That should have been followed by a smiley. 
Hope no Yankee feathers were ruffled.
Lonesome Polecat:
That is actually closer to the original dogma as I understand it. I think a passage in the OT actually says ‘The dead know not nothing’, which aside from being an atrocious double-negative actually summarizes things pretty well. To my knowledge, there is nothing in the Bible, New Testament or Old, that in any way supports an afterlife before the Second Coming. The idea that ‘grampy is smiling down’ is, apparently, not Christian. Same with the idea of angels looking anything like humans, or being comparable to us (the Bible says we were made in YHVH’s image, not the angels).
By the way, I found the comment and the later posting very funny. (“You’d better be smilin’ when you say that.” -Classic movie quote, now I just gotta think of which one :))
Come to think of it, doesn’t the Catholic church forbid cremation on the grounds that the body ought to remain as intact as possible for the Resurrection?
I recall something Bertrand Russell once wrote. He posited a man in a cannibal culture who had never eaten anything but human flesh, whose parents had never eaten anything but human flesh, etc. etc. ad nauseum. He then asked what would happen if this man converted to one of the Christian sects which preach the resurrection of the physical body. Since every molecule of his body originally belonged to someone else, how would he get resurrected? Ol’ Bert was noted for touches like that.
Glad you got a giggle out of the wisecrack. 
I’m no expert on the Bible, but when I was a regular church goer, it seems to me that mention was made of being judged after death and going up or down. I seem to recall ministers, when speaking of a deceased, commenting that he or she was with Jesus or God now, or in ‘a much better place.’
Many learned people have talked of heaven and hell, but I don’t recall anyone saying that after you croak, you get to lie in ‘sleep’ for a few million or billion years until the world ends.
Back to the OP, more or less.
Think about it. Since humans first became sentient and, thusly, human, billions have died. If all were thoughtfully buried, we’d be knee deep in bone yards by now. I figure we’ve produced enough bodies to cover every square inch of the globe. Every time you went to dig a hole, you’d be shoveling up bones. Luckily, millions dissolved into compost (something else to consider, because many bodies when buried, completely dissolved so there is nothing left to ‘rise’), more millions were consumed by animals and converted into deposits of fecal material, same by fish – whose fecal material was consumed by other organisms, who in turn were consumed by others, converted into s**t and the cycle runs on). Millions were burned to ash in natural disasters, and so on.
I’m excluding wars, because, with humans, those seem to fall under ‘natural’ disasters.
So, because of the ecology of the Earth itself, a discarded human body, unprotected, returns to raw elements, especially in the presence of water. Few bones are unearthed from shipwrecks found after hundreds of years. In certain sections of the ocean, bones go real fast because of their calcium content. (So, does this mean that when the Day arrives, are people all over the globe going to explode because of having consumed foods which contained, through serial dilution, molecules of previous humans? By now, all of us have consumed bits and pieces of ancestors.)
Preserving the body seems to be a plunge for immortality, though until the civi war, embalming, with the exception of the Egyptians, was an inefficient process. People were poked in the dirt real fast before they started stinking up the place.
Cremation seems to be the best way, though, for it takes up less space, if you choose to bury the ashes.
The afore mentioned phrase ‘the dead know not nothing’ can be looked at in several ways. The dead, meaning the empty shell of the body, knows nothing because they are cast off husks, with the real intelligence, the soul, having gone on to wherever it goes. It could also mean that they slumber in a timeless limbo, awaiting resurrection, but does it mean in a corporeal sense, due to the fragility of a body?
Was there also not something concerning rebirth as another? (Damn – I can’t think of the term.) Plus something concerning souls being recycled? (That would make sense, considering how the species human likes to pop kids out.) If the body were needed to remain intact, would it not then be designed not to turn into worm food, dust, organic sludge or fertilizer when buried in the ground? Even with all of their techniques, Egyptians managed to preserve essentially something like real dry beef jerky covering bones. Those mummies barely resemble anything human.
Current embalming techniques give way after 10 or 20 years, and the body, even if sealed in a nearly impervious coffin, becomes affected by bacteria carried into the container with it.
Personally, I figure a nice, hot fire which reduces a body to ash is much more preferable than laying in darkness, slowly rotting away into an organic sludge. I’d like to be cremated, placed on a rocket and shot to the moon or out into space, or even to Mars.
Even poking bodies into Mausoleums produces a bigger problem. Eventually, we’d need a necropolis the size of New York City to hold all of the bodies, with thousands of levels. By then, we’d probably be using fake marble, having mined it all to cover millions of square miles of halls, floors and ceilings for the homes of the dead.
Darn, this is a morbid thread!
Does the term JUDGEMENT DAY ring a bell?Bong! Bong! Bong!
The idea is that we all die and lie around rotting until the Resurrection, when everyone who has ever lived will be raised from the dead to face the judgment of Yaweh the Hairy Thunderer. If your name is not written in the Book of Life, you get tossed down to Hell to roast for eternity while the saved live on in eternal bliss. (One of the blissful pastimes will be watching the torments of the damned from on high. Hope I get the popcorn concession.) But, hey, eschatology isn’t one of my strong suits, being limited mostly to what I’ve picked up from Jack Chick tracts. 
One of the resident Bible thumpers around here should be able to enlighten you.
Also, we’re not talking about millions and billions of years here. The folks who take this seriously tend to be biblical literalists who believe that the world is no more than a few thousand years old and won’t last much longer.
As I said, these days the idea seems to be limited to a few Protestant sects in the South. It’s not terribly common even down here.