Is suicide a sin?

These are excerpts from letters written by Robert G. Ingersoll that were published in the New York World, 1894. 

 

 

 “People should not suffer for the sake of supernatural beings or for other worlds or the hopes and fears of some future state. Our joys, our sufferings and our duties are here.  After all, death is not so terrible as a Joyless life. Next to eternal happiness is to sleep in the soft clasp of the cool earth, disturbed by no dream, by no thought, by no pain, by no fear, unconscious of all and forever.

 The fear of God, of Judgment, of eternal pain will cause such believers to suffer the pangs of this life until relieved by natural death. But when there is no fear of the future, when death is believed to be a dreamless sleep, men have less hesitation about ending their lives.

 The old idea was that God made us and placed us here for a purpose and that it was our duty to remain until he called us.  If God determines all births and deaths, of what use is medicine and why should doctors defy the decrees of God with pills and powders?  What pleasure can it give God to see a man devoured by cancer?  Why should he stay and suffer?  A little morphine would give him sleep — the agony would be forgotten and he would pass unconsciously from happy dreams to painless death.

 Sometimes I have wondered why Christians denounced suicide. If Christ were God, then he had the power to protect himself from death. But instead of using his power he allowed men to take his life.  If a strong man allowed a few little children to hack him to death with knives when he could easily have brushed them aside, would we not say that he committed suicide?  If Christ were, in fact, God, and allowed himself to be killed, then he consented to his own death — refused, though perfectly able, to defend and protect himself, and was, in fact, a suicide.

 We cannot reform the world by law or by superstition. As long as there shall be pain and failure, want and sorrow, agony and crime, men and women will untie life’s knot and seek the peace of death.

 If we wish to prevent suicide we must by education, by invention, by art, by civilization, add to the value of the average life.  We must do away with false pride and false modesty. We must become generous enough to help our fellows without degrading them. We must make useful, honorable work of all kinds. We must mingle a little affection with our charity — a little fellowship. We should allow those who have sinned to really reform.  People do not hate the sick. Why should they despise the mentally weak — the diseased in brain?

 Our actions are the result of circumstances and we do as we must. Given a certain heart and brain, certain conditions, and suicide is the necessary result. This truth should fill the heart with pity for the failures of our race.

 All we can say is that the good and the bad, the educated and the ignorant, actuated by many motives — sometimes in the calm of Judgment, sometimes by insanity — raise their hands against themselves and desperately put out the light of life.  They are our unfortunate brothers and sisters. We should not curse or blame.”