“You know Becker’s book The Denial of Death?” Rhodes asked. “It won the Pulitzer Prize.” I said I did. According to the anthropologist Ernest Becker, all humans, not just religious people, need to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that we are, in one way or another, immortal, that some part of us will never die. Humans are unique, Becker believed, in that we realize that we are going to die from a very young age. Our deaths rightly frighten us; we are all born with strong survival instincts. But since too much fear of death gets in the way of living, healthy individuals repress their
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