Yea, I know what you mean. Records of a temple listed over 5 million flower bouquets in one month as gifts to the temple. You then have to think about the size of the population and conclude that people must have visited the temple at least twenty times a week. So this must have happen during the harvest celebration. Then you have to realize that the people had to have time to grow the flowers. And then there has to be a value put on the flowers. Flowers are a luxury item of no value and are grown when times are good and there is plenty of food and people are happy.
Here's an awesome podcast on how the fear of death led to some aspects of religion. They stumble into the discussion of it about half way through]
But "fear" is only part of the equation, we wouldn't fear death if we didn't love. That's why Ingersoll said “Love is a flower that only grows on the edge of a grave." If we didn't care about our human connections, we wouldn't be bothered when they end. We wouldn't look to create meaning from something that has ceased to be. Religion tries to do that, and ignores that meaning is created by the living. Religion says, "this is what that meant", life says, "take this moment and make something of it."
This is kind of a tangent, but do you mean the bolded bit in an absolute sense?
I don't know what "absolute sense" means to you, so I can't answer that. The two things are tied together, if you didn't care about a person you wouldn't be bothered when they die, if you didn't care about what you do for others, you wouldn't care about your own death.
Ah okay, I think this answers my question. I know that I'd fear my own death even if I didn't care for others, so your comment jumped out at me.