Revolutionizing death

Cemeteries are a terrible idea. As a strict and sincere atheist, I believe that the moment all the blinking lights go out in my brain, I'm a lump of pinkish goo and hair. I accept that. I don't particularly like it, but I firmly believe it, and I will never be persuaded otherwise. But the actual act of dying and being put through a mortuary is a mental conflict for me, and it should be for everyone. Here's why:

Cemeteries take up an enormous portion of the earth's surface, often on arable land that we could be farming. So what the fuck? I'm an atheist, I don't know if my fellow contributors are, but what the hell is the point of all this coffin and burial industry? The cemeteries are getting full of melting Christians, and we're building new ones, with no public outcry. We're creating the same problem with landfills, except garbage dumps get converted to baseball diamonds and city parks you can play soccer in. No dice for cemeteries, they're sacred ground, blessed by priests and hugged by god. Cremation is just as bad. You pay thousands of dollars to put someone in a suit (they're dead, they don't care), and then you pay thousands more lighting it on fire. With natural gas. A resource we should be saving.

So rise up with me and spread the word, the business of funerals is just that: business, and we need to curtail this now and find a new, inexpensive and non-wasteful way of getting rid of our old dead people. Hi-rise cemeteries for the religious folk sounds easy enough to build. Your family can lease a death suite, they can plant grass indoors and keep your body in a nice shallow grave, or perhaps a wall safe. Give the building tinted windows so us secular folk can get with our lives (or deaths).

For me, like Chad Vangaalen said in his song "willow tree", I want you to "take my body, put it in a boat. Light it on fire... send it out to sea."