Religion
Jewish law forbids embalming for traditional burials, which it considers to be desecration of the body. The body is ritually washed by select members of the Jewish community, wrapped in a muslin sheet, and placed in an all-wood casket. The casket must not have any metal in it, and it often has holes in the bottom to ensure that it and the cadaver rapidly decompose and return to the earth. Burial vaults are not used unless required by the cemetery. In Israel, Jews are buried without a casket, in just the shroud.
Islamic law instructs the deceased to be washed and buried with only a wrapping of white cloth to preserve dignity. The cloth is sometimes perfumed, but as in natural burial, no chemical preservatives or embalming fluid are used, nor is there a burial vault, coffin or casket. Coffins are used, however, in countries such as the UK, where the law requires it.
Read more about this topic: Natural Burial
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Not thou nor thy religion dost controule,
The amorousnesse of an harmonious Soule,
But thou would’st have that love thy selfe: As thou
Art jealous, Lord, so I am jealous now,
Thou lov’st not, till from loving more, thou free
My soule: Who ever gives, takes libertie:
O, if thou car’st not whom I love
Alas, thou lov’st not mee.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)