A new study has found that religious individuals and atheists might actually share a shocking similarity: both are among the least afraid of dying, according to at least some of the surveys and articles included in the meta-analysis. Researchers at the University of Oxford, among other colleges, explored some of the most intriguing international studies that have explored the relationship between the levels of peoples’ faith and their fear or anxiety associated with dying. While the assumption has long been that the more religious one is the less likely he or she is to fear death,

researchers came to a “complicated” conclusion after analyzing 100 articles from between 1961-2014 that represented a total of 26,000 people.“It shows that the very religious and atheists are the groups who do not fear death as much as much as those in-between,” the University of Oxford said in a press release, noting that the results were published in the journal Religion, Brain and Behavior. READ MORE