Denied Religious Customs...

Strange-Globe, strange place indeed… Many cultures throughout the world have unusual burial practices and customs. Many of these are due to religious ideas and doctrines which have become imbedded within their culture. The western world has always bounced between cremation and inhumation when burial is concerned. The history of European culture has significant swings between all sorts of different burial techniques. The Egyptians mummified their corpses and enshrined them in magnificent burial tombs. The ancient Greeks had very precise rituals concerning the treatment of the dead. In Sophocles Antigone the heroine becomes distraught due to the lack of respect given to the corpse of her brother Polyneices. She is later put to death due to her insistence in giving her brother a decent funeral. Such lack of respect and ill care towards a death is often an incredibly sensitive matter in all cultures, often it is seen as an affront to both the gods and the person if burial is not concluded in the appropriate manner.

In recent news a devout Hindu lost his battle with the High court in London for the legal right to hold an open air cremation. Open air cremation has been an integral part of Hindu ritual for centuries. In 2006 Davender Ghai, a devout Hindu, petitioned the Newcastle City Council to allow him the right to have an open air cremation, but the petition was denied due to environmental and social factors. Feeling that his religious freedoms had been impeded, Davender appealed to the High court invoking Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects religious freedom, and Article 8, which covers the right to private and family life.

Unfortunately for Mr Ghai his appeal was denied and the original verdict was upheld. The High court ruling once again highlights the UK’s slide towards a totalitarian nanny state where individual freedoms are slowly, bit by bit being eroded into oblivion. It’s a sad state of affairs really. I doubt many people would object to Mr Ghai’s cremation as long as it wasn’t held in their own backyards, but instead Mr Ghai has been forcefully denied his religious beliefs which are ironically protected by the very PC laws that the government used to deny his application.

Strange-Globe, strange place indeed.