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There are plenty of cultures were belief in an afterlife and religion only have tenuous connections or none at all Classical Paganism and Temple Judaism stand out as particularly relevant examples to the west . the Greeks of course had a god of the dead but he was no where near the center of worship. I think the West's assumption that religion = afterlife has to do with path-dependency. (That member of my tribe who thinks his birthday is so important that it messed up my Blake's 7 watching schedule.) To throw some more fuel on the fire James Fraser thought religion had its origin in charlatanism and wrote 13 volumes on that thesis.