It's not that he was destroyed (in my opinion only, you understand), it's that his body was damaged such that he could not express fully through it any longer. If you damage a radio a bit, you will get static when trying to tune in to the program. If you damage the radio a lot, you won't get any more program or any noise whatsoever from it. That does not mean that the program has been destroyed! It means that the radio has. But someone who didn't have a full understanding of what the radio's function is might well assume that the program itself had been destroyed when the radio stopped working.

In fact that is what natives assumed when first confronted with such things. First they assumed that the radio was alive and that the sounds it produced were its own original voice or that it was a god of some kind. Then when it stopped working they assumed it was dead.

People's general belief about physical death is entirely analogous to the radio example. The body is not the original source of the program, it's the medium through which the program broadcasts to others who are also in physical bodies. To reach physical eardrums you have got to use physical vibrations...via the vocal chords, if speaking. To reach physical eyes you have got to use visible light and shadow, and maybe color. And so it goes.

I can just see a bunch of radios sitting around bemoaning the eventual death of the program when their circuits wear out.

- LH