RE: After An Atheist Dies
July 19, 2017 at 10:38 am
(This post was last modified: July 19, 2017 at 10:39 am by mordant.)
Funerals and related rituals are for the living, not the dead. If my survivors need some of that to deal with my dissolution, they can knock themselves out. I have no need to know that anything in particular is going to happen when I die, and I most certainly won't have such a need after I'm dead.
Like others here, my organs will be donated to science, and I'll end up cremated most likely. My atheist son went that route, they took most of his skin and quite a lot of bone and ligaments for grafting purposes and incinerated the rest.
It's entirely possible to have lovely memorial services that celebrate a person's life, professionally mounted without the aid of clergy. It's possible, but not necessarily easy outside of large urban areas, to find secular persons with experience and expertise in that area, but it can be done, especially with advance research and planning.
Even middle of the road to liberal churches often do a pretty good job in this area, with a minimum of inserting their ideology into it. My late wife's home church (rural Methodist) put together a truly lovely memorial video of stills and home movie clips of my wife throughout her life, that I really appreciated. People who knew her three decades ago in high school came some distance to pay last respects, and that meant a lot to me. It's irrational, but the fact it would have moved her meant alot to me too. People neglected her in life, frankly, and it's too bad it took a funeral to get them off their arses, but it was better than nothing. It was too late for her to take pleasure in it, but I did.
Like others here, my organs will be donated to science, and I'll end up cremated most likely. My atheist son went that route, they took most of his skin and quite a lot of bone and ligaments for grafting purposes and incinerated the rest.
It's entirely possible to have lovely memorial services that celebrate a person's life, professionally mounted without the aid of clergy. It's possible, but not necessarily easy outside of large urban areas, to find secular persons with experience and expertise in that area, but it can be done, especially with advance research and planning.
Even middle of the road to liberal churches often do a pretty good job in this area, with a minimum of inserting their ideology into it. My late wife's home church (rural Methodist) put together a truly lovely memorial video of stills and home movie clips of my wife throughout her life, that I really appreciated. People who knew her three decades ago in high school came some distance to pay last respects, and that meant a lot to me. It's irrational, but the fact it would have moved her meant alot to me too. People neglected her in life, frankly, and it's too bad it took a funeral to get them off their arses, but it was better than nothing. It was too late for her to take pleasure in it, but I did.
