re: #824 Irish Rose

Heh.
I attended a church for 25 years that preached the doctrine of rapture. I knew a lot of people who wouldn’t even consider cremation after death, because they believed that God might have a hard time putting them back together again at the trumpet call. Dead bodies are supposed to be kept as physically intact as possible.

I took a lot of heat from these people, when my dad passed away and I honored his wish to have his remains cremated and distributed at his favorite fishing hole. I even did the job myself. Our elders were horrified.

I took even more heat when my mom passed away and I honored her request to have her remains cremated, split into three different containers, and distributed in three different places on two different continents… which I also did myself. The church elders officially put me on their shitlist, and I’m still there to this day.

Rebelliion against the straightjacket of formal religious thought and observance has been elevated to hobby status in my family, we’re all troublemakers :).

Can I laugh? Growing up Baptist that sounds very familiar and funny as (pardon the expression) hell.

My favorite story of religion run amok; My dad was the county Chaplin for the Fire Dept. and Sheriff, he was also a volunteer firefighter. One night their was a SIDS death the family call 911 and their pastor. Fire Dept got their first and determined nothing could be done. The families pastor arrived, looked the the mother holding the dead infant and said, “what sin have you committed to cause this.” He’s lucky the only thing the firefighters did was throw his ass out the door. They called my dad who spent hours with the distraught mother. It was literally 8 hours before she would surrender her baby to my dad.