Excerpt from, “Grief Without Beliefs” from the Huffington Post.
I know that we’re alive through our offspring. You are physically an embodiment of your father’s biological and genetic essence. This includes everything from how you look to many of the behavioral and personality traits you have. In other words — and this is not an exaggeration — your father is literally alive through you, as mine is through me. For me, knowing that is incredibly powerful and comforting.
I know that we continue to exist through the earth. This is my attempt at being euphemistic about your fertilizer theory. As part of this huge reservoir of terrestrial carbon, we die and become part of the earth, which gives rise to new life, as it once gave rise to us. That is also very powerful to me in a more collective, worldly sense.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/atheists-death_b_4134439.html
Traces of Hope 
Mmmmmmmmm! Nice argument. A little dated. Reminds me of the ‘we will; only exist as an eternal memory of God.’ Good as far as it goes. However, Judaic/Christian theology does not have it’s genesis in metaphysics. Rather it begins and ends with Revelation. We didn’t decide one day to invent God. God spoke. We heard. Rahner would say that that revelation started us on a transcendental journey. A journey into greater and greater complexity. “The fundamental thesis of human anthropology is that the human spirit has an implicit, unobjectify awareness of it ultimate horizon and has so as it’s apriori condition.” Revelation points us in the right direction, a return to the dirt or even to stardust is not transcendent because it does not allow for transformation. Transformation is the message of Easter and the story of Christianity. Bill. (Heythrop)