The idea of immortality in the theocentrical ideological systems and in a religious worldview

The article addresses the idea of human immortality, reflected in different ways in different forms of religious outlook, analyzes cultural, historical and individualpersonal traits of the existence of this idea. It is proved that individual- personal characteristics of the subject of religious consciousness have crucial significance for the predominance of soft or rigid forms of retribution beyond the grave. The article makes comparison of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism and Western and Orthodox versions of immortality within the Christian religion. Detailed attention is paid to the ideas of the immortality in Russian philosophy (the heritage of N.F. Fedorov, N.A.Berdyaev, S.L. Frank, Lev Shestov). It is concluded that the moral reasons for rejecting the death by Russian thinkers are in their special attention to the value of the bodily-spiritual unity of the human personality. It is stated that two main social functions performed by religion as a social institution are repressive and compensatory functions; the latter exist and interact as a dialectical contradiction. The author considers the typical approaches to the problem of death and immortality by Orthodox theologians of the 19 th and 20 th centuries; it is noted that in their works there is a tendency towards decreasing the repressive component in the models of the underworld retribution. At the same time, the disciplinary function of the official church religiosity is important, as the church retains its influence mainly through the implementation of this function. It is concluded that the perceptions of the human postmortem existence reflect the national-cultural and subjective-personal features of understanding the justice as an ethical category, as well as the fact that the idea of immortality in religious consciousness takes different forms not only in accordance with the type of religion but rather with the type of personal attitude to the problem of death.