*The most obvious examples of how worldviews provide the basis for terror management are religious worldviews such as Christianity and Islam, in which one’s earthly purpose is to serve one’s deity, after which those who have been true to the teachings of the deity will be rewarded with eternal life. Indeed, a spiritual dimension and concept of eternal soul had been central to all known cultures until the rise of science-based secular worldviews in the 19th and 20th centuries. These forms of literal immortality (or death transcendence) are supplemented by symbolic modes of immortality offered by secular components of culture. Symbolic immortality can be achieved in modern society through identification with collectives and causes that transcend individual death, such as one’s nation; it can also be achieved through offspring, inheritances, memorials, and many forms of cultural achievement in the arts and sciences (novels, paintings, sculptures, discoveries, etc.). Thus, as a result of the socialization process, people everywhere live out their lives ensconced within a culturally derived orderly and meaningful construal of reality in which they strive to be significant beings qualified for transcendence of death through an eternal soul and/or permanent contributions to the world.*
