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Suicide
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 by joelIt is illegal to commit suicide. Of course you really can’t be convicted if you succeed, and honestly, how do you punish someone who wants their life to be over? You can’t assign them the death penalty, that’s giving them what they want. And apparently their lives are already intolerably miserable as it is. There’s not much you can do to make their lives more miserable. And even if you somehow managed to make them more miserable than they already were, that’s really not going to suddenly make them want to live.
Conversely, you can’t exactly reward that kind of behavior, either. Soon enough people will be threatening to end their lives left and right, just to get the free candy. Heck, some people already do that for the attention and the drugs it nets them.
I have known my entire life that suicide is wrong. But it’s a difficult kind of immorality to categorize. On the surface, it seems to be a crime directly against yourself. And once you’ve hit the pavement, there is no longer a categorical “you� to be committing crimes against. Also, everybody is going to die sooner or later, and while suicide DOES rob you of the opportunity for more life, hopefully some of which will be rewarding or meaningful, it does have the virtue of allowing you to take the reigns of your destiny and choose the time and place you are going to die.
There is the very reasonable argument that suicide hurts those who are close to you. This may be true, but then does suicide become morally justified if you are close to no one? Is the value of a person’s life dependant on how many people they know and affect on a regular basis?
The only way I can see my way morally clear to deign suicide an offense is if it an offense against God directly. God, it is said, has a plan. It is a stubborn man that looks in his Creator’s face and says “Nah, I don’t want your plan for me. Here, you can have my life back, I don’t want it.� It’s the same kind of rudeness one might display on Christmas by handing an un-opened gift back to the giver and saying “No thanks. I really don’t want whatever YOU were going to give me.�
Of course if your view of God is something other than that, I see no reason for you to think of suicide as morally wrong.
