(This post is visiting from my MySpace blog, but it deals with the philosophy of death and all that good stuff, so maybe it'll spark some discussion here.)
It has become popular to incinerate inanimate bodies as opposed to putting them underground in fancy boxes. This is hardly surprising, as fancy boxes can be quite expensive, and we mostly aren't so superstitious anymore as to think that bodies will one day come back to life to live with Jesus and happy baby sheep in sunshine land. Of course, far be it from us to lose hope en masse, and my own geek intellectual brothers--the transhumanists--seem quite convinced that we'll be able to raise a well-preserved corpse in the future.
I don't like to piss on technological optimism, but even if we could resurrect corpses, why would we go about doing it? We could upload an isomorphic representation of their brain state into a mind simulator program, but that's about shit for an afterlife. The details of what consititutes consciousness or the self are far too sketchy to be sure that such a thing would even be worth the effort. Then again, I've always thought that folks are too overly frightened of death for their own good. Oh no, we eventually stop experiencing things. Or, really, oh well.
We die all the time in some sense. We're hardly conscious during every moment of sleep, and I don't exactly remember suffering for such lapses. If we really want to embrace life, we also have to embrace death: look into his hollow eye sockets and shrug. You aren't really loving life if your grounds for doing so are a comparison to a dreaded lack thereof. Have we drifted so far from existentialism and into fancy that we forget such things? For most folks, clearly not. Incinerate away, my friends. Just wait 'till their dead. Right?