Here’s how I think I would have liked to have it explained to me when I was little, instead of hearing about heaven and hell and souls meeting Jesus. Note that this is a non-transhumanist explanation and doesn’t deal with the possibility of physical immortality, because I don’t think my mother was aware of that idea; but she certainly knew basic biology and could have given this explanation, if she hadn’t been motivated otherwise by religious faith:
“People are made of the same stuff as plants and bugs and slugs and mice. We live a lot longer than bugs and slugs and mice, though, and longer than a lot of plants, too. When we die, the stuff that we’re made of goes back into nature and gets turned into other living things. If someone dies and gets buried, eventually all the stuff that the person is made of gets turned into dirt, and then into bugs and plants and other living things.
“After death, the person isn’t there any more. It’s just like the tomato plants and the sunflowers in the garden: when winter comes, they die, and we dig the dead plants up and put them in the compost pile to become good dirt for next year. By the spring, the old dead plants are all gone; the bacteria and bugs and worms in the compost pile have eaten them all up and turned them into dirt.
“You could look through the whole compost pile and not find a leaf, or the sharp yellow smell of tomato plants: it’s all been turned into dirt. All the things that make a person who they are — their thoughts, their feelings, their abilities, all of it — all that disappears when they die, just like the leaves and the smell. What’s left behind is just the stuff they were made of, and that becomes dirt.
“There are a few things that last after death, though, besides just the stuff that a person is made of. A person’s children live on after them, like the seeds of last year’s plants. A person’s ideas and feelings can, too, if they record them: we can still know a lot about what Mark Twain thought, even though he died in 1910 and we can never talk to him — because he wrote it down. John Lennon died in 1980 but we can still hear his voice on records. And we can have memories of what a person has done; their accomplishments and how good of a person they were still last after they’re gone.”
Here’s how I think I would have liked to have it explained to me when I was little, instead of hearing about heaven and hell and souls meeting Jesus. Note that this is a non-transhumanist explanation and doesn’t deal with the possibility of physical immortality, because I don’t think my mother was aware of that idea; but she certainly knew basic biology and could have given this explanation, if she hadn’t been motivated otherwise by religious faith:
“People are made of the same stuff as plants and bugs and slugs and mice. We live a lot longer than bugs and slugs and mice, though, and longer than a lot of plants, too. When we die, the stuff that we’re made of goes back into nature and gets turned into other living things. If someone dies and gets buried, eventually all the stuff that the person is made of gets turned into dirt, and then into bugs and plants and other living things.
“After death, the person isn’t there any more. It’s just like the tomato plants and the sunflowers in the garden: when winter comes, they die, and we dig the dead plants up and put them in the compost pile to become good dirt for next year. By the spring, the old dead plants are all gone; the bacteria and bugs and worms in the compost pile have eaten them all up and turned them into dirt.
“You could look through the whole compost pile and not find a leaf, or the sharp yellow smell of tomato plants: it’s all been turned into dirt. All the things that make a person who they are — their thoughts, their feelings, their abilities, all of it — all that disappears when they die, just like the leaves and the smell. What’s left behind is just the stuff they were made of, and that becomes dirt.
“There are a few things that last after death, though, besides just the stuff that a person is made of. A person’s children live on after them, like the seeds of last year’s plants. A person’s ideas and feelings can, too, if they record them: we can still know a lot about what Mark Twain thought, even though he died in 1910 and we can never talk to him — because he wrote it down. John Lennon died in 1980 but we can still hear his voice on records. And we can have memories of what a person has done; their accomplishments and how good of a person they were still last after they’re gone.”