Firefighter here. I was reflecting on a fatality I attended recently. My thoughts wandered to how a body looks like it is ‘just matter’ in a way that a living thing does not, even when sleeping. Previously I assumed this observation was just something to do with traumatic death, but this person seemed to have died peacefully and the same, ‘absence’ of something was obvious.
I’m not a religious person, but it made me wonder if there actually is something that ‘leaves’ when someone dies (beyond the obvious breathing, pulse etc).
I’m not looking for a ‘my holy book says’, kind of discussion here, but rather a reflection on the direct, lived experiences of people who see death regularly.
Medic 30+ years.
Life “energy” is gone. Of course no one knows what happens to the electrical energy in a human upon death… but, it definitely leaves the body.
This is where people’s belief system kicks in. I’m not religious and don’t believe in heaven/hell. I do personally believe in a spirit world.
I kind of like the most remote possiblity of becoming a ghost.
You “personally believe in a spirit world” - that is exactly heaven/hell - religion is belief in a spiritual world…
Semantics -
They didn’t say “spiritual,” they said “spirit” and “ghost.” Ghosts are not in any heaven or hell but unseen among us on Earth. Not necessarily something to worship or fear either. I think it’s a step apart from religion.
Absolutely not of any religious realm. And I would never claim it’s true.
Religion is a set of organized, ritualized practices based on spiritual belief. You can be spiritual without being religious, and I know a bunch of active, practicing Catholics who don’t believe in anything supernatural, so I would say you can be religious without being spiritual.
You might be interested in the story of Luigi Galvani’s experiments with frog muscle tissue. It was seminal work in anatomy as well as physics.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631069106000370?via%3Dihub
Ty. Far more verbose than an explanation of the frog experiments.