How true does this title sound? Movies would tell us differently. How many times has it happened that a villan has sustained a mortal wound and pops back up for one last scare? If it looks dead and it smells dead, its dead.

By the way: My first reading of this was "there is no afterlife" but lets say you die and there is an afterlife, you're still dead.

Who knows? I look to other cultures for the idea of death. For example, in the Spanish language, there are two verbs meaning to be. Ser and estar. There are several differences between the two, but the pertinent one for right now is that ser is used when you say something is and that something is permanent. Estar is used for things that are temporary.

In Spanish, however, when you say My dog is dead, you would say Mi perro esta muerto. When I learned this, I laughed, because the use of estar implies that death is not a permanent condition. My teacher then explained that estar is used because that dog wasn't always dead.

In my opinion, death in the Hispanic culture (disclaimer: this is my own personal experience, not a sweeping generalization) has so much more significance than in my own (I grew up in the States, so whatever that implies for your own definition of culture). I went to el Dia de los Muertos in southern California when I lived there, and I was amazed at the reverence and celebration for the dead shown by the participants.

That doesn't really address the issue, but thats just what I thought of when I read this.