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If you could just bury the body in the ground, it would be fine. But if you put it in the usual cemetery, there will be a casket which is then placed in a concrete or fiberglass vault. It will then be placed several feet under the ground. It will be difficult, if not impossible for plants to make use of the body.
Why not? "Returning our bodies to nature" has precious little impact on nature one way or the other, to put it mildly. If you're more comfortable w/cremation for whatever reason, you aren't bothering nature in the least.
Considering that, except at the cheapest prices, one of the traditional selling points of caskets is how well they'll preserve the dead person from all those "return to nature" things the OP seems to value so much, I don't think many people in the US want to see their loved ones simply decompose back to bacteria and such. And if you just stuck people in the ground, that decomposition process has all manner of potentially Bad Outcomes, particularly if the body is close to a water supply.
Why cremation? Well, why not, unless you also believe in some interpretations of various religions, that require burial so that the dead can be resurrected at some point, i.e., judgment day. It also lets you keep the remains of the loved one close by.
But the topic does remind me of one of my favorite classical music jokes, in two parts.... What is Beethoven doing today?
Decomposing. (bada-bing!)
What would Beethoven be doing if he were alive today?
Clawing madly at the inside of his coffin, trying to get out.
In nature,animals after death are decomposed by microbes and become the nutrients of microbes and plants,thus participate in the circulation of the organic matter in biosphere. This course has already lasted hundreds of millions of years since life appeared on earth,and our bodies are the products of this circulation.
After death,as long as not to burn the body as garbage by cremation,the body would still be in the original natural process.The remains would be eaten by microbes and plants,thus turned into other life forms and still in the biosystem and participate in the eternal circulation and evolvement of life in nature.
I get the idea of nature recycling the body as nutrition for other life forms, but this would have to entail burying bodies without embalming them. (I think burying embalmed bodies is truly ridiculous--eventually just too much land involved.) Without embalming, you would have a similar problem (land shortage) plus the problem of disease. Perhaps you could bury unembalmed bodies in a desert area to add nutrients to an area that has a shortage. Still, considering the number of people on earth, now and future, cremation seems like the practical choice. After all, most parts of the earth are rich in nutrients from various forms of biomass.
As an aside, it's interesting to note the many large tracts of land in our well-populated metropolitan areas that are devoted to warehousing dead bodies.
Humans were created by nature,not by man himself.It is very recently (compared to the long history of life in nature) that cremation became one of the rituals to dispose human dead bodies,before that no human society and other animals burn their deads to ashes,all of them simply buried the dead in earth.So I think burial is natural and cremation is manmade and unnatural.
humans are the product of nature,during the course of the production,millions of generations of humans born and died, very few were burned to ashes after death.If we have the least sence of trust in nature that created us,should we be cautious to change the way humans and animals dispose their dead for millions of years,as cremation burn the body immediately to ashes is so different from the simple and natural burial.
From a personal perspective,since I don't know why and how I came into being,I think its safe and prudent to be buried after my death,in the hope that nature may arrange some kind of producing new lives which may have some connection with my precent existence and my body not been burned to ashes by cremation,and which worth to live as my life.
Just as the origin of human life is unknown,the future of human life is unknown too.There are billioms of years to go.No one can refute the infinite posibilities of nature,since it had really made us from nearly nihility.
Humans were created by nature,not by man himself.It is very recently (compared to the long history of life in nature) that cremation became one of the rituals to dispose human dead bodies,before that no human society and other animals burn their deads to ashes,all of them simply buried the dead in earth.So I think burial is natural and cremation is manmade and unnatural.
The history of cremation is quite long: Cremation dates to at least 20,000 years ago in the archaeological record with the Mungo Lady, the remains of a partly cremated body found at Mungo Lake, Australia.
In the Middle East and Europe, both burial and cremation are evident in the archaeological record in the Neolithic. Cultural groups had their own preference and prohibitions.
Phoenicians practiced both cremation and burial.
Scholars today quite generally agree that cremation probably began in any real sense during the early Stone Age -- around 3000 B.C. -- and most likely in Europe and the Near East.
With the advent of the Bronze Age -- 2500 to 1000 B.C. -- cremation moved into the British Isles and into what is now Spain and Portugal.
In the Mycenaean Age -- circa 1000 B.C. -- cremation became an integral part of the elaborate Grecian burial custom. In fact, it became the dominant mode of disposition by the time of Homer in 800 B.C. and was actually encouraged for reasons of health and expedient burial of slain warriors in this battle-ravaged country.
By the time of the Roman Empire -- 27 B.C. to 395 A.D. -- it was widely practiced, and cremated remains were generally stored in elaborate urns, often within columbarium-like buildings.
However, by 400 A.D., as a result of Constantine's Christianization of the Empire, earth burial had completely replaced cremation except for rare instances of plague or war, and for the next 1,500 years remained the accepted mode of disposition throughout Europe.
I want to be cremated, mixed with gunpowder, and stuffed into a firework shell for blowing up. The idea is that I blanket my entire home town, and to put on a pretty, if brief light show, and to literally go out with a bang.
If my corpse could be left in an open field for vultures to feast on that would be fine by me. The funeral business is such a waste; caskets. concrete liners in the ground; such a waste of space. Cremation is easy and cheap.
The origin of life and humans is unknown.That is to say that humans do not know how they came into being and why humans come to this world.
We only know that life and humanity is the product of natural process.Humans should therefore be in a humble attitude towards nature and the product of natural process: the human body.
Death and giving birth both are parts of natural process.Death is human body lose its functions and stops working.In nature,animals after death are decomposed by microbes and become the nutrients of microbes and plants,thus participate in the circulation of the organic matter in biosphere. This course has already lasted hundreds of millions of years since life appeared on earth,and our bodies are the products of this circulation.
After death,as long as not to burn the body as garbage by cremation,the body would still be in the original natural process.The remains would be eaten by microbes and plants,thus turned into other life forms and still in the biosystem and participate in the eternal circulation and evolvement of life in nature.
Nature never produces garbage.Its every process is reasonable,otherwise it is unlikely to create life and humans.
Death is a normal natural process,but cremation is the artificial destruction of the human body.and is the artificial destruction of things and processes that we don't really know.
Burial is to return the human body to nature.let it be handled by nature,even coffins are redundant.The dead thus blend naturally and be in one with nature and live forever with nature.By that we pay reverence to nature and things that we don't really know and also the greatest respect for the dead.
So why cremation?
If I didn't have to be embalmed I would say dig a hole and throw me in, but the thought of slowly decomposing (longer than natural) is disgusting. Also, I do not like the idea of spending so much money on a casket and a funeral service, especially when you're just going to ooze all over it. Burn me throw me in a box until one of my family members can take me to a mountain top.
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