"Besides the danger of a direct mixture of religion and civil government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations.
"The establishment of the chaplainship in Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights as well as of Constitutional principles.
"The danger of silent accumulations and encroachments by ecclesiastical bodies has not sufficiently engaged attention in the U.S."
— -- James Madison, being outvoted in the bill to establish the office of Congressional Chaplain, from the "Detached Memoranda," Elizabeth Fleet, "Madison's Detached Memoranda." William and Mary Quarterly (1946): 554-62.
Would it have been wrong if he did?
Would it have been wrong if he did snort up some of his father's ashes in a line of coke? I have heard of people who rolled up their loved ones ashes into some pot and smoked it. The last act of a loved one, being able to get high off of him/her. Almost poetic.
IMO when a person dies, what is done with their body is a personal thing to be left to the loved ones. They should do what means the most to them, it is not anybody else's business. If Keith Richards had thought he could find peace with his father's passing by snorting some of his ashes, good for him. My dad was a Wagnerian opera fanatic. When he died, I took his urn to Bayreuth, Germany to Wagner's fabled opera house when they were having the yearly Wagner opera festival. He had always wanted to visit there. There was a performance of "Lohengrin" and then I went in back of the opera house, which sits majestically on this hill, and spread a few of his ashes in a nearby garden. It was a nice peaceful area. I like to think he's still there listening to the music. It was just my own way of saying goodbye. My sisters got their shares of the ashes too and did whatever they wanted. One of them sprinkled ashes in a very beautiful upstate part of the Hudson River.
I think I'd rather be cremated too in the end. Otherwise the way things are going, if I was buried, I might just get dug up and moved somewhere in the future when some profit-monger buys the cemetery and wants to put up condos.