From another thread:
We all know that life invariably leads to death. And we all know that "dead" or "inorganic" matter has the potential to become life. Life and death, or "alive" and "dead" are defined as two different very states of being, complete opposites.
However, it seems to me that life and death are just words, imperfect human attempts at defining something that may very well go beyond definition. At what point does a person become alive? Or at what point does the living material of a mother and father become a person? Well according to society, it is whenever the law declares it to be.
At what point is a person who is dying in a hospital bed considered dead? At what point is a corpse no longer considered to be a person? When the "professionals" declare it to be so.
We all know these declarations are just attempts at making a clean cut where the truth is actually much more vague. We don't really know when a person becomes a person. We don't really know when they cease to be. We just try to make sense out of a vague situation, try to get all the pieces of the puzzle to line up straight.
Life and death are not absolute opposites. We may define them in such a way to feel like we understand our reality a little better, but the reality is that life and death are connected and lead into each other in a vague and mysterious way. Because life and death are just human attempts at understanding something that is beyond life and death. Life and death are our attempts at fitting reality into little boxes. In reality there is no life and death, there is just this continuous, vague phenomenon that builds up and releases, that goes up and down, back and forth, in and out and changes all the time.
