TV's "Bones": Morality of burial of corpses via alkaline hydrolysis or bugs

[Rocky8311]

I was watching the television show “Bones” (I’m liking it) and there was something that kind of bothered me about their treatment of one human corpse sort of bothered me.

They had an extreme burn victim’s skeleton and they used some sort of flesh-eating beetles to clean the bones by consuming the remaining soft tissue. For some reason that made sense at the time, it was desirable to have the bones clean for their investigation, but thinking about it, I did not like that they were disposing of a human body…they might as well have thrown it to dogs.

I’ve been taking in some Christopher West/Theology of the Body-type stuff in the last few years, beginning to see that the human body is not a mere prison for the soul, but should be handled with respect even in death. I recently read about an immoral process available to of disposing of bodies that entailed dissolving a body in chemicals and flushing the liquid down a sink.

I think it was alkaline hydrolysis. Anyway, it seems to me that it’s just wrong to flush a human body down a sink or to feed human flesh to bugs on purpose. I can’t really find much on the morality of either of these, vis a vis the Catholic faith.

Is there anything we know about this?

 

[ericka1701]

I’m assuming since it is on “Bones”, it involves a John/Jane Doe, who is not identifiable by other means. I am aware of a few of the techniques used to ID a person based on analysis using the bones of a body. The technique was perfected an hour drive away at University of Tennessee’s “Body Farm” (this is an archived news story from 2000, but the research is still going on there).

In this case, I would say that the morality of catching a murderer (and protecting society from that murderer) and/or figuring out the identity of the victim (especially in cases where the murderer is a repeat offender) would outweigh any possible immoral acts that might have been performed to cause that to happen.

I don’t know anything about alkaline hydrosis, although that does sounds like an immoral way of dealing with the deceased’s body. A bit creepy, too (although formaldehyde creeps me out, too)…
God Bless!
Ericka

 

[Rocky8311]

I just read the article, that sounds horrible. As Christians we can’t do evil so that good would result. What remains to be seen is whether this is an act of desecration.

How sickening that they would leave human bodies out in the elements to be fed on and to decompose. Why would it even need to be human bodies? The “Body Farm” had better tag its bodies really carefully or they’d become a dumping ground for all sorts of criminals’ misdeeds and they’d never know it. It seems like exactly the kind of facility that would then dispose of humanbodies down a drain when they were done, once the process was legalized.

Catholic morality doesn’t work by allowing a moral evil so that good would result.