USA - A New Form of Cremation

Inside a white brick building in West Baltimore, a long silver chamber full of water seesawed back and forth over a platform.

Within it, a body dissolved. Skin, flesh and organs turned into amino acids and sugars with each tip of the chamber. In a matter of hours, all that remained were bones and the leftover watery solution.

This process, which is called alkaline hydrolysis, but is known more colloquially as water cremation, has been gaining popularity across the country since it was first used in the funeral industry in 2011, according to the Cremation Association of North America.

Death care professionals say water cremation appeals to those who resonate with the idea of themselves or their loved ones departing the Earth through water.

“If you look at it biblically, we talk about our bodies as being earthen vessels. Earthen. Clay,” said Joseph Brown, owner of a funeral home offering the service. “We wash away the clay, the vessel, and we give the family back the minerals, the calcium and phosphate.”

-www.yahoo.com, 18 August 2025

Commentary: When Adam and Eve transgressed God’s commandment not to eat from the tree the knowledge of good and evil, God’s judgment was: “ In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19).

There is great controversy within Christendom globally as to the disposal of the saints’ temporary tabernacle (body). Cremation, for example, is an increasingly popular way of disposing the body, but its origins are grounded in paganism. Here we need to add, regardless of how the body is disposed, it has no relationship to the person’s salvation. Yet being buried seems to be the way practiced during Biblical times.