25 Things That Everybody Knows But Nobody Wants To Admit

[snooper2]

(Example, -that nobody on this earth will remember you even existed in 100 years)

[TheBlackAdder]

1. Yep, once your 3rd generation descendants pass, your grave might be dug up for real estate.

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Or, what a supermarket did in Philly, just pave over the graves to make a parking lot.


Sooner or later, your bones will be the playthings of future generations.


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[whatthehey]

2. I truly cannot comprehend why anyone cares

It's obviously an artifact of early social interaction that predates the current modern humans so there is no denying a deep and long nigh universal concern with the remains of the dead, but it's so profoundly silly that it's amazing it's never been widely challenged while so many other archaic taboos have been.

Other than the circular logic of it being "respectful" (it's only seen as such because of the long-held superstition), what real reasons are there to take particular care and ritual observances with corpses? They differ widely too. Parsis leave them out for vultures, most prefer burial or cremation (but in some societies one or the other is taboo), public immolation, mummification, cannibalism (mostly historical), caves, whatever, but the idea that the ritual is important, whatever it is, remains.

Why? Apart from the few religions which posit actual bodily physical reanimation there's no real theological reason to worry (and even here if the god/s in question can give you back flesh and organs long decayed, cannot they give you back bones?) and indeed in some major religions the flesh is the lesser sinful vessel of the far more vital "soul". It's not really warranted for hygiene reasons any more and hasn't been for centuries. I'm sure that's how many taboos arose, as corpses attracted scavengers and predators, stank up camps or settlements and polluted water supplies, but hell we've had germ theory and disposal technology for things far worse than human remains for generations now. Corpse disposal is absurdly wasteful and expensive - anyone who's ever taken a cab from JFK to Manhattan can barely avoid contemplating the mind-boggling opportunity cost of all that real estate for a start, let alone environmental damage in less crowded areas. All so maybe, rarely, 3 generations can stand 6' above your rotting shell and fool themselves into thinking that they are thereby granted some special license to think about you more meaningfully.

Surely there are more useful things to do with corpses, and surely there are enough rational folks who truly don't care what happens to theirs after they die. Cut me to pieces and use me as comedy props for all I care. Feed me to fish or use me as target practise for Welsh archery competitions. As long as I'm dead first...

[TheBlackAdder]

5. There are more Native American skulls, in museums, than there are living Native Americans

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22:53 Thousands of skulls just in the Smithsonian alone. More stored in institutions than those living.


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[whatthehey]

8. Hmmm.. not sure you meant it that way but the anthropology angle is a thought

The only way we know what little we do about human prehistory including the diaspora from Africa is because of remains, including albeit not limited to skeletal remains. They may be in even less supply had there been a more utilitarian approach to disposing of corpses so yes that's a point. Our knowledge today is greater because preservation happened both by chance and by design.

It's also however another point not vital any more. We are leaving and archiving enough records of our existence and lifeways to keep a whole planetload of putative 20,160 CE anthropology students in PhD thesis topics.

[The2ndWheel]

6. So you can comprehend why someone might care

You just find it silly.

[whatthehey]

7. Actually no not now. I can comprehend why they DID care

I might very well care if not burying them meant I had to fend off hyenas or drink polluted water, but that's not the case any more.

[The2ndWheel]

15. Well we still think we live in something called the year 2016 too

We should say the year 13 billion, give or take. Better yet, get rid of the whole year concept, as the foundation of it isn't all that objective. One spin around the sun on this particular planet is a year? Great, that literally means nothing anywhere else in the universe. It doesn't even mean anything to anything that isn't human on this planet.

The abstract human imagination is a weird and crazy place. We give names to things. That's a tree, that's a fish. Trees and fishes don't know they're trees and fishes. We draw straight and curved lines that we use as words. We use words like good and bad, or right and wrong, concepts that don't actually exist anywhere outside of the human mind. We think rights exist. We think The Constitution is more than just a piece of paper. Again, a weird and crazy place.

We are prisoners of history, and slaves to the future.

[whatthehey]

16. An interesting convention that, true enough.

The culturally, and militarily, dominant societies on earth at the time when global communication and commerce advanced enough to make a single shared number for each succeeding year important happened to date their years from the putative (but impossible, even in scripture; we know when Herod died etc) birth of a religious founder. so that's what we all agree, even if reluctantly for those with their own systems sometimes, to call the year.

The year as a period has a bit more concrete meaning, and had even more when agriculture was the world's overwhelming industry but the number surely is just a shared, almost arbitrary convention. The difference though is there is a reason for that convention. It serves a valid purpose to this day, and even if we change the nomenclature in future, having a shared universal number for each year will still be useful (I frankly lack the physics to know how to do this if we get to be an interstellar species, but there will need to be some way to say that it's period X on both Antares 3 and Rigel 7). I do know enough ancient history to know that one of the landmarks in understanding any culture and their place in world history is working out their dating systems, then working out what they called their equivalent of hell and roundly damning them to it for not having the current shared conventions we do now.

Burial cuatoms are another shared convention, with more divergence among subgroups, but I don't know of any that have the utility of an agreed year number.

[The2ndWheel]

21. Some sort of peace of mind I suppose

Pretty much everything we do is to escape death for another day. I'm sure we all go through an existential crisis or two. If we did that all day, nothing would get done. Whatever burial customs exist are for the people still looking into that dark oblivion, not so much the dead people.

Some people like books, others go for Kindle. There's no real need for physical books anymore, but some people like them.

[randome]

19. We would all live longer if we could forget our birthdays and our ages.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen, Anthem (1992)[/center][/font][hr]

[The2ndWheel]

22. I've grown to be in favor of getting rid of clocks myself

[ChairmanAgnostic]

3. why would cockroaches want to play with my bones?

At the rate the GOP is going, that is all that will be left a century from now.

[TheBlackAdder]

4. One day, someone might dig up your bones and make religious idols of them, worshiping them.

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The Relic By John Donne 1572–1631 John Donne

When my grave is broke up again
Some second guest to entertain,
(For graves have learn'd that woman head,
To be to more than one a bed)
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let'us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls, at the last busy day,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?


If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mis-devotion doth command,
Then he, that digs us up, will bring
Us to the bishop, and the king,
To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men;
And since at such time miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.


First, we lov'd well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why;
Difference of sex no more we knew
Than our guardian angels do;
Coming and going, we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals
Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free;
These miracles we did, but now alas,
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173380



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[PasadenaTrudy]

9. I didn't have kids

And neither did my sibs, so we really don't care!

[Oneironaut]

10. I want to be eaten by vultures.

I mean, you're already dead. Might as well have at least one good thing come out of it. Or at least use my ashes when it gets too icy or something. Why get buried?

[TheBlackAdder]

11. Same here. Getting buried is actually kind of gross. The whole embalming process, breaking bones...

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Wiring the inside of the mouth, propping up the eyelids, the wax, the leakage... for what?


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[whatthehey]

12. Piece of cake; convert to Zoroastrianism and move to India

I think some Tibetans have a thing called sky burials too, but going the Parsi route is probably easier unless you are a mountaineer.

I had long ago plumped for the Body Farm to be used to study forensics, but both their recent publicity increasing donors and their (speaking of plumped...) weight limits mean that's unlikely to happen unless I die of something that degenerates tissue. Still a very useful way to use a dead body. Puckish note to wannabe thrill killers: murder a massively obese person, as there are far less data on decomposition etc for unwieldy bodies few medical labs study. I'm not quite that, but a good 20lbs or so over their 250lb limit. Go for a 500lber to be safe.

[Oneironaut]

13. I saw a video of one. It's sick and awesome at the same time.

I think it was in Tibet. As gross as it was, it's very practical. A dead body is just meat, and vultures are hungry. lol

It's a win-win thing, really. I feel kind of bad for the guy who "prepare" the bodies, though. He's basically a human butcher and the vultures are his customers. Not good viewing for those of a weak stomach.

[hfojvt]

14. the example is just plain wrong

William Hickok was born on 10 Dec 1609 and died in 1646.

Okay, it is possible that is not the correct birthday, but a person by that name did exist and died in 1646. 370 years after his death and I, at least, still remember that he existed. I may not know where he is buried or if his bones still exist.

But in the words of V "There is a face beneath this mask, but I am no more that face than I am the muscles underneath it or the bones underneath that."

So who cares about Dem Bones Dem Bones? or should care?

Granted, I cannot tell you much about him, other than that he was married to Elizabeth Coles and had two sons Samuel and Joseph, and also some grandchildren that neither he nor his wife ever saw.

But I clearly remember that he existed, and also Joseph Loomis, and Matthew Grant and Martin Schumacher, who died on 7 Apr 1675. Considering that Martin Schumacher, for example, had at least 7,526 descendants, I would say that his existence had an impact and is STILL having an impact on the world today.

[Jim Beard]

17. I don't care what they do with mu bones but I do have a 200 acre farm by a somewhat busy highway.

I intend to dig a 30 foot hole and line it with pipe and cement to about 20 foot above ground. I want to make it where anyone wishing to build, will build around it because it will be costly to move. I intend to have a huge plaque with my name welded in it so the decedents off all the people who were assholes to me will have to to see my name.

They can sprinkle the ashes around the base.

BTW, a local funeral home set off a panic when they mailed out advertising letters to everyone in town. Most peoples first though before they learned of the mass mailing was, Do they know something I don't? True story.

[Jim Beard]

18. I don't know but I would like to know those people.

Being a Genealogy learner, I like to walk the old tombstone type cemeteries and see some marker that a special note. It all makes me curious.

[randome]

20. I found a baby rattle in an old cemetery once, hidden by the tall grass.

I've always wondered how it got there.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen, Anthem (1992)[/center][/font][hr]