perhaps does an amoeba respire?
Why don’t we go with the Wikipedia definition? The article on life begins with:
Now, to transcend means “to rise above or go beyond” according to dictionary.com. And isn’t the above passage a wonderful illustration of this idea of transcendence? The processes of “metabolism, reproduction, and adaptation” are new phenomena that are non-existent in inanimate matter. And “negative entropy” - life forms absorb energy from their surroundings rather than the reverse - isn’t it amazing how living things seem to go against the law of entropy, a law that dead things invariably follow? (Doesn’t that remind you of the idea that human beings go against their animal instincts? 
) Living things “rise above or go beyond” dead matter by not being wholly bound by simple physical rules. An ant acquires a simple form of volition that allows it to climb up a tree, seemingly against the law of gravity, a feat that no dead thing can do.
…I’ll go with my simple/valid explanation of what constitutes life, thanks!
Amoebas are single-celled, and cells in themselves respire/metabolise…
i agree
What does it mean to be rational? Somehow that definition looks like another preference.
You don’t need technology,philosophy, science,religion or government to transcend life and death.
You only need the will to survive for that simple gesture. Infact that really doesn’t prove why ancient man needed “transcendence” at all or why we need it in our own present generation.
Religious “transcendence” historically was the mother of philosophy,science and the ethics of government.
In this thread my motive is to ask why was religious “transcendence” in ancient times necessary?
If religious “transcendence” in ancient times was unnecessary then so is everything else which extended out of it historically including philosophy, science and ethics of government.
It was religious “transcendence” that first brought people out of forests and jungles of nature into constructed confines that we call civilization.
My challenge to everyone is this thread is to show why the first forms of “transcendence” was necessary.
( The religious kind.)
I don’t believe it is appropiate to talk about the modern systemizations of “transcendence” like that of philosophy,science and government ethics without first looking at their parent known as religion that historically came first.
Good question. Hold that thought for we will need it later in the discussion. 
It’s good to know that a combination of you and/or a dictionary can explain the phenomena of life and death so easily… When I have other questions rooted in metaphysics, I know who to talk to from now on! 
P.S. People are dominated by instincts. 
To understand this post people might want to check out this thread here:
You have a short memory don’t you? My post was an answer to this little challenge of yours:
You didn’t ask me to explain “the phenomena of life and death”, did you? I provided what you asked for - evidence for the claim that living things transcend inanimate matter. It was necessary to get an agreed or standard definition of “living things” and “transcend”, because otherwise, you may have an idiosyncratic take on what those words mean, so as to make you think that living things don’t transcend dead things. Judging by your other posts, getting such standard definitions is necessary. And oh, if there’s a problem with the evidence provided or my reasoning, let me know.
On the other hand, to say that “people are similar to other categories of animals by being dominated by instincts” would be “irrelevant”.
I don’t know if I agree with your “above and beyond” definition of transcendence. I see ‘transcendence’ more of a “progressive above and beyond”. It doesn’t mean simply going above and beyond, to me, its moral connotations come from “transcending to heaven/enlightenment”. So, it’s practical applications are not just metaphorical location references to categorical concepts. In a sense, transcendence means “going beyond and being better than the previous state”.
That’s why I dislike the term and have a hard time giving an example of ‘transcendence’. I don’t see many things in the world as truly transcending anything.
What is better or what is worse than one situation compared to another? I don’t like getting into those philosophical issues, because they always seem to go nowhere.
Ha, I was going to say that you only dislike the word transcendence because of its religious connotation. You confirmed that and went a step further, saying you dislike the word just because it implies “better than”! Re the religious part, the fact is that the definition given was the primary one from a dictionary (not from me) and it does not denote anything specifically religious. Hence I was justified in using the term in the biological context of living vs dead things.
Now I agree that transcend implies “better than”, but there’s nothing wrong with that association. The thing is, you really can’t avoid grading things as better or worse than something else. Your post has many instances of such grading, eg. “transcendence is not a good word to use”, “discussing whether something is better or worse goes nowhere, ie. it’s better not to discuss it”. What’s actually better is to work out the reasons behind a common-sense idea like “it’s better for an animal to survive rather than die”. The idea of transcendence may help there.
You’re right that there’s nothing wrong with the “better than” notion. However, since I refer to ‘transcendence’ as some kind of religious/spiritual progression (of the soul), I think that is where my distaste of the concept comes from. Throughout my entire life, I have only heard the word used in instances where people are metaphysical about spirituality: transcending the body, in death, suffering on earth, etc.
I find that dictionaries give bad definitions. Many times, they do not recite the whole description of a word. If I wanted to give you a description of ‘transcendence’, I would find out how the word came about through which cultures, dialects, and root words in history. I would take the practical usages of the word (which the dictionary does) and I would also mention about how those practical usages are used correctly or incorrectly amongst the masses of English-speaking people in our culture/society.
The best impression I get from a word is if you ask a stranger or anybody really, what ‘transcendence’ means and let them go into detail without saying anything about it…
I imagine with ‘transcendence’ you’ll get a lot of people saying something along the lines of, “the soul transcends the body.”
So, this kind of metaphysical progression within ‘transcendence’ is what I avoid with care. People could say ‘go beyond’ and it would suffice, wouldn’t it?