Science can explain HOW of things, but it cannot explain WHY of certain things (For example, why did life arise from non-life and evolved from simpler creatures to more complex life forms only to die and disappear?) So are the conflicted religions whose chief concern is in safeguarding each one’s separate identity.
Next option is to look for pearls among the stones—using power of our own reason. Leave behind even our own old style of looking at death as the opposite of life. Let us start on a clean slate: Though Jesus himself foretold truth will be overpowered by interpolators (Mathew 13:24-30), fortunately his perception of death remains intact: “Unless a seed falls into earth and dies, it cannot produce any grains.” His taking the unmistakable principle behind the eternal seed-tree mechanism makes all the difference—physical apparatus of the seed dies but life continues (which he further reiterated, with absolute clarity, through the famous parable of Lazarus and Rich man). Thus for Jesus, death was an expression of life, the most critical defining feature of life. When you die, you are making the ultimate undeniable assertion that you have been alive. In fact, death is even a precondition to life. You yourself are the proof. When you were in your mother’s womb, you thought it was your only world what you thought as the most comfortable place for you to be in. At the time of delivery, when you were pushed out, you thought in that trauma that you were experiencing a form of death, only to realize later that your life was continuing in a totally different world. This was the guarantee for some thinking people that death is not the end, but only an exit from the world to some other form of life—may be at yet another plane or dimension (which are irrelevant at this time, hence are best left as a surprise).
This type of reasoning will only help us (never harm us). For example William Shakespeare started his life as an ordinary person working for a drama troop, and his work was to raise the curtain and to pull it down at the appointed times. However, at some point of time, he began to think that he was more than his physical body and should tap the enormous power that sustains his mortal coil—and the rest is history. Look at one of his golden words: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, Page 13) He experienced firsthand another piece of truth hidden in the Bible: “Eternity” resides in each one’s physical body. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
Kahlil Gibran alludes to the same when he wrote: “Your children are not your children … they come through you but not from you … You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” List goes on and on: “Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.” (Abraham Lincoln) “I would love to believe that when I die …. some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.” (Carl Sagan) “In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.” (Will Durant).