I find the verses mentioned do not directly or indirectly say that cremation of a deceased person's body is wrong in the eyes of God. All of these verses are about the condemnation of people by their actions and happen to use fire, or are about fire in some way (the bones), not about the choice of disposal of the earthly body. We know that over the thousands of years bodies of christians and non-christians alike have been lost to sea, burned in tragedies, burned in the holocaust, burned or lost in all kinds of accidents, drowned, burned/crushed on 9/11, burned in plane crashes, devoured by animals (even those in the Roman persecution where lions were involved) -- and, the body decays in the grave. Not just pagans burned - pagans had certain ceremonies - it isn't the act of burning that is solely pagan, it is the beliefs & ceremonies that make them pagan. Then there were times of great disease where bodies were pushed into mass graves or burned to try to stop the spread, pagan, or christian. Do we really need to take indirect verses about fire and interpret (because it is definitely an interpretation and not a clear mandate) it to mean that the body must only "respectfully" decay in the dirt? Jesus died to free us...rules like that that are man made...and verses pulled out of context to back them up - are unnecessary. I'm far far from "progressive" and much more conservative in such things - but there are some things that seem to just be man-made rules based loosely on someone's interpretation and in the end, they don't matter at all. Also the idea of, well Christ was 'buried' so we should only be buried too - is strange - we don't get buried behind a large rolled stone, with herbs & a shroud either. Christ's tomb was empty after 3 days...it wasn't their cultural practice to burn the body, but if it had been, HE still would have been raised up on the 3rd day.