begin to refute the doctrine of transmigration of souls developed by Brahmanism, i.e. the belief that after death any living being is reborn as a new living being (human, animal, deity, spirit, etc.). However, Buddhism made significant changes to the teachings of Brahmanism. If the brahmanas asserted that by means of rituals, sacrifices and incantations different for each class ("varna") it is fashionable to achieve "good rebirths", i.e. become a raja, a brahmana, a wealthy merchant, etc., then Buddhism declared all reincarnation, all kinds of being inevitable misfortune and evil. Therefore, the highest goal of a Buddhist should be the complete cessation of rebirth and the attainment of nirvana, i.e. nothingness.
Since personality is understood as the sum of drachmas in a constant stream of reincarnation, it follows the absurdity, meaninglessness of the chain of natural births. The Dhammapada states that "being born again and again is sorrowful." The way out is the path of gaining nirvana, breaking through the chain of endless rebirths and achieving enlightenment, the blissful "island" located in the depths of a person's heart, where "they do not own anything and do not crave anything." Famous symbol nirvana - extinguishing the ever-quivering fire of life expresses well the essence of the Buddhist understanding of death and immortality. As the Buddha said: "One day of the life of a person who has seen the immortal path is better than a hundred-year existence of a person who has not seen the higher life."
For most people, it is impossible to attain nirvana immediately, in this rebirth. Following the path of salvation indicated by the Buddha, a living entity usually has to reincarnate over and over again. But this will be the path of ascent to the "highest wisdom", having reached which the being will be able to get out of the "cycle of being", to complete the chain of its rebirths.
A calm and peaceful attitude towards life, death and immortality, the desire for enlightenment and liberation from evil is also characteristic of other Eastern religions and cults. In this regard, the attitude towards suicide is changing; it is considered not so sinful as meaningless, for it does not free a person from the circle of birth and death, but only leads to birth in a lower incarnation. One must overcome this attachment to one's personality, for, according to the Buddha, "the nature of personality is continuous death."

2.4. Concepts of life, death and immortality based on a non-religious and atheistic approach to the world and man. Irreligious people and atheists are often reproached for the fact that for them earthly life is everything, and death is an insurmountable tragedy, which, in essence, makes life meaningless. L.N. Tolstoy, in his famous confession, painfully tried to find in life that meaning that would not be destroyed by the death inevitably impending for each person.
For the believer, everything is clear here, but for the unbeliever there is an alternative to three possible ways of solving this problem.

First way- this is to accept the idea, which is confirmed by science and just common sense, that in the world it is impossible to completely destroy even an elementary particle, and the laws of conservation are in effect. Matter, energy and believed to be information and organization are conserved complex systems... Consequently, the particles of our "I" after death will enter the eternal cycle of being and in this sense will be immortal. True, they will not possess consciousness, a soul, with which our "I" is connected. Moreover, this type of immortality is acquired by a person throughout his life. We can say in the form of a paradox: we are alive only because we die every second. Erythrocytes in the blood, epithelial cells die off every day, hair falls out, etc. Therefore, in principle, it is impossible to fix life and death as absolute opposites, not in reality or in thoughts. These are two sides of the same coin.

Second way- the acquisition of immortality in human affairs, in the fruits of material and spiritual production, which are included in the treasury of mankind. For this, first of all, you need confidence that humanity is immortal and that a cosmic destination is in the spirit of the ideas of K.E. Tsiolkovsky and other cosmists. If self-destruction is real for humanity in a thermonuclear ecological catastrophe, as well as as a result of some cosmic cataclysms, then in this case the question remains open.

Third way to immortality, as a rule, are chosen by people whose scale of activity does not go beyond their home and immediate environment. Without expecting eternal bliss or eternal torment, without going into the "cunning" of the mind, which connects the microcosm (ie man) with the macrocosm, millions of people simply float in the stream of life, feeling themselves to be a part of it. Immortality for them is not in eternal memory blessed humanity, but in everyday affairs and worries. "Believing in God is not difficult .... No, you believe in a person!" - Chekhov wrote this without at all assuming that it was he himself who would become an example of this type of attitude towards life and death.

Conclusion.

Modern thanatology (the doctrine of death) is one of the "hot" points of natural science and humanitarian knowledge. There are several reasons for the interest in the problem of death.
Firstly, this is the situation of a global civilized crisis, which, in principle, can lead to the self-destruction of mankind.
Secondly, the value attitude towards human life and death has changed significantly in connection with the general situation on Earth.
Almost one and a half billion of the world's inhabitants live in complete poverty and another billion is approaching the mark, one and a half billion earthlings are deprived of any medical care, a billion people cannot read and write. There are 700 million unemployed people in the world. Millions of people in all corners of the world suffer from racism and aggressive nationalism.
This leads to a pronounced devaluation of human life, to contempt for the life of both one's own and that of another. The bacchanalia of terrorism, an increase in the number of unmotivated killings and violence, as well as suicides, are symptoms of the global pathology of mankind at the turn of the 20th - 21st centuries. At the same time, at the turn of the 60s, in Western countries appeared bioethics- a complex discipline at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, biology, medicine and a number of other disciplines. She was a kind of reaction to the new problems of life and death.
This coincided with the growing interest in human rights, including in relation to their own bodily and spiritual being and the reaction of society to the threat to life on Earth, due to the aggravation of global problems humanity.
If a person has something like the death instinct (which Freud wrote about), then everyone has a natural, innate right not only to live as he was born, but also to die in human conditions. One of the features of the XX century. is that humanism and humane relations between people are the basis and guarantee of survival for humanity. If earlier any social and natural disasters left the hope that most people would survive and restore what was destroyed, now vitality can be considered a concept derived from humanism.

Used Books.

1. Handbook of an atheist. Political Literature Publishing House.
Moscow, 1975

2. Philosophy. Study guide for students. 1997 year

Introduction

"The fear of death comes from the fact that people take for life one small, limited by their own false idea, a part of it."

(L.N. Tolstoy)

1. The concept of death and immortality

Death is almost an absolute powerful limiter for a person. She frightens him, which naturally seems to be omnipotent, but, as in the issue of freedom, it is important to understand: facets give life a certain meaningful content, meaning, since they make human life definite and complete. Only when trying to understand death, not only in a negative way, is the mystery of immortality determined. If we were immortal, we could calmly postpone each of our actions for an unlimited time, but in the face of death as an inevitable end, as the boundaries of our capabilities, we must make the most of the time allotted to us and not lose a single opportunity to fill life with meaning and content. Thus, we can say that "death is needed in order to truly appreciate the significance of life."

Death, writes Yu. V. Sogomonov, is capable of performing a useful role. She is a powerful catalyst for life. After all, if eternity awaited a person, then it would be worthwhile to hurry, would it be necessary to strain one's strength and will, should one fight for earthly happiness? In this case, a person would have the ability to ossify ... A clear awareness that life is not infinite does not terrorize morally resistant people at all. Consciousness time trouble teaches a person to value time, not to waste it on insignificant deeds and strive to live life in such a way that later it was not excruciatingly painful for the aimlessly spent years ... A person, realizing that death will come inevitably, is in a hurry to live, and in a hurry to feel.

Arguing about the concept of death, the question arises: what is its nature? There are two conflicting answers to this question, both of which have ancient origins and are still widespread today.

“Obviously, such expressions were common in ancient Greece. For example, in the Iliad, Homer calls sleep "the brother of death", and Plato in his dialogue "Apology" puts the following words into the mouth of his teacher Socrates, who was sentenced to death by the Athenian court: "And if death is the absence of any sensation, it is something like a dream when the sleeper does not see any further dreams, then it would be surprisingly beneficial. In fact, I think, if someone had to choose a night on which he slept so that he did not even dream and, comparing with that night all the other nights and days of his life, he would realize how many days and nights he lived better and more pleasant in comparison with all other nights and days, it is easy to count. So, if death is such, then I, at least, consider it beneficial, because all subsequent time (from the moment of death) turns out to be nothing more than one night. "

2. Death and immortality in world religions

1 Christianity

“The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).

Acts 12, 2: "And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some for eternal life, others for eternal reproach and shame."

Thus, in Christianity, death is regarded as a dream of the physical body, while the soul is immortal.

2 Buddhism

"Buddhism says that every new convert should be" shown the path to amata, "on which the liberation of the mind is achieved through the deepening of wisdom and meditative practices (sati, samadhi)."

Consequently, the aspiration of the soul or ego (atman) to eternal individual existence is the immediate cause of all suffering and the basis of the cycle of reincarnation (samsara).

Buddhism views the search for eternal life as a deliberately doomed path leading away from enlightenment: even gods who live unimaginably long, in the end, die.

Buddha said: "Be your own lamps", "All my teaching has only one taste of salvation."

In heaven is the paradise of Tushita, its name means "satisfied, joyful". This is one of the areas where the gods dwell. It is located above the summit of Mount Sumeru, the center of the world. The garden of joy and the world of desires and passions are extinguished. In the paradise of Tushita, souls who have observed the five commandments are reincarnated: do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not lie, do not intoxicate yourself - as well as those who have nurtured immeasurable states of consciousness with good deeds and meditation: a loving heart, compassion, impartiality - in other words, those qualities, which are the essence of the awakened mind. In this heavenly world, the souls of bodhisattvas are reborn. The Buddha of the future, before his condescension to earth, dwells in a heavenly paradise.

In Islam, “between death and the Day of Judgment, when Allah will finally decide the fate of all people, there is an intermediate state barzakh (block). In this interval, the bodies of the dead are still able to feel, although they are in the graves, and the souls of the dead go either to heaven (the souls of Muslims) or to the well of Barakhut in Hadramaut (the souls of the infidels). In Islam, there is grave punishment - a small trial over people immediately after death, a kind of preliminary investigation. The grave in this regard is purgatory, where preventive retribution is determined - punishment or reward. As in Christianity, before the Day of Judgment, all the dead will be resurrected and appear before God. The righteous will find eternal bliss in paradise - al-Jannah "

Immortality in Islam differs from immortality in other religions in that warriors who died in the battle for the faith immediately gain immortality in paradise. Therefore, in Islam it is believed that death is an integral attribute of life, its component. After death, everyone except non-Muslims is equal in the face of Allah. Immortality in Islam exists, as in other religions, its only distinguishing feature is that the warriors who fought in the name of Allah gain immediate immortality in paradise.

3. Death and immortality in different cultures

1 Ancient Greece

The question of death is one of the eternal questions that man has been asking himself since the time of his appearance on earth. Death is the problem that a person inevitably faces, being a temporary being. Each epoch develops its own attitude to death, its own understanding of death. In ancient Greece, it was believed that "death is not the destruction of life, but a simple change of being"

After death, the soul of the deceased could get either into the dark dungeon of Hades, or on the Isle of the Blessed, depending on the nature of the deceased's earthly life and the favor of the gods to him. One way or another, the death of a person did not at all mean a complete cessation of life. Man simply changed his place of existence. The souls of dead people are nowhere in the underworld burdened with terrible suffering, their torment is spiritual: they miss the sun, yearn for relatives, for their native place.

Ancient mythology was one of the first to formulate the idea of the judgment of the soul after the death of a person. Three judges await the soul of the dead in the underworld - "Minos, Eak and Radamant". They weigh the good and bad deeds of the deceased in front of them, after which they assign him a place of permanent residence.

The views of the ancient Greek philosophers on the problem of the immortality of the soul are different.

Plato believed that the soul is immortal only due to the fact that it is rational and connected with the world of ideas. “There is a divine element in the human soul, and it must be freed from the power of matter. Then a person conquers immortality for himself. But gaining immortality means leaving the lower material world, not its transformation. " It turns out that Plato believed that immortality is real, but not in physical form, only the human soul is immortal, and it acquires it only by getting rid of the bodily shell, i.e. due to the death of the physical body.

“Another great philosopher, Aristotle, who was a student of Paton, believed that the soul dies with the body and that there is no immortality of the soul. According to Aristotle, the soul is a form that organizes and animates the matter of which a person is composed, that is, that which gives integrity to the body. ”Plants and animals also have a soul. The soul of plants is associated with nutrition and reproduction, the soul of animals, in addition to these two functions, has the ability to sense and the ability to move in space. In addition to these abilities, the human soul also possesses the ability to think. Reason is what distinguishes humans from plants and animals. Mind is that part of the soul that does not perish with the body, but returns to its original, the highest principle, according to which the cosmos was created.

2 Ancient Egypt

“In the view of the ancient Egyptians, a person consists of the body“ Hett ”, the soul of“ Ba ”, the shadow of“ Hybet ”, the name“ Ren ”and, finally, each person has his own invisible double, the guardian angel -“ Ka ”. Ka is born with a person, relentlessly follows him everywhere, is an integral part of his personality; Ka does not die with the death of a person. He continues to live next to the human body in the place of his burial, which is therefore called "the house of Ka". The life of Ka depends on the degree of preservation of the body and is closely related to the latter. Therefore, funeral rites were performed with great care. The corpse was turned into a mummy and carefully hidden in the closed room of the tomb; the possibility of accidental destruction of the mummy was also provided for: in this case, the statues, which conveyed as closely as possible the features of the deceased, could replace the mummy and become the seat of Ka.

Along with Ka in the religion of Ancient Egypt, much attention is paid to the true soul - Ba, depicted as a bird with a human head and a lamp with vegetable oil burning in front of it. According to the pyramidal inscriptions, the deceased flies up into the sky in the form of a bird; he sometimes also takes the form of a grasshopper, since the Egyptians considered the grasshopper to be a bird, and in this form it reaches the sky.

Immortality in ancient Egypt was the ideological basis on which the Egyptian empire existed for 4 millennia.

In the first speech of excuse, the deceased turns directly to Osiris. In the second - to each of the 42 gods-judges, each of whom pronounces its own sentence:

3 Ancient Israel

Death was not present in the world immediately after its creation; death came into the world together with the fall of man. After creating the earth, God created the first man, Adam and Eve, his wife; He settled them in the East in the Garden of Eden, in paradise. “God commanded man:“ ... from every tree in the garden you will eat. And from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, do not eat from it; for in the day you eat of it, you will die ”(Gen. 2: 16-17)”. However, the snake manages to tempt Eve. Eve succumbs to the snake's persuasion, agrees to taste the fruit and gives Adam to taste it. Man thereby falls into "original sin", caused by his own pride, the desire to compare with God. For this, God expels Adam and Eve from paradise; henceforth, a person must get his own bread, and also a person becomes mortal. Death, therefore, is an unnatural state of the world, it is its temporary state, it is a kind of illness that every creature is subject to before the judgment of humanity and the onset of the kingdom of God.

The nature of man is twofold: on the one hand, he was created in the image and likeness of God, God breathed breath or spirit into him, and on the other hand, man was created from dust and will return to dust. “Experiencing one's own greatness and, at the same time, one's own mortality is one of the tense and insoluble contradictions inherent in any culture. Biblical texts speak of the vanity of human existence; The book of Job is a prime example of this. " Long life is the greatest benefit for a person. As in many traditional cultures, death is humiliating: it reduces a person to the state of a worm in the grave or sheol - a dark and terrible area in the depths of the earth. God has no power over Sheol, because death is essentially a denial of his work. Therefore, the dead are deprived of communion with God, and for believers this is the most powerful test. But God is stronger than death: He can raise a person from the dead, if His will.

4 Middle Ages

At the same time, death was understood as a temporary state of a person, after the end of the world, the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment, the righteous will gain eternal life in paradise, where there will be no sorrows and diseases that a person is forced to endure on earth. The hope of eternal life and eternal bliss, on the one hand, is the basis of moral choice, and on the other hand, a consolation for a person facing death. After all, death is only temporary; only the body dies, the soul is immortal.

The other side of this attitude towards death was the clear separation of the world of the living and the world of the dead; the dead now seem to be unable to penetrate into the world of the living, the world of the dead turns out to be closed, inaccessible to the living. Material evidence of this was that the cemetery began to be built outside the medieval cities.

Medieval culture is a Christian culture, practically devoid of a secular principle; all aspects of human life were imbued with religiosity. However, medieval culture also absorbed some elements of pagan cultures that existed before it, which were deeply rooted in human consciousness. So in the medieval attitude to death, we can trace the intertwining of Christian and pagan ideas. For example, in Germany it was believed that the shadow of a man without a head on the wall announced the imminent death of someone close to him. In Scotland, a warning of imminent death was dreams in which the sleeper saw the burial of a still living person. In Europe, fortune-telling about the onset of death was widespread: it was believed that death was foreshadowed by certain outlines of drops of wax thrown into cold water.

Conclusion

Despite the existence of a huge number of beliefs, peoples and their different perceptions of the world, they all recognize the existence of death and "life after life."

Literature

1.Balandin R.K., Life, death, immortality. M., 1992.

2.Balashov L.E., Life, death, immortality. 2009

.Berdyaev N.A., Experience of paradoxical ethics, M., 2003

.Moody R., Life After Life: Research on the Phenomenon of Continuing Life After the Death of the Body, Minsk, 1996.

.Polikarpov V.S., The Phenomenon "Life after Death", Rostov-on-Don, 1995.

.Fustelle de Coulanges Numa Denis, Ancient Civil Society: A Study of the Cult, Law, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, M., 1996

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Problems of life and death and attitudes towards death

in different historical eras and in different religions

Introduction.

1. Measurements of the problem of life, death and immortality.

2. Attitude towards death, problems of life, death and immortality

in the religions of the world.

Conclusion.

Bibliography.

Introduction.

Life and death are eternal themes of the spiritual culture of mankind in all its subdivisions. Prophets and founders of religions, philosophers and moralists, figures of art and literature, teachers and doctors thought about them. There is hardly an adult who, sooner or later, would not think about the meaning of his existence, impending death and the achievement of immortality. These thoughts come to the minds of children and very young people, about which poetry and prose, dramas and tragedies, letters and diaries speak. Only early childhood or senile insanity relieve a person from the need to solve these problems.

In fact, we are talking about the triad: life - death - immortality, since all the spiritual systems of mankind proceeded from the idea of the contradictory unity of these phenomena. The greatest attention was paid here to death and the attainment of immortality in another life, and human life itself was interpreted as a moment given to a person so that he could adequately prepare for death and immortality.

With few exceptions, all times and peoples spoke quite negatively about life, Life is suffering (Buddha: Schopenhauer, etc.); life is a dream (Plato, Pascal); life is an abyss of evil (Ancient Egypt); "Life is a struggle and a wandering in a foreign land" (Marcus Aurelius); "Life is the story of a fool, told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, but devoid of meaning" (Shakespeare); "All human life is deeply immersed in untruth" (Nietzsche), etc.

Proverbs and sayings of different peoples like "Life is a penny" speak about this. Ortega y Gasset defined man not as a body or spirit, but as a specifically human drama. Indeed, in this sense, the life of every person is dramatic and tragic: no matter how well life develops, no matter how long it is, its end is inevitable. The Greek sage Epicurus said: "Accustom yourself to the idea that death has nothing to do with us. When we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist."

Death and potential immortality are the strongest bait for the philosophical mind, for all our life affairs must, in one way or another, be commensurate with the eternal. Man is doomed to think about life and death, and this is his difference from the animal, which is mortal, but does not know about it. Death in general is a payback for the complication of the biological system. Unicellular organisms are practically immortal and the amoeba in this sense is a happy creature.

When an organism becomes multicellular, a mechanism of self-destruction is built into it at a certain stage of development, associated with the genome.

For centuries, the best minds of mankind have been trying at least theoretically to refute this thesis, to prove, and then to realize real immortality. However, the ideal of such immortality is not the existence of an amoeba and not an angelic life in a better world. From this point of view, a person should live forever, being in a constant bloom. A person cannot come to terms with the fact that it is he who will have to leave this magnificent world where life is in full swing. To be an eternal spectator of this grandiose picture of the Universe, not to feel “full of days” like the biblical prophets - could anything be more tempting?

At the same time, many great people realized this problem in tragic tones. Outstanding Russian biologist I.I. Mechnikov, reflecting on the possibility of "educating the instinct of natural death," wrote about Leo Tolstoy: that this is a vain hope. Why, he asked himself, raise children who will soon find themselves in the same critical condition as their father? Why should I love them, raise them and watch them? For the same despair that is in me, or for stupidity? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them - every step leads them to the knowledge of this truth. And truth is death. "

1. Measurements of the problem of life, death and immortality.

1. 1. The first dimension of the problem of life, death and immortality is biological, for these states are essentially different sides of one phenomenon. The hypothesis of panspermia, the constant presence of life and death in the Universe, their constant reproduction in suitable conditions has long been expressed. The definition of F. Engels is known: "Life is a way of existence of protein bodies, and this way of existence consists essentially in the constant self-renewal of the chemical constituent parts of these bodies", emphasizes the cosmic aspect of life.

Stars, nebulae, planets, comets and other cosmic bodies are born, live and die, and in this sense nobody and nothing disappears. This aspect is most developed in Eastern philosophy and mystical teachings, proceeding from the fundamental impossibility of understanding the meaning of this universal circulation only by reason. Materialistic concepts are based on the phenomenon of self-generation of life and self-infliction, when, according to F. Engels, life and a thinking spirit are generated “with iron necessity” in one place of the Universe, if in another it disappears.

Awareness of the unity of the life of man and mankind with all life on the planet, with its biosphere, as well as potential forms of life in the Universe, is of great ideological significance.

This idea of the sanctity of life, the right to life for any living being, by virtue of the very fact of birth, belongs to the eternal ideals of mankind. In the limit, the entire Universe and the Earth are considered as living beings, and interference in the still poorly understood laws of their life is fraught with an ecological crisis. Man appears as a small particle of this living Universe, a microcosm that has absorbed all the wealth of the macrocosm. The feeling of "reverence for life", the feeling of belonging to the wonderful world of the living, to one degree or another, is inherent in any worldview system. Even if biological, bodily life is considered an inauthentic, transitory form of human existence, then in these cases (for example, in Christianity) human flesh can and should acquire a different, flourishing state.

1.2. The second dimension of the problem of life, death and immortality is associated with an understanding of the specifics of human life and its difference from the life of all living things. For more than thirty centuries sages, prophets and philosophers of different countries and peoples have been trying to find this watershed. Most often, it is believed that the whole thing is in the awareness of the fact of impending death: we know that we will die and are frantically looking for a way to immortality. All other living things quietly and peacefully completes their journey, having managed to reproduce a new life or serve as fertilizer for the soil for another life. A person is doomed to painful lifelong contemplations about the meaning of life or its meaninglessness, torments himself, and often others, and is forced to drown these damned questions in wine or drugs. This is partly true, but the question arises: what about the death of a newborn child who has not yet had time to understand anything, or a mentally retarded person who is unable to understand anything? Whether to consider the moment of conception (which cannot be accurately determined in most cases) or the moment of birth as the beginning of a person's life.

It is known that the dying Leo Tolstoy, referring to those around him, said,

so that they turn their gaze to millions of other people, and not look at one

lion. The unknown death that does not touch anyone except the mother, the death of a small creature from hunger somewhere in Africa and the magnificent funeral of world famous leaders in the face of eternity do not differ. In this sense, the English poet D. Donn is deeply right, who said that the death of each person belittles all of humanity and therefore "never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you."

It is obvious that the specifics of human life, death and immortality are directly related to reason and its manifestations, with the success and achievements of a person during his life, with the assessment of his contemporaries and descendants. The death of many geniuses at a young age is undoubtedly tragic, but there is no reason to believe that their subsequent life, if it took place, would give the world something even more brilliant. Some not quite clear, but empirically obvious regularity is at work here, expressed by the Christian thesis: "God first of all chooses the best."

In this sense, life and death are not covered by the categories of rational knowledge, do not fit into the framework of a rigid deterministic model of the world and man. You can talk about these concepts in cold blood up to a certain limit. It is due to the personal interest of each person and his ability to intuitively comprehend the ultimate foundations of human existence. In this respect, everyone is like a swimmer jumping into the waves in the middle of the open sea. You need to rely only on yourself, despite human solidarity, faith in God, the Highest reason, etc. The uniqueness of a person, the uniqueness of the personality is manifested here in the highest degree. Geneticists have calculated that the probability of this particular person being born from these parents is one chance in one hundred trillion cases. If this has already happened, then what amazing variety of human meanings of being appears before a person when he thinks about life and death?

1.3. The third dimension of this problem is associated with the idea of gaining immortality, which sooner or later becomes the focus of a person's attention, especially if he has reached adulthood.

There are several types of immortality associated with the fact that after a person remains his business, children, grandchildren, etc., the products of his activities and personal belongings, as well as the fruits of spiritual production (ideas, images, etc.).

The first type of immortality - in the genes of offspring, is close to most people. In addition to the principled opponents of marriage and family and misogynists, many seek to perpetuate themselves in this way. One of the most powerful drives of a person is the desire to see their own features in children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In the royal dynasties of Europe, the transmission of certain features (for example, the nose of the Habsburgs) has been traced over several generations. This is associated with the inheritance of not only physical traits, but also the moral principles of family occupation or craft, etc. Historians have established that many prominent figures of Russian culture of the 19th century were related (albeit distant) to each other. One century includes four generations.

Thus, over two thousand years, 80 generations have changed, and the 80th ancestor of each of us was a contemporary of Ancient Rome, and the 130th was a contemporary of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II.

The third type of immortality is the hope for the "dissolution" of the body and spirit of the deceased in the Universe, their entry into the cosmic "body", into the eternal circulation of matter. This is typical for a number of Eastern civilizations, especially Japanese. The Islamic model of the relationship to life and death and various materialistic or, more precisely, naturalistic concepts are close to such a solution. Here we are talking about the loss of personal qualities and the preservation of particles of the former body that can enter into the composition of other organisms. This highly abstract kind of immortality is unacceptable to most people and is emotionally rejected.

The fifth path to immortality is associated with the achievement of various states, which science calls "altered states of consciousness." Basically, they are a product of the psycho-training and meditation system adopted in Eastern religions and civilizations. Here it is possible to "break through" into other dimensions of space and time, travel to the past and the future, ecstasy and enlightenment, a mystical feeling of belonging to Eternity.

We can say that the meaning of death and immortality, as well as the ways to achieve it, are the reverse side of the problem of the meaning of life. Obviously, these issues are resolved in different ways, depending on the leading spiritual setting of a particular civilization.

2. Attitude towards death, problems of life, death and immortality in the religions of the world.

Let us consider these problems in relation to three world religions - Christianity, Islam and Buddhism and civilizations based on them.

2.1. The Christian understanding of the meaning of life, death and immortality proceeds from the Old Testament position: "The day of death is better than the birthday" and the New Testament commandment of Christ "... I have the keys to hell and death." The divine-human essence of Christianity is manifested in the fact that the immortality of the individual as an integral being is conceivable only through resurrection. The path to it is opened by the atoning sacrifice of Christ through the cross and resurrection. This is the sphere of mystery and miracle, for man is removed from the sphere of action of natural-cosmic forces and elements and is placed as a person face to face with God, who is also a person.

Thus, the goal of human life is deification, movement towards eternal life. Without realizing this, earthly life turns into a dream, an empty and idle dream, a soap bubble. In essence, it is only a preparation for eternal life, which is not far off for everyone. That is why it is said in the Gospel: "Be ready: for at an hour you do not think, the Son of Man will come." So that life does not turn, according to M.Yu. Lermontov, "into an empty and stupid joke", one must always remember about the hour of death. This is not a tragedy, but a transition to another world, where myriads of souls, good and evil, already live, and where each new one enters for joy or torment. According to the figurative expression of one of the moral hierarchs: "A dying person is a setting sun, the dawn of which is already shining over the other world." Death destroys not the body, but its corruption, and therefore it is not the end, but the beginning of eternal life.

Christianity connected a different understanding of immortality with the image of the "Eternal Jew" Ahasuerus. When Jesus, exhausted under the weight of the cross, went to Golgotha and wanted to rest, Ahasfer, who was standing among the others, said: “Go, go,” for which he was punished - he was forever denied the rest of the grave. From century to century, he is doomed to wander around the world, waiting for the second coming of Christ, which alone can deprive him of his hateful immortality.

The image of "mountain" Jerusalem is associated with the absence of disease, death, hunger, cold, poverty, enmity, hatred, anger and other evils there. There is life without labor and joy without sorrow, health without weakness and honor without danger. All in the blossoming youth and age of Christ are comforted by bliss, partake of the fruits of peace, love, joy and joy, and "love each other as themselves." The Evangelist Luke defined the essence of the Christian approach to life and death in this way: "God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. For with him all are alive." Christianity categorically condemns suicide, since a person does not belong to himself, his life and death are "in the will of God."

2.2. Another world religion - Islam - proceeds from the fact that man was created by the will of Almighty Allah, who, above all, is merciful. To the question of a person: "Is it when I die, will I be known alive?", Allah gives the answer: "Does not man remember that we created him before, and he was nothing?" Unlike Christianity, earthly life in Islam is highly regarded. However, on the Last Day, everything will be destroyed, and the dead will be resurrected and brought before Allah for final judgment. Belief in an afterlife is essential

because in this case a person will evaluate his actions and deeds not from the point of view of personal interest, but in the sense of an eternal perspective.

The destruction of the entire universe on the day of the Just Judgment presupposes the creation of a completely new world. A "record" of deeds and thoughts, even the most secret, will be presented about each person, and an appropriate sentence will be passed. Thus, the principle of the supremacy of the laws of morality and reason over physical laws will triumph. A morally pure person cannot be in a humiliated position, as is the case in the real world. Islam categorically prohibits suicide.

The description of heaven and hell in the Qur'an is full of vivid details, so that the righteous can be completely satisfied, and the sinners get what they deserve. Paradise is the beautiful "gardens of eternity, below which rivers of water, milk and wine flow"; there are also "pure spouses", "full-breasted peers", as well as "black-eyed and big-eyed, adorned with bracelets of gold and pearls." Those sitting on carpets and leaning on green pillows are bypassed by "boys forever young" who offer "bird meat" on dishes made of gold. Hell for sinners is fire and boiling water, pus and slops, the fruits of the "zakkum" tree, similar to the head of the devil, and their lot is "cries and roars." It is impossible to ask Allah about the hour of death, since the knowledge about it is only with him, and "what is given to you to know, perhaps the hour is already at hand."

2.3. The attitude towards death and immortality in Buddhism differs significantly from Christian and Muslim. Buddha himself refused to answer the questions: "Is he who knows the truth immortal or is he mortal?" And also: can he who knows be mortal and immortal at the same time? In essence, only one type of "wondrous immortality" is recognized - nirvana, as the embodiment of the transcendent Superexistence, the Absolute Beginning, which has no attributes.

Buddhism did not begin to refute the doctrine of transmigration of souls developed by Brahmanism, i.e. the belief that after death any living being is reborn as a new living being (human, animal, deity, spirit, etc.). However, Buddhism made significant changes to the teachings of Brahmanism. If the brahmanas asserted that by means of rituals, sacrifices and incantations different for each class ("varna") it is fashionable to achieve "good rebirths", i.e. become a raja, a brahmana, a wealthy merchant, etc., then Buddhism declared all reincarnation, all kinds of being inevitable misfortune and evil. Therefore, the highest goal of a Buddhist should be the complete cessation of rebirth and the attainment of nirvana, i.e. nothingness.

Since personality is understood as the sum of drachmas in a constant stream of reincarnation, it follows the absurdity, meaninglessness of the chain of natural births. The Dhammapada states that "being born again and again is sorrowful." The way out is the path of gaining nirvana, breaking through the chain of endless rebirths and achieving enlightenment, the blissful "island" located in the depths of a person's heart, where "they do not own anything and do not crave anything." the essence of the Buddhist understanding of death and immortality. As the Buddha said: "One day of the life of a person who has seen the immortal path is better than a hundred-year existence of a person who has not seen the higher life."

For most people, it is impossible to attain nirvana immediately, in this rebirth. Following the path of salvation indicated by the Buddha, a living entity usually has to reincarnate over and over again. But this will be the path of ascent to the "highest wisdom", having reached which the being will be able to get out of the "cycle of being", to complete the chain of its rebirths.

A calm and peaceful attitude towards life, death and immortality, the desire for enlightenment and liberation from evil is also characteristic of other Eastern religions and cults. In this regard, the attitude towards suicide is changing; it is considered not so sinful as meaningless, for it does not free a person from the circle of birth and death, but only leads to birth in a lower incarnation. One must overcome this attachment to one's personality, for, according to the Buddha, "the nature of personality is continuous death."

2.4. Concepts of life, death and immortality based on a non-religious and atheistic approach to the world and man. Irreligious people and atheists are often reproached for the fact that for them earthly life is everything, and death is an insurmountable tragedy, which, in essence, makes life meaningless. L.N. Tolstoy, in his famous confession, painfully tried to find in life that meaning that would not be destroyed by the death inevitably impending for each person.

For the believer, everything is clear here, but for the unbeliever there is an alternative to three possible ways of solving this problem.

The first way is to accept the idea, which is confirmed by science and just common sense, that the complete destruction of even an elementary particle is impossible in the world, and the laws of conservation are in effect. Matter, energy and, it is believed, information and organization of complex systems are conserved. Consequently, the particles of our "I" after death will enter the eternal cycle of being and in this sense will be immortal. True, they will not possess consciousness, a soul, with which our "I" is connected. Moreover, this type of immortality is acquired by a person throughout his life. We can say in the form of a paradox: we are alive only because we die every second. Erythrocytes in the blood, epithelial cells die off every day, hair falls out, etc. Therefore, in principle, it is impossible to fix life and death as absolute opposites, not in reality or in thoughts. These are two sides of the same coin.

The second way is the attainment of immortality in human affairs, in the fruits of material and spiritual production, which are included in the treasury of mankind. For this, first of all, you need confidence that humanity is immortal and that a cosmic destination is in the spirit of the ideas of K.E. Tsiolkovsky and other cosmists. If self-destruction is real for humanity in a thermonuclear ecological catastrophe, as well as as a result of some cosmic cataclysms, then in this case the question remains open.

The third path to immortality, as a rule, is chosen by people whose scale of activity does not go beyond their home and immediate environment. Without expecting eternal bliss or eternal torment, without going into the "cunning" of the mind, which connects the microcosm (ie man) with the macrocosm, millions of people simply float in the stream of life, feeling themselves to be a part of it. Immortality for them is not in the eternal memory of blessed humanity, but in everyday affairs and concerns. "Believing in God is not difficult .... No, you believe in a person!" - Chekhov wrote this without at all assuming that it was he himself who would become an example of this type of attitude towards life and death.

Conclusion.

Modern thanatology (the doctrine of death) is one of the "hot" points of natural science and humanitarian knowledge. There are several reasons for the interest in the problem of death.

Firstly, this is the situation of a global civilized crisis, which, in principle, can lead to the self-destruction of mankind.

Secondly, the value attitude towards human life and death has changed significantly in connection with the general situation on Earth.

Almost one and a half billion of the world's inhabitants live in complete poverty and another billion is approaching the mark, one and a half billion earthlings are deprived of any medical care, a billion people cannot read and write. There are 700 million unemployed people in the world. Millions of people in all corners of the world suffer from racism and aggressive nationalism.

This leads to a pronounced devaluation of human life, to contempt for the life of both one's own and that of another. The bacchanalia of terrorism, an increase in the number of unmotivated killings and violence, as well as suicides, are symptoms of the global pathology of mankind at the turn of the 20th - 21st centuries. At the same time, at the turn of the 60s, bioethics appeared in Western countries - a complex discipline at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, biology, medicine, and a number of other disciplines. She was a kind of reaction to the new problems of life and death.

This coincided with the growing interest in human rights, including in relation to one's own bodily and spiritual being and the reaction of society to the threat to life on Earth, due to the aggravation of global problems of mankind.

If a person has something like the death instinct (which Freud wrote about), then everyone has a natural, innate right not only to live as he was born, but also to die in human conditions. One of the features of the XX century. is that humanism and humane relations between people are the basis and guarantee of survival for humanity. If earlier any social and natural disasters left the hope that most people would survive and restore what was destroyed, now vitality can be considered a concept derived from humanism.

Used Books.

1. Handbook of an atheist. Political Literature Publishing House.

Moscow, 1975

2. Philosophy. Study guide for students. 1997 year

3. Culturology. Textbook and reader for students.

Essence, problems and attitudes towards death in various religions. Death and immortality in world religions Death and immortality in different religions

Buddhism

Islam

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