On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 01:06:52PM -0700, Howard Brazee wrote: > Tsarren wrote: > > >Exactly. Funerals of any kind are for the people left behind, not for the > >dead. > > > > > The services are. (although people such as Churchill planned his own > funeral). Whether the body is embalmed, buried, or whatever is left > over from old religions. Try telling someone irl that the next time they lose a relative, they can just save the expense of a burial or cremation by putting the body in the trash bin the next time their trash service comes by (after all, we throw meat scraps in the garbage all the time, it's not like landfills coundn't handle bodies). Leaving aside the legality of such, I bet their response is going to be to question your sanity. No human culture of which I know, past or present, has ever discarded the bodies of their dead in their middens, despite this being the most practical thing to do (you'd have to bury or burn mass casualities from a war or epidemic, but that's an exception). What happens to the remains most definitely is for the people left behind - atheists care what's done with them too, so it's not as if it's just a religious thing. What is done with the remains is a part of the services. Kat