I mean, this question is not just about normal criminals.
Think like very bad crimes. Like serial killers, rapists, child rapists, terrorists, corrupt officials, terrible leaders, cruel dictators, generals that ignore laws of war, or like people has bad as Hitler. Which of these people do you think deserve a respectful burial, if any.
Is there a level of evilness that you think should not be allowed to have a proper buriel or have their corpses mutilated. Or should everyone deserve a respectful burial regardless of crimes.
I personally don’t even know how to answer this question myself. Like the funeral isn’t even for the dead. Its for the living. So to me, the question seems like, should the relatives of a bad person be allowed to see the corpse treated respectfully. I personally don’t have an answer to this question.
This is a question that is at least older than feudalism - the Greek tragedy Antigone deals with this question. And the answer, like always, is that desecrating a corpse is bad and dangerous and don’t do it, family is gonna be pissed and rightly so.
Even if it’s funny as shit that there were heads on sticks on top of Parliament for a while.
Yes, because compassion is what makes us better then them.
pedantry is what makes some better than others :p
Odd thing to fixate on, but yes. We ought to spend our energy on the terrible people still alive. Who cares what they do to the demon husks once they can’t hurt anyone anymore? Bury it with flowers and fireworks for all I care. Let’s focus on the suffering of the living.
Oh I have random throughts all the time. I read an article about the US sending SEALs to kill a designated terrorist leader and they gave him a burial according to his culture, so I just though that was very interesting. Like I expected military people to just burn or mutilate the body.
Well believe it or not most people in the military are human beings, not bloodthirsty monsters that burn and mutilate bodies. Osama’s burial was done the way it was for pretty good reasons. Imagine the uproar and additional violence that would have happened if it came out that his body was treated like you say. It would have cost even more lives.
I, for one, am kind of relieved that military personnel have respect for their adversaries.
the story to fixate upon there is how the cia located bin laden in the first place – by having agents pose as international aid workers dispensing the polio vaccine in pakistan.
this one act has led to a distrust in aid workers in that country and the flourishing of polio. countless innocent lives ruined, but i’m sure uncle sam considers those as adequate compensation against killing one man who had sequestered hinself away with his goats and his porn.
we should care less about how that one man was buried then and more about how the polio-ridden corpses of children are treated today.
I hope my questions don’t come across as me dismissing or distrusting what you are saying, but this is the first I’ve heard about this information and I find it interesting.
When you say that it caused a distrust in aid workers, where did this distrust come from, and where did it end up? To rephrase, from my understanding, bin Laden wasn’t exactly a good guy locally either, so if civilians found out that he was taken out with the help of undercover aid workers, would that not strengthen the trust that the aid workers were there to help? The only people that should be wary after finding this out would be his supporters, no?
Unless the fear is more of an outside force interfering with your government, good or bad, which is more understandable, especially in a time and place where information wasn’t as readily available. I’m sure it’s obvious, but I’m a US citizen, and though I absolutely detest the man and his following, I’d be pretty fucking concerned if China had Trump popped.
burial and cremation, as practices, should be be dispensed with altogether.
i want my eventual corpse to be donated to a green burial.
Or, alternatively
No but in all seriousness you’re absolutely right. Green burial needs to be normalized.
You can only be evil when you are alive. In death we are all rotting meat, neither good or evil.
Does rotten meat care about its burial at all?
Not entirely true, when memorials are built to an evil person which perpetuates their evil, that evil survives the mortal coil.
It’s why after taking DNA samples, Osama Bin Laden was thrown in the ocean, and Hitlers bunker was built over and his body disposed of by the KGB. Evil lives on.
Is desecrating their corpse going to deter them from further bad actions in the future? No? Then let’s not.
It might deter other people from bad actions.
Yes but not for the reasons people are stating here. Dead people are dead. They don’t deserve a damn thing, whether saint or sinner.
Burial is for the living. So it’s up to the next of kin how to go organize it. Since those people are typically innocent of the crimes of the deceased, their behavior has little or no relevance to what sort of burial there will be, unless it affects how those people might wish to go about it.
They should get respectful burials as they will become gender-neutral bathrooms for eternity.
Decency is a decision you make about who you are. It’s not about them.
As long as I get my dumpster burial I think even bad people can have the burial of their dreams.
Bruh why are you trying to terrify those poor sanitation workers?
I want a Viking dumpster burial with all the fixins, no sanitation workers are needed
Lol I though you wanted to throw your body like on the curb where they pick up the trash lol
Volunteers among both their loved ones and their victims should vote on every aspect of it. /j
The worst person in the world, while living, looses all consideration for how they’re treated. At that point, it’s not about what they deserve as much as it’s about living up to our own standards for how we compose ourselves.
We don’t feed evil people to rabid hogs not because they don’t deserve it, but because we respect ourselves more than that.
Likewise, everyone deserves a baseline level of dignity in death because that’s a standard we hold ourselves to.
It’s not for them.It’s not for them. Exactly.
We don’t choose not to speak ill of the dead because we’re going to like offend the Dead or that we’re going to invoke some sort of spiritual curse on ourselves.
We choose not to speak ill of the Dead so that the people who still miss them and love them and care for them won’t live in a world where the people that they care about are being slandered.
It just saves everybody a whole lot of grief if you let the dead beat the dead and move on.
Sure, if you have a personal grudge against the person then that’s a different story but if you did not ever interact with that person and they are a bad person then just let them be dead and let them fuck off into non-existence.
Yes. No exception. Period.
Because the burial is not for the dead themselves, but for anyone left behind.
No matter how vile a person is, it’s likely that they had at least a person or two who miss them.
A counter point is should those folks see the dead person’s vile behavior normalized? Are people smart enough to differentiate?
There was a serial paedophile killer in the UK who killed (after doing other things) someone I know’s daughter. When he died, he was cremated and dumped in the ocean in an undisclosed location from a boat. This was only released after the fact.
I don’t have an opinion on that, but I do think they don’t deserve us to call them by their names. Having their name go down in history is what they want — referring to them descriptively (eg. ‘the tyrant who took over Nazi Germany’) takes the focus away from the person and puts it on their horrible actions – which anyone with those traits, not necessarily just A**** ****** could have done.
