Maybe, maybe not, but I'd question some blanket assertion being made without evidence that deeply religious people experience less existential dread. It's going

Maybe, maybe not, but I'd question some blanket assertion being made without evidence that deeply religious people experience less existential dread. It's going to depend on plenty of other cultural specifics, of course, but not all religions involve an afterlife and some involve the possibility of an afterlife that is much worse than simply running out of time. 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.