I’m an atheist, and I want a religious funeral, with lots of loud hymns, weeping, etc. The whole thing.
Why? Because my family is very religious, and I want them to be comforted.
I’m an atheist, and I want a religious funeral, with lots of loud hymns, weeping, etc. The whole thing.
Why? Because my family is very religious, and I want them to be comforted.
Oh don’t worry. GOD will take care of you all
[QUOTE]
I don’t want anybody to make a fuss. When I go, I just want to be stood outside in the garbage with my hat on.
[QUOTE]
In the spirit of Stranger In A Strange Land…
Eat Me.
I want to be cremated, mixed into paint, and have that paint used to paint a picture of me. Then I am going to donate myself to a museum. And if I’m lucky, haunt little kids on field trips for a few hundred years.
Hey, just because I’m atheist doesn’t mean mean I’m logical. Seriously, I’d want something that offers equal comfort to my non-religious immediate family, Protestant extended family, and Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim (and probably a few others) friends. Plus, there’s the issue of some clergymember who’s never met me trying to give a eulogy.
As for actual disposal method, in decreasing order of preference:
Donate any useful bits to medicine.
Donate whatever can’t be used to science.
In Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress family members’ remains are used to fertilize the flower garden. Always seemed like the nicest way to remember someone. Cheap too.
That stuffed and mounted thing.
God’s going to pay my funeral expenses? Cool!
I’ve told my wife I wanted to be harvested for useful organs, whatever’s left is to be cremated, and then she can do what she likes in terms of memorial services. She, however, keeps insisting that she’s going to have me stuffed and mounted and that she’ll pull me from room to room on a little wheeled cart.
I told my sister (younger than I by a year and a half) that I wanted to be sent to medical school, to be used as a cadavor. This, because my fat old body hasn’t any organs that aren’t pretty badly used up, and consequently no good for transplantation. She was horrified by the idea. All of my siblings are agnostics like me, so I don’t expect there will be any kind of religious memorial. Scorch and scatter is the alternative I would prefer.
My family love me and I have friends who will miss me. That’s enough. How they celebrate my life or mourn my death is up to them.
It was strange for me, it may not have been for the rest of those gathered. He was very strong in his atheism and wanted to be cremated. His mother, the staunch Catholic, honored the cremation request (his dad, a “fallen” Catholic, had only recently been cremated, also), but she had a Catholic funeral/mass with this little wooden box on a pedastal, and it was just really ironic to me because he always mocked religion.
The situation was absolutely surreal to me: I had shunned the trappings of religion long ago, yet here I am, doing the sit down, stand up, kneel, “peace be with you” with the 2 ladies in front of me who I had earlier heard talking about the ex-wife (me), just the things he used to mock others for doing; the priest giving the oratory was a recovered(?) alcoholic, the deceased was a dead alcoholic, but the priest didn’t know him at all, and made a self-serving speech about addiction and God and the 12 Steps that the deceased could never follow because of the higher power thing (he was trying to turn the death into a lesson, I suppose. I felt he should be honoring the dead by speaking of his many good qualities); and me the whole time unable to stop crying, nose running.
Wow that’s depressing.
I wouldn’t have had it any other way, though (except the priest’s speech), because the ritual gave comfort to his mom and I’m sure others there also.
I’d like to donate any usable bits, and then have a green burial. I guess some kind of non-religious ceremony for the folks left behind.
I’m not an atheist. But I’m not a deist either, especially when it comes to getting pissy about religious forms.
Having lost almost all of my close family, I do know this: funerals can be incredibly gruelling for those left behind. Just somehow–anyhow–getting through the formalities beggars the comfort well-wishers want to give so badly. YMMV but words and formalities can just get in the way of grieving, remembering, celebrating the life gone and comforting those left behind.
For myself? Ain’t gonna be around or know…but my preference: harvest whatever organs may help somebody, then cremation. Scatter my ashes; it’s all good earth. If friends and foes so wish, let 'em gather, talk, laugh and go on living. Had my turn, it was a blast, couldn’t have wished for better company and rock on.
Veb
Ashes scattered over the river through my old school campus. No service, no flowers, no memorial, no monument, no urn left over.
I want to be cremated and scattered on my “thinking hill” where I grew up. Though I hear they’re building a house there now, so I guess that plan is scrapped.
The most moving funerals I’ve attended featured people telling stories about the deceased, as well as religious observances. At my great-aunt’s funeral, her grandson told everyone how she had taught him to surf by putting a longboard in the pool. At my great-uncle’s funeral, my dad talked about fishing with him.
I suppose that’s the kind of funeral I’d want, if anyone insisted on giving me one. I hate the idea of a bunch of people getting together to talk about me, though.
My mother wants to be buried in a cardboard coffin, with no gravestone, just an apple tree. I am determined that this will be the way it is done, to respect her wishes.
I would ask for this myself, were it not for the fact that I have a much better idea (shamefully stolen from someone else):
I want my body mummified, painted blue, and then fired from a cannon over the heads of the unsuspecting mourners gathered at my funeral.
No funeral, no memorial service.
Plunder the corpse for any usable organs not fouled by years of tobacco and alcohol and cannabis and psylocibin and lysergic acid and peyote and cocaine and opium, and burn the rest.
I’d like the ashes to be dumped from a canoe in the middle of Long Pond on Mount Desert Island, Maine, while someone plays long tones on the flute, harmonizing with the loons.
i have expressed the wish to be cremated. i would prefer not to have a pastor speak at any kind of ceremony for me. i want to seperate myself from christianity. i did however become close to bhakti yoga, or the hare Krsna science. so a little temple music would be nice if played(partly to piss off anyone that knew how i openly accepted other religions as truth and also how i refused to have christianity shoved down my throat) although i do not believe in god as many see it to be, i’m not dead set against my wishes being ignored, as it was said, i 'll be gone and know nothink of the matter…
I don’t want a funeral. I’ve requested that my family refuse to pay any expenses related to the disposal of the body - just don’t pick it up from the morgue, and let them do whatever they do to unidentified corpses with it.
Do like I’m doing, Cowboy: get yourself bronzed. The hard part is coming up with an appropriate gesture.
Hard atheist here, who wants to be cremated. I want to avoid those embarrassing weepy funerals where everyone files past the waxy-looking corpse and tries desperately to think of something nice to say about the deceased.
If I were to have a funeral, I’d want a Viking funeral! Lots of drinking, songs, laughter, maybe a few good naughty stories being shared. I hope most of my relatives are there, for the reading of the will if naught else, and hopefully an ex-husband or three. I can’t wait for my last great shocker from beyond the grave!
“I, Nichol, being of sound mind and body…do hereby bequeath all my earthly goods to the transexual stripper known as Pablo…”
.:Nichol:.