It is a straightforward declaration of preference. The speaker prefers life to death. Extracting meaning from that is not hard.

The problem is that "all things being equal" is a terrible choice of words. It very strongly implies that the speaker doesn't always prefer life to death (otherwise he would have just said "It is better to be alive than dead"), but it gives the listener no clue as to what exactly are the speaker's criteria for a living state to be better than the dead state.

What are the "things" that are supposed to be or not be equal between Universe A where I'm alive and Universe B where I'm dead?