I am deeply sacred of death, but not the afterlife. I simply do not believe it and in a sense lack the ability to believe it because despite my deep engagement with religion over my entire life, I do not share the capacity for irrational irreligiosity despite wishing I did.

As for religion, I will say this: the sacred is terrifying, is meant to be terrifying, and it has been so for almost all of human history. It is an Abrahamic-Buddhistic notion that the good and the pure = the sacred and the impure, dirty and evil = profane. It's an admirable effort to contain human impulses which is why these are the "final forms" of religion before the whole world fell into irrelegion, but they are pointless to contain how the human brain is actually set to see what's sacred: something as sovereign, taboo-breaking within its own sovereignly set boundaries and terrifying.

As such I do not fear religion because, in my eyes, religion properly said has ceased to exist: all that exists now is institutions ("organized religion"), religious justifications for bigotries that are ultimately actually secular but have no secular, rational justification that passes anymore as well as coping mechanisms to make oneself feel superior ("I am spiritual and enlightened, the others are not"). What exists that is religious now is human instinct which led to religious beliefs, but no longer is religiously understood, e.g. teen boys' fear of the opposite sex (in ancient times understood as a profound religious prohibition on Boy The Hunter, girls taking away your hunting (and warrior) prowess by ending your adolescent state).

Ultimately I think Celtic mentalities towards birth are indicative of fundamental human notions: Celts believed that a son was a reincarnation of the father and the daughter of the mother. Humanity rarely feels it as intensely as the Celts, but all of it feels that their children are how they reach a degree of continuity beyond their own discontinuity of being, i.e. their separateness from other people and the rest of time, and thus to have a child is to "continue". It is in a sense a real afterlife, even if, purely rationally speaking, merely a genetic one... but subjectively you can interpret how merely genetic it is, of course, most people do.