Why cremation

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
41

There is also a widespread rumor, which is almost totally untrue, that in the 1500s the methods of determining time of death were so archaic that coffins were designed so that, when buried, an apparatus (connected to the coffin at one end and a bell at the other) would protrude from the burial site. If someone where accidentally buried alive, or found themselves revived somehow, any movement in the coffin would cause the bell to ring and people would go dig 'em up. I say this is “almost” totally untrue because coffins fitted with those types of alarms, among others, were designed in the 1800s, though they rarely found practical application.

Point is, many people find anxiety in the idea of being buried for one reason or another. Of course, medical technology has advanced since, so we are generally more certain of time & cause of death.

Also, consider natural disasters like massive floods that wash up cemeteries and spread rotting, diseased bodies among those trying to survive. This happened during Katrina and people were getting sick from just having contact with the same water that the corpses were floating around in.

Plus, if One Eyed Willy had been buried, the Goonies would have been forced from their homes for God sakes…

Care to link us to any said “datas” that brought you to this conclusion?

Don’t forget that people have long utilized tombs throughout history. I suppose that could be considered burial as they were generally beneath ground and locked away, though they were often open structures so that kind of defeats the whole decomposition into the Earth theory.

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EU laws governing emissions from crematoriums during the last ten years have led to most crematoriums being updated and computerised. Since carbon particles are outlawed, crematorium now emit only invisible gases. Contained within these are dangerous pollutants, including dioxins but most significantly, mercury. Crematoriums are thought to be responsible for approximately one sixth of all UK emissions of mercury, caused by the combustion of dental amalgam, whcih have been linked to birth defects, kidney disease and multiple sclerosis. Atmospheric dioxins, pollutants linked with cancer and other illnesses, and emissions of the chloride and formaldehyde used in the embalming process are also emitted.

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That’s a problem with the method being used; not the action itself.
Or else we could on and on about burial policies that cause problems.

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Google burial and cremation you can find lots of related datas.

While what is manmade and unnatural may be good for the alive,its not good for nature and the dead.The dead is no longer a living human being,but a part of nature.the dead body as organic matter,is good for the microbes and plants in the soil if it had not been cremated,and it thus is in the natural process which once created life,including humans.Who knows in the subsequent natural process what nature would produce which maybe better than the dead’s previous life? Why destroy this process by cremation?

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It is philosophical. Cremations cost less and funeral burials cost more, but the wealthier opt for cremation where as the poorer go for the funeral. It is about the money for one and it is about respect for the other.
At least here in america.

46

Well, I for one will not be barbarically (in my opinion) buried in a box aimlessly.
Instead, I will be cremated.
Half my ashes will be put into diamonds that will go to safe-keeps for my two daughters.
The other half will go into reserve (if I die first) to be combined with my wife’s ashes where both of ours will be placed into the soil for a tree’s nutrients.

Half of my wife’s ashes will also be in those diamond safe-keeps.

47

I never heard of or thought of that before. Cool idea.

Half of my ashes will go into a grille for my brothers (non biological).

… I planned to follow with a joke about it being (the kind of grille used) for barbecue, as I thought the black man barbecuing stereotype would nicely solidify the previous reading of “brothers”, and that irony–intensified by the taboo of cannibalism–could elicit a chuckle or two…

but then I realized holding another’s ashes in one’s mouth is gross enough.

Wouldn’t want people accusing me of suggesting all people are cannibals, neither.

As for the OP:

What is “natural”? The only coherent, simple definition (if we are to agree on one that can distinguish a unnatural thing from a natural thing) is something (whether it be a noun or a verb) that would be (or least could be) as it is without humans
(specifically, symbolic thinking minds–that, at least, see themselves as–capable of consciously and deliberately manipulating the environment as an attempt to obtain or avoid predicted future possibilities)
intervening in their process.

…You see the point?
By the only coherent, meaningful and useful definition of the word “natural”, there is no natural way for humans to react to dead bodies.

The OP is limited by the (very common) underlying associations:

Life = Good
What is necessary for life = Good
What is necessary for life = Nature
Nature = Good
Natural = Good
What man does with things in nature that no other animals or natural things do = Not natural
Not natural = Bad

I don’t know of any decent points arguing for a universal ( or even general)…bad, not good, not healthy, not practical, or whatever of cremation.

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Natural is good for the dead.The dead is no longer a living human being,he returned to the same natural process as before he had been born.It is this natural process that brought him to life,and back to this process after his death by natural burial.As the dead is in the same natural process as before he was born,no one can absolutely exclude the possibility that this process would in the future produce kind of new life which may have some connection with the dead, since the same process once created human life from lifeless chaos.

The manmade cremation destroyed the body by high temperature,thus destroyed the original natural process. Cremation emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air,thus does no good for both the dead and the alive.

The one chooses natural burial believes that death is not the final end of life,his life is with nature,the natural process that created human life is a creative and living force.

The one chooses cremation believes that death is the final end of life,it is not necessary to return the body to earth,so destroy it by burn it to gases and ashes.By thus doing the dead was really destroyed and is really the final end of life for all.

49

This is ridiculous…and I mean that heartfelt.

Look, you want to propose burial, even bodies laying raw in the ground without caskets.
You propose this is more natural and therefore better.
Better for whom?
The planet won’t give a crap if we die anymore than it gave a crap that the dinosaurs died.
So that means the only thing left here you could be working on saving is humans because the planet doesn’t need saving from humans.
If your plan is to return to natural ideas as a solution to pollutants, then you have just helped killed man; not save it.
150,000 bodies a day rotting at 100 to 300 years tops, but days to years for the effective human pollutant stage, in the ground.
Remember the plague?
Mass human bodies in rapid rate, laying down the dead in mass burials, eventually we figured out burning the dead bodies was a better way to clear the dead out than letting them explode in the ground spreading their disease.
150,000 bodies per day (55+ million per year) laying raw in the ground doing this youtube.com/watch?v=cxT-IPvLKB0 with whatever cotangents they may have in their system, not to mention the shear mass of bodies rotting is disease enough.

A good old wood fire does the trick well enough to be honest.
What’s the worst that happens?
Ash?
That’s terrible.

And if the power supply used to burning is causing pollutants, that’s because everything we use largely right now is a pollutant based power supply.
The moment we can pull off mass deployment of an efficient economical, industrious, and environment friendly power source; one will be deployed, and such factors as cremation power supply is negated as a concern.

Or, we could pull a Viking and ship bodies into the Ocean on wood and burn them there.
What’s the worst that happens?
They burn down to the bone instantly; turning into potassium ash that is instantly mixing with carbon from the wood and mixing with the salt in the Ocean water.
Then the water washes back to shore at some point with an increased potassium-carbon-salt-water mixture being added to the soil.
Oh darn!
That would…well…it would make things grow really well actually.

And people wouldn’t catch the second plague from this idea.

So again; “natural” doesn’t mean it’s the best thing out there.
“Natural” also means that you should just up and stop drinking filtered or cleaned water by water plants because it’s more natural to just rely on natural sources for water like man originally did.

Well, this is dumb of course, because we lack all of the enzymes at this point to handle drinking water naturally reasonably well enough as per say a Neanderthal.
Enacted, such an idea for water consumption would simply kill humans in mass millions; not save them from pollutants of the power sources used to filter water.

Same with your assertion.
Just because it’s “natural”; doesn’t mean it’s good.
Volcanoes are “natural” and they have and will absolutely kill massive amounts of life on this Earth, and contain the very real possibility of killing humans nearly to extinction.
They are natural; and they suck.

50

How about processing the organism back into something like hormel or maybe hamburger helper

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Natural burial is good for the dead as I said in my post above,and it does no harm to the alive.Humans buried their dead for millions of years and never caused infectious disease.

The one chooses natural burial believes that death is not the final end of life,his life is with nature,the natural process that created human life is a creative and living force.

The one chooses cremation believes that death is the final end of life,it is not necessary to return the body to earth,so destroy it by burn it to gases and ashes.By thus doing the dead was really destroyed and is really the final end of life once for all.

52

How ironic…

a burial done because of the belief of a life after death is “natural”.

Sure, okay, I’ll just assume your idea of a “living force” “creating” a human life. But you know what “life” means in the context of “a human life”, right? You know “death” is the opposite, right?

“Nature” isn’t something out there that includes and is beyond the human body, it’s just a word used to refer to phenomena we all go ahead and agree exists because we can point to them and refer to them (with words) when we don’t see them. It’s usually used to refer to things that happen that we can’t control, or haven’t. “That’s human nature”, “natural selection”, etc. Nature isn’t absolutely “good” just because it has life (and we think life is good); it, like anything else, requires a human mind to think it’s good. Right and wrong are not objective things that man has to learn from the wisdom of nature, they are words that are based on human experiences. If one feels wrong about being buried, and his family knows this, then for them it is wrong for his dead body to be buried. Other people may disagree with their choice, but nature doesn’t make judgments.

53

We need philosophizing instead of feels here,if not,what’s the use of philosophy?

I said my philosophic point of view of natural burial,that 's to return the dead naturally to where he had come from,don’t destroy it by cremation.

I just wonder what’s the philosophic reason of cremation.

What a pity that most people choose cremation instead of natural burial for financial reasons.A succinct burial would be cheaper and more environmentally- freindly than cremation.

So cremation is the worst personal choice in our time for both it’s bad impact on the environment and it’s irrationalness.

54

The use of philosophy, like any practical value, is to minimize bad feelings. It does this by trying to untangle illogical thinking so one isn’t directed by confused, counter-productive beliefs.

You just keep saying “but burial is natural”, as if that’s a rational argument for why it ought to be done. It isn’t.

55

Not to mention that burial isn’t natural to humans; it was learned.

Recently, we were able to witness for the first time a primate peaceful death in it’s community.
The events resulted in the fellow primates close to the deceased leaving the deceased where they passed.
The deceased was female, and her child continued to stay with her for some time after her death, but it was in mood of grief and sadness that this was done; the child was the only one to stay the entire night.
Up to her death, she was groomed and taken care of, even tested by the others for life in various manners by many of the group that collected around her.

However, there were no burial interests at any point.

Elsewhere, in Africa, mothering primates that have had children die continue to carry the deceased young even as long as into stages of natural mummification; but they do not bury the dead.

Man, as I’ve shown, has left no evidence of burying the dead for the same time frame that man has been around.

Burying the dead was a social evolution that was very poorly done at first and grew more advance through a very long span of time.

In short, while the grief and compulsion to do something after someone dies is natural to man and evidentially man’s closest relative, burial is not natural to man; it was invented.

[size=85]some sources for the above discussed, for further reading for anyone interested.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co … 01984.html
siasat.com/english/news/rare … himp-grief[/size]

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I never found Cremation to be environmentally ethical, all the smoke released into the air while dead corps will prove to be beneficial to the plants and trees. We can " ritualize " death without breaking the cycle of natural decomposition.

57

I’m confused.
Cremation is environmentally unethical, but the smoke produced is beneficial to the plants and trees?

I’m not understanding how that works.

58

Dead corps in the soil will soon be decomposed by microbes and thus benefit the soil that supporting plants.Natural in ground burial can "ritualize’ death without breaking the cycle of natural decomposition.

59

Because the end of Return of the Jedi is perfect as is:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpLlegVAyEs[/youtube]

The question of cremation or burial seems to be entirely a matter of personal preference.
Both are associated with environmental drawbacks.
Both can be meaningful ceremonies.
Both are arbitrary cultural traditions.
There is no moral upper-hand.
You just do what pleases you.

So why cremation? Because you’re Hindu or Buddhist. Because burial scares you. Because it’s cheaper. Because you watched Star Wars and the ending of Return of the Jedi made such an impression on you that you decided to be burned rather than buried. That’s all there is to it, really.

Plus: Fire is divine. Prometheus stole it from Zeus and gave it to man. Forget nature. Fire is the way to go.

60

I think you misunderstood Christ,He mean the dead corpse in the soil will be beneficial to plants and trees.