Cultural Beliefs on Life and Death

The very existence of death as an empirical unknown, urgent in its demands, has served to stimulate some of man’s greatest creative efforts. Many conceptual themes have emerged from these efforts to understand the meaning of death. In our society death is viewed as the end of life or as the beginning of eternal life. It would be negligent to discuss beliefs, ethical values, and attitudes related to death without noting that even in this modern scientific world our knowledge of death remains projective in its origins; the extent to which those projections permeate our culture and the cultures of other societies appears to be limitless. Definitions of death are of considerable significance for an understanding of attitudes about death, for once an individual has been defined as dead, by whatever definition employed, the attitudes toward the person may be expected to change.