So, just to clarify: Everybody here who’s saying that it would be wrong to defer to the Navajo objections to commercial missions placing cremains on the moon…
… would also agree that there are no valid objections to future commercial missions covering said cremains on the moon with (sanitized) powdered dogshit, right? Because no objective harm is being done in either case?
I would have absolutely no issue with this. Do you think I would?
I think it might say something about the people who decide to finance such a mission. It’s not like the cremains are being sent to the moon by people who specifically want to use their funds and energy to stick it to the Navajo, after all; it’s being funded by people who think it would be cool to put their relatives’ cremains on the moon. That says a lot about those people, too, and not much of it is good - that they’re probably far too wealthy, that they’re spending money on frivolous things, etc.; but that still seems less offputting than spending fund and energy specifically because you want to disrespect someone else’s resting place.
But again, with all that said, no, I would not give a crap (pun not intended) if someone decided to spread dog shit over the resting place of these cremains.
Where do people spread cremains now? Unless you’re keeping them in an urn forever, you’re probably spreading them someplace like a park (full of dog shit), the ocean (full of fish and whale piss), or like… the parking lot of a sports stadium whose team you were a fan of (full of human piss)? I have no idea where people spread cremains aside from what I have seen in movies. But I doubt you can completely avoid animal shit anywhere on Earth.
Great! Sounds like we got a potential gofundme. 
[quote=“Babale, post:202, topic:995727”]
but that still seems less offputting than spending fund and energy specifically because you want to disrespect someone else’s resting place. […]
I think the motive would be more a matter of making a point about the cultural contingency of beliefs about “disrespect”, and how mainstream culture tends to privilege some of those beliefs over others in our shared structural framework of society.
Such as all of them. One of the shames of this nation’s history was Native children being taken from their families and forced to attend boarding schools where they were cut off from their culture and coerced into assimilation with “civilized” culture.
You’re welcome to start one, if you want. Like I said, I wouldn’t spend my time and energy specifically to disrespect someone else’s beliefs in an attempt to tit-for-tat a perceived slight against my own beliefs; but if that’s how you want to live your life, more power to you; I wouldn’t be offended or try to stop you.
I’d think something like Piss Christ represents that sort of point. I think Piss Christ is very clearly disrespectful towards Christianity, which is the point, which is fine. But I’ll note that the author of Piss Christ used his own crucifix to make his art, he didn’t piss on the graves of specific dead Christians whose tombstones had crucifixes.
But again. If that’s the point you want to make and you’re willing to spend time, effort, and money to make it happen - no skin off my nose. (Or anyone else’s, because cremains don’t have skins or noses anymore).
[New post because I realized that editing my previous post to respond to a post subsequent to it is bound to be confusing, if not in fact an actual violation of posting rules]
Well, except for the part where you spend your time and energy to advocate for considering their concerns “immaterial”. Which I think many might consider disrespectful.
The fact that you don’t even notice when your dismissiveness of minority beliefs comes across as disrespecting them, but you explicitly and repeatedly state that an intrinsically neutral physical act like placing canine excrement on top of human cremains should be considered “disrespect” of mainstream beliefs about behavior appropriate for human remains, is kind of illustrating my point.
You seem to have completely misunderstood Serrano’s stated intentions about the artistic message of his work Immersion (“Piss Christ”):
(And if you look at the work Immersion itself, it definitely does not visually suggest any attempt at ugliness or defilement or contempt with regard to Christian symbolism. It’s actually quite a beautiful and glowing image of a crucifix. The artistic message seems to be more along the lines of divine immanence being able to transform superficially sordid material (a cheap mass-produced plastic crucifix, a beaker of human waste) into something radiant. Or something.)
So, again, I think your posts are really illustrating my point about mainstream-culture privilege taking for granted the rightness of its own default views about what should count as “respect” or “disrespect”, and assuming that opposing minority views can be dismissed as “immaterial”.
…He didn’t realize that immersing a holy symbol in urine could be considered offensive or controversial? Um, yeah.
I think you completely misunderstood me.
I don’t have a problem with putting dog shit on cremains. When I walk my dog in the park, I am sure I do that, because people like to spread cremains in parks.
If Fred died and had his ashes spread all over my local park, and I know about this, but I continue to walk my dog through that park and let him do his business, I don’t think that says anything about me.
On the other hand, if I fucking hated Fred, and he had his ashes spread in the park across town, and I specifically take my dogs to the park across town instead of the park right down the street because I like knowing that my dogs are pissing and shitting on Fred’s ashes; I am not harming Fred, obviously, he is dead. But my intentions come from a bad place, and internally that’s going to have negative impacts on my psyche, because I become the sort of bitter person who goes out of his way to “hurt” Fred. Even though I am not hurting Fred, because he is dead, the fact that I do things because I want to (futiley try to) hurt others is negative for me.
Again, this completely misses my point.
The dog shit isn’t disrespectful. The fact that I chose to put dog shit on this particular location because I want to disrespect people who I feel disrespected me is.
If I put dog shit on the moon because I want to put dog shit on the moon, cool. If I put dog shit on the moon in crater ABC, cool. If I out dog shit on the moon in crater ABC because Fred had his cremains put in crater ABC and I want to stick it to Fred, then in my own thoughts I am being an asshole.
Just like, if Fred asks that his remains are put on the moon because he loves the moon, he is a wasteful idiot; if Fred asks that his remains are put on the moon because he hates Navajo people and wants to do something that bothers them, he is an asshole.
And ISTM that if Fred learns that putting his remains on the moon seriously bothers Navajo people, but nonetheless goes ahead and does it anyway because his arbitrary whim of being a wasteful idiot is more important to him than the Navajo people’s feelings, he is still being somewhat of an asshole.
Is he being less of an asshole than somebody whose only motive in such an act is to annoy Navajo people? Sure. Should we make it explicitly illegal for Fred to be an asshole in that particular way? No, I doubt that that would be reconcilable with civil-liberties concerns.
But does that mean that we’re bound to endorse Fred being that kind of an asshole, or that Fred’s action counts as somehow standing up for religious liberty in a meaningful way? No, I don’t think so.
No they aren’t. Sure, the definition of death has changed somewhat over time with advances in medical knowledge.
But I don’t think any culture on earth has any real difficulty discerning the difference between a live person and an obviously dead one.
As a member of a minority culture whose views are very often not the default, I resent the implications and the whitesplaining.
ISTM that by these criteria you can’t do anything because someone somewhere considers it offensive.
The Navajo honor their traditional faith but devout Christians and Muslims often see any non-Abrahamic faith as satanic and incredibly offensive. The Navajo people know that Christians are offended by their traditional practices, but they do it anyways! Does that make them assholes?
Nope! Because if you get offended by what other people do when it doesn’t affect you, you are the asshole.
The average American consumes over 50 lbs of pork a year. I am not religious, but having been raised Jewish, I view pigs as disgusting, filthy, yet highly intelligent beasts - not as food. But if I said that consumption of pork offended me, and decreed that any Americans who eat pork anyways are being assholes to me, I would be the asshole.
If I was part of a proposed expedition to the moon, and I demanded that pork be forbidden in our new base because its presence offended me and because I didn’t want to breath in recirculated pork farts, I would not be asking the linar base to make reasonable accommodations; I would be the asshole.
Yeah, I don’t buy that.
Cool, then please provide your objective definition of the terms “alive” and “dead”, without any circular reasoning.
I am not going to get drawn into this. I think you are arguing just for the sake of it.
This started as a joke. Let’s leave it at that.
Yes indeed.
My personal belief system is that I need to have my remains sent to the moon. If someone does not let me do this, they are disrespecting me and my beliefs.
I’m sure he did. It’s called freedom of expression.
Where is it legislated that anyone has the ‘right’ to not be offended by anything someone else says or does?
Well, Iran etc, of course. I am astonishingly glad I don’t live in any country like that.
As for holy symbols, I don’t believe I have any. You can use Origin of Species or Newton’s Principia as toilet paper if you want, it doesn’t bother me.
Umm. The Peregrine is not gonna get to the moon.
I think it might be awhile before another one is ready to go. And since the first one failed it’s gonna be a tough sell to get anyone to fork over more cash to have an ash or two on the moon.
To be clear, I think that Serrano absolutely had the right to immerse a holy symbol in urine, and photograph it, and display that photograph in galleries. Any law that prohibited him from doing that would be a bad law. And I think it’s also quite clear that he knew full well that doing it would be offensive and controversial, and that that was almost certainly his reason for doing it, and doing things just because they’re offensive makes him kind of a jerk. Not the kind of jerk that we should have laws against, but a jerk nonetheless.
This parallels the current case in so far as, if anyone deliberately sent human remains to the Moon specifically for the purpose of offending the Navajo, that would also be a jerk move of the sort that shouldn’t be against the law. But there the similarity ends, because I don’t think that was anyone’s reason for sending the remains to the Moon, and so I don’t think that the people who did so were jerks.