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By: Darryl J. Roberts Humans have cremated their deceased throughout recorded history and even before. Civilizations from the ancient Australians, Babylonians, Greeks, and others have used the funeral pyre to literally invoke the “ashes to ashes” concept of death. In I Samuel (31:12-13) if the Bible you can read, “All the valiant men arose, and went all night, and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Beth-shan, and came to Jabesh, and burnt them there. And they took their bones, and buried them under a tree at Jabesh, and fasted seven days.” Cremation fell out of vogue in most modern civilizations by the 17th-18th centuries. By the late 1800’s, however, against a backdrop of public protest, cremation advocates-particularly in Europe- began to promote the burning of the dead. They cited concern for the public health and pollution of the groundwater they feared was being caused by in-ground burials. By the turn of the century, cremation was becoming more accepted as an alternative to burial. The proponents offered many persuasive arguments: land was too scarce in many areas to be given over for the burial of the dead; cemeteries would be sources of pollution even decades after the final interment’ cremation replicates the exact same process that a buried body will undergo, just far more quickly and without the unpleasant images of slow decomposition; a cremation is far less expensive than a full funeral service and subsequent burial. Kenneth V. Iserson, M.D., in his book Death to Dust cites an early American pro-cremation pamphlet as depicting the choice between burial and cremation as, “between incineration which disposes the body in one hour in a beautiful glow of heat and earth burial which prolongs the process through fourteen to twenty years of loathsome decay. Darryl J. Roberts
Profits of Death An Insider Exposes the Death Care Industries
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Cremation Urns->
