Comparing Funeral Rituals: Japan and Catholic South America

Since the beginning of human history, death has been the most terrifying force and the greatest teacher that our species has had. Being notoriously difficult to understand, it seems inevitable that humans are afraid of it. Yet death has been an important teacher to every generation of man. Without death, men would have never conceived the idea of a separate body and soul. Without this distinction, it is quite possible that many of the religions and various Gods that make the world so culturally diverse would have never existed. …