Why do atheists have dead bodies at funerals?
The question Can you have a funeral without a body? is not as useful as the question Why would you have a dead body at a funeral? Yes, yes, you can’t have a wedding or a civil partnership without the happy couple, and you can’t have a baby naming without a baby, so how can you have a funeral without a corpse? But are these events equivalent to a funeral? A corpse is a passive, insensate participant, that’s the difference. Yes, a baby is not an active participant at its naming, but it has to live with the consequences. What difference does a funeral make to a corpse?
That’s the nub of it. And the answer is that for some people a funeral does make a difference to the corpse and for others it does not.
There are, I think, three ways you can view a dead body. Think, now, of your own body when it’s dead. Which of the following will apply?
1. My body and my soul belong together (I am not dead, I am sleeping).
2. I had a body. Now I am a spirit (my body is old clothes).
3. I had a body. That was me (ditto).
Each describes a specific bodily status. Number 1 is explicitly Christian; you are sort of sleeping, awaiting resurrection in your earthly body. Number 2 is broadly spiritual. Number 3 is explicitly atheist. If you are a number 1 or 2 you are going somewhere; you are in a state of transition, the difference being that 2s leave their bodies behind. If you are a number 3 everything stopped when you took your last breath. Every minute that passes thereafter leaves you further and further in the past.
In order to mark the transition of a dead body number 1 it makes good sense to demonstrate its continuing dynamic by physically bringing it to a departure ceremony and wish it safe journey.
For a number 2 body I’d have thought a departure ceremony optional. John Lennon was a 2. Yoko One had his body burnt unattended and held a memorial ceremony instead, to take place everywhere and anywhere. “Pray for his soul from wherever you are,” she said. But inasmuch as the flight of a soul is about movement and transition and endurance, a farewell ceremony for the body is an appropriately symbolic alternative.
As for the number 3s, I’m not sure that they’ve thought this through. Ask an atheist if he or she wants to be cremated or buried. Chances are you’ll be made aware of a strong preference, arrived at in the consideration of a strong revulsion for one or the other. Wrong answer. The right answer is that it doesn’t matter a bit.
So, for number 3s, atheists, to bring a dead body, outworn carcass and so much deadweight, to a farewell ceremony would seem to be illogical and unnecessary. For atheists, surely, it’s got to be a memorial service every time?
My argument is not nearly as cut and dried as it seems.
posted by Charles Cowling at
13:58
2 Comments:
No, it's not (your argument cut and dried), is it. There's a lot of sense in it, Charles, but as I think you imply, sense and logic are not always happy bedfellows. Each has its clandestine affairs elsewhere.
Humanists bang on about reason and logic being what they do (and we all ought to) live by. There's no logic in funeral preferences if you believe there'll be nothing of you left when your body's caput. But there's every good sense in it, because while you're alive you like the fantasy of watching it happen after you've gone. It's an engaging distraction, just like it's fun to believe you're James Bond till you leave the cinema. Besides - and perhaps more importantly - the old habit of looking over your shoulder to make sure God's not watching dies harder in self-proclaimed atheists than in any of us.
As for your survivors, it makes both sense and reason to take your body to their ceremony. Think of anyone you've known who's now dead . Pause... What do you see? A vacuum? An absence? I doubt it. You're much more likely to be looking at their face, dead as it has been all this time. You can't completely dissociate a person from their body even when it's been one point eight metres under for twenty years, let alone a week or two after you last spoke to them. The sight of your sightless relative's corpse, and the thought of it in the coffin, is as sobering as it gets when it comes to Worden's first task of Accepting the Reality of the Loss.
Isn't that at least part of the reason, and the sense, of having a ceremony for our dead?
How very timely, as tomorrow, I'm doing a funeral without a body! This is because the family felt that the funeral (a cremation in their case) was too claustrophobic and not how they wanted to say goodbye to their loved one.
As a card-carrying atheist/humanist, I really don't care what happens to my body once I'm dead, as I genuinely think that I will have ceased, and therefore won't know a thing about it.
As someone who has lost a loved one, I also felt the same way, but still needed the ritual of the funeral to be part of my grieving. Would it have made any difference if my mother's coffin hadn't been there? To me, no. She'd left us as we watched her die in the hospital. I went to see her body in the FD's chapel a few days later - for me it wasn't a worthwhile experience, as again, that didn't seem like Mum to me, just someone (over) made up to look like her. I'm not sure what I was expecting in making that visit, but it actually only validated what I had already thought.
So, personally, it was about having some kind of ceremony of remembrance, a chance to publicly say "that was my Mum, I loved her, and now she's gone". The box and her body within it, weren't vital.
However, it's a personal thing. I know what I think, what I don't know is if I'm right, or not.
Love and peace to all.
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