In practice it has not always been so easy, and those of us who think of ourselves as CORPSES (Children of Rationalist Parents) may find ourselves seriously embarrassed when it comes to carrying out the wishes of our progenitors when they die. Bans on mourning and demands for oblivion are not going to have much effect when we are wracked with grief – when happiness is the last thing we want, when we find ourselves dwelling in remorse and remembrance and will not be comforted. Hence one of the most conspicuous elements in the transformation of rationalism in recent decades: the rise of a burgeoning service industry supplying secular celebrants for humanist funerals, to fill a ritualistic gap that earlier generations would not have wanted to acknowledge.
The decline of hardline rationalism about bereavement may be part of a global social trend towards blubbering sentimentality and public exhibitions of grief: Princess Diana and all that. But there could be something more serious behind it too: a suspicion that the no-nonsense approach to death advocated by pure-minded atheists bears a horrible resemblance to the attitudes that lie behind the great political crimes of the 20th century – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the massified deaths of two world wars, the millions discarded as obstacles to progress in the Soviet Union and China, and of course the Nazi death camps.
If Holocaust stories are uniquely hard to bear, it is not because they describe suffering, death and humiliation on a bewildering scale, but because of the calculated impersonality and disinterested anonymity with which they were inflicted on their victims. (...)
As far as the old-style rationalists were concerned, any desire to ritualise death and remember the dead was a sign of a failure of nerve, and an inability to grow out of religious indoctrination – especially all that Christian stuff about personal survival, arraignment before a divine judge and consignment to heaven or hell. But in fact Christianity does not speak with one voice when it comes to death and dying. In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus issued a severe reprimand to a disciple who wanted to give his father a proper funeral: get back to work at once, he said, and “let the dead bury their dead.” The rebuke may seem like an enlightened anticipation of 20th-century rationalism, but it is also perfectly consistent with some main doctrines of Christianity: if the body is just a temporary home for an immortal soul, and a perpetual temptation to sin, then the sooner we shuffle it off the better.
The Egyptians, lacking the assurance of eternal life, had favoured mummification and entombment, at least for the ruling elite, while the Greeks and Romans preferred cremation and a good epitaph, and the Jews went in for speedy burials, usually in communal graves. But the Christians, with their confident expectation of a life after death, had no need for such pagan mumbo-jumbo.
by Jonathan Ree, Rationlist Association | Read more:
Image: Jessica Chandler
