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 It seems to me that as humans, we should like simple descriptions of simple things.  However, it seems that some things are so simple that a simple description for how it works is just too scary for us to accept.  If you think of death for example, could it just be explained as people wear out, their body stops working, they die and decompose.  However, death seems like such a huge deal to living people.  Rightfully so I guess, because we spend so much time focusing on life.  When we are born, we have no clue about the world, and spend years figuring out how to move around and communicate with others.  Then, we spend a few decades being educated.  Toward the ends of our educations, we start the extreme worrying about what we are going to do with our lives, how we are going to make money and thrive.  And as we become working adults, our worrying just digresses to less and less important things, such as which electric company will charge me the least, or when am I going to file my tax returns?  It seems to me that there are older, retired people who start to see the importance of living again, as death is approaching.  But really, who wants to hear the simple explanation that all of this ends one day and your next job will be rotting.  A simple explanation to a simple thing like death is scary.  With a simple explanation of death like this, it would seem as though you spent almost 100 years running around and then one day ran off a cliff.  There is no dramatic ending, there is no better place, their is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? 

Therefore, I think that in some cases, complicated explanations are needed to justify the energy we spend building up to them.  For our own sanity, we need these complex stories of afterlife, heaven, and rebirth to keep doing what we do during life.