Is Cremation Permissible for Christians?

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Salvation in Christ Alone and the Coming Judgment

The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of Almighty God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear His words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed, and they will perish. God wrapped Himself in flesh, condescended, and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the Father, where He sits now to make intercession for us.

Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear His words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

Introducing the Cremation Question

Welcome to Bible Bash, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask. We're your hosts, Harrison Kerrig and Pastor Tim Mullett, and today we'll seek to answer the age-old question, is cremation permissible for Christians?

Now, before we get into this episode, I've just got to say, we took a little break for Christmas there, Tim, but it feels pretty good to finally be back recording episodes again. We kind of got ahead of schedule before Christmas so that we could take off for the holidays and do all of our traveling and gift-giving.

We didn't close down our church, so we met with our church family and worshipped God on the day that Christ was born. So that was nice, being away from everything, but I think there's something that feels good about just being able to get back into the regular groove and make new episodes.

Yeah, the podcast grind, man. So it was a fun break, but we're back at it. We're back in the saddle.

We're going to have to get out the oil.

Yeah, dust off all the cobwebs. That's right. But today we're here. We're talking about cremation versus a normal, probably what we would consider a more traditional burial method and putting someone in a box and then putting them in the ground six feet deep.

I think, I guess, do you want to start with just, we did a Twitter poll on this, and we got a pretty good response out of it, so do you want to start just explaining what some of the answers to the question were for people and then what the results were?

Burial as the Biblical Pattern

Yeah, well, about two-thirds of people say that cremation is permissible, and give or take about a third said that it wasn't permissible. And this, I mean, historically speaking, this is exactly the opposite of what you would expect.

Yeah, I was a little surprised when you told me that. I was expecting it to be most people saying, no, it is not permissible.

Well, there used to be this idea of a Christian burial. So burial is a very Christian idea. And the reason why burial is a very Christian idea is because as you read through the Bible, I mean, there's 114 verses that use the different conjugations of the form burial.

So you have 114 verses that talk about this. This is the idea that goes all throughout the Bible. Burial, burial, burial, burial. Everyone was buried, except for the bad guys, right? So except for the bad guys, all the good guys were buried.

You have a few examples of cremation in the Bible, like Nadab and Abihu offering strange fire before the Lord. You have some of the Israelites grumbling and God consuming them in the outer parts of the camp with fire.

You have Elijah calling down fire from heaven on the prophets of Baal. So you have cremation there, too. And then hell, ultimately, is an example of cremation.

Just as a side note, isn't it so strange that in every instance where fire is raining down, I guess outside of Pentecost, it's viewed as a bad thing, right? But then you have all these worship songs that are, you know, rain your fire down on us.

It's like, ooh, I don't know if I want to sing that line or not.

Yeah, they don't know who they are on the story at that point. But yeah, definitely. But there used to be this idea of a Christian burial, essentially. And you can look this up on Wikipedia or whatever.

I know that's not an academic source, but you can look up the idea of a Christian burial. And this was basically just the common belief of Christians throughout the entirety of the church age was that the standard impulse was to bury your dead.

And there's reasons why they would do that other than just following the biblical practice at that point. But then that was just kind of the standard state of affairs. And I think recently, basically what's happened is that burial has gotten so expensive and cremation is cheap.

Someone on Twitter, I think, basically said that if cremation costs $25 ,000 and burial only costs $1 ,000, then everyone would realize how dumb the arguments for cremation actually are at that point.

So they're not actually good arguments. Really, what this is about, it's mostly about a financial, like how much it costs at this point. And so what's changed is just burial has become so expensive that then people are kind of coming up with some sort of case to be made for cremation, which is basically an unknown practice throughout church history at that point, just burning.

The only examples of this happening were Romans burning Christians as Roman candles. And Christians were burned by means of persecution. And even the Jews at that point, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego being thrown in a fiery furnace.

The examples in the Bible are all pagan. And throughout church history, they're all pagans basically trying to destroy Christians and deprive them of a Christian burial and humiliate them in that way.

And so this is not coming from the Bible. It's more just coming from the pocketbook.

So with the examples you're giving, basically what you're saying is all of the positive representations, or at least the majority of the positive. Well, it sounds like you're saying all of the positive instances of people being buried throughout the Bible, the positive ones, they're actually being buried, right?

Yes. And not only is it the case that all the patriarchs are buried. So over and over again, you're going to see they were buried with their fathers and buried as throwaway statements. But then there's some major stories in the Bible that center around burial.

So just think about Abraham purchasing the field for Sarah in the Promised Land. That's a burial story, right? Joseph, not wanting his bones to remain in Egypt, but to be brought in the Promised Land.

There's another story that's centered around what happens to their body after death, right? He wants his remains to be brought into the Promised Land, not to stay in Egypt. So you have a lot of stories like that.

Jesus being buried. But there's just burial stories that are taking some very prominent positions within the narratives, too. So it's kind of like the natural expectation, but then there's also some very prominent stories that center around what we're talking about, too.

And so all of their representations of burial as the positive, right? But then as you mentioned, the negatives are getting burned out. The negatives are getting fire rained down on you from heaven, right?

Sure. So is that enough in your mind to say that burial is the obvious right answer, but at least the safer answer in all of this?

The Body, the Image of God, and Resurrection Hope

Yeah, so if you're trying to answer this question, is cremation permissible for the Christian? I would want to say no. My answer is no. But I think looking at the biblical evidence at this point, the Bible says whatever was written for former times was written for our instruction.

That the man of God may be equipped for every good work. And so I think you have all these examples that are given that are in some sense meaningful. So I would want to say no, I don't think it's permissible.

But I mean, it just doesn't seem to follow the pattern that we see. But then at the very least, like in a bare minimum, I would want to say it should be viewed like in a dubious sense. Like meaning it modestly, I would say it's morally dubious, meaning like Christians should kind of be skeptical of this and should be repelled by this.

But then I think we probably should lean more towards this being unthinkable, not it being normal. Does that make sense? Yeah. All right. But like, though, you have to kind of make sense of why that is the case.

So it's not just like you can say, hey, there's a practice and a pattern and a lot of burial stores Bible over and over. Like all the good guys get buried, right? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. All the bad guys get burnt up.

That hell is burned up. Look, what would Jesus do? Well, he got buried. Well, I think, but then even our salvation is picturing we're buried with him in baptism and raised to walk with him in the newness of life.

And so I think there's a lot of symbolism there. And so I think there's questions that undergird this discussion that go beyond the example. So does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Like the examples all lean towards burial, good, cremation, bad.

Mm-hmm. But then you have to think about the theology of what you're doing that undergirds the project. So there's more to be said than that. Okay? Okay. That would just be a starting point. So one of the things that has happened basically in this discussion and as I was having it with the people online, I've had this discussion with people plenty of times in the past.

So this is not new stuff. But most people, what this ultimately revolves around for many people is, if I could just kind of paint the objector's view here, most people when they look at this, they basically have a moral intuition to say, hey, it doesn't matter what happens to the body.

Because the body they may kill, God's truth divides still. They think about the fact that, all right, let's say you were thrown into the lions and eaten up. Let's say you were turned into a Roman candle.

Well, ultimately, God's going to raise you one way or the other.

And the fact that you…. You didn't have any control over what happened to your body.

Yeah. Let's say you get eaten by a shark at sea, whatever. Ultimately, there's a sense in which, from the perspective of you getting a resurrection body, none of it matters. Does that make sense? Yeah.

So we're not like the Greeks or whatever, where Achilles cuts out Hector's tongue and his eyes so that he will enter into the afterlife with blind and mute, essentially, in his ears and deaf. So what happens in the body in this life is not going to carry over into the next in that kind of way.

So you mutilate the body. It's not some sort of superstitious thing to say, hey, I'm going to cut off your ears so that for all eternity you won't be able to hear. That's the opposite, actually.

Yeah. God heals affirmatives in the next life.

Yeah. And I mean, you could get burned up like a Roman candle. It doesn't matter. God's going to still raise you, right? Right. Most people, that's the extent of their thought process on this, is to say it doesn't matter what happens to the body because you're going to get a resurrection body no matter what.

Fair enough? Mm-hmm. All right. But I think that that's profoundly misguided, okay? So for that kind of person who is making that kind of argument, I want to say, well, look, all right, would it be okay, then, to feed your dead wife's body to your pets in order to save on dog food?

No. Why not? It feels icky. Well, isn't that just you being a Puritan, like a Puritanical killjoy?

Feeding my wife's remains to the dogs. That sounds like something some psychopath would do. A psychopath that also refers to their dogs as their fur babies. But it didn't matter, right? It's just a corpse.

No.

No. Hey, but I'm not persuaded by your no.

I don't want Spot eating my dead wife's body to save on dog food.

All right. But does it matter or doesn't it? Okay. I saw an article where essentially a couple devoted their grandmother's body to science and they were paid for it. But then apparently the military had bought her body and she was used as like her body was strapped to a chair and they were using explosive rounds on her body just to see what would happen.

Are you serious? Yes. Oh, my goodness. The question is, is it fine to test military weapons on grandma's corpse? I mean, is it okay to feed your dead wife's body to dogs in order to save on dog food? Can you just throw your dead person off the cliff, right?

Just throw them off the cliff somewhere. It doesn't matter. The thing is, this goes against your sense of what's right and wrong.

Yeah. It's kind of like you think about Holocaust mass graves. It's like, well, that doesn't sound right. I mean, obviously, all of the Holocaust doesn't sound right. But even down to the burial method, like what happens after they die, that doesn't feel that feels equally.

Well, maybe not equally, but certainly very bad.

But the thing is, you have a moral intuition to say that's wrong. And this moral intuition is built into the fabric of who we are in a wide variety of ways. So this moral intuition you have, you may not be able to explain where it comes from, but it's there.

But then this is the same kind of moral intuition that soldiers have on the battlefield where you don't leave any man behind. Right.

Yeah, there'd be like revolutionary times. There's like a period to go and pick up, collect your dead, basically.

In order to give them a Christian burial. Yeah. I mean, but then even if they shoot your friend on the battlefield, don't you? I mean, you've watched plenty of war movies where they're lugging the corpse along with them just to not leave them in enemy territory in order to be defiled or whatever.

And so we have this sense that dead need to be honored. Sure. So if someone dies, you don't just let them laying on the side of the road. You dig them a burial because you feel like you need to honor them in some way.

Right.

Yeah. It's even frowned upon to speak poorly of a person after they die. Unless they're really bad and everyone agrees that they're bad. Then it's like, okay, now we can all say what we're all thinking, but never said out loud.

Right.

But the thing is, you have that moral intuition that's been drilled into you through tradition and culture, right? But then you have to ask, is that right? Is it right? Not just is it there, right? So a lot of the cremation people, the arguments are it doesn't matter whatsoever.

But then if you press them, and I was pressing people on this. So would you feed your dead wife's corpse to your dogs the same on dog food? It doesn't matter, right? She's going to get a resurrection body.

Who cares? It's like, no, that's crossing the line. Well, what's the difference? And I didn't get any answers on what's the difference. And so what's happening there is you have individuals who they're being inconsistent with what they're saying.

Right. So they've accepted some sort of moral obligation there. They just don't know where it comes from.

Does that make sense? Yeah. And then they disagree on where exactly the line is, I guess.

Right. So what's happening is functionally, cremation is 1K, burial is 25K. Okay. That's what's happening. Yeah. What's happening is their conscience is still bound to the other standard to some degree.

Now, I heard one guy on the Twitter poll basically said, yeah, I made the mistake of watching someone get cremated. And that was disturbing to my core. And I should have never done that. Right. And I think it's a lot easier to talk about this in the abstract, let someone else burn the body than it is to picture yourself watching the body get burned up.

At which case it would bring more moral clarity to the situation of what we're actually describing. But my point, though, is just to say you have an intuition that's triggering. Right. With certain levels of desecration of a corpse without necessarily the theology to tell you why that's wrong.

Right. And so part of what's happening, though, is that we're actually not Gnostics. Okay. So meaning we don't just believe that the body is unimportant. Sure. Yeah. Right. So we believe that it's not just the spirit matters and the body is irrelevant.

That's not what we are. We're not Gnostics. And so you have prominent burial stories in the old covenant where it was very important for Abraham to get that burial plot in the promised land and to get Sarah in that burial plot in the promised land.

And even to purchase it. And to purchase it. They were going to give it to him for free, and he refused.

So he died in faith, not receiving the promise of the promised land. Yeah. But the only taste of it he got was burying Sarah in it. And that reflected his eschatological hope. Right. Is that she would get buried in it.

He would get buried in it. But he never got to live there. Right. So the thing is, though, we're not Gnostics. We believe that the body will be raised. And so it's not just like you're looking at that dead body.

And there's been people, I've been at funerals, and they're like, you know, that's not her. And it's like, no, it is. You know, it is. Meaning that that's her. You know what I mean? But that body is going to be raised.

Now, sure. I mean, it can get eaten up and return to dust and everything else. God's going to raise that. Like, there's some correspondence that that body has to the resurrection body. It's not just irrelevant.

You get what I'm saying? And then what you do with it matters. Like, it mattered. Like, it really mattered to the patriarchs what they did with it. Right.

Christ's Burial, the Woman with the Alabaster Flask, and the Resurrection Body

Which, like, you know, to that point, because I think there are a lot of people who think that the physical body they have now, yeah, it has no correlation to whatever physical body they'll have in heaven.

But then, you know, you think about, like, well, I mean, I guess maybe it's first Thessalonians where, you know, Paul talks about the dead will be raised first. Right. And then everyone will be caught up in the air to meet Christ.

Right. Even the ones who are currently living. So, you know, unless you think they're going to, like, they're going to get, like, you know, Dementor kissed, their soul gets, you know, sucked out through their mouth or something, and their soul flies up in the air and their body just flops over or something, which I don't I've never met anyone who thinks that's what would happen to them.

It's probably more just we'll all get caught up in the air with the body that we are currently in. So it seems like even reading through verses like that, the physical body has an unavoidable correspondence to our eternal body.

That's right.

In some way. Right. So there is a correspondence, you know, and the scriptural language at this point is actually pretty strong. You know, so at various points, it's like the same body will be raised.

I mean, it's that kind of thing. Now, we know that. Yeah. I mean, that body gets eaten by a lion. I don't know how that all works, but there's like the point is just to say that there's correlation there and it matters and it matters what happens.

And I can a very real sense in the way Jews and Christians always thought about this is that in honoring that body, you are honoring the person. Okay. So it's not just kind of like you're honoring a corpse.

No one viewed it that way. They didn't view it like, oh, that's just shell.

You know, that's like a meat sack. Yeah.

They didn't do it that way at all. I mean, in fact, I mean, like one of the most and this is a passage that I just couldn't like to the kind of person who is saying what happens, what happens to that corpse doesn't matter.

Right. Mm hmm. Jesus didn't think that way. Okay. So, you know, you remember the story of the woman with the alabaster flask. Okay. Mm hmm. So the disciples, they were all scandalized by the fact that she is wasting all this money on him.

Right.

Yeah. She should have sold it, given it to the poor.

Right. But then what Jesus told them is like, so they didn't realize what was actually happening. They just thought it was a waste. Right. They thought it was a waste of money. But then what was actually happening is Jesus basically aware of this.

So this is Matthew 26, 10. He says, why do you trouble this woman for? She has done a beautiful thing to me. Now notice what he just said. He says, what she's done is a beautiful thing. Right. Mm hmm.

Yeah. She's done a beautiful thing to me. And then he says, well, why is it a beautiful thing for you? Always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me with you. Now notice what he says. In pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare it for burial.

Yeah. Right. Mm hmm. And then he says, truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she will be done will be told in memory of her. And so this passage, it totally undercuts this notion that what you do to the corpse doesn't matter.

Mm hmm. Do you get what I'm saying? So her doing this and preparing his body for burial, it wasn't seen as a waste of money. It wasn't seen as worthless. In fact, Jesus says it was a beautiful thing. Right.

Mm hmm. So what people frequently were saying is Jesus doesn't care. Jesus doesn't care about it. It's like what he did for himself, didn't he? Do you get what I'm saying? He cared that she was honoring his body.

And it wasn't just it didn't just reduce to like that was a nice intention, lady, but like a dumb act of waste of money. Right. Because none of it matters because it's just I'm just going to get raised.

Right. No. Yeah. Like you doing that communicated what was meaningful. Right. So it mattered to Jesus that she prepared his body for burial. And then it mattered to the disciples. They were very concerned to give him a burial.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's why they petitioned the Romans to let them do that. So the point there is just to say it was very important to them. And they didn't like no one in the Old Testament and no one in the New Testament viewed it as just a corpse that you could just dispose of.

Right. Yeah. And so not only that, but then they had theological motivations. They thought what they did with it reflected ultimately their hope. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And even going back to our point about our physical body now having some sort of relation to the one we'll have in heaven. I mean, what happens when Jesus is resurrected? Right. His body is gone.

Right. Right. Because he's alive. He's not in the grave anymore. So it's not like, hey, there's one sort of deflated body in the tomb, and then there's another Jesus body that he's using to go around and talk to all of the disciples and the apostles.

It's just the same body with the same holes in his hands. And glorified.

And glorified. Well, yeah. I mean, that's a great point, just to say that there's a correlation. And I imagine when he returns and the dead and Christ are raised, I mean, all these dust piles all over the world, wherever they were, will come.

And however that works. I mean, if it was eaten by a lion, he'll figure it out. I don't know. Yeah. I guess let him sort out that one. Sort it all out. But I do imagine, though, I mean, when people were raised in the tombs, they came out of the tombs.

There's not still a corpse in there because it was completely irrelevant. They came out of the tombs they came from. And so those are pictures of things. And so I think the point there is just to say that Jews and early Christians, they didn't think that what you did with the body didn't matter at all.

In fact, they thought it reflected their hope, their eschatological hope. So, you know, for Abraham, getting that burial in the Promised Land, that reflected his hope. You see what I'm saying? And it reflected their hope of resurrection and their hope of God fulfilling his promises.

And in the same way with Joseph. Joseph, he wanted out of Egypt so he can get to the Promised Land because that's where his heart was tied. In a similar way, I think, you know, Christians, there should be a very real sense in which we want our last moments to be a testimony to faith.

Right. And so, I mean, now you think about burning yourself up as a testimony to your eschatological hope.

It's kind of like singing, let the fire fall down on me.

Yeah, I mean, at that point, you just….

Maybe your heart was in the right place, but you know not what you say.

I hope you didn't speak better than you knew, you know, at that point. No, I mean, so I think what's happened is we are unaccustomed to thinking in these ways anymore. But then this is the natural way that Old Testament saints thought, and this is the way that the early Christians thought.

And so we should reorient ourselves with what we're doing and think more soberly about the afterlife and the nature of our hope. And I think Christians, you know, for the past 2 ,000 years, they understood these things kind of intuitively.

This is why you recoil at the thought of feeding. Now, the reason why you recoil at the thought of feeding your wife to the dog is because you know that in some sense that's disrespectful to the person, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But then, you know, there is a famous story of a woman getting eaten by dogs in the Old Testament, too. That's why I bring this up. So Jezebel, right? Jezebel was such a wicked woman that, you know, God basically punished her by predicting her death, you know, essentially that she would be eaten by dogs.

But then the text is very specific in that this basically was to fulfill that no one would be able to look at her remains and say this was Jezebel, right? Yeah. So she was wiped off the map, right? Unable to be remembered.

She wasn't there. She didn't exist. So she was that wicked that she was erased. And when you think about cremation, that's what cremation is doing. It's erasing them, right? No one can look at them and say this is them anymore.

And so I think there's something profoundly, like, we don't think that way, but we probably should. Do you get what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. Like, no one could say, like, we don't think in terms of leaving a legacy.

We just, you know, wipe me off the face of the map, who cares, whatever, you know? And it's just like, that's not the way I thought, man. You're praying to end up like Jezebel. That's a weird thing, you know?

Like, if you want to have Jezebel's ending, that's a strange place to be, isn't it? That's weird. Yeah. I would like to be eaten by dogs. Well, I mean, but, like, just to be erased, you know, just to be erased, like, from memory.

You didn't exist like that. That shouldn't be, there should be something unsettling about that, I think. So anyways, what I'm trying to say is, like, your intuition to say there's something wrong there is, I mean, there's a lot of scripture, I think, and principles that would feed into that that maybe we've forgotten, you know?

So all that's left is the tradition, but there's a lot to that more than what people think. Does that make sense?

Cultural Objections, Cost, and the Question of Necessity

Yeah. I guess, you know, a question arises when you think about, there are certain cultures where at least it seems like a burial by fire was, like, a pretty normal thing. You know, you think about, like, and I understand that this is sort of a stretch because you're talking about pagan nations and civilizations at this point, but you think about, like, Nordic people, for example.

It seems like that was a pretty common way to honor the dead was to build, like, a pyre, basically, with their body on it and burn it, right? And that was their way of showing respect to the person, right?

And so is there any, you know, in light of something like that, again, I know we're talking about, like, a pagan nation at that point or a pagan culture, you know. Is there anything there to say, like, well, maybe there's something to, like, the way that you honor the dead body of the person might vary from culture to culture?

Or, you know, is that like a, no, that doesn't matter? They don't have the same understanding that we do when it comes to what happens to the dead.

Yeah, I think there's a, I mean, basically just a multiculturalism kind of discussion there where all cultures are viewed as neutral and then you can't criticize any culture and you can't say that any of them are wrong in any way.

And I would say that, yeah, they're looking forward, like, they're speaking better than they know they're, you know, they're pointing to their eschatology.

They're singing Fire Fall Down on me right there, huh?

Someone, you know, someone posted on our Twitter poll and they made a comment to essentially say, you know, from their grandmother to say, you know, I know that if, like, I want to be buried. Like, I know that if I were cremated, God could sort it all out and give me a resurrection body.

But then, you know, it just seems easier to leave it alone. It seems safer. The impulse is just to say, I know that if I tear this thing up, He can put it all back together. But it seems to make more sense just to give it to them as it is and not make it harder than it needs to be.

Not that, like, it's, you know, anything's hard for God, but there is something about what, like, that country wisdom kind of statement, right? Like, it seems like it's silly, but then I think it speaks better than you know.

Well, I guess there's an argument to be made for, like, hey, you know, so we're created in God's image. And you're basically trying, not, I don't think people are doing this on purpose. Like, they're thinking about this specific thing, but, you know, you are, it does seem like you are in a certain way trying to, like, remove yourself from that purposefully.

Does that make sense what I'm saying? Like, we're made in the image of God, and then you're reducing yourself to something that's basically, I mean, unrecognizable.

Right, well, I think along those lines, I mean, you can go to funerals and people are hugging this corpse. Sure, yeah. And it isn't intuitively obvious that that's stupid. Mm-hmm. Do you get what I'm saying?

Mm-hmm, yeah. Like, they come up and they hold the hand because they, like, and so part of this is, like, it gets to your horror at the thought of feeding your wife to your dogs for dog food to save money.

Because, like, you know, you know, you know that's her. Do you get what I'm saying? Yeah. And so, and this is what you're getting at with the image of God kind of thing that you're saying. Just to casually dispose of it and destroy it, it feels so utterly wrong because this is made in the image of God.

And, like, you said it feels sadistic. And the reason why it feels sadistic is because it's very hard mentally just to say, like, you feel there's a connection here, right? Yeah, yeah. Because there is.

Because there is. Yeah, because there is. And so you just take a hatchet to the thing and chop it all up. It feels like you're a serial killer, right?

Yeah, I was watching, well, I wasn't watching. I saw a, I can't remember if it was, like, a news article or what it was. But in whatever I was looking at, it had a picture from some movie that just came out.

I think, like, maybe it's called, like, The Northmen or something like that. It came out this year. And apparently in one part of the movie, the main character, he goes to this village and he kills all of the males in the village who are his enemies, if I remember correctly.

And after he does this, he basically mutilates their bodies and hangs them up on the side of one of the buildings in, like, a certain mythological image as a way to essentially, like, defile this village and the people he killed.

And I think that's basically what you're getting at here is, like, there's a certain way you can bury someone that shows respect to them as a person. And then there's a certain way that you can, you know, basically dispose of someone that communicates a total lack of respect for who they were as a person.

Yeah, I mean, throw them into a wood chipper or something like that, right?

Yeah, like, that's something a serial killer does.

You see, people might get irritated at us even just talking about it, right?