Nor do they promise anything. A promise, after all, promises something still to come, and the dead have nothing to offer to the future except their own brute facticity. This man belongs to this son. That man belongs to that woman. In some ways, bodies seem more real than the selves and voices that animated them.
Bodies seem in fact a fundament of truth.
Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain , observes it is this peculiar capacity of bodies to substantiate ideological claims that accounts for the prevalence of warfare. Using the body to substantiate one's claims is a risky business. There is always the possibility that the evidence will backfire or will betray the cause that it is meant to support. One can't really predict what a body will end up saying. The very possibility of God-talk is under question.