Religion has no place in the legal definition of death

It's difficult to believe that we are still debating the legal point of death in this day and age, but apparently we are. The issue has raised its hoary head once again with the natural death of 27-year old Taquisha McKitty, after over a year of artificially-maintained "life".
Ms. McKitty initially died from a drug overdose after taking a toxic cocktail of street drugs in 2017. First responders encountered no pulse, but managed to get her breathing again artificially on a ventilator. Swelling in her brain cut off oxygen to her brain, though, and she was declared brain-dead six days later. The woman's religious family, though, believed that she was still alive (on the grounds that her heart was still beating, albeit with mechanical assistance), and took a legal fight to Ontario's top courts in order to block the hospital's intention to discontinue life support. As a letter in the Globe astutely points out, this legal battle did not prolong Ms. McKitty's life, it prolonged her death.
We've seen this kind of thing before, usually involving fundamentalist Muslims, Jews or Christian's, who think they know better than the medical profession. In Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, the definition of death is left up to doctors, but brain death is usually defined as essentially a situation where a person no longer has the capacity for consciousness and is unable to breathe without help. It's the best we can do. Some religious folk, though, feel the need to muddy the waters by insisting in their own definition or interpretation, thereby eroding public trust in doctors. The unfortunate dead woman is described by the family and their lawyer as deeply religious, notwithstanding her drug habits and her teen pregnancy.
Religion should have nothing to do with it, though. What if someone claimed that their religion dictated that a person could only be considered dead once all their flesh had melted off the bone? Or, conversely, when a person's eyes were closed for longer than a day, regardless of heart or brain function? Such examples may seem far-fetched, but they are far from inconceivable. Should we pander to such views? Surely not; that way madness lies. Why, then, should we have to take account of other non-scientific viewpoints? Doctors have a hard enough task as it is, let's not make it any harder by incorporating the randomness of religion.