Good Rebuttal Essay Essay Example

Most psychologists writing on necrophobia have come up with interesting claims regarding what necrophobia really is and how it affects individuals. Necrophobia is generally understood to be the fear of dead things. It arises from an irrational fear not only of dead things but also things associated with death and dead people. A necrophobic individual may, in addition to having fear for corpses, may also fear such things as coffins, cemeteries, tombstones, hearses and funerals. Some writers have defined necrophobia more broadly to include the collective cultural predisposition of a people regarding death. In this sense, necrophobia is understood to mean the fear of the dead or death by a group of people sharing the same cultural ideals. Akop Nazaretyan, writing in his paper Fear of the Dead as a Factor in Social Self-Organization asserts that necrophobia ranks as the oldest irrational fear by humans. He argues that necrophobia has accrued numerous advantages to the human society because it defines the way they handle the dead and those they have left behind. He says the constant fear that the dead may come back to revenge their death by harming those who killed them, or those who have harmed the relatives they left behind plays a critical role in defining the relationship between the bereaved and other members of the society (Akop 2). This, in my opinion, is not necessarily true. I will look at this particular argument be Akop with a view to refuting it.
Secondly, there are cultures where the dead are believed to be harmless. In such cultures, respect for the dead is informed age old values of decency. The dead are treated well on the basis of who they were and the reputation they had in the society when they lived. In such societies, respect for the dead is an appreciation of what they did when they lived. People who made unprecedented contributions to the societies, such as kings and political leaders, are often treated with utmost respect when they die. It is the people’s way of appreciating the work done by these people to make the society a better place when they still lived. In such societies, it is common for thieves, murderers and other social misfits to be treated with disdain even in death. If there was fear that they could revenge these, they too would be accorded respect in death.
Akop therefore misses the point by a wide arc when he argues that the respect with which people treat the dead is stems from the fear that the dead would revenge, or punish them if they were treated any differently.

Work Cited

Akop, Nazaretyan, “Fear of the Dead as a Factor in Social Self-Organization”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35:2 0021–8308, 2014.