If I were hit by a truck tomorrow, I don’t think any of the people who would go to my funeral would be rationalists, and most of the people who would go would be religious. Should I just let them do whatever they want with my corpse? I don’t want a religious funeral, but it really doesn’t seem like time to have someone put up a big “only idiots believe in an afterlife” sign, as much as I wish I could have one at my funeral.
(My wife has said that she’s opposed to me being cryopreserved because then I won’t join her in the afterlife. She has some strange beliefs about death and spirits and such: she doesn’t just believe in ghosts, she thinks that when things go missing, it’s because the ghost of her dead brother moved them. I’m going to have to work it out with her once I can actually afford to pay for it—we’re at the “choosing which of food, rent, and electricity we’re going to pay for this month” stage of broke.)
Yeah, I’d personally handle a family funeral (for a person who happens to be rationalist) very different from a “rationalist funeral.” (My friend who died a couple years ago had a large number of rationalist friends. His family held a religious funeral in his home town. Almost exclusively rationalist friends in NYC and Berkeley had respective funerals that were able to basically assume ‘rationalist culture’.)
This is a pretty important distinction and this post was almost entirely intended to frame the “cultural rationalist” funeral/memorial. I’ll update the OP to clarify. (It turns out that much of the advice here is still good for a mixed/non-denominational funeral – a simple ‘take turns talking’ style funeral culminating in a final reflection/farewell’ seems generally appropriate. But I’d have framed it much differently and had a different journey towards that end point if I were optimizing for “non-denominational” over “rationalist.)
Should I just let them do whatever they want with my corpse?
Why not? I mean, it doesn’t really seem like you can currently afford to pay for even life-insurance-funded cryopreservation at the moment (given that you report having trouble with basic necessities), so unless that were to change in some way, why not let your surviving friends and social allies make their preferred choice about the matter?
If I were hit by a truck tomorrow, I don’t think any of the people who would go to my funeral would be rationalists, and most of the people who would go would be religious. Should I just let them do whatever they want with my corpse? I don’t want a religious funeral, but it really doesn’t seem like time to have someone put up a big “only idiots believe in an afterlife” sign, as much as I wish I could have one at my funeral.
(My wife has said that she’s opposed to me being cryopreserved because then I won’t join her in the afterlife. She has some strange beliefs about death and spirits and such: she doesn’t just believe in ghosts, she thinks that when things go missing, it’s because the ghost of her dead brother moved them. I’m going to have to work it out with her once I can actually afford to pay for it—we’re at the “choosing which of food, rent, and electricity we’re going to pay for this month” stage of broke.)
Yeah, I’d personally handle a family funeral (for a person who happens to be rationalist) very different from a “rationalist funeral.” (My friend who died a couple years ago had a large number of rationalist friends. His family held a religious funeral in his home town. Almost exclusively rationalist friends in NYC and Berkeley had respective funerals that were able to basically assume ‘rationalist culture’.)
This is a pretty important distinction and this post was almost entirely intended to frame the “cultural rationalist” funeral/memorial. I’ll update the OP to clarify. (It turns out that much of the advice here is still good for a mixed/non-denominational funeral – a simple ‘take turns talking’ style funeral culminating in a final reflection/farewell’ seems generally appropriate. But I’d have framed it much differently and had a different journey towards that end point if I were optimizing for “non-denominational” over “rationalist.)
Why not? I mean, it doesn’t really seem like you can currently afford to pay for even life-insurance-funded cryopreservation at the moment (given that you report having trouble with basic necessities), so unless that were to change in some way, why not let your surviving friends and social allies make their preferred choice about the matter?