This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
As per Stephen Covey, only some things are in my circle of influence, so I don't bother with what's outside.
One thing I notice about strongly Abrahamic religious people is that they are okay with eschewing the pleasures of life because they believe that heaven is their next step, and the only way to get there is to abstain from things they enjoy, are "tempted" by, and/or would otherwise be ambitious toward.
They'll give up things like sex before marriage, education, household autonomy, careers, foods, non-heterosexual partnerships (suppressing their own attraction preferences), coffee, alcohol, being in the presence of the opposite sex...almost anything you can name will be something that someone religious will just give up because they think it will grant them favor by God.
Religions that believe in things like faith healing will even give up medical care because they believe God will heal them. I know someone who is doing exactly this and is nearly immobile out of pure stubbornness. A quick and simple procedure could save them a whole bunch of pain and suffering and give them their abilities back.
In contrast, I find some of the ideas of "pleasure activism" to be very interesting. We've been taught to avoid pleasure, that it's "sinful," that it's "embarrassing" (especially for women). But why? Why is it bad? Here's an example article: https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/18/gender-studies-professo...
Watch a televangelist like Sid Roth and you'll see that a large swath of Christianity revolves around sitting around and praying for good things to happen rather than making them happen through action. It's an incredibly selfish and futile form of Christianity.
This is what the Pharisees were doing. Christ clearly refuted this kind of religious attitude. See Matthew 23.
A couple of the things you listed are genuinely sinful. On the other hand, careers, food, alcohol etc. can be sinful, but are not always. See e.g. Judges 9:13 and many other verses.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=judges+9:13&ver...
Also see 1 Timothy 4:4.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+timothy+4:4&v...
I'm not really concerned what a certain popular novel on the subject thinks about sin, especially one as heavily edited and manipulated as the Bible. [1]
As long as I'm not harming others, I wouldn't say that anything I do is sinful.
I might even argue that sin doesn't exist. Transgressing against divine law is something you can't really do if you don't believe divine law is real.
You can argue it's cope but for many people it's as real as gravity.
There is also the issue that common western manifestations of existential dread, i.e. the Nietzshe eternal return, Sartre's dilemma of having no choice but to make a choice but all of them are bad, even up to the contemporary worries about near-infinite compounding of sub-optimal ethics in far-future focused EA circles and AI-risk circles, are not in any way mitigated by the possibility of an afterlife. All the trillions of future people you cause suffering to will still suffer even if you end up in heaven.
Yes, of course. God will forgive you though if you are penitent. Existential dread resolved.
At least that's the Christian answer. Another wildly successful social technology.
That would speak to those people's lack of understanding of gravity more than anything else in my view