Christian funerals refer to a hereafter. How is it known that there is a hereafter? And, if there were one, how would any particular individual's destination be known? Skeptics attending funerals listen with respect and interest but remain skeptical. We are united by the accepted custom that everyone except a few sectarians attends weddings and funerals of friends and colleagues irrespective of denomination or tradition. When the Pope announced that it was OK for Catholics to attend family weddings etc in other churches, he merely acknowledged what anyone with any sense was already doing. Vox populi vox Dei.
Dominic Flandry effectively prays to his dead fiancee, Kossara, but does not think that he receives an answer. Mormon missionaries (scroll down) advised me to ask God for the truth about religious matters so I did. But I have to interpret whether I received an answer.
12 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And at the very beginning of Chapter 1 of ENSIGN FLANDRY, we see mention of how the light waves carrying the loyal pledges of men who saluted Emperor Georgios on his birthday would lap on his tomb. You commented that indicated how the bodies of deceased Emperors were treated after they died, to be solemnly and respectfully buried.
Christians, like the late and Protestant Duke of Edinburgh, believe the New Testament is proof of the life and resurrection of Christ. And of an afterlife. Catholics would add that the TRADITION of the Church and the miracles God sometimes grants thru his saints are also proofs. And Christian philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas have proposed arguments, thru reason alone, for the existence of God.
Truthfully, I am skeptical of the skeptics!
Ad astra! Sean
Note that universalistic religions like Christianity have (relatively) more egalitarian funeral rites.
Eg., the Haida, the longhouse totem-pole builders, gave their chiefs elaborate funerals and carved a totem pole to recount their lives.
Commoners got buried in communal trenches.
Slaves were just chucked into the ocean for the fish.
Likewise, one of the ways you can trace Christianization in Europe is the decay of elaborate funeral rites for high-status individuals with elaborate grave-goods interred with them. Christians didn't get buried in long-ships with human sacrifices and horses and elaborate displays of wealth and weaponry. Their funerals might have processions and such, but the body went into the ground in a shroud.
With earlier cultures, this means we really don't know their funerary customs as far as the mass of the population is concerned.
The Corded Ware/Battle-Ax culture in Europe, for example, buried its chiefs individually in grave-mounds which often still stand, and the names for the culture are based on the pottery and weapons that were interred with them.
We have far fewer examples of commoner burials.
NB: the change took some time.
Hrolf Granger (aka "Rollo"), the Viking founder of Normandy, technically converted to Christianity as a condition of being given the fief...
(In fact, he'd seized it, and his "homage" to King Charles involved kissing his foot, which he did by grabbing him by the ankle and holding him upside down.)
But at the time of his death, he not only made gifts to various churches for funeral masses, he had dozens of slaves and horses killed and interred with him, along with rich treasures and weapons.
His descendants were more sincere about the White Christ.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As always, you give us very interesting comments! And I did know of how, by and large, Christian burial rites were basically the same for all, for the King as for the peasant. Yes, high ranking persons got more elaborate funerals, but more as a matter of degree rather than in kind. Christian Kings of France and England were not buried with sacrificed slaves or with huge amounts of costly goods. I have read of how some kings gave instructions their bodies be dressed as monks. And with crucifixes probably placed in their hands. And that would be about it.
Ad astra! Sean
Christianity values humility, which would be a bizarrely weird concept to pagan warrior-aristocrats. Their value-system exalted a ferocious pride in power and status, which had to be flaunted even in death, and savagely asserted in life.
Christianity started out as the consolatory religion of the powerless, of slaves and women and members of despised subject-races like the Jews, and it still shows; ‘my kingdom is not of this earth’, because all its followers were going to get in this life was a face full of dirt.
As Nietzsche pointed out in “The Geneology of Morals”, much of the new faith’s moral underpinning was an attempt to undermine the master class’ worldview by a sort of cultural-psychological jujitsu, since they couldn’t fight them straight up. Hence the stress on empathy, which as Nietzsche said is the mechanism by which suffering becomes a contagious disease. And even if that didn’t work, you could at least hope for a heaven while the earthly master burned in Hell.
The old pagan faiths were more public than matters of private belief, and they were this-world oriented. As the ghost of Achilles says in Homer, “better to be the hired hand of a poor peasant than a king among the.strengthless dead”. They were the religions of the powerful.
Incidentally, Buddhism was founded by the son of a king, not of a village carpenter, and -that- still shows, too! I if in rather subtle ways.
My view:
Christianity, essentially the belief that "Jesus is risen!," could only have been founded after he had died so it was not founded by him. Peter was the first to recognize Jesus's Messiahship while the latter was still alive and the first to proclaim his resurrection after he had died so Peter founded Christianity as a Jewish sect and Paul relaunched it as a Gentile religion by allowing converts to be baptized without first being circumcised even though Paul was arrested making an offering in the Temple so had not completely split from Judaism. If Christianity were a novel, then Jesus would be the central character while Peter and Paul would be the co-authors.
We know Socrates almost exclusively through his followers - and you get a very different view of him in, say Xenophon than you do in Plato.
I have not read any Xenophon.
Jesus's teaching was not "Jesus is Risen!" but "The kingdom is at hand. Repent and believe the good news."
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Yes, I agree Christianity was simply BEYOND the mental horizon of paganism, with its exaltation of pride, power, and wealth in this life.
Your mention of Nietzsche's view of Christianity reminded me of how Adolf Hitler had similar ideas about Christianity after he moved to Vienna in 1908. A religion he came to privately hate and persecuted as much as he dared to do during his rule of Germany.
Paul: Except Christ did not stay dead, but rose again. THAT changes everything and makes arguments like yours unconvincing. I do not agree Peter and Paul were the founders of Christianity. They were commissioned and authorized by the risen Christ for what we see them doing.
And PETER preached to non Jews as well, such as to the centurion Cornelius. To say nothing of his strong association with the pagan city of Rome itself. All Paul did was to extend and build on what Peter had started.
And, even if people with beliefs similar to what were stated here deny the claims of Christianity, they have a very hard time explaining away things like the Shroud of Turin or the miraculous cures recorded at Lourdes.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Scientists should not explain anything away but should always accept that there are phenomena that they do not understand as yet.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Or course I agree with that principle. Another point I should have made is that I think the Shroud of Turin and Lourdes are not ONLY for Christians but also for skeptics and unbelievers. They are meant by God to at least make them uncertain.
Ad astra! Sean
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