Fear is a feeling induced by perceived danger or threat. A baby can’t perceive a threat, but it can’t be alone after growing for nine months inside the mother. That is probably the next discomfort after the traumatic experience of birth. But reading that quote from Wikipedia, it is the response that is inborn, not fear per se. Our bodies know how to react to threat or danger, but it must first be perceived.
Here again, the reaction is what is inborn, not a fear. Fear has to be perceived, regardless whether the threat is real or imagined.
Thanatophobia is a pathological disorder, an abnormal fear of death. It isn’t “normal”, i.e. in someone’s DNA.
Terror management theory (TMT) attempts to explain a type of defensive human thinking and behavior that stems from an awareness and fear of death. According to TMT, death anxiety drives people to adopt worldviews that protect their sense of self-esteem, worthiness, and sustainability and allow them to believe that they play an important role in a meaningful world.
psychologytoday.com/us/basi … ent-theory
It is an awareness, that it a perception of death that people fear. That means, it is comes when people become capable of perceiving death. This isn’t usually the case in children, unless they are confronted with death and it has a traumatic effect. Normally this fear grows with the death of parents, but also with the premature death of siblings. That is why older people tend to return to the church to find the meaning that is lost when people around them are dying.
Once again, this is all necessary if one develops a fear of death. I would say that the fear of futility or pointlessness of existence can make people take drugs to soothe their misgivings about life. Buddhism accepts that life is absurd and that suffering is the lot of mankind, but offers a way to cope.
I have never avoided the fact that an existential crisis can occur, but to say it is in our DNA is misleading. What is inborn is the bodies reaction to fear. But there are normal causes and abnormal causes of fear, which have to be separated from each other. That a growing fear of death is normal is something I accept, but to say that the cry of a baby is a sign of that fear is just as misleading.
Your reading. It may also be the way many people see it. I do not see it that way.
The sacrifice of the son is an age old mythological storyline, especially when you see Christ as the Logos, the word that created the heavens and earth. There is a deeper storyline there than this modern evangelical view. We can discuss the meaning of sacrifice seen through the words of the Bible and even in the Quran. How this reflects on key stories and practices, such as Abraham’s offering of his son, the Leviticus rites of sacrifice and purity, the Hajj, and the death of Christ. But that would have to be another topic.
The gods are primal images to describe deep phenomenon in the lives of human beings at a time when survival was the most important thing to talk about. The Ancients were considering how to understand the world and their role in it. Being pre-science, Gods, devils, angels and evil spirits describe influences they experienced and they developed stories which they enacted as a means to spread the information of how to live and survive. These stories became more and more complex and gradually a primitive understanding of human and animal behaviour crept in, which made the stories multi-layered.
When Israel formed, they were gathering all kinds of mythological descriptions of existence, and there were many. Each culture had their own gods but Israel saw this as primitive and chose one god, who was god of gods. This wasn’t an easy process and so they told a story that described how they were found and chosen by that one God. They developed a code of behaviour which became the Torah, and wrote themselves a history, based on the histories that they found in other cultures. They had heroes and Kings, but all the time, an underlying message was in these stories – Kings are not reliable but become self-serving. They envisaged a King that would not be so, but would be aligned to the will of God. The were various forerunners in their records, people who are said to have been closer to the ideal, but not quite. David was one of them.
The prophets described how God’s people betrayed him and they were punished by God, suffering defeat and being deported, finally losing ten of the twelve tribes of Israel. Only Judah and Benjamin remained. Christianity has it, that from these two tribes, only one person remained true to God and he was sacrificed. They saw it as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. And he was the One who died to save all from retribution of God, but only those who aligned with him and his spirit, the spirit of God.
The Sermon on the Mount spelled out a new law, one of love and compassion, which revolutionised the parts of the world in which it was spread. But then, for reasons we can only guess, it became a religion of the diaspora, of gentiles and not Jews. Still it was very effective in changing the religious landscape – until Rome adopted it as a state religion. That is when things started falling apart. It is amazing that there were still pockets of the faithful, which preserved and developed the faith until this day. Today we can look back on that miracle that occurred despite the terror and the pillage that became part of Christian history. Especially the attempts to wipe out Jews is contemptuous, but also the deaths of dissenters and so called heretics, who in fact were transporting the spiritual heritage of the faith.