"Human Composting" Promoted in New York Times

Nick1000 · Dec 10, 2022

(Orthodox Church opposition cited in this article in the National Review)

The NYT has a long article out promoting human composting as a means of final disposition. The idea is to quickly turn bodies into dirt and then plant flowers in the remains or return the compost to the forest as fertilizer.

I have no objection to composting the dead being legal, as it now is in five states, and soon, apparently, in New York. But the story illustrates how profoundly traditional Christianity has collapsed in the West, and indeed, the meteoric growth of what might be called a nature worshipping neo-paganistic ethos: Per the Times:

I visited another forest in Southern Washington. After decades of depletion by logging, this forest had been taken over by a conservation organization with a special mission. A golf cart drove me along a re-wilding logging path, up to a field of dark-brown compost. The soil in this compost had once made up the bodies of 28 different humans: now, all were one, part of the woods around them. These 28 people chose to donate their soil to help regrow native trees and eventually bring shade to a salmon-spawning stream.

Notice the anonymity of the deceased. Notice that, unlike traditional Christian burial practices, with human composting, the body itself has no real meaning.

Yes, Christianity understands that, as Ash Wednesday has it, dust we were and dust we shall be. But that’s not all we are or will be in traditional Christian practice. Indeed, the dead body has value because the human person does. For example, the Orthodox Church believes:

Not only do the Orthodox revere the body, but we also acknowledge the part our physical bodies play in our salvation. Our bodies are just as valuable as our souls. According to Holy Tradition and Scripture, we will be resurrected in our physical bodies at the Second Coming of Our Lord. We must take care of our bodies, feeding them properly, getting adequate rest, and healing them with the Holy Mysteries.
Today, many Western Christians now allow cremation, in light of the fact that its association with paganism or Gnosticism is no longer a reality. However, the Orthodox Church asserts that voluntary cremation, regardless of its detachment from pagan thought or ritual, in every instance denies the value of the human body and of material creation in general. Hence, we as Orthodox Christians are to avoid it.

How we treat our dead reflects our views on what we think about the living. In this sense, human composting — and even more so, another growing practice of liquifying bodies and pouring the remains into the sewer — reflects a disturbing mindset that denies ultimate meaning to human life and views us, essentially, as just another animal in the forest. At the very least, these innovations reflect a lamentable, accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian values that undergird Western Civilization.

‘Human Composting’ Promoted in New York Times | National Review

How we treat our dead reflects our views on what we think about the living.

www.nationalreview.com

ArmyMatt · Dec 11, 2022

Lord have mercy

whatisinausername · Dec 11, 2022

I don't see an issue. I work in a hospital lab. We take stuff from bodies all the time. I look at cells under a microscope, that is their body, their blood and throw it in the trash. Should I bury it? These are a person's cells, their very blood.

When you poop, you poop out your own cells. Your cells are dying, at different rates, and being replaced. I believe in the resurrection and do believe showing respect for a body, but most of who we've been has been pooped out, shed, or went out with our urine. Most of who you have been will amount to much more than you are at death.

dzheremi · Dec 12, 2022

Lord have mercy.

We look to the resurrection of the dead, the life of the age to come.

bèlla · Dec 12, 2022

This isn’t new. Washington was the first to legalize it. CNN covered it in 2019 so did the Post.

Nick1000 · Dec 12, 2022

whatisinausername said:
I don't see an issue. I work in a hospital lab. We take stuff from bodies all the time.

Often including babies in their nineth month of gestation.

Also known as "stuff from bodies" in certain circles.

whatisinausername · Dec 12, 2022

Nick1000 said:
Often including babies in their nineth month of gestation.

Also known as "stuff from bodies" in certain circles.

We have nothing to do with abortion.

When you are born you begin scattering your matter all over the Earth. You flush your cells, you flush your blood, you flake your skin and vacuum it up. I get large bottles of blood for culture for people that die before we can test it. Should I bury it? Return it? Heck, I get samples for dead people that are DONATING organs.

I think we went to an extreme. We have embalming, steel caskets, concrete cages. Does that help you in the resurrection? What about the Christians in Japan that were vaporized? I believe in being respectful to the dead. I'd like my body to be buried and rot, because it is going to rot one way or another with minimal impact.

ArmyMatt · Dec 12, 2022

whatisinausername said:
I don't see an issue.

as Orthodox, we have a very specific understanding of how the body of the departed is to be treated.

ArmyMatt · Dec 12, 2022

dzheremi said:
We look to the resurrection of the dead, the life of the age to come.

amen

Akita Suggagaki · Dec 12, 2022

I am all for a more eco friendly process. Do we really need embalming, caskets and vault? What a scam!!

whatisinausername · Dec 12, 2022

ArmyMatt said:
as Orthodox, we have a very specific understanding of how the body of the departed is to be treated.

Right... but what is a body? I am not being contrarian, but I literally throw out bottles and bottles of dead people's blood with living cells that went septic all the time. I just chuck them. I don't think anything about it. You are putting the vast majority of your body in the toilet and trash during your life.

Our bodies are a collection of independent cells. They can live on their own in the right conditions. I find the issue interesting. I have degrees in Science, Philosophy, and Theology. I trash something with living cells from a person that died shortly after it was given.

dzheremi · Dec 13, 2022

I have a couple of degrees myself, but I know that there is nothing I can know that can contradict the faith of our fathers, who have taught us about the value of the body and how it is to be properly and reverently handled. If I think I know something better than they do, then I've clearly prized intellectual pursuits above God-revealed truth, and that is much to my detriment.

Perhaps next time you 'trash' the components of a person's body, you can take a moment to stop and think about how the person whose tissues and fluids you are dealing with was created by Almighty God, given the animating breath of life, and as such is a unique and irreplaceable temple of the Holy Spirit. If you believe in the resurrection of the dead, you know that there is more to God's creation than chains of proteins or however you've been taught to see things in the context of your degrees.

ArmyMatt · Dec 13, 2022

whatisinausername said:
Right... but what is a body? I am not being contrarian, but I literally throw out bottles and bottles of dead people's blood with living cells that went septic all the time. I just chuck them. I don't think anything about it. You are putting the vast majority of your body in the toilet and trash during your life.

Our bodies are a collection of independent cells. They can live on their own in the right conditions. I find the issue interesting. I have degrees in Science, Philosophy, and Theology. I trash something with living cells from a person that died shortly after it was given.

what do the Fathers say and how did they approach the dead?

whatisinausername · Dec 13, 2022

ArmyMatt said:
what do the Fathers say and how did they approach the dead?

Respectfully and in the absence of technology. We harvest organs from people. We do autopsies. We embalm the dead with chemicals that replace their blood. I find it interesting to think about.

ArmyMatt · Dec 13, 2022

whatisinausername said:
Respectfully and in the absence of technology. We harvest organs from people. We do autopsies. We embalm the dead with chemicals that replace their blood. I find it interesting to think about.

the Fathers continue to this day, so there is no absence of technology. so again, what is their approach?

Chesterton · Dec 13, 2022

whatisinausername said:
Most of who you have been will amount to much more than you are at death.

Don't you see how un-Christian, atheistic and materialistic that statement is?

whatisinausername · Dec 13, 2022

Chesterton said:
Don't you see how un-Christian, atheistic and materialistic that statement is?

No. The majority of what you have been in your life gets flushed down the toilet or put in the trash. Our cells die after a number of years. Your red blood cells last only 3 months. That is why your poop is brown.

I find it all interesting being a devout Christian and someone that works in a lab with the living and the dead. A had a manager who left a vial of his blood at my work station on his last day. I asked him if I should keep it as a relic (as he was VERY much liked). He found it funny and I tossed it. What if he were a Saint?

ArmyMatt · Dec 13, 2022

whatisinausername said:
What if he were a Saint?

if he is a saint, that’s something to answer for on Judgment Day, when everything we’ve done will be exposed.

Chesterton · Dec 13, 2022

whatisinausername said:
No. The majority of what you have been in your life gets flushed down the toilet or put in the trash. Our cells die after a number of years. Your red blood cells last only 3 months. That is why your poop is brown.

I've never heard of any Christian who thinks a human is his cells. You know the expression "you are what you eat"? You're saying that the majority of what I've been in my life is food, that I have been just cows and bananas and such, that I am just material from the material world.

whatisinausername said:
I find it all interesting being a devout Christian and someone that works in a lab with the living and the dead. A had a manager who left a vial of his blood at my work station on his last day. I asked him if I should keep it as a relic (as he was VERY much liked). He found it funny and I tossed it. What if he were a Saint?

Click to expand...

A manager left his blood for you? You considered keeping it as a relic because he was well-liked? Are you trolling us here?

E.C. · Dec 13, 2022

Akita Suggagaki said:
I am all for a more eco friendly process. Do we really need embalming, caskets and vault? What a scam!!

We really don't. Although the vaults help for planning purposes.

My old parish, ironically in Washington state, used to bury parishioners in wood caskets. We had a crew of three guys who could make a casket in two or three days if needed. When one of the grandmothers of the parish reposed, I was not only a pallbearer for her (and her husband four months prior) but I actually helped our caretaker nail the lid shut. In church. At the end of the funeral. It was an honor. There is no describable sound in the world like a nail going through a casket lid and into the casket itself.

They were both buried in a vault afterwards because that was the cemetery's rules. Neither were embalmed, but some cosmetic makeup was added to their faces and hands by some of the ladies of the parish. That was it.
You actually can make a funeral plan and as part of it include an opting out of embalming.

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