Death is a scary thought for everyone.

We all know we can die at any given moment so, we use generally accepted ideas on life after deathn order to ease our neurotic thoughts.

And because life after death plays a major role in the way people live out their lives now, they feel very strongly about their beliefs.

Religions are often built around the idea that living a morally, just life will lead to a better afterlife, and living an immoral life will doom the person for eternity.

“I was raised to believe that if I sinned, I had to pray and be forgiven by God or I’d go to hell forever,” Richard Neino, mechanical engineering major, said.

Whether the founders of the religions meant for their beliefs on the afterlife to be used as scare tactics or not, the fact is that they are.

“Fear (of the afterlife) is used, and it’s in all religions too,” Elizabeth Shadish, philosophy of religion professor said, “Plato’s claim is (that if no one were watching), everyone would be immoral. They would just satisfy themselves if they never got caught, and why wouldn’t you? So, I don’t know if (the fear) is bad or good.”

But for people that aren’t religious, death is viewed with less faith and more science. While most religions focus on the soul and spirit, making an afterlife a possibility, science focuses on more tangible things, like the body and its parts. Therefore, if the heart stops, and the body shuts down, then that person’s life ends.

“I think that once you die you die. You go back into the earth, the animals eat you, they die and go into the earth. It’s the circle of life,” Ryan Pelle, communications major, said.

But others base their theories beyond faith or science. Some people have near-death experiences where they get a glimpse of the afterlife. For instance, there have been numerous reports of people dying for seconds or even minutes and when they come back to life, they claim to have seen a white light or tunnel.

Some say that this is a sign of God existing and that the light or tunnel is a spirit traveling to heaven.

Still some scientists contend that this light is apart of the dying process. They say that when a person is in cardiac arrest, their body begins to turn off and the light or tunnel is what the eyes see as they shut down.

Because many cardiac arrest survivors experience rapid-eye movement when they come back to life, it solidifies scientists’ theories that the eyes do abnormal things while a person is dying.

There are many different beliefs on the after life and nobody can be 100 percent sure that theirs is the right one.

“Nobody really knows what happens when we die,” Pelle said, “But we will all find out one day.”