People almost universally seem to place high value on the treatment of corpses, and I don’t really understand it. In ancient religions that believe a copy of your corpse is made in the afterlife (or something to that effect), like in ancient Egypt where they’d bury you with useful things, then it makes sense to treat corpses as they did, even if it’s silly, it makes sense within that belief system. But the big religions now - at least the western ones I’m familiar with - seem to place no little importance on corpses.
Why, then, are people so obsessed with treating them as some sort of holy object?
We dedicate large plots of high quality land to graveyards all over the place. Space is often at a premium in the locations you find graveyards, and the land is often very nicely landscaped and quite pleasant - very often a place that would make a great park or something else suitable for public use. Instead it goes almost entirely unattended and unused because apparently some rotting sacks of meat need them more than the living.
There’s usually a strong cry to recover bodies from disasters even when it’s impractical. Now - wanting to confirm that your loved one as killed in the disaster makes a degree of sense - but even in cases where that’s not an issue, for example an airliner that crashed into the sea and is sitting under miles of water - people want to recover bodies from being buried in the sea to… bury them under some dirt.
Movies and other stories often portray military units as leaving no man behind, and this includes dead comrades - often putting their lives in great jeopardy to retrieve or carry these bodies. I don’t know if this reflects a real practice, but even if it doesn’t, the fact that it’s supposed to resonate with us as part of the story seems to indicate that people feel that this is important.
People buy elaborate caskets that are expensive armored hermetically sealed shells, as if their body needs to somehow be protected for a thousand years.
Some people refuse to donate organs, or to donate their body to science in general, because somehow they feel the need to keep their corpse intact, and deny using their corpses in ways that could help real, living people.
There are great taboos against doing anything that could be viewed as desecrating corpses. Robbing graves, for instance, is a strange thing to criminalize since it’s far more bizarre to me that anyone is burying valuable things with people, yet it’s generally regarded as quite a despicable crime. Eating a dead person may be one of the strongest taboos in our culture, even under extreme circumstances where it’s the only practical route to survival.
In general, people are completely squicked out by the idea of anything happening to their corpse when they’re dead that they wouldn’t want to happen to their live body.
And I have to wonder - why? Why do you care? Do you think you’ll inhabit your body after you die? Do you think the condition of your body affects you in the afterlife? Do you think your body is still meaningfully you in some way after you’re dead? Do you think that you’ll be able to somehow know or experience or suffer from improper handling of your corpse?
Christianity has no special status for corpses are far as I’m aware, so for the vast majority of Americans I don’t think there are religious motivations behind this.
What, then? Is it just misplaced anxiety over death? That somehow asserting control over other people’s corpses, in the hopes that others will do the same for you, some way to take control over your anxiety over death? That’s the only guess I have at all as a psychological motivator.
It’s so common that I suspect I look like a complete oddball for not understanding why a cold piece of meat is so important and requires so much respect, but I just don’t get it.
As for me - give my body to necrophiliacs who pass me to cannibals when they’re done. I won’t care, because I can’t. Might as well let someone alive be happy.