I just had an interesting discussion with my Catholic friend, “C.” The topic: What are the boundaries of suicide? In particular, when does acquiescence to harm, or deliberate participation in likely-death acts, become suicide?<\/p>\n
We started on the question of abortion to save the life of the mother. And I asked — well, if it’s 100% sure that the mother will be killed by the pregnancy (assuming that this could be ascertained), is it suicide if the mother refuses to have an abortion, thus knowingly killing herself? C’s answer was twofold. First, he was sure that this act was not suicide. Second, he proposed the following general test — suicide is an act which has the primary <\/em>purpose of ending one’s own life. Other acts may have the secondary effect of ending one’s life, but that’s a side effect of the main purpose, which is in this case having a baby. <\/p>\n To see if that distinction held up, we played with a few hypotheticals:<\/p>\n 1. Kamikaze pilots, crashing their airplane into an enemy ship to try to sink the ship. Suicide? By C’s test, we think that this is not actually suicide — the primary purpose being to sink the enemy ship.<\/p>\n 2. Hopeless stands against impossible odds (e.g., Thermopylae<\/a>). C’s test places these groups in the non-suicide camp.<\/p>\n 3. Most interestingly, Jesus himself. Jesus had the power to prevent His own death, but He allowed Himself to be slain. C’s test becomes complicated here. As C suggests, it is impossible to conceive of Jesus as a suicide. Jesus’s main purpose was not to die, but rather to overcome death. However, there is a counter-argument, which is that Jesus actually intended to die, and that that intent would lead to His death being counted as a suicide. <\/p>\n It’s an interesting question; particularly the third example. Now, we don’t have the same strongly anti-suicide culture and theology as Catholics — we believe that suicide is a sin, but the sinful nature of suicide is not emphasized (I think) to the degree that it is within the Cathlic church. Should we, as church members, view Christ’s death as a suicide? There are arguments that this makes sense; particularly since the scriptures make clear that Christ set forth with the express purpose of laying down His life<\/a>, that He might take it up again.<\/p>\n And if Christ’s death is not to be considered a suicide, then is this because C’s proposed distinction is wrong? How can we distinguish between Christ’s acts and the acts of some other person who sets out to lay down his life? How do we define the boundaries of suicide?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just had an interesting discussion with my Catholic friend, “C.” The topic: What are the boundaries of suicide? In particular, when does acquiescence to harm, or deliberate participation in likely-death acts, become suicide?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}