For everyone who complained that I didn’t say anything nice about Arthur C. Clarke in yesterday’s very brief note (I can’t help it, I don’t believe in burying my opinions along with the corpse), here’s some information that made my opinion of Clarke shoot up a couple more notches:
The famed science fiction writer, who once denigrated religion as “a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species,” left written instructions that his funeral be completely secular, according to his aides.
“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral,” he wrote.
I’d say the same thing about my funeral, with the added stipulation that if anyone tries to preach, at word one I want my friends and family to rise up and carry the jerk bodily out the door, and throw him or her into the street.
I’m going to be a total stickler about the music. Seriously, I don’t want anyone playing “Amazing Grace” or some s**t like that. Then again, I’m hoping I just won’t die in the first place. Come on, technology!
Madalyn Murray O’Hair left specific instructions against
any religious bullshit at her funeral; she did not want
any christian present for fear “they might shove a crucifix
up my ass”. We will surely spare you the indignity of this
fiasco!
2nd that, DaveX.
That’s surprising, considering the end of the (terrible) Rama series. Maybe it’s possible to get over crazy sci-fi writer syndrome?
(if so, I hope Larry Niven/Orson Scott Card can repent)
You know, this brought to mind something said by Kurt Vonnegut:
“Now at a memorial service for Isaac Asimov a few years ago on the West Coast I spoke, and I said, ‘Isaac is in heaven now,’ to a crowd of humanists. It was quite awhile before order could be restored. Humanists were rolling in the aisles. Should I, God forbid, pass on some time, I hope that some of you will say that Kurt is up in heaven now.”
Do you really NOT want someone to say at your funeral: “PZ is in heaven now?”
“I’d say the same thing about my funeral…”
Good grief, why have a funeral at all? A dead human body is no different from a dead cockroach. Just dispose of the stinking corpse and be done with it. Funerals are for god-soaked weirdos. Why waste time and money on a dead animal?
The best send off would be Hunter S. Thompsons’s firing his ashes out of a 150 foot tall cannon, accompanied by red white and blue fireworks and “Mr. Tambourine Man” over a loudspeaker.
So I apologize for being off-topic here. PZ, I just came across this. I think it might be relevant to you. It’s quite alarming. Sit down before reading.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/science/18beer.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Thank goodness I’m not a scientist. I could never give up my beer.
HELL YES PZ!!!! I want one of those biodegradable coffins and have a tree planted on top of it. This is the real way to be reincarnated!
“Why waste time and money on a dead animal?”
Umm…compassion, closure, social ceremony, grieving process, the wake (free food and alcohol).
So does the corpse need to be present? No. But a farewell ceremony is certainly a healthy thing for those left behind and probably not considered a waste of time or money by them.
My husband argues that the truly atheist, materialist approach is not to care – since you’ll be dead. Funerals truly are for the survivors, to help them transition and cope. Nevertheless, I still like the idea of a secular funeral. I’ve purchased a transcript of a piece by Aaron Freeman that I heard on NPR, to have on hand for my funeral. Here’s how it starts:
I have left instructions that my funeral will open with a string quartet playing “Ave Maria” as the only paen to the religious members of my family. After that’s over, they tap a keg and turn up the volume on “Bastards on Parade” by the Dropkick Murphy’s.
You are all welcome..
“Should I, God forbid, pass on some time, I hope that some of you will say that Kurt is up in heaven now.”
Does anyone know if that wish was fulfilled for Mr. Vonnegut?
I agree wholeheartedly. Although I also agree with Alex; your views are not incompatible. In a comment at the Friendly ATheist’s blog I wrote the following:
Well, I’ve already decided that when I die I want to donate my organs; anything that some doctor can get some use out of can be taken, even if they only use it to feed the lab rats they test medicines on. I won’t care one way or the other, since I’ll be dead, and it will help other people more than having my body rot in the ground (or worse, be embalmed, at a huge expense, so that it does not rot).
I also don’t want expensive funeral services, ostentatious flower displays, or anything else that may incur expense, except inasmuch as doing that would make my loved ones feel better. After all, I certainly won’t notice any of it, so why should they bother?
Funerals are for those who are left to grieve, not for the deceased. Sure, I’d prefer it if everyone could accept death for what it is, but not everyone can. If having religious elements at my funeral would help those who can’t cope, then I’d have no problem with it because, well, I’ll be dead.
My mother wanted to return to the earth, but at the time it was mandated that people be buried in cement coffins to avoid contaminating the water supply, so she chose cremation as the closest she could get.
Personally, I’m hoping that by the time I die there will be lagoons or sandbeds where we can be gently deposited to have the best chance of being fossilized.
I don’t want to be dead; there’s no future in it.
I also told my family no religion, and to throw my body in the nearest anarobic bog so it could be discovered and studied in a few tens of thousands of years.
This is off topic, but I can’t help but think clarke would have appreciated this. : – )
Funerals aren’t really for the deceased, despite what some godbots claim. Funerals are for those still alive.
I’m setting aside enough money to cover the expenses of cremation and a wake. That covers the responsibility I feel for the disposal of the corpse and consideration of family and friends. Beyond that, I really don’t care what is done with/to my corpse.
Wait a minute we have to die??? Are you all telling me science will not figure out how to turn off aging? I will also settle for living longer than the mythical oldest person in bible(any religious text will do), or some kind of cellular regeneration like Dr. Who…
Don’t tell me this is just fantasy, lets make it a reality!
“I plan to live forever. So far, so good.”
Steven Wright
i’ve always wanted to be a cadaver when i grow up and die
“Why waste time and money on a dead animal?”
This “are we just animals?” thing seems to be a favourite of fundies of all kinds. By saying this, they seem to imply that animals are not worthy or respect. My beloved cat was buried with all the respect she deserves. But really I wouldn’t like to be a pet in a born-again-Christian home.
(and much less a child!)
I’d always thought I could consider my life well-lived if there were a riot at my funeral. Y’know, scores of police barely holding back the Brownie haters as my widow(s) throw themselves on my casket just to be close to me one last time. Finally, a rock is thrown, and the miles-long procession erupts into chaos. Tear gas will be my incense, and screamed slogans will be my hymns.
Thethyme @ 21, visit Kurzweilai.net. Pretty interesting information regarding your concerns. There’s a lot to go through though. But even when we are able to defeat the deterioration of our biology, would you want to, for how long, and who gets to? There’s quite a bit to consider and work out.
The lovely bride and I told the baptist minister presiding over our wedding that we wanted zero religious over or undertones to our ceremony. He was nice enough to oblige although he was a bit confused why we had him doing it, at first. He’s a good friend of my now deceased grandfather, who was an atheist as well and who presided over my grandfather’s funeral. He’s a very open minded guy and went through with it with no mention of anything religious. My grandfather who was a deep thinker but not without a sense of humor wrote out his entire funeral to make sure there was no god bothering going on. He did however throw in this one tid bit. He had his minister friend read this statement near the end of the funeral.
I see my funeral being equally “fairy-taleless”.
I always wanted my body to be donated to science/medicine. but now I want to steal Monado’s idea and be fossilized. It still counts if the scientists are a few million years in the future, right?
Sadly, my boyfriend tells me I don’t get to choose either of those (or check organ donor on my liscense). If he has his way, I’m going to end up mummified and on display in his living room. Canopic jars and all.
But really, who cares, it’s not for me, it’s for those who survive me. Even if those people happen to be strange…
Here lies the atheist all dressed with no place to go.
Can anything be more realistic to us?
Yeah no need to remember loved ones. Fuck ’em.
What? I have a radically naturalistic worldview and this strikes me as extraordinarily insensitive and, well, completely wrong-headed.
First, a secular memorial service has little to do with the kind of hoo-hah involved in religious funerals. The biggest difference: the focus of the former is not on the death and promised eternal life of the deceased, but on a celebration of his or her life. Second, often that life really is worth celebrating. Humans tend to touch the lives of those around them in a more meaningful way than, for example, a cockroach might do. That warrants, I think, some more post-mortem consideration than dumping the “stinking corpse”.
I think of an atheist funeral as a marvelous occasion for making a statement–to other atheists, and to religious believers. The courageous and even cheery way that David Hume faced his death, without any belief in an afterlife, shook up some of his religious friends. I hope that I can have a similar effect. My funeral instructions are set. I have string quartet versions of two Bad Religion songs (“Sorrow” and “Struck a Nerve”–words to be included in program) to start and end the thing. Songs by Rush (“Bravado”) and Flaming Lips (“Do Your Realize??”). A reading of a couple of Larkin poems (e.g., Aubade), and sections from Pullman and Dawkins. Does that not say something important about godlessness? I hope that it does. Not too soon, of course. But someday.
Alex@26:
Yes, for as long as we can, and everyone. I don’t mind if I have to be paused for as long as it takes to largely defeat scarcity.
# 27 Doesn’t the presence of a baptist minister negate
the wish to have no religious overtone or undertone in the
ceremony? Huh? You could have gone to the city hall and
been married by the mayor or any civil official. You just
cancelled out any non religious crap. Beats me, this type
of reasoning.
It would be nice if someone did this at my funeral (for real).
Larry Niven? I know about OSC, but what does Niven have to repent of on this score? I’m a fan of his work, but not especially familiar with his private life (beyond book-jacket bios). Did I miss a memo?
If there’s interest, this summer I’ll look for that marvellous freethinker’s memorial I found on a gravestone in the Niagara Peninsula several years ago and transcribe it to Pharyngula, maybe on an open thread.
Trust fund or some other financial intrument to pay for an evening at a bar or nightclub for my survivors. And a funeral procession like this:
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSN0847972320080208
Fireworks and cannon a la Hunter S. Thompson optional.
Ditto #12 on the Dropkick Murphys – theirs will be the only version of “Amazing Grace” allowed!
(Back from making 3-egg frittata.)
Niven floated the idea of “returning to the happy nothing” in his book Isle of the Dead.
as (#4):
Most of the last three Rama books were actually the work of Clarke’s collaborator, Gentry Lee.
We ended up having a vicar at my mother’s funeral. Mainly because neither of us had and particular idea about what to do.
I thought I’d read pretty much his entire ouevre, but I can’t recall a book by that title… nor can I find it in his wikipedia bibliography. Perhaps you’re thinking of Roger Zelazny?
Well actually I am pretty much resigned to the fact that the fundie part of my family cannot be stopped from holding Requiems for me, praying for my immortal soul etc. I only ask that my immediate family ensure the actual farewell ceremony at the crematorium be secular. Oh and I want to go into the flames to the soaring strains of Dave Gilmour’s guitar at the end of Comfortably Numb.
I would like to have an open house autopsy as my funeral. Everybody can come along and see what made me tick.
I, too, have a “no religion at my funeral” instruction in my will. I may not be around to notice, but I don’t want anyone using the opportunity of my death to promote superstitious beliefs I didn’t have in life.
I want to be buried in the sea. That way as my body decomposes it can be used as fuel for a chemosynthetic ecosystem.
Someone’s got to keep those whalefall communities alive once all the whales are gone…
It sounds like the minister was a personal friend, Holbach, which is entirely understandable.
Bill Dauphin:
From what I’ve seen, both Niven and his sidekick Pournelle are pretty serious wingnuts. I debated Niven at a scifi conference once; the topic was whether SDI was a good thing because it might function as a “stepping-stone to space.” A personable enough guy, but pretty right-wing. I don’t know about his susceptibility to woo.
I want my corpse disposed of in an ecologically sound way (no embalming, no metal coffin) but other than that cheap, cheap, cheap – so the money can be spent on the wake instead! :)
Oh, and my younger brother’s in charge of the music, except that the list must include Monty Python’s “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” from their film Life Of Brian. (The B in BT stands for Brian.)
Alex @ 8:
Just wait till I tell all my geologist friends… :-)
Well I want to be at my funeral, freeze dried and seated, holding the keg. Otherwise, I will insist that all the music be MY kind of music, which should alienate anyone not repulsed by a corpse for a keg cooler.
I’m actually going to post this in a few places, so forgive me if you see this more than once.
I think, rather than talk about the impact that Clarke had on the world or myself, which is substantial, I’ll let Clarke speak for himself. Here’s a link to a video that Clarke released just weeks ago on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Enjoy.
I’m hoping for a couple of ED-209s: “Put down your Bible, you have 10 seconds to comply.”
Best eulogy ever was this one for Graham Chapman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JuJMDrj2M8
Can you imagine how unseemly the alternative–lots of solemn weepy crap–would have been at the funeral of a Python? Fantastic. I hope John Cleese can come to my funeral.
My own instructions, but Arthur should certainly go to the head of whatever line has formed:
Take the ashes up the first operational Space Elevator and out to the end, beyond the counterweight. Release them over a 24-hour period during an equinox. They will thus be scattered over the entire solar system and rain down gently on Mercury, Venus, Earth and the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
I would consider Eddie Izzard’s idea of being flung into a tree, but I don’t think my girlfriend would approve. Not after she vetoed “See You Later Alligator” as funerary music. But really, that’s the time when everyone could use a good laugh, right?
I have had that very conversation with my one and only offspring and she has agreed to, make it so.
I added that if it is possible practically and legally I would prefer to just get left in the woods.
Short of that there are natural burial sites in existence in the states and there are groups working to create ones in Ontario and Vancouver.
You can go in the ground as is or wrapped in biodegradale cloth or, well you get the picture.
My father passed away a few weeks ago, and he wanted a non-religious service, so we conferred this to the funeral home doing the service. They did a great job on the non-religious service, but completely blew it at the family-only meeting downstairs before the service. The idiot director was holding a conch shell that “god” created and was using it as a prop to explain to explain to the family and especially the younger kids that “god” created you and when your body (shell) wears out, he calls you back to heaven. I have a 12 year old and 4 year old, my 12 year old knows I’m an Atheist but, the 4 year old is too young IMO for me to convey this to. I only work on critical thinking skills with him at this point. But, how dare this asshat try to undermine my wishes and try to proselytize my youngest at my father’s NON-religious service. I was completely miffed, I didn’t say anything, as the family had enough to deal with, but I kept shooting my mom and my wife the WTF looks, which they both thought was comical. It made me realize that I will have to specify not only a non-religious service, but also that there will also be NO mention of religion at ANY of the pre-events either. I also specified to my wife, at that time, that I want proud Atheist to be included in my obituary regardless of what the newspapers tell her is proper.
Well, the beer thing might be true of biologists — or maybe just Czech biologists — but I don’t think it holds up too well in geology…
…actually that’s kinda worth doing. Someone ought to do that study. Me, I’ll be too busy banging on rocks (Hawaii, WOO!) and drinking beer.
Honestly, I don’t care how my service is done. I used to care, but then I figured – I’ll be gone! If it makes my family feel better to talk about the afterlife, fine by me. The funeral isn’t really going to change anything as far as my situation is concerned, but I’d like to minimize their grief if possible.
My mom likes to give instructions for her funeral from time to time, and we just say “It’s not up to you. You’re not invited.”
i think if anyone gets all superstitious at my funeral, i’ll just start haunting them as payback.
But I wonder how one could be a successful beerologist if the findings in that study hold true. Hmmm…..
Yes, the funerals are for the living — to remember and honor the dead. Atheists live on only in their legacy, the people and ideas we leave behind. Our lives are not only about ourselves, and what we do can make a difference in the world when we are gone. The future matters to us now.
The idea of having religion included in my funeral “because I won’t be there anyway” absolutely appalls me. Trash my legacy? It would also shock me if someone gave a pagan funeral for a deeply devout Catholic because “they’re not around to object anymore” — or gave speeches on the joys of hunting at the funeral of an animal rights activist. The funeral should reflect and respect the values and beliefs of the person you are remembering. It’s not an opportunity for the survivors to get even or make a point.
There is both comfort and meaning to be found in the humanist outlook. Secular funerals can be deeply touching and even inspiring. If religious people can only sooth themselves by telling everybody “the person isn’t really dead” then they can go somewhere else later on and do it on their own time. It’s not as if there are no religious forums for them to go to.
Yah, perhaps… but I took the comment to which I was responding to be referring to superstitious nonsense, as opposed to political nonsense.
FWIW, having read a good bit of each of their solo work in addition to the Niven/Pournelle collaborations, and having peeked at Pournelle’s blog occasionally, it seems very likely to me that virtually all of the militarism found in Niven/Pournelle comes from Pournelle. Pournelle is one of the prototypical examples usually given by anyone discussing the Military SF subgenre; Niven, OTOH, has offered up whole chunks of the Known Space story-space to other writers, specifically because he’s not comfortable writing about combat.
As for other aspects of wingnuttery… well, I don’t know much about Niven personally, but if his (solo) fiction is any guide, he seems like a fairly open-minded guy on issues of personal behavior (i.e., sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll), and no great lover of cops or authoritarian government.
Some of the Niven/Pournelle collaborations (esp. Lucifer’s Hammer and Oath of Fealty) contain fairly agonized conflict between liberal inclinations and the exigencies of crisis… which I had always taken as the result of a fruitful tension between the authors’ differing outlooks.
Of course, it’s always tough to sort out SF authors’ personal views based on their work, which is inherently involved with what-if thought experiments. Heinlein is often claimed by right-wing militarists (based on Starship Troopers) and libertarians (based on The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), but his work also includes favorable portrayals of one-world government (based on the UN, in more than one case) and even one-solar-system government (a British-style constitutional monarchy, no less) not to mention clan-based communalism. OTOH, a major theme of his Future History series is the abject evil of theocracy, which ought to give pause to current-day right wingers who try to claim him as one of their own. And that’s not even mentioning his depictions of what my junior high librarian called “far-out sex” (and when she said that, he still hadn’t written his farthest-out sexual speculations).
I think SF authors spend so much of their public lives playing with ideas for the fun of it (one of Niven’s autobiographical/retrospective collections is called Playgrounds of the Mind) that it’s nearly impossible to sort out what they really believe… if there even is any such thing: In his public life, Heinlein was everything from a socialist to a hardcore libertarian, and we still haven’t seen an in-depth biography that would tell us anything substantive about his private life.
Not for nothin’, but I think most of those guys were sincere in the “steppingstone to space” argument. Pournelle, who was the ringleader of that cabal of pro-SDI SF writers, may have been a true warboy, but I think the others were just following in the time-(dis)honored tradition of leveraging militarism for spaceflight technology development (while maintaining a certain willful blindness to the moral consequences) that goes back to von Braun and his cohorts. Not exactly a stunning endorsement, of course, but I don’t think it’s quite correct to imagine these guys were all het up to “join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages.” They just wanted to get spaceships by any means necessary. Or, at least, so it always seemed to me.
If I could figure out a (cheap) way to have my dead body turned into a mechanism for panspermia, then I’d have its component bits launched (economically) in a shotgun at some distant star cluster.
It would tickle me to think that at some time a couple of billion years from now, some aliens evolved from me would be arguing about their own origins.
My instructions as they stand are to be cremated and then buried at the foot of a sapling (redwood preferably). A thimble-full of my ashes will be held for burial at space – if it becomes cheap enough during my heir’s lifetime. But only if my trajectory gets me past the heliosphere – otherwise don’t bother!
I don’t have high hopes for a space burial – but hey, if you don’t ask…
My plans matter to me RIGHT NOW. The argument that I will be gone when I’m dead has no impact on the meaning those plans for me in the present. It is true that I will not know or care if they are carried out once dead, but I can’t think of a single reason why I should let that fact deprive me of the interesting experience of trying to plan the kind of funeral that I WOULD find meaningful, WERE I there to “enjoy” it. I count is my one last great swipe at performance art…and perhaps a parting “fuck you” of defiance toward death. At least such a notion has entertainment value for me while I yet live.
My stated intentions have always been “rifle the carcass for anything useful, and burn the scraps”. As for the service or lack thereof, I fear I won’t be there.
I have just decided that at my memorial service, Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” will be played at HIGH volume, and everyone will be *required* to dance for ten minutes.
Why? Because Boogie Wonderland brings back to me the time of my life when I was freest, free of attachments, free of disease and age-related debilities, free of the cynicism and despair of too much experience. Even now I sometimes play it to lift my spirits, and it still does.
Dance, everybody, dance!
I don’t have any particular preference for my wake, funeral, or disposal. However, I have designed for myself a solar powered tombstone. The idea is that visitors can ask questions and hit a button to hear my voice randomly give one of several prerecorded short replies. Think Magic 8-Ball.
Hopefully I’ve got some time before I have to put that plan into action.
PZ, as much as we don’t like to think about it, those of us who will be around for your funeral will make sure your wishes will be carried out.
Perhaps you could suggest a suitable dress code for your funeral.
May I suggest:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/31/halloween-lil-baby-s.html
As for a song:
If I die without any NSAIDs on board, I’d like a zoroastrian disposal of my body. I’m sure the carnivorous birds would find me quite yummy. Other than that, I don’t much care what people do about my funeral/memorial service/whatever, as long as it makes the survivors happy. Although I must admit that the live forever plan sounds like the best one so far.
I plan on convincing whoever will inherit my life insurrance to not waste money on burying a dead body in fancy. Be cheap and use the rest for a kickass vacation instead.
Personally though, I won’t give a damn since I’ll be dead. Just you know… An advice.
Sweet a beat down at a funeral! Mine will be the same way completely secular and with a rousing party after my service. I always thought that ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ By Aaron Copeland would be fitting music. Oh, then cremate me.
“I’d say the same thing about my funeral, with the added stipulation that if anyone tries to preach, at word one I want my friends and family to rise up and carry the jerk bodily out the door, and throw him or her into the street.”
I vote for having them sacked instead – much more fun! ;)
back to Clarke…I think the conclusion of Childhood’s End–some kind of weird evolutionary leap, who cares, but the best part is that the aliens look just like Satan–is a good sign that Mr. C had suitably unorthodox opinions. I always enjoyed teaching the novel to tenth graders. I got into repeated tangles with fundie kids and parents who were offended by it. The attempts by dimwit Christian pharisees to comment intelligently on literature were an education in rhetoric.
ice
I would love to donate as much organs as possible to those who need them.. what is left you can grind and use as fertilizer.. no waste at all
I’d say the same thing about my funeral, with the added stipulation that if anyone tries to preach, at word one I want my friends and family to rise up and carry the jerk bodily out the door, and throw him or her into the street.
It won’t matter. None of them will exist when you wake up from this dream. But you could wake up to an even worse dream: you’ll feel a horrible burning sensation all over, and the sound of irrationality, creationism, and biblical preaching will be all that you can hear. Eventually you’ll realize where you’ve ended up – a hell specifically designed for you, complete with physical torture, and with the mental torture of having to listen to televangelists for all eternity, telling you how wrong you were, and how much better Behe is doing right now. No, I can’t say I envy you at all.
Is this the real Dr. Hovind? Are people in federal prison for tax fraud allowed to spend their time trolling on blogs? Or did they let the little shit out already?
I like your solar power idea Abby- I was trying to think of some monument more useful than a bench and the only thing I’ve come up so far it a hand-pumped bidet.
PS: Gentry Lee defiled the RAMA series
I think the comment attributed to Dr. Hovind is satire – but it’s really hard to tell the difference between wacky satire and fundamentalist hate.
Be this Dr Hovind real or unreal, he is a fucktard!
Kudos to that.
I grew so terribly depressed over the charges the funeral home was socking my father with over the death of my mother a few years back (>$10,000!) that I told my oldest daughter as we sat there in the “counseling room” listening to my father getting fleeced; “Just cremate me and be done with it, okay?”
She leaned over and whispered; “Hell, I’ll just throw your ass in a dumpster and pocket the money!” Just like in school, that got us to giggling but we just couldn’t help it: the absurdity of the whole damn racket, preying upon people at their most vulnerable time is horrible, and then she has to say something like that.
We still laugh about that, a legacy my mother would have been much happier with, rather than the fleecing done to my father.
There is a way to ‘live on after death’. My particular plans are to have my body donated to one of the ‘body farms’ that use cadavars to document deteriation of unembalmed bodies. Then to have my skeleton donated to the Smithsonian to help bolster it’s collection. As a side note, I also have worked on my family geneaology and it gives me sort of a kick to think that at some future date my resting place will be listed as the Smithsonian!
Clarke has been one of my favorite SF authors since I started reading the genre.
On the other hand there is a way to ‘live on after death’. My particular plans are to have my body donated to one of the ‘body farms’ that use cadavars to document deteriation of unembalmed bodies. Then to have my skeleton donated to the Smithsonian to help bolster it’s collection. As a side note, I also have worked on my family geneaology and it gives me sort of a kick to think that at some future date my resting place will be listed as the Smithsonian!
As for funeral plans, if I haven’t had a chance to fly in space before I pass, I want to be cremated and have my ashes launched on a rocket.
Doesn’t have to be a fancy high-dollar in-space “burial,” though; the plastic nosecone of an Estes rocket launched by the local NAR section will do just fine.
raises a glass to Arthur Clarke’s memory.
When I go, I’ve likewise asked my wife to basically be hostile and basically rude to anyone who pulls any theistic nonsense. I’m probably going to have to have someone else do it, though; she’s in favor of it but is not as confrontational as I am.
Perhaps the worst part of being secular is knowing that idiots like Dr. Hovind won’t realize he’s wrong after he dies. Still, I think much of their craziness comes from a deep-seated suspicion that they’re simply gone when they die. And so they spend their entire life in desperate denial, and don’t live one second longer for it. How pathetic.
I don’t know what his funeral was like, but purportedly the last words of Oscar Wilde were: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I go.”
PZ — better make sure you proofread those instructions, if you don’t want them to “carry the bodily jerkily out the door…”
When I die I want the money I have set aside for the occasion to be used to cremate my body. A trusted friend who runs a catering business receives the ashes, filtered for small chunks of bone and grit, and adds it to the breads and muffins and sweet rolls and finger sandwiches and the ranch dressing dip and most importantly to the punch. Drink the punch!! Drink me. Eat me.
Then all my friends and family can note my passing by giving something of their memory of me to all the other attendants. And they will each take something of me away with them in return. Whether they know it or not (tee-hee). Full circle. Recycled. And still a part of you!
I think #90 just crossed-over into creepy-land. I just hope you don’t have a basement, or hockey-mask, or chainsaw, or secret crawl-spaces in your house. You know, the typical stuff you’d expect to find belonging to a deranged, maniacal, psychopathic predator.
Oh wait….that was humor. – rrrright?
I’ve been terribly specific in my instructions. I’m to be used for whatever organs they can harvest (and I’m already afraid I’ve worn out the liver)and then put into the cheapest box they can find for a totally non-religious cremation. As the curtiains close on my casket going into the flames I want “Great Balls Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis to peel out at a hundred decibels. I’ve also specified only primary colours can be worn, feather boas are optional extras and I’ve left aside 2 grand for the piss up. My terribly upper-middle-class-social-set mother is MORTIFIED.
*Sniff*, I wish I could be there, it’ll be one hell of a party.
I would have my bones donated to apes in hope that they make tools out of them (monolith optional). Only, instead of Also Sprach Zarathustra, something by ZZ Top (namely, Tush).
In today’s Grauniad, Terry Pratchett is quoted as quoting(? paraphrasing?) Arthur C Clarke as “complaining that the reason why the apes [in 2001…] never won the Oscar for best make-up was that they were so good the judges thought they really were apes.” — http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2266509,00.html
Or as someone in the other thread put it (paraphrasing), a distinguishing feature of Clarke’s fiction is this really could be the future.
I’ve nothing to add. For some reason that seems to sum it up.
I just flashed on a squad of pallbearers from the Ministry of Silly Walks! ;^)
@ Alex #91
Rest assured, gentle reader, that the words above are a mere echo of a drunken conversation warmly remembered from a time long ago. I just took the opportunity to get some extra mileage out of it.
By the way, a touch of ash in your food is normally not detected by the tongue or palate. So, what did you have for lunch last Tuesday?
My instructions for my death are that anyone who wants any part of my body, for any purpose, is welcome to it. I have already told my family, and they approve.
My wedding is definitely going to be secular, and will probably have “Yesterday” played at it…
I’ve made it very clear that I’m not to have a funeral at all. No showings, no ceremonies, no nothing. I don’t want excessive amounts of money spent on the disposal of my body either, but I really don’t care what gets done with it. Throw it in a ditch, bury it in the back yard, have it stuffed and used as a hat rack, what do I care, I’m dead?
Actually, my wife’s latest plan and one I like is to have me cremated and mailed, at random, to people all over the planet in a greeting card that plays “Pieces of Me”. I think that would be hilarious.
I don’t understand that clip.
The real Hovind isn’t a doctor. :-)
~:-| Please explain how you arrive at that reading.
You know, the Yanomami non-funeral rites were pretty similar last time I read something about that topic…
I don’t understand that clip.
The real Hovind isn’t a doctor. :-)
~:-| Please explain how you arrive at that reading.
You know, the Yanomami non-funeral rites were pretty similar last time I read something about that topic…
I just want to attend my own funeral.
In the otherwise kinda-cheesy movie “Waking Ned Devine”, there’s a scene in which a character delivers a eulogy at the fraudulent funeral of his still-living best friend.
It’s kinda sad that, by and large, we aren’t comfortable telling our friends and family exactly how we feel about them until we’re saying it at their funeral.
Once Jim in Accounting dies unexpectedly, we’re reminiscing about his many quirkily amusing, sometimes annoying, but ultimately endearing habits.
I’m sure you know how it goes.
Why don’t we celebrate these things about people while they’re still alive?
“TREAT YOUR LOVED ONES LIKE THEY’RE ALREADY DEAD” sounds kinda funny when you say it aloud, but since we seem to reserve our most honest and heartfelt thoughts for the dead, it seems like good advice to me.
“I’ve made it very clear that I’m not to have a funeral at all. No showings, no ceremonies, no nothing. I don’t want excessive amounts of money spent on the disposal of my body either, but I really don’t care what gets done with it.”
Same here. I want my body disposed of for the cheapest possible price. Absolutely no ceremonies. Not a penny wasted. Let the death cult called Christianity waste money on the dead. A real atheist treats its dead the same as any other animal species.
A real atheist, BobC, like a real human being, treats the dead with the respect, compassion and thoughtfulness that is due. All are due at least some. Eh?
I suspect you posted before you thought.
Well, I do feel a bit peckish.
Crudely Wrott, A real atheist treats people who are alive with the respect, compassion and thoughtfulness that is due. It’s impossible for a dead person to appreciate respect and compassion.
Part of being thoughtful is telling my relatives to spend their money on themselves instead of on my worthless dead body.
Point taken, BobC. But we don’t treat the dead one way or another for their sake. We do it for ours. The living. To remember and possibly emulate.
That is to say that to be kind to the living and the dead is considered a good thing to do by people who think like me. ;->
Go well.Walk tall.
Throw me out in the woods and let me rot.
Have a party with a keg of Sierra Nevada (Bigfoot Ale if available, OK to fall back on the Pale), play Miles Davis (It Never Entered My Mind) and the Grateful Dead (Comes a Time*, Black Peter, Ripple) and speak well of me.
Thank you.
*”Don’t you see? / Gotta make it somehow / on the dreams you still believe…”
If I could live forever, I could do that impossible prospective evolution experiment that would silence the creationists forever (or is that too naive?)
I’ll take two populations of cockroaches, or maybe cuttlefish, isolate them in two separate artificial environments, and check back in 1 or 2 million years and document their divergence. I could even record the drift in gene frequencies in each population for every single generation, and I’ll have actual specimens of transitional forms for every generation.
As for the funeral issue, if the fossilization option exists, I’d take that in a second. After all the useful organs are harvested.
The comedian David Cross had an hilarious bit about being given to necrophiliacs.
My wife and I have agreed that the least expensive cremation, and the cheapest possible memorial service is the way to go. Sure, our loved ones will (hopefully) want to gather to remember us, but the financial burden can be huge, and our corpses aren’t worth it. Get together, get drunk, stoned, or whatever, and reminisce. Laugh. Tell funny stories about how stupid I was when I got too drunk. Mention that thing I made you promise never to mention; if marriage only lasts until death, prohibitions on amusing anecdotes certainly get grandfathered in. Remember me as I was, not as some idealized caricature. Remember the fullness of my life, including the full list of mistakes and foibles.
I would like to be remembered for who I was, not for who everyone wished I had been.
For those who just want to be recycled, I remember the old childhood ditty:
And sinc we’re talking a bit about science fiction, who wants to go the Valentine Michael Smith route?
[or Eddie from Rocky Horror Picture Show]
Cryogen freezing will, I hope, become cheaper and more mainstream by the time I die, so I’ll opt for that.
If it doesn’t, or if I am killed in a manner that damages my brain (say, a massive stroke), then I’ll just donate my body to science (an anatomy teaching museum or something). It’ll either have a bionic limb or be genetically modified (if all goes well), so that will give them something interesting to look at.
On a different but related topic: should I meet my end in a remote crevasse or at the bottom of the sea please don’t ask people to retrieve my body. It’s one of the most bizarre demands that people make: that healthy people should risk their own lives to retrieve a dead body.
For those considering the Michael Valentine Smith route:
Robert A. Heinlein memorial service 7:00 PM Barbecue 7:30 PM (no salt necessary)
NB: The link leads to a search page. Search string “Heinlein” works.
Me, I plan on cremation. Family tradition involves cremation followed by scattering. A completely secular memorial generally follows the cremation.
I think it would be cool to have a creative mortician retrofit my corpse with mechanical actuators, so that at the wake or an open-coffin viewing someone with a remote control could make me sit up and turn my head. That would be a service to remember!
I’ve asked my wife to cryogenically freeze my head, and have it shot into space. As its my dying wish she HAS to do it, its the law. (I’m not actually ‘dying’, well only in the sense that we all are!)
My thinking is that in a couple of hundred million years something will find me and be able to revive me and attach me to a new body. Its a long shot I know…
I cannot remember when I first read an ACC story – probably “Critical Mass”, about 1953/4, when I was 7/8.
I think I’ve got all the anthologies and novels, sitting up on my SF wall to the right as I type this.
Terry Pratchett gave a good short eulogy on Radio 4 this morning.
I suppose I’ll have to put my DVD of “2001” on soon, though how much of it I will actually see through the tears is uncertain.
Ave atque Vale.
“In this universe, the light was falling: the shadows were lengthening towards an East that would not know another dawn. But, elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered: and along the path he had once followed, Man would one day go again.”
I want to be plastinated and made part of the Bodies exhibition, that way I can freak people out after I’m gone. Either that or be used as a real-life prop in a horror/action film which requires a body to be blown up/burned/fed to sharks.
As to music for the remembrance ceremony or whatever it’d have to be Faded by The Afghan Whigs followed up by Eastbound And Down (Smokey and the Bandit theme tune)!
Real atheists care nothing about the dead. I had no idea elephants were so devout.
As for me, I want my ashes loaded on a very small rocket and dispersed over Canyonlands in Utah, accompanied by a too-loud rendition of John Adams’s “Short Ride in a Fast Machine.”
Clarke may have asked for a religion-free parting, but Edward Rothstein for the New York times manages to slap him with a religionist label anyhow:
“Perhaps any sufficiently sophisticated science fiction, at least in his case, is nearly indistinguishable from religion.“
WTF? I feel that Clarke has been unduly insulted. How is it that by looking at “big”, amorphous and polymorphous issues, (e.g., how did humankind get to where we are today and how will we eventually deal with life when both we and our technologies have even further evolved), science fiction becomes “religious.”
Of course, the writer points out elsewhere that Clarke isn’t really religious, because “There is something cold in his vision.” It’s as if Rothstein thinks that atheist admirers of science should be incapable of appreciating or speculating about any issues other than technology and any insight into the human condition, or any display of warmth, must be religious in nature.
My instructions are to donate any useful organs, take anything worth examining for study, and dump the rest in a hole in the ground & plant a tree (or an herb!) Then, have a party. First round’s on me.
While grieving is OK, I think it’s most important to celebrate the life one led.
Goodbye, Sir Arthur. You done well.
Of course the idiots at CNN had use the religious term “guru” in describing Clarke in the headline of the article you linked to.
I’d be kind of embarassed to have a physicist saying such confused and meaningless platitudes for me. Using “energy” as a sciency stand-in for “soul” is not indicative of clear thinking.
MTran #122: I share your revulsion of that contemptable comment by Edward Rothstein at the NYT.
Here’s a self-proclaimed clever-guy who thinks it profound to characterize Clarke’s vision as “something cold”.
But there’s nothing colder than jabbing at a dead person who has brought so much inspiration to so many, and whose ideas positively do not merit such an assinine characterization.
Here’s one for Mr. Rothstein, who I trust is still alive and reasonably healthy: what the hell have YOU accomplished with YOUR writing? You’re little more important than any other hackprick, even AFTER Viagra. Get over yourself.