I think you are wrong. Humans are emotional and irrational when it comes to dealing with their emotions. This is especially true when it comes to certain areas of human experience where we feel no sense of control.
Emotions as such don't make us irrational. The highlighted part is the point of all my links. You can reduce irrationality significantly by providing people with acceptable living conditions. It has already been done:
Society without God.
I don't claim that we can eliminate every single thing that makes us unhappy.
You can provide for everyone’s needs and people will still cling to superstition. I think this is especially true when we lose someone close to us. It’s very hard for most people to accept that death is the end and we will never see that person again.
No, they won't. Most of us in this forum, for instance, don't cling to superstition. But, yes, it
is bloody hard to lose somebody, and it may make us wish for a realm where we we'll meet that person again, but in this forum most of us don't think so, and in my country most ordinary people don't believe in an afterlife.
Even for me, I am an atheist and I know intellectually that death is the end; however, when I allow myself to think of the possibility of my wife dying (she has lupus but she’s “ok” right now ) there is a big part of my heart that desperately wants to believe that maybe I’m wrong. If she goes before me, it’s going to hurt very badly not to have her here anymore (****, I’m tearing up just typing this) with no possibility of being in her presence again. I don’t think I’ll embrace woo, but I wouldn’t rule it out entirely. It would be immensely comforting to believe even just a little.
I empathize with all of your feelings. However, I'm at a loss when it comes to comforting people who experience a loss like the one that you fear. don't even know how to comfort myself when I'm in a similar situation. I mourn until I get out on the other side.
The only thing I
can do for others in similar circumstances it to prevent ghoulish predators from taking advantage of them - of the dying as well as of their relatives. And I have experienced that the bereaved - even though they didn't heed my warnings - were actually grateful that somebody had
tried to warn them when they were desperate and got into the clutches of occultism and alternative 'healers'.
Beyond the finality of death, no matter how well our basic needs are met, many people still embrace superstition. We want to believe in meaning. We want to believe in purpose. That some of us have managed to reason ourselves out of that doesn’t mean much.
Yes, we sometimes
want to believe in meaning and purpose - in particular when our whole existence doesn't make sense. This is why it's so important to make sure that people's
lives do make sense. That they are not forced to spend a life in misery and squalor.
But I can guarantee you that most Scandinavians didn't
reason their way out of superstition and religion. They lost the
need to believe when life became livable. When they no longer had to worry too much about putting a roof over their heads, food on the table, educating their children, or paying doctor's bills.
But even here, we still
die, of course, but that seems to be a burden that we can live with when our
lives don't suck too much.
If
life is worth living, we tend to lose the
need to believe that we'll be compensated for our walk through the valley of tears in an imaginary Heaven. And if our loved ones at least had good lives when they were still among us, that tends to be a comforting thought, too, somehow.
