Myself, I thought that was just, historically speaking, dumb. The other day, I read a quotation in passing that I wished I had conjured up myself back in those times, that went straight to the heart of the psychology of belief and unbelief, and what is far more often at stake in people's psychological motivations for their beliefs, but was much more precise than my more intuitive "That's dumb."
“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”– Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, “The Discreet Charm of Nihilism"