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

Tigger_juggler

Yes, I think you make an excellent point there. The thing is that having faith in 'real world' things is normally based on prior evidence that you can 'trust' that person etc. When people lose faith or have none it is because they have been let down. The 'good' thing about having faith in a god is that when you are let down by the god for what ever reason one can justify those reasons that god knows what he is doing. An unconditional trust can help.

I am sometimes jealous of people who have that level of faith and are very happy in believing that there is someone looking over them and waiting for them when they 'pop their clogs'(i.e. die!). Unfortunately, I could never have that faith as I would be living a lie.

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I understand that, and sometimes it takes something else too that will make you believe in a higher power or not. There is also a reason I have the faith I do in God, but in this case it's a tad too personal and therefore will not be mentioned here.

But, again, as my Dad said, in the end we all die and someone will be right. No one knows the future, so we won't know if we'll be in heaven, hell, in the ground returning to the earth, travelling around in outerspace, ruling over our own planet, be reincarnated into another animal, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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I am not a Catholic, although for some reason people think I am, therefore I have no comment on transubstantion. Communion for Protestants is symbolic (but no less important.)
As for open coffins, that's entirely up to the family, at least it is here. Both my parents had closed coffins, and for my brother we had an open coffin, which was an important thing, for my sisters who had to come from 100s of kilometres away, so that they got the chance to see him again.

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For me, the whole issue is the disputed consensual aspect of the donation! (Despite several people trying to make my objections be about religion! Some people are simply obsessive! )
The other issue is the complete lack of dignity in the exhibition. I've quoted the Boston Legal episode, where the angry widow donated her husband's body to a similar exhibtion, and he was posed as a street bum, bottle in hand, to the distress of his children. If the 'donors' of the bodies (the families, I assume!) knew their relatives would be posed as they are, would they have been so happy? Somehow I doubt it.

sorry, I thought you were catholic for some reason.

Your objections don't come accross, to me, as being mostly about consent though.

The problem is, that since it is religious types mostly who are complaining, anyone who disagrees with them is taken as being anti-religion. That might be, but mostly people want the religious types to keep out of our lives if we're not part of their gang.

They are perfectly within their rights, IMO, to tell adherents of their religion to stay away but that's the extent of their remit. Everything else is just "by the way".

It is not about religeon for me, as I said I suspect the reasons he is doing the exibitions are nothing to do with education but more with some sort of weird kick he is getting from doing it. As I said I find him very odd and suspect his motives. I also don't think it is particularly dignified what he does to the bodies either. As I said I saw the hour long programme and interviews he has done and can't quite put my finger on it but wouldn't want to pay to see exibitions as somehow encouraging him. Besides the one hour programme went into graffic detail about how the bodies are prepared and showed the finished exibition. As I said I can't quite put my finger on it but feel he revels in death and what he does to the bodies in a not very normal way.
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Genuine autopsey work is a very differant and important matter and can help to find cures for illnesses, train doctors, and trace things like asbestos damage. But the bodies are then not displayed in a frankely grotesque manner after.

Tigger_juggler

And the only way which ever god is the real one does exist is if he appeared to everyone somehow ratehr than hiding siliently and allowing the the 'scientific method' of evidence and rational logical thought to conclude that he doesn't exist.

Maybe, appear in front of me then transport me to Australia for 10minutes and bring me back...obviously I would need him to do that with the snap of his fingers not using a long haul flight from Heathrow.

Strangely:

As it is an exhibition intended to arouse emotional responses, it seems as though your reaction is entirely predictable.

Perhaps he IS getting some sort of a frisson from the display; odds are that many other people do as well. If so, the exhibition succeeds.

If there is an issue of consent on the part of the bodydonors, that's a red herring with respect to the validity of the display as legitimate art or education. That side issue can be addressed separately from the question of whether there is any merit to the display.

My reaction would be that there is merit as long as the artist can find a venue and a few members of the public as an audience. Hell, even if he can't, it might have merit. How many artists couldn't find an audience in their lifetimes but are recognised today as being worthy contributors to the arts?

Of course, the fact that Vicky/Della finds it offensive adds to its merit in my opinion.

Pardon me to intrude like this (without reading the backlog), but is this guy the same who had an exhibition of slices of dead bodies last year in Poland?

Mmh, that one, probably:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3307869.ece

Yes it is

Consistency. Gotta love it!

I guess it's fair to say that he has a unique body of work.

I certainly wouldn't call it art, nor got the impression it was intended to be.
As to many of the visitors getting their jollies from the exibition in the same way as the exibitor did I have my doubts. As I said I find the exibitor very odd. I don't want to go into too much detail but feel he has an obsession with dead bodies that goes far beyond what would be called normal. As I said this is only my opinion.

His fascination with the mortal coil after it has been shuffled off is surely at one end of the bell curve. But I also suspect that making you uncomfortable and then question why you feel uncomfortable is precisely his intent.

Sorry, I think that is way deeper than he intended. I think it is more about him than anyone else.

All art is as much about the artist as anything else. Except maybe the audience.

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Very well put, Strangely Strange!

"I am not a Catholic, although for some reason people think I am, therefore I have no comment on transubstantion. Communion for Protestants is symbolic (but no less important.)"

you just pretend really hard to be cannibals, then? does that make it better? dont you see how normal people think cannibals, or people who pretend to be cannibals, are weird?

help me here, cos i dont get the next bit.

"For me, the whole issue is the disputed consensual aspect of the donation!"

then

"The other issue is the complete lack of dignity in the exhibition."

so is the WHOLE issue consent? or not?

and i followed one of your links about consent, and at the end of it was a story which showed there had been some doubt about consent with some bodies, and doktor death had sent them back. it sounded, fdrom the link you gave, like he was doing his best to be as above board as possoble. did you even read the story you pointed us at?

and on dignity, its YOUR idea of dignity. did you even think about what other people might think about your idea of dignity? like i said, in some parts of the world a dignified funeral is being burned on a public bonfire, or being left out for the birds to eat.

i guess what im asking is why is your idea of dignity relevant?

"I've quoted the Boston Legal episode"

earth calling DA, come in DA. i have some important information for you. Boston Legal is not a documentary. those people are ACTORS. they are reading something called a SCRIPT. a script is something a man called a WRITER made up out of his head. it didnt really happen. you do know what fiction is, right? its like a story in a book, you know, like the lord of the rings or the bible. er...

"he was posed as a street bum, bottle in hand, to the distress of his children. If the 'donors' of the bodies (the families, I assume!) knew their relatives would be posed as they are, would they have been so happy? Somehow I doubt it."

well yeah, IF we lived in an episode of Boston Legal. i live in the real world, tho. in the real world, the bodies in the exhibition are NEVER posed in such undignified poses. you wouldnt know that, cos you dont know what your talking about becaus youve never seen it. ALL youve seen is some american TV show AND YOU BELIEVED IT! HAHAHAHAHAHA!

in the real exhibition, the bodies are posed in ways that show how we work. their doing stuff like swimming, horse riding (yeah, they plastinated a horse!), playing basketball or chess (the chess one shows brains...

there was a bit of controversy about the exhibition i saw, but it was about the pose of one body a pregnant woman complete with feotus. some people said it was 'too sexual'. i saw it. didnt look sexy to me. all i could think was that the people whod complained must have been rilly, rilly sick to have been thinking about sex looking at that.

id take any kid over about six to it. younger than that theres no point, they dont know what their looking at. even that young they probably dont believe their real bodies. its kind of hard to understand even for a grownup. but its a real eyeopener to things like just how big your blood vessels are, and how completely the same we all are under the skin, and how well we cope with a body so badly designed

You mean evolved?

No rational intelligent person or being would design the human body the way it is. It is one of the most wasteful, ergonomically poorly designed things around.

It's ironically lucky that our brains which evolved faster than our bodies to cope with what our brains created has meant we at least are able to design stuff to help our bodies cope with modern day.

The spine is one major issue: it evolved to hang in the horizontal plane.

And don't get me started on the whole issue of excrement: both the 'waste' involved in it, the emissions and the discharge chute arrangements.

Show me one effluent point in the world that has got two huge pillows wrapped around the end of it?

I rest my case. Excrement is the one thing that really does show that creationists are wrong. As I say no rational person would design it that way if they had a choice.

HUGE pillows? speak for yourslef!

So basically you have the argument from UNintelligent Design?

I'll buy that as a rebuttal.

If one can argue that the perfection of the design of (anything) is indicative of an intelligent Creator, one can certainly argue that flawed design suggests that the Creator (at the very least) is IMperfect. Non existent is a possibility too, of course.

Old people losing control of their bowels. Impossible to explain from a benevolent, all powerful god perspective; Simple from an evolutionary standpoint.

Ditto with prostate cancer. The list goes on. Crappy design, but inevitable oversights in a system that has natural selection as a paradigm

knee joints are rubbish.

one of the bodies in teh exibition i saw had had a knee replacement, and it looked wierd with this bit of shiny metal in among the bones and muscles