h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What are we atheists to do about funerals?
Getting married in a registry office is accepted and not being christened is fine...but I don't want the bits that medical science can't use being buried in consecrated land.

What are my options?

Attempt to plan your life so that you die in a mincer owned by McDonalds.

Secular cremation - sprinkle it on the rose beds. (Some hospitals already offer this for the bits they can't use.)
Instructions to my heirs Hold a partty, take the ashes with you and sprinkle them when you're all good and drunk. Basically, you need to make a will however young you are and make sure your executors know what you want to happen to your remains.

I personally plan to get married in a ceremony that I and my spouse completely make up, possibly taking place on an weatherbeaten scow and being married by a smelly sea-captain for the price of two bottles of rum.

I like the "get em all good and ripped" idea, so I think I'll steal it. But I think I want to be sprinkled on the Pacific Ocean, because, well, no reason, I suppose, and it won't make any difference to me if they do that, or merely suck up my cremated remains in a Dustbuster and empty me into the waste bin.

I think that anywhere possible to have my ashes spread would be great, but if I did have a choice I think that if it were possible that I like to have my ashes from which every sprinkled into space. I really don't have any particular reason for this other than the fact that astronomy is my life.

Yes but cremation is not ecologically sound.
Can I arrange to be mulched?

I imagine you could, but the union of funeral dirrectors might be disturbed by the idea. Quite a somber occasion, that would be. People gathered around, mourning the loss of a loved one, when the sound of a wood chipper, run by people from the Department of Public Works, disturbs their grief. The corpse begins its slow journey along the conveyor into the jaws of the chipper. Only seconds later, the pulped remains- bone, blood, and entrails- spray out the back, to be collected in large plastic bags and used as fertilizer in Farmer Bob's wheat fields. Just like the end of 'Fargo'.

Could give rise to a whole new industry catering to people who don't want their food fertilized by human remains.

-jb

Don't tell anyone I died, dig a hole in the back forty and let me push up daisies.

No, really I have asked to be cremated and my ashes half spread across the Rocky Mountains (you'd have to read Spirit Wanderer to understand) and half over the OutBack.

'Nonnie
(Who plans on using the dragon wings I acquire on death to fly to Oz anyway. Wonder if carrying my own ashes would be a breach of protocol? )

PS: Mother was the one who wanted the hole on the back forty. Unfortunately too many folks were in on the secret of her death.