everyone dies. stop fussing.
The BBC asks: is taking a mobile phone picture of the Pope's body disrespectful or just a sign of how times changed during his 26-year papacy?
I once saw a photo of a man holding his cellphone to the wall of a holy place in Mecca, so his mother could pray to it. Times have changed: here in good ol' democratic Malaysia a man might conceivably divorce his wife via SMS; every snot-nosed prepubescent youngster on the street these days has a swankier phone than I do; and today at one point during lunch with my parents, all three of us were on the phone to three other people, while seated together at a meal with each other.
But taking a photo of the dead pope's body seems no "less blasphemous" to me than, say, procuring a piece of his funereal robe or some other suitable relic from the saintly body before burial - common practice throughout Christian history, I think. Digital relic, so to speak. I've even read that some medieval reliquary procurements extended to sawing off a couple of saintly stiffened limbs, too. Compared to that, camera-phone relic acquisitions are positively sacrosanct. C'mon, Catholics, move with the times.
Here is the bird I was talking about (just after smacking into the window pane), taken with one such camera phone :) Because really, it's conceivable that we are perhaps driven to jump to that photo, not out of irreverence, disrespect or unethical intrusion, but by a mortal urge to retrieve the irrepressibly fleeting moment, to be savoured, reflected upon, exchanged (but almost certainly never erased) in the moments we have left, fleeting as they all are, and irretrievable, of course.
Also, the police take photos of dead bodies all the time. Why all the pussyfooting around death, is what I want to know.