Research Paper on:
Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
adopts a belief system in order to be accepted into an "immortality system" for support and for the belief that life exists beyond current perception. For those people who are  overly consumed by death and are unable to form a belief or a level of acceptance, they are victim to neurosis or mental illness. Others who accept death and are  able to live successfully with the knowledge and acceptance of their eventual outcome can be considered heroic. Because the denial of death is responsible for the formation of cultures, scientific  processes should not be used to influence this psychological process because man truly does know little about the ultimate foundations of life. While  many anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and psychologists study the prospect of death which at often times seems to consumes the human mind, Ernest Becker in his opening preface to his text  "The Denial of Death" (1973) comments that the main thesis of his book "does much more than that" the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal  like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity - activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it  is the final destiny for man" (Becker, 1973, p. ix). While the basis of his theory may explore that mans anxiety stems from his fear of death, it is also  important in the understanding of human nature and the development of cultures (The Denial of Death, 2002). Beckers text basically focuses on how humans develop strategies to make them feel  mortal and vulnerable to eventually escape the feeling that we are somehow mortal. This contrasts philosophers such as Socrates who believed that humans were not morally mature until considered "the