Religious Cling to Life

According to a study recently published in JAMA, religious people are nearly three times as likely as the non-religious to cling desperately to life when they have terminal illnesses. Godless heathens are less interested in aggressive, expensive treatments that do nothing but prolong their doomed existences, and they're more likely than the faithful to plan for death with things like living wills and do-not-resuscitate orders. At first, this seems like a counterintuitive statistic. Aren't the religious supposed to be more sure of a heavenly afterlife and thus more comfortable with death? But while it's easy to look at this and think that maybe religious convictions aren't as strong as people would like to think, it's also possible that the religious are just desperate to evangelize as long as they possibly can. Or they're willing to prolong their suffering just in case God changes His mind about that whole miraculous recovery thing. More details here.