Who in the Christian religion decided that burials must be in the ground?
I thought about this as I watched a piece on a New Orleans cemetery, which has above ground tombs because of the high water table. The place looked like a real mess with all of these assorted tombs ranging from new to crumbling wrecks. Then I thought of other cemeteries with below ground burials and monuments that were crowded, often resembling something out of a horror show and the newer type where they only allow a flat plaque.
Through this, I loosely associated about all of the billions of bodies poked in the dirt taking up millions of acres of ground, stories of grave yards flooding out and the rotting caskets popping up to drift across the street, the Orthodox (?) Jewish belief that the entire intact body must be buried unembalmed and with no autopsy and the expensive racket of funeral homes.
The American Indian ‘buried’ their dead above ground. Several peoples of old cremated them, left them to the wolves or dumped them in a Holy River.
I understand that this might possibly come from the Biblical statement that, at the end of days, the Dead shall rise and believers ascend into heaven, though those billions of bodies lost for various reasons over the years through war or accident are thought to be included also.
Then I figured it was based on the resurrection of Jesus, but the Jews would not have anything to do with that.
Now, perhaps some smart people discovered diseases and stench, as well as dangerous animals being drawn to rotting bodies above ground and worked burial into religion for safety reasons. Like, I read once where the sacredness of cattle in India came about in a time of great famine, to protect a future food source for survivors. That way people could use the milk produced, plus gather the nutrient rich droppings for fuel and fertilizer and have a lasting supply of beef instead of slaughtering the animals and having nothing.
Cremation, to me, over the years, has begun to seem much nicer. Simple, clean, quick and cheap. No being placed into an over priced casket, lowered into a cement lined hole, sealed in place, where one slowly rots over the years and the grave eventually fills with water and one turns into a disgusting organic soup to filter away into the water table.
Cremation takes up less space. Burnt to a nice crispy powder, the chunks ground up, everything placed in a container the size of a quart mason jar and either dumped into a hole in the ground the size of a water pipe or kept on a respected mantle, in a small niche in a tomb or scattered across the lands.
In some places, the ashes of the dead have been used for fertilizer. Imagine, being a pain in the butt all ones life and then helping to produce delicious tomatoes and peppers.
So, who decided that bodies must be buried for religious reasons? Think about how many hundreds of thousands of square miles are taken up by grave yards sectioned off into 3x6x6 foot plots. Kind of like human land fill sites. I watched a program in which a woman decided to give unwanted, dead children a burial place so she and her husband bought 4 acres of land and opened it to the country. It filled up so fast that they’ve bought another 4.
Very nice sentiment, but it’s going to grow and that’s 8 acres already consigned to no further use. They showed a shot of the place, with little crosses with nice little name plates spaced in neat rows about 3 to 4 feet apart. With cremation, they could put 3 times as many in the same area.
So many believe that the body must be buried reasonably whole and I just wondered why.
