OK - I was going to go cite suicide bombing as an
exception to that statement that JIB as usual has homed in on as the thing to quote out of context.
I chose
not to mention that because this is about suicide/euthanasia and not terrorism, patriotism, jihadism/crusading or any other politicised abstraction involving violence and/or oppression and war-like activities because this is about the purely 'normal' human consequences of taking your own life for whatever reason. Religious zealotry/oppression comes under politics ultimately, dress it up however you like :x What Evergreen is talking about is the normal social stigma of suicide and/or assisted death outside of those parameters and it's effects on normal people regardless of faith issues to some extent although most religions proscribe it ordinarily for the reasons you've rightly set out - I agree with those.
What I was and am talking about is the devastation that someone leaves behind them when they take themselves out of the circle of family affection and support with very little or no reason and very often without any warning whatsoever to indicate that they're in distress or ill and commit suicide. Whatever the reason for them going off and jumping off a tall building, or overdosing thoroughly and beyond rescue, or driving themselves off Beachy Head, suicides leave everyone they know utterly shocked and appalled at their actions, followed very swiftly by guilt and trauma at not realising why they'd felt compelled to do such an awful thing that leaves their nearest and dearest without a parent/child/sibling etc and unable to even know how they might have helped to lessen or take away the need for such a terrible solution. I don't care if somebody thinks they have nobody to care what they do - there's
always somebody who's there to feel grief and shock over a 'needless' death, even if it's 'only' the poor driver of the bus you chose to walk to oblivion under and the people who were late for work or other myriad and mundane human consequences that will be a result of the traffic chaos caused by that?
Suicide is a ripple effect, no matter what you do and euthanasia/assisted death is one way to minimise the cause and effect by doing so in a rationalised and inclusive manner so the people you leave behind are in no doubt as to the reason and inevitability of your needing to die and so they are at least spared one shock in knowing it was your genuine choice and they could have done nothing to prevent it. I'll go one further and say that assisted death (
not euthanasia as that implies a constraint of choice), actually empowers those left behind to mourn you more comfortably because they may well know that their counsel and/or support will have been of use to you in making the decision
even if they did not agree with what you were doing simply because they had an opportunity to voice their opinion before you took that final step of
your choice.
The human reaction to premature death is universal and whether or not you are a person of faith (and I am most certainly not such a person) if someone you loved died a sudden, unnecessary and, above all,
unanticipated self-administered death you would have wished you could have a) stopped them doing it and b) at least have had a chance to help them in some way before they were too far gone is despair or whatever -
that is the reasoning most religions focus on in condemning suicide, not the other extremisms and that is all I meant by the comment.
