This is the vital question asked by William Wildblood at his blog.
He concludes:
Death is the summation of life and should be completely accepted. If you submit to God's will in this matter and resign yourself to his keeping in humility then whatever you may or may not have done in your life you will be all right. The creature is returning to the Creator and that is a tremendous thing to be faced with a sense of awe but also wonder and excitement. It is only the person who rejects his Creator who need fear death.
My impression is that the mainstream attitudes to death are:
1. I never want to die and I won't think about it. I will do everything in my power to stay alive.
And/ Or:
2. I want to die quickly and painlessly, with total annihilation of consciousness, as soon as I stop enjoying life.
The main agents of hope are technology. On the one hand massive technologies of life support and intensive therapy to sustain life - many people wanting to 'live forever' (at any cost, even if as only a brain, or a computer download).
On the other, escalating propaganda and demands for a comprehensive bureaucratic system to provide painless killing on demand (euthanasia).
