Why exhume & rebury?

Discussion in 'Religion' started by Dinosaur, Sep 22, 2016.

  1. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    A recent article gave details of the identification of a WW2 soldier buried overseas where he died.

    The family had the remains exhumed & transported to the USA for reburial.

    Why do some people consider it necessary to go to the expenses involved in projects such as the above?

    What difference does it make where a body is buried? The deceased is no longer capable of caring.​

    I have given instructions to my family to turn my body over to a medical school or the local coroner, with further instructions that no burial rituals or other expenses be incurred.

    Funerals are expensive & surely do nothing for the deceased.

    It seems better to me to spend the money on living relatives & perhaps on friends of the deceased.​

    As far as I am concerned, just dig a hole & toss my body into it after the medical school is done with it.​

    My maternal grandfather was a funeral director & two of his sons were employed by him.

    One was part time & merely retrieved bodies. As a teenager, I often accompanied this uncle into mines & other places.

    The other embalmed bodies as a full time job. When circa 8-15, I watched this uncle embalm bodies. He was remarkable at make up & the use of photos to create the appearance of the face of a body crushed in a mine cave in or other accident which did extreme damage to the head.​

    I was astonished at the cost of funerals & burials, especially those paid for by families which could not afford the expenses they incurred. That was many decades ago & I suppose funerals are even more expensive today.

    My grandfather often complained when he charged as much as $1000 less for a funeral & then discovered that the family used the savings to buy a more expensive monument.

    What is the reason for spending so much money on a dead body?

    Note that Quakers have no clergy & members of a meeting make remarks which might be made by the clergy of other religions. A Quaker (Society of Friends) funeral joke Follows.

    At a Quaker funeral there was silence for 35 minutes. Then a man stood up & said the following
    10 minutes later, a man sttod up and said
     
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  3. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Incineration for me. I don't need to use up 20 square feet of the planet.
     
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  5. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    You would deprive the biome of your accumulated nutrients?
     
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  7. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    They'll get there. They don't need their own garden plot to do so.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  8. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Because it makes people (living people) feel better.

    Funerals, wakes etc aren't for the dead. They are for the living. A lot of people miss that.
     
  9. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    5,902

    Often WWII remains found overseas weren't buried, they are just found where they fell on some forgotten battlefield. I think that the deceased's families want to feel like their lost family member is finally returning home.

    I think that it's kind of touching.

    I'm like you Dinosaur, I don't really care what happens to my body after I die. I'm probably too old for my organs to be good transplant candidates, and I don't think that I have any conditions that would make me interesting to medical science. So cremate me, I guess. (I've even suggested that my friends eat me. You are what you eat...)

    On second thought, maybe I would like my ashes to be placed next to my parents' graves though. I'm kind of sentimental about the idea that we are all finally back together, even if in death.

    That wish isn't all that different from the fallen WWII soldier... finally returning home.
     

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