racism or just simple capitalism?

This is definately not a black on black thing. I recall, when I was liviing out in Stockton Calif, there was a guy who was payed really big bucks to take peoples ashes and,by private plane, would distribute the cremains over the Sierra Nevadas. The cops found a cache of human cremains and bone crumblies in a wooded area BEHIND THIS GUYS RANCH near VAccaville.


1If youre gonna set up a scam, think through the consequences

2Try not to leave evidence where you live

3AT least have some fake records to assert that youve fulfilled your part of the contract

I think the guy was found when some hunters stumbled over the piles of bones and ashes. He was jailed but the families who enetred into these agreements were all screwed. I recall one man who had his wife dumoed out over some mountain and with the idea that his asjes would be similarly distributed. He was devestated and died of a stroke(probably aggrivated by the news).

I think it's just selfish greed, which has no color barriers nor it is restricted to any particular economic philosophy.

greed does not explain this. There was once a taboo on desecrating the graves of the dead, and this has largely gone away. I think that is ties into a modern lack of respect for elders, as well as the loss of any sense of the sacred. Everything that modern man touches is profane

To quote someone else: "It's all about the money."

My vote is capitalism...pure and ugly.

My jaw dropped when I heard and saw this last night's news. Never underestimate the depths to which some people will go to for the love of a buck. I need to see and do something VERY uplifting to wipe this out of my mind.

Nonsense. There have always been graveyard thieves and if anything desecrating graves is less common now than it has been throughout history.



Do you ever listen to yourself and laugh at these kind of proclamations?

Pervasviness of media has you convinced that man is becoming more profane. (perhaps fanning the flames of a fundamentalist vewpoint). All that media does is put it in your face...whereas, 50 years ago most legitimate media would squelch or not deal with such scandalous news, if they could avoid it. These events occured but may not have been covered.

yes, stealing from graves has long been a problem. However stealing the bodies, or not doing with the bodies what was promised and what dignity for the dead demands is a new problem. There has been a rash of revelations about cremations of the dead not being properly conducted, and improper conduct at cemeteries.

That we do not properly honor and respect the dead is not a laughing matter. No matter what grievances can be made against Christianity, it can not be denied that proper care of the dead was part of the covenant. As Christianity recedes we are losing this part of civil behaviour. Well we get to the point were we leave the dead to rot in the streets? I hope not, but this future is not out of the question.

Corpse theft is not a new problem. Tombs were raided for years just for the bodies. Egyptian mummies were ground into powders and thought to have healing powers. It was also a lucrative trade for centuries to dig up newly buried bodies and sell them to doctors and artists so they could study anatomy.

Some of the greatest artifacts in museums were robbed from tombs by some very Christian archeologists, explorers and thieves.

Can you point to a shred of evidence to support this view? It sounds just like the oft quoted opinion that abuse of the living (child abuse/sexual abuse) has always happened as it does now, but we are advanced enough to bring it out in the open. There is no documentation/proof/science that supports this view, it is a myth. I think that we know enough about our elders to know what they believed, how they lived, and how well they usually policed their impulses to know that they neither abused the living or the dead on the scale that we moderns do.

Whether or not Christiainity is receding is a debatable issue. However, this all doesn't account for graveyard desecrators. I'm sure the KKK considered themselves good Christians, too, but it never stopped them from lynchings. Wars have been fought in the name of Christianity (or other religions). The degree of sociey's Christianity neither prevents nor does it promote such behavior - nor does it increase society's morale behavior on the whole.

on a strictly personal level the entire idea of "desecration of the dead" is an absurd concept. Dead is dead. Is cremation desecration? I suppose for the remaining living family/loved ones it has emotional value but that's about it.

The victims here ARE the families. I'd call it an equiv. of an act of terrorism to them, for sure. The dead don't feel a thing.

You seriously need to go learn about the history of humans. Robert suffers fools with much more patience than I do, so I will let him do the details if he so chooses.

fair enough (I still think the entire funeral/cemetery falderol is anachronistic)

No, it isn't. Undertakers have been doing shady stuff for a long time. Hell I bet a gold tooth has much more of a chance of reaching the grave now than in the past.



Rash? You must mean "several". That's not a lot of data to indict the "profanity" of modern man on don't you think?



I wasn't talking about laughing about the dead, but rather laughing at your sweeping proclamations about mankind. Seriously, you know very well that this proclamation you just made is based on you seeing a handful of cemetery news stories in the last year or two. Don't you find it thoroughly silly that you are willing to make sweeping proclamations about modern man?



Says hawkeye. This is an ipse dixit, as usual. You don't have evidence to support any form of increase in this behavior but that won't stop you from proclaiming the truth according to hawkeye.



Come on hawkeye. Read it yourself and try not to laugh at your somber silliness. There have always been instances of dead rotting in the streets and it has nothing to do with ethics (they are smelly, this isn't going to change) but rather a break-down in society where burying the dead is no longer feasible (e.g. war going on).

Burying the dead is not primarily motivated by respect, even if you have no respect for the dead you don't want them lying around. Your Christianity theory about the dead is really out there.

In a post to Ragman you ask:



What's good for the goose is good for the gander. How about you point to a shred of evidence to support the notion that the dead get less respect these days due to the less Christianity?

When you make a claim that others dispute, you should be more worried about having evidence for your own claim than putting burden of proof on those who respond to you to substantiate their rebuttals.

I'm in agreement with you on this issue, but I think it begs the point. The surviving families need some peace and freedom to grieve. If you look at it in a purely capitalistic manner, they didn't get their money's worth due to fraudulent practices.

Nonsense again. If anything the evidence points to more abuse of both the dead and the living. Why don't you try to back this kind of thing up hawkeye? When you research it you should see how prevalent it was historically.

In the past it was common to let corpses rot out in the open to send a message to others. Sometimes stuff like hanging them over the gates to a city for weeks.

In the past it was very common for 12-14 year old girls to be forced into marriage, sex, and frequently fatal childbirth.

The history of mankind is so rife with the kind of abuse of the living and dead that only a blindness to it can explain how you think the "profane moderns" are so much worse.

Where do you get your stuff?

What springs to my mind here is this:

"Reductio ad absurdum is a mode of argumentation that seeks to establish a contention by deriving an absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be accepted because its rejection would be untenable. It is a style of reasoning that has been employed throughout the history of mathematics and philosophy from classical antiquity onwards."

You make an absurd or unprovable contention and it obscures the point. Immoral acts were commited in this graveyard caper - of that there's no doubt to anyone reasonable. It seems to me, as a rational logical observer, that Christianity's increase or decrease has had no historical bearing on the freequency or infrequency of such acts in past or present.

Witness these analogies: in the '30s and '40s during WWII, some predominately Christian nations involved themslves in warfare and conducted atrocities. Where was Christianity and it's pervasivness and influence on morality then? Furthermore, FDR, a Christian, turned a boatland of Jewish escapees/refugees away to their mortal peril at NYC harbor. Where was his Christianity at a timeframe when society was ":more Chrstian" [in your estimation]?