organ donation

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After I die anything can go - it'll be no use to me and I'll know nothing of it so I signed up.

No, I get exactly what you say. You're saying that it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money to bury a body that's just going to rot anyway, right?

But they're not buying comfort for the body; nor (unless they have odd beliefs about the afterlife) are they buying the casket for the benefit of the person whose body is in it. They're buying emotional support for themselves.

The benefits of what people buy with money don't always have to be tangible benefits. These are people who, their whole lives, have looked at a face that gave them information about the person who they loved. When they think of that person, they think of that body. They still have emotional ties to that person; and they desperately wish to connect with that person. They can't connect with the soul; so they do their best to somehow connect with the body. Those social bonds are strong as steel; they can't be broken just because the person is dead.

And so your NT, with his whole life based around connecting with people, is left with the body of a person he used to connect with. Old habits are hard to break. Emotions are just as real as material objects. Feelings have just as much of an impact on the mind as logic does.

Everything people do, even supposedly irrational things, they do for a reason. Logic dictates only that the body should be dealt with in a way that stops it from becoming a health hazard; but funerals are not done for logical reasons. The reasons behind funerals are psychological, social, and emotional. Without funerals, people would have more difficulty grieving. People would, paradoxically, be more frightened of death.

Why do we use burial, rather than some other method? That one's cultural. As a culture, we (people from North America and Europe, in this case) have been settled down and farming for a good long time. Farming means being attached to the land; it means passing down the land to your children; it means storing important things on that land. Is it really so unlikely that people who raised crops and animals for a living for hundreds of years would bury their dead in the same land they were so intimately tied to? It was a way of saying, "Here are my ancestors. Here I will be. Here my children will be." It was a way of integrating yourself into your family and your community. That's how people deal with their basic fear of death--they see themselves as part of a larger picture. (Organ donors, incidentally, are doing exactly that by giving permission for their organs to "live on" after them.)

We haven't been industrialized for that long--not nearly long enough for burial to fall out of favor. I think there are many better alternatives; scientific research could use more bodies than it's getting, and there are lots of new options for ecologically safer burials that don't involve so many chemicals or toxic fumes in the air. But even as ecologically questionable as they are, burial customs do serve a purpose. If you were to remove everything but logic from a human being, then sure, they would be irrational; but if you look at the whole social/cultural/emotional picture, they're pretty much essential.

I'm definately being an organ donar. Might as well.

Scenario 1:
Organ donor and non-organ donor are brought to a small hospital in the middle of the night in bad shape. The one surgeon on call has the time to save just one of you. There are no other factors to decide which patient to operate on first. Which one do you think they'll let die first?

Scenario 2:
Doctors aren't sure what is wrong with you and can attempt a treatment which could help if they are right, and would kill you if they are wrong. Do you think their judgement here would be affected if they knew you were an organ donor?

Scenario 3:
Huge accident, overturned bus, airline crash, terrorist attack; a hundred people are brought in. They couldn't possibly be all helped all at once, so doctors must decide who to treat first. Some of the accident victims may even need organs themselves, or the hospital has other sick patients who need organs. If doctors made certain choices here and bumped a couple of organ donors to the bottom of the queue, the odds are no one else would ever learn their reasons.

I'm not an organ donor.

That's a little naive, don't you think? I have friends in the healthcare business. (And oh yeah it is a business, at least it is in the US.) I know what I'm talking about.

Besides, what if they can't choose who needs help most? Lacking triage, the organ donor could very well find themselves at the bottom of the queue.

i find it hard to believe people would choose who dies based on that:S

apparently the uk is moving towards an 'opt out' rather than 'opt in' system anyway which i think makes alot more sense

I've intended to sign up for about five years, but never got down to it. *shame*