By: TAYLOR BENNETT
Staff Writer
“I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave”. These were the words of Roman poet Horace in one of his famous books, Odes. Death is the greatest blanket term of all. Death is when a living thing no longer has proper organ function, consequently resulting in no brain activity and termination of breathing. One can kill everything from a bug to a conversation to a person. On the other hand, to be living is, in a sense, to exist with a defined purpose. The purpose is not always palpable, even taking an entire lifetime to simply find one of those purposes within oneself. Good or bad purposes are entirely up to interpretation. Personification also breathes life into inanimate objects, which as nearly everyone beyond the surface level of consciousness knows, is impossible. To perceive something or someone as dead is entirely illogical. There is a further continuation of a life well beyond the failure of organs to function, what happens after this perceived life is up to individual interpretation. Simply because something no longer exists in the way that we can see it doesn’t mean that it is “dead,”; rather, it is living in a way that we aren’t able to comprehend. Because of this truth, it is clear that nothing can really be classified as “dead,” thus should not be referred to as so.
Those who claim that the term “dead” is entirely reasonable argue that death is based on clinical facts. That when circulatory and respiratory systems crash and brain activity is nonexistent, something is officially dead. An autopsy may reveal the irreversible failure of the heart, lungs, and brain – sometimes all three. It is true that these are biological factors that declare a thing living or not, and that there should be no arguments or protests to this because coroners cannot write “living” on someone’s toe tag or death certificate – it would make absolutely no sense to do so. Declaring something living or dead based on a clear and concise textbook definition is the most logical thing possible in any situation. A decomposing body with no viable organs is not living;, it ceases to exist and cannot be defined as living in any classroom or operating room. While some may believe that the dead continue living after their biological death, there is no rational way to explain this, and science cannot prove this with solid facts. Therefore, any argument against using the word “dead” to define something is entirely illogical.
On the contrary, a significant number amount of people do believe in some sort of afterlife, whether it be for religious or other personal reasons regarding belief. This is entirely valid in the sense that this has been a widespread belief essentially since history really began to be documented. To call something dead if it is going to be alive again in the afterlife makes no sense. While there is no irrefutable evidence to support the thought that there truly is a second life or period of reincarnation for every living thing, there is no indisputable proof that there is absolutely no rebirth. After all, if an entire period of history was literally called “The Rebirth,” (The Renaissance)., how can rebirth be possible in inanimate objects (being history and culture), but not animate, living things? To say that an entire culture can be reborn and resurrected, but living, breathing things cannot, is entirely contradictory, thus meaning that nothing ever really is “dead,” making “dead” an outdated and unsuitable term for things that have lost basic organ function.
The wall built dividing basic science and spirituality has kept the two entirely separate for an incredible amount of time. Society has been led to believe that people may choose one, but that means that they cannot have the other. No gray space for anyone to debate the vast expansion of both over the last few centuries, or last few decades at that, and how they may be combined on some occasions. By having both science and spirituality as part of one’s life, we are capable of expanding our thoughts to new horizons and exploring the possibility of a relationship between the two. Simply because the vessel can no longer function properly does not mean there is a loss of soul. Souls may be held in the human body, but they do not fail along with it after resuscitation fails. With this being said, rather than insisting that something is “dead,” simply referring to something as “ceasing to exist in this life” should suffice. In this way, there is a logical appeal to the science behind the matter, and the spirituality of it through noting that the existence has simply stopped in this life, but not others.