Which speaks so much about the vanity of this world... These people may have once been very, very important...noahzarc1 said:
Americans are impressed by the age of European buildings.Arachne said:
Trust me the irony is lost on no one. It is said the richest place in the area is the cemetery. However there are also many stories a cemetery can paint and I for one appreciate the history they hold.RaphaCam said:
That's really just delayed and even sadder cremation... :-\Arachne said:
It’s a pagan ritual that has always been rejected by the Orthodox Church. In the Byzantine Empire it was indeed punishable by death, and while I am not supporting that, by any means, the fact that the Byzantines viewed it with such horror I think should be indicative of the attitude we should take towards this horrific practice. Especially considering it is forced on the Orthodox Christians in the Orient. This forced cremation in Japan represents religious persecution against our faith by Buddhists and is something I feel the Orthodox should not stand for.Avdima said:
It is negligent and unacceptable, but it lacks the violence that characterizes the intentional incineration of a human body. Decomposition is a fact and it is natural. On the other hand, the burning of the body is unnatural and a violation.RaphaCam said:
But bones are still a human body, even if they don't look like it. This reminds me of when I went to a museum with a friend (who is deeply religious) and we decided to admire some archaeological material. As I crossed myself after seeing a piece of a lithic skull, she was pretty puzzled at it, as if it were as human as the pottery around.Alpha60 said:
Would this be possible alternative?Arachne said:
Sorry but that is not entirely true. In monasteries outsided and inside Mount Athos, the buried monks/nuns are also exhumed after three years and their bones are stored in the ossuary, are the cemeteries on Athos for instance, overcrowded too?Arachne said:
Monastic custom doesn't change the situation in urban cemeteries, but eh, you tried.Apostolos said:
This sounds good to me. The only downside is interference with subway construction; underground cemetaries mist be carefully planned so as to not inadvertantly obstruct rapid transit corridors. Fun fact: the London Underground in a few places is routed around “plague pits”, at least according to legend (presumably the subsurface lines only, such as the Metropolitan, District, and Circle lines, as opposed to the deep level tube lines like the Central, Victoria, Bakerloo, Northern, Jubilee, Piccadilly and my personal favorite, the “drain”, also known as the Waterloo and City ). But the tube lines are deep underground, and it is undesirable to have to build a metro that far below the surface, and also it would be in my opinion inappropriate for a metro to pass beneath a cemetary regardless of depth (bearing in mind several do this).IreneOlinyk said:
I think the crypt church at the Sedlec Ossuary has the right idea. Use the bones to decorate the church:Arachne said:
And so, because of the municipal authorities milking cemeteries for all their worth, and have made it a prosperous industry, while at the same time avoid moving cemeteries to larger areas outside of the city, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? The Orthodox Tradition is that the dead are buried. Period. One is free to choose of course, but choosing cremation puts you automatically outside of the Church. That's what the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece has declared. One doesn't cherry-pick in the ChurchArachne said:
Except that (1) no one is trying to pressure the Church to accept cremation, and (2) those who live outside the Church and reject Orthodox tradition don't care what the Synod has declared.Apostolos said:
No-one is trying to pressure the Church yet there are public articles of advocates of cremation who condemn the "anachronistic" and "inhumane" attitude of the Church and try to shape public opinion. But I agree with you, most of these advocates live outside the Church and reject Orthodox tradition already, so obviously they don't care what the Synod has declared. Their influence is big, of course no practicing Orthodox Christian will succumb to these hypocritical accusations.Arachne said:
Indeed, the same arguments routinely crop up in the West, for example, as reasons why the Church of England or the United Methodist Church, which have thus far almost miraculously held out, ought to get into the business of homosexual weddings.Apostolos said:
No, at least one of us think you all are crazy for how you're talking, I'm just getting better about choosing my battles.Alpha60 said:
None of us are suggesting that persons involuntarily cremated, or even voluntarily cremated, are denied salvation, just as it is not church doctrine to say people blown up in explosives accidents or who fall victim to a nightmarish chemical accident will not be resurrected. Indeed even if one were completely annhilated by antimatter, God could still resurrect one bodily. Rather, the problem with cremation is that it is an ugly thing to do to people, the historic patrimony of Paganism, from Scandinavia to India to Japan, with a few exceptions such as ancient Egypt and Zoroastrianism, whose religious values draw closer to Christianity (as Fr. Andrew Damick notes, the ancient Egyptians got the idea right of a living incarnate God but merely misidentified that person as Pharoah rather than Christ, and also their idea of an afterlife was closer to the truth than the views of Hellenic Paganism or indeed corrupt Sadducean Judaism, whereas Zoroastrianism shares many features with Christianity and the faith of ancient Israel, looking somewhat like a syncretic position between the Hebrew religion and Hinduism). Of course, what Egypt did and the Zoroastrians do isn’t exactly “kosher” by Orthodox Christian standards or indeed by Judaic standards, but it is closer than the disturbing practices of the Roman, Nordic, Hindu and Buddhist religions.Asteriktos said:
