Just thought I'd ask, since what you wrote previously sounded just like his denial of death thesis. It may be "pedestrian", but is largely unknown nowadays. Most folks would prefer to forget the idea immediately on hearing it, I'd wager.
Yes I'd agree that Becker's book "The Denial of Death" posits that civilization is an elaborate defense mechanism against our knowledge of our own Mortality. AND Yes I'd agree that what I wrote about God being a myth to hide from our own mortality says the same thing. Becker says it much more elaborately and extends the idea to cover a lot more ground. I say the idea is pedestrian. I guess I say that because I had a classical education at a Jesuit college which was very traditional and the idea sounds very commonplace to me. I am sure that Becker was quite familiar with Swinburne, Julius Caesar (the Gallic Wars), and other classical authors so that it should have seemed pedestrian to him also. As I write this I also realize that as a catholic schoolboy I used to serve as altar boy at a number of catholic funerals. Holding a censor, standing next to a coffin and singing Kyrie Eleison might have made personal death more pedestrian an idea to me than to most.
Why bother explaining anything at all? Why not just say, "Because God said so." That is what these guys do in every other instance? They are already brain washed? Why try to explain this one case? Since when do Jesus lovers care about logic and explanations?