AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Death and the sacred are deeply entertwined. According to Religion Explained care of the dead is at the very core of reliugion and predate language and culture (check not sure it actually says that)
The obvious example of a horror so great that God cannot tolerate it, is death - true death, mind-annihilation. I don't think that even Buddhism allows that.
This is sort of a surprising thing to hear from someone with a Jewish religious background. Jews spend very little attention and energy on the afterlife. (And your picture of Buddhism is simplistic at best, but other people have already dealt with that). I've heard the interesting theory that this stems from a reaction against their Egyptian captors, who were of course obsessed with death and the afterlife.
Religion aside, I truly have trouble understanding why people here think death is so terrible, and why it's so bloody important to deep-freeze your brain in the hopes it might be revved up again some time in the future. For one thing, nothing lasts forever, so death is inevitable no matter how much you postpone it. For another, since we are all hard-core materialists here, let me remind you that the flow of time is an illusion, spacetime is eternal, and the fact that your own personal self occupies a chunk of spacetime that is not infinite in any direction is just a fact of reality. It makes about as much sense to be upset that your mind doesn't exist after you die as it does to be upset that it didn't exist before you were born. Lastly, what makes you so damn important that you need to live forever? Get over yourself. After you die, there will be others taking over your work, assuming it was worth doing. Leave some biological and intellectual offspring and shuffle off this mortal coil and give a new generation a chance. That's how progress gets made -- "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it". (Max Planck, quoted by Thomas Kuhn)
Yet all this intellectual ok-ness with death feels false somehow. When someone I know even very slightly dies, I am saddened along with everybody else. It is a loss – that person won't be around any more, no more contributions, no more interactions. That is is entirely normal and inevitable doesn't change the feeling of loss.
Still feels strange. It is a reminder of the transitoriness of all things. I like to think I am aware of this, but probably that awareness is shallow, and my life is conducted as if this was an eternalist universe. Death breaks us out of that, which is probably good but it feels bad.