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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Nope. They bury their dead and they are very thoroughly destroyed by decomposition. That won't prevent God from restoring them in the future.

And yes it is silly they don't extend this logic a little further into thinking God will restore someone from a pile of dust or missing an organ due to organ donation.

Christian views on the resurrection of the dead are very similar to the Orthodox Jewish view. This is a key area where the Pharisees’ perspective was shared by Jesus and of course Paul, and so rabbinic Judaism and Christianity pulled from the same source.

Interestingly enough, though the Pharisees were usually the foil for Jesus’ preaching, there’s a key point in all the synoptic gospels where a Saducee constructs a complicated question about the resurrection to try and probe the meaning of it, and Jesus gives an answer that compares the resurrected dead to the angels. Luke adds this interesting anecdote: "Some of the teachers of the law responded, 'Well said, teacher!'" In other words, the argument of Luke is that some of the Pharisees responded, "yeah, stick it to those Saducees who deny the resurrection!"

It's an interesting story that complicates the view common in Christian preaching that the Pharisees were uniquely evil or the great enemies of Jesus, rather than people he was so critical of because they shared certain important values in common, particularly the place of common people in living out the commandments of God and the importance of the "kingdom of priests" beyond simply the Levitical priesthood, as well as, of course, the resurrection of the dead.

Most Christian traditions approve of organ donation, however, seeing it as a meritorious act of charity.

Views on cremation were historically very critical, but the main source of opposition has been twofold: 1) cremation creates a culture where the bodies of the dead are seen as disposable rather than a part of their person that should be laid to rest and 2) cremation destroys the remains that might become relics (which themselves are usually skeletal).

The view of all Christian traditions that venerate relics is that the body of holy people is a vessel of grace, which persists after death. Catholicism and Orthodoxy both historically reject cremation for this reason, but Catholic canon law has changed to allow for cremation so long as point 1 isn't a problem and the remains are reverently interred. As a prudential judgment, I disagree with this, as I think the culture of cremation leads too easily into denial of Christian views of the body and not permitting it draws a firm line in the cemetery that divides the Christian view from non-Christian views.