Abstract: This article examines some results of the study of the attitude of religious people towards death, mainly Christians, with the purpose of determining the modern representation of death. On the basis of the Siberian Federal University, the author conducted a research on the attitude of student youth towards death. A group of the respondent demonstrated the affiliation to one or another religious, faith in God; their answers were interpreted on the subject of their attitude towards death, established representation of death, and variations of protection against the fear of death. The methodological concepts on the attitude towards death of such authors as Philippe Ariès and Gilbert Durand, as well as the Russian cosmism, served as the prerequisite for formation of hypothesis of the research. In the course of this work, the authosr determined that the majority of student youth formed a negative representation of death that does not correspond with the religious ideology. Several concepts that reflect the attitude of youth towards death and their method of fighting the fear of death are described. The authors draw a conclusion on the state of religious consciousness of student youth that is a result of unfamiliarity with the religious norms or fusion of the traditions of various religions.

Keywords: social institutions, imaginaire, Russian philosophy, cosmism, religion, Christianity, death anxiety, death, Russian cosmism, death studies

Abstract:   This article examines death as a temporal phenomenon capable of influencing the process of emergence of the particular types of social interaction, structures, and institutions. The image of death has its own history and relates to social practice, which is traced in transformation of forms of the creative embodiment of death. In social life, people rely on the diverse models of the perception of time that define the dominance of the collective or individual, attitude to the tradition and the past, publicity of cemeteries, and designate the grounds for eschatological interest towards the postmortem existence. The goal of this work consists in pursuing correlation between the perception model of the historical time with the social representations on death and social becoming: structure of social life and modes of existence. Thus, the author uses the method of phenomenological reduction, intentional analysis, and modelling. The scientific novelty is defined by application of the phenomenological approach towards examination of death as a phenomenon of social existence. Each model allows coordinating social interaction with regards to death, as well as social becoming as a whole. The author considers the three model that determine the link between time, social representations of death, and social becoming: existence without death; existence towards death; existence from death. The author indicated the transition in modernity from the liner model of time perception to pendulous; from Western-centrist worldview to Eastern-centrist; as well as their synthesis. Temporality of death is associated with the changes taking place in the current social life: activation of suicidal behavior, growth of deviation.  

Keywords: social representations, eschatology, crisis, social, becoming, time, death, vital world, instance of death, image of death