Hobbes's account of religion/nationalism and terror management theory

Throughout Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes makes repeated reference to the primacy of human consciousness in provoking individuals to subject themselves to the rule of a sovereign. Specifically, the ability to conceptualize oneself as a discrete entity with a past and (imaginable) future, combined with a propensity for causal reasoning, places humans in the problematic position of fully perceiving our inevitable mortality. This perception includes both a general recognition that all organisms have finite life spans and a more acute form of terror related to the possibility (and uncontrollability) of suffering a particularly gruesome death at any moment. Hobbes argues that, at the ground level, the state and organized religion exist not only to deliver us from the actual physical conflict of the state of nature, but equally importantly, from the psychological terror that arises in an environment where death is quite salient.

http://en.oboulo.com/hobbes-s-account-of-religion-nationalism-and-terror-management-theory-65022.html