Sometimes people invent substitute rituals to use in place of conventional Christian funeral ceremonies: probably because they have little faith in Christ or have not been instructed well so as to appreciate the gift of His Resurrection. But some of the rituals people propose don’t quite make sense to me yet.
As a case in point, I can understand people wanting to have their bodily remains shot into space, into the sun or wherever, as a Romantic gesture of oneness with the universe. That’s a statement of belief — belief of some sort. But now it turns out that the customers of the first space-shot “burial” didn’t even get that for their ticket price. They only ended up taking what the travel biz calls a Cruise to Nowhere: go out, ride around, but don’t stop anywhere: just go back – back home, back where you started.
So their rocket came back to earth after 4 minutes and parachuted into the mountains of New Mexico. Uh, was there a point to all that?