Religious Attitudes to Death: What Every Pathologist Needs to Know. Part 2

Abstract

Special significance has always been given to the disposal of the dead throughout history and in every human society. The practice originates back to the ideas enthused by primitive people regarding human nature and destiny as opposed to sanitary concerns, when the disposal of the dead was ritualistic. Examples can be seen when studying, for example, the Palaeolithic people, such as the Neanderthals and later groups, because as well as burying their dead they also provided them with food, weapons and other implements. This implies that there was a belief that the dead still needed such things beyond the grave with such significant practices being traced back to approximately 50,000 BC. Practiced in most parts of the world, the ritual burial of the dead seems to stem from an instinctive incapacity or denial on the part of man to believe that death is the ultimate conclusion of human life. Additionally, the belief by man that something or some part of the individual person who has died continues to exist in some way perseveres today, even though there is clear scientific knowledge of physical decomposition caused by death itself. In contrast, the idea of personal extinction through death is a difficult concept that was unfamiliar until the sixth century BC, when it developed in the metaphysical considerations of Indian Buddhism. Such beliefs were not evident in the ancient Mediterranean world before its presentation by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC).

The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or sociaL...In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence. Emile Durkheim 1858–1917 [1]