Theos-Talk Archives (December 2002 Message tt00489)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, Mic Forster <micforster@y...> 
wrote:
> In our own instant oatmeal culture though the
> sacredness behind death has gone completely out the
> window.

You got me to thinking. I am sure that statement is true for you 
personally, but the fact that people pay a fortune to have corpses 
filled with embalming fluid, then after admiring them in a grotesque 
manner have them placed in very expensive wooden boxes and lowered 
into concrete encasements (water proof, no less) and preserved in 
perpetuity, then go to church and pray that all these stiffs pop up 
out of the ground alive some day suggests that society in general is 
not all that secular. Some of these superstitions are so 
preposterous that it is hard to believe they still endure, but endure 
they do.

Many years ago when I was a kid I worked for a few months in a retail 
store. I had a regular customer whoworked for a funeral home and 
came in late wearing a jacket with the business' logo on it. He had 
to master that somebody-just-died look that they all affect in that 
business, so I tried to make him smile with bad jokes. One night he 
came in especially late and I asked him: "Are you just dead?" Not 
the slightest change of facial expression, but he did not like the 
comment because he told me I would be laughing out the other side of 
my mouth if I knew how much green there is in the funeral racket. He 
felt compelled to tell me how much green there is in, and when he did 
I felt compelled to whistle. I wouldn't touch that business with an 
undertaker's shovel, but people are not unsentimental about rotting 
corpses.