I don’t think of these people as suicides. For some, there would have been no more conscious thought than one might have if you put your hand on a hot stove. For others, well, all of us here have not been to that other country where we have to make such choices, and may we never be there.

  I’m a semi-religious Jew, meaning that I believe in God and practice somewhat but not fanatically. This poster represents my pet peeves about many, but not all, atheists, they assume that all religions are interchangeable and that the charges against one religion can be leveled agaisnt all religions. If the crticism against religion is that all religion is false than that charge can be leveled against every religion on the planet. It may or may not be true but it can be used against every religion.

  This poster isn’t arguing that, its arguing that all religions teach that people who commit suicide are damnned to hell. No branch of Judaism from the most liberal to the most Orthodox believes this. In Jewish theology there is no hell. Rabbis don’t even like talking about the afterlife even at funeral services. The basic Jewish idea about the afterlife is that there is one but we have no idea what its like and its useless talking about it. We prefer to focus on life rather than life after death. Christianity might teach that people who commit suicide go to hell. Other religions might believe horrible things happen to suicides in the after life. Jews don’t.

And yet, suicide: still a choice to not be encouraged.

There’s a David James Smith piece at the Daily Nation that TPM linked to that wrote in depth about the jumpers. In it, there is some documentation that a few of them really did try to climb down the outside of the building but fell. Some might have fallen from the windows. But most of them made the choice of how they’d die, and although it’s absolutely appropriate to call these people victims of homicide, there is, imo, no small integrity in that act of choice. It’s horrible to contemplate dying on impact, but it’s horrible to contemplate dying under a collapsing building or being consumed by a 2500 degree fire. But yeah, the pearl-clutching about calling them ‘suicides’ because that might provoke some priest somewhere from conducting a burial mass? Fuck that noise indeed.

What incredible vanity, to blame people who jump out of a burning building for committing suicide. That blows my mind.

Re: Lee @ 2

I don’t think any sensible person would claim that all religions have the same dogma. The suicide example is simply emblematic of the religious tendency to cause unnecessary hand-wringing because of something someone’s imaginary friend might have said some time in the distant past. It makes sense to use the example of Christianity and suicide, because the prevalence of Christianity means that most readers will understand the reference.

That anyone even refers to these deaths as suicides is enraging enough.

This example shows some of Xianity’s worst aspects:

1.  ASSUMPTIONS about other people’s actions (how do we know he jumped vs. fell, was pushed, tried to climb, etc)
2.  The need to JUDGE everyone else’s actions. 
3.  Constant, pathological obsession with hell, the devil and damnation.

Any group that can take the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as laid down in the Gospels, and come up with radical right-wing politics is capable of any possible delusions.

There is an authoritarian streak in American culture that believes that pain and suffering are important and anything that alleviates pain and suffering is wrong.

Working in a medically-related institution, one sees two incompatible ideas related to experiencing pain.  One is to have the same compassion toward people we would have toward our pets — if they’re experiencing pain then analgesics are to be given as necessary to alleviate the pain, and if the pain cannot be alleviated with pain-killers, then euthanasia is an acceptable course of action.  This is considered to be mainstream ethical treatment.

And then there are those (apparently the RCC is big on this) who find some sort of “nobility” in pain, and discourage controlling pain as somehow against god’s will or something.  (I understand that Mother Theresa and JPII were big believers in letting their own pain go untreated, and in MT’s case, the pain and suffering of those around her was to go untreated as well.)  In the world view of these people, it’s unethical to treat pain.

One group would never condemn that poor bastard for jumping.  The other group would condemn him for jumping instead of burning to death, like god intended.

And BTW, many Christians don’t believe (truly) in a “benevolent” god either, only an arbitrary, random, and capricious god who demands unquestioning worship from the proles, or else.  All that benevolence crap is from the New Testament.  Once the “Christ” is taken from the NT, the rest of it can more-or-less be discarded — except for all that misogynist and judgmental stuff from Saul/Paul…

It seems that there are two different kinds of suicide which have to be dealt with in completely different ways.  In one, someone has made a rational and informed decision to stop living, and in the other, someone can see no other way out of the physical or emotional pain they are experiencing.  For the first the correct action is probably to accept that we can’t control other people’s actions and for the second the correct action would be to help that person change their circumstances.  But it’s very, very problematic, because it’s hard to tell one from the other.

Please point to where I said “all religions are the same”, Lee.  I looked up and down and just don’t see it!  I said that religion is often just as likely to give people irrational fears, but that’s a much different thing.  It’s simply stating baldy that there’s no factual accuracy to the claim that make-believe about supernatural beings is automatically more comforting than realities. I’m not really interested in the jockeying between religions about whose particular brand of bullshit is better than someone else’s.

The time I most clearly felt solace in religion was when I was a kid, shortly before confirmation class, I think.  I felt extremely happy when I realized that, although my faith was not perfect yet, eventually it would be because I was already smart enough to reason and patient enough to work at it.
Of course, anyone could have told me that faith does not work that way, but it was very clear to me at the time.  I’m not religious anymore, for various reasons, and I think of that as a very interesting time in my growing up.  I suppose I would feel very uncomfortable if an adult told me today that they felt “solace” for that same reason, but I would let it go.
Thanks for the link to Post Secret: never heard of it before, cool site.

@4 ben, I think the *only* reason anyone would ever think that there’s a *single* reason to dispute that they were victims of homicide is the way that Christian myths about suicide have poisoned our very ability to think clearly.  Someone throwing themselves out of a window so as not to burn to death is like someone whose brakes go out making the decision to go off the cliff rather than slam into the mountain.  It’s fucking inappropriate to pick at their decisions like that, and the only reason we do it at all is that a couple millenia of theological wankery has groomed us for it.

Lee, I googled “suicide jewish law” and got somewhat different information:

Suicide in Jewish law is a very serious offense. The Talmud says, “For him who takes his own life with full knowledge of his action [the Hebrew word is b’daat] no rites are to be observed. . .There is to be no rending of clothes and no eulogy. But people should line up for him [at the end of the burial ceremony] and the mourner’s blessing should be recited [as the family passes through] out of respect for the living. The general rule is: Whatever rites are [normally] performed for the benefit of the survivors should be observed; whatever is [normally] done out of respect for the dead should not be observed.”

Jewish law does not, however, place all suicides in the same category. One category of suicide, as stated above, includes those who are in full possession of their physical and mental facilities (b’daat) when they take their lives. A second category includes those who act on impulse or who are under severe mental strain or physical pain when committing suicide. Jewish law speaks of an individual in this second category of being an anuss, meaning a “person under compulsion,” and hence not responsible for his actions. All burial and mourning rites are observed for him.

So jumping from the Twin Towers was maybe okay under Jewish law and maybe not, depending on whether the jumping was motivated by “compulsion.”  Onlookers get to opine and judge. 

Amanda’s point stands.

If the crticism against religion is that all religion is false than that charge can be leveled against every religion on the planet. It may or may not be true but it can be used against every religion.

Tautology aside, the fact that the poster says nothing of what you claim, it is indeed true that if any one religion is false - and like it or not, every single religion says this about every other religion - then all of them can be false.

Then again, I’m impressed by your need to make a sober discussion about how one very large religion does indeed condemn people to hell for suicide and whiney crybaby party about you or your religion. That kind of hilariously pathetic vanity represents one of my pet peeves about many, but not all, believers.

I think we have very heavy stigmas against suicide, even among the non religious, and you can blame this on religion, if you like, but we generally think of suicide as something to be avoided almost at all costs.

I don’t see any religions condemning the jumpers on September 11th or advocating burning to death rather than death from impact, so I am not seeing what you’re arguing against here. Of you’re arguing against the fact that people jumping to their deaths, even on September 11th, makes people uncomfortable, there’s a good reason for that: our lizard brains do not make rational differentiations of when “jumping off a tall building” is okay, so our emotions just short-circuit to “seeing people jump off the twin towers makes me feel uncomfortable about someone choosing to do that.”

When cooler heads to time to evaluate the situation, the government and churches did not consider them “legally” suicides.

A little over a decade ago, I came across Vonnegut’s Requiem Mass. By his own admission, it wasn’t very good. It’s a quick and not very well considered inversion of the Latin original, in which the souls of the faithful pray for a merciful judgement. Vonnegut’s brilliance was in recognizing that deep time would eventually erase all the mistakes and pains of memory.

This rocked my world at the time, as something I’ve struggled with WRT the afterlife was the death of my paternal grandmother, who was driven by extremes of emotional and physical abuse to become abusive herself. I can’t imagine her in a state of grace, because she’d be unrecognizable, and yet her eternal damnation living with that fear and anger is equally unthinkable. The thought that death obliterates pain and suffering isn’t very well accepted outside of Buddhist thought.

Of course, if these people threw themselves onto a grenade or in the line of fire, we’d be giving them medals.

I said that religion is often just as likely to give people irrational fears, but that’s a much different thing.

Indeed. The fact that there isn’t likely to be an afterlife filled with everlasting torment assigned by a capricious deity is comforting. That’s why I like “It’s okay, there probably isn’t a god” as an atheist message.

For an example, see this comment at the new Phrangyula:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/09/11/why-do-women-have-orgasms/comment-page-1/#comment-49528

Women tying themselves in knots because they occasionally masturbate, despite otherwise being good Mormon wives and mothers. 

False, Tyro. I very specifically said I didn’t get it at first—-it seems like basic human decency to assume the best of people who jumped, on the grounds that we don’t know what it’s like to be in a burning building—-but cards like this and other info I gathered from elsewhere made it clear that the stigma came from cultural taboos about even necessary suicide that comes straight from religious claims that only god gets to decide when you die. That families of the dead would be tortured with theological hand-wringing about this is mortifying, and yet.

If you wish to deny that this is going on, Tyro, just avoid clicking that link.  It’s true that many of the religious commentators do a nice tap dance to get around the question—-religion is about making shit up as you go along, of course, and so it’s easy to invent new rules around this problem that you hadn’t thought about before—-but the mere fact of the discussion fucking pisses me off.  Theological hand-wringing often turns real people’s lived experiences into nothing more than fuel to be fed into blowhard’s faux philosophizing by wondering what some imaginary guy in the sky thinks about it.

Also, in general I object to the way that religion has stigmatized suicide so severely.  A suicide is the same as any other death, in my opinion. I’m not a huge fan of ranking deaths like there’s some prize at the end, and the reason I can have that opinion is I don’t believe there is a prize in the end.

Um, who is making the argument that a person who chooses to jump out of a window in the face of certain death by burning is going to hell?  I have literally not heard one single religious authority figure say this, I have not heard one single religious person I know say this, and frankly, this is the first I have ever heard of anyone anywhere making this claim.  I don’t see this argument being made anywhere (Including in either of the articles linked to by FA).  Can you link to someplace where someone is claiming that the people who jumped from the WTC on 9/11 are going to hell?

Religion brought a great deal of pain to the relatives of Norbert Hernandez and Jonathan Briley, two victims tentatively ID’d as the individual known as “the Falling Man”.

The Hernandez family - devout Catholics - were torn apart, with those who believed him to be the falling man becoming persona non grata. They were so tortured by the idea that he might have jumped that one of his daughters began having visions of him in the house, and they had to move. Another daughter angrily insisted that the “piece of shit” in the photo was not her father. They were besides themselves that people on the internet were saying he was in hell. Religion brings comfort, indeed.

Jonathan Briley emerged as a more probable ID. The day after, his preacher father gathered the family in a 3 hour prayer session and demanded of God to know where his son was- they just wanted closure. The day after, the coroner called and an intact body was confirmed as his. Afterwards, his father lived with the massive regret that he had made the wrong demand of god - that his son, who was trapped above the impact zone with no way out - could have lived if his father had asked for a different miracle. Can you imagine living with that idea weighing on your heart?

Go read Tom Junod’s amazing article at esquire. One of the things I got out of it was that in these examples, religion brought some comfort (as it did to Briley’s sister), but also a lot of extra, needless pain.

Kit-Kat, that the question even comes up is the problem.  That we have to sit around saying, “Does htis count?  Let’s dig around our ass and come up with a special exception to our alreacdy fucked-up claims about hell because even we aren’t massive enough assholes to claim 9/11 victims are going to hell.”

Even if you believe that ordinary suicides go to hell, religion has destroyed your basic sense of decency.

Um, who is making the argument that a person who chooses to jump out of a window in the face of certain death by burning is going to hell?  I have literally not heard one single religious authority figure say this, I have not heard one single religious person I know say this, and frankly, this is the first I have ever heard of anyone anywhere making this claim.  I don’t see this argument being made anywhere (Including in either of the articles linked to by FA).  Can you link to someplace where someone is claiming that the people who jumped from the WTC on 9/11 are going to hell?

The fact that Christianity (I don’t claim to know what other religions think) makes this a question that can be asked isn’t enough to demonstrate that it can cause terrible pain to people, rather than bringing the comfort it promises?

Amanda’s google search turned up a lot of people asking the question.

Amanda said:

I’m generally not a big fan of the notion that big lies are fine if they give people solace, even if it were true that said lies actually did.  But there’s no real evidence that the big lie of religion gives that much comfort, on the whole.  It’s far more likely to give people irrational fears and make them think uncharitable things by suggesting that it’s “god” that told them so.

That families of the dead would be tortured with theological hand-wringing about this is mortifying, and yet

I was about to note that in fact, the relatives of a man suspected to be the Falling Man in the image were indeed distressed, and insisted that it couldn’t be him because he was a good man, and a good Catholic, and he wouldn’t have jumped. But Tuff Ghost @ 22 has covered it in a lot more detail.

Kit-Kat, that the question even comes up is the problem. 

Of course it’s a problem: you can either not stigmatize suicide at all, or you can stigmatize it and have the issue “come up” about situations like this. And it’s not as though this has never come up before in human history: these issues have been pondered, but people jumping to their deaths (I’m not going to call it suicide here) is going to feel inherently wrong to people, even if there’s nothing wrong with it under the circumstances. WHO, specifically, is condemning the jumpers, here? Not, “who is asking how we reconcile our disapproval of suicide with the 9/11 jumpers?” No. WHO are the people condemning the jumpers? Names, specifically.

I read some of the posts and articles that Amanda linked to, and I still don’t see who is making the argument.  It always seems to be reported by someone else, “Some have said that . . . .” or “I heard there was a little girl who was told . . . .”  Is this actually an argument that is seriously being advanced by anyone?  Frankly, my feeling is that these people (assuming they intentionally jumped, rather than falling as a result of disorientation or panic, being pushed out by the force of the explosion, or falling while attempting to climb to safety) did not commit suicide in any ordinary meaning of the word.  They jumped, knowing that they would almost certainly die on impact (but perhaps hoping for a miracle), in order to avoid an inevitable death from burning.  And any person who suggests that someone facing that awful choice is deserving of any kind of punishment at all is unconscionably heartless.  But I literally haven’t seen anyone actually *advancing* that argument, just people claiming that someone else did, or wondering if someone else would.

@Comment #26: Tyro on 09/12 at 06:02 PM

WHO are the people condemning the jumpers? Names, specifically.

1. Read the links on the Google search that Amanda posted: http://bit.ly/o4o5qs
2. Read the “Falling Man” article in Esquire: http://bit.ly/qjazoA

Can you link to someplace where someone is claiming that the people who jumped from the WTC on 9/11 are going to hell?

From the Junod article:

It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted a woman to wail, “God! Save their souls! They’re jumping! Oh, please God! Save their souls!”

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0903-SEP_FALLINGMAN#ixzz1XmKBqOr0

Even if you believe that ordinary suicides go to hell, religion has destroyed your basic sense of decency.

But nice of you to deny that the person who wrote this card to Post Secret struggled, Kit-Kat.  Can’t let people’s experiences get in the way of our comforting illusions that there’s no inherent danger is just making shit up about sin and redemption.

@Comment #27: Kit-Kat on 09/12 at 05:05 PM

And any person who suggests that someone facing that awful choice is deserving of any kind of punishment at all is unconscionably heartless.  But I literally haven’t seen anyone actually *advancing* that argument, just people claiming that someone else did, or wondering if someone else would.

The Catholic Church has always been good at realpolitik, and at knowing when to ignore their own rules, which clearly state that folks who jump out of burning buildings are committing a sin because they are treating their lives as their own. That is why you’ve not heard Catholic’s talking about the issue much.

Look, I’m not going to defend any religious tradition that would claim that the people who jumped did anything worthy of condemndation or stigmatization.  That’s heartless and horrible and disgusting.  To the extent you’re arguing that people are actually claiming this, though, I’d like to know who. 

To the extent you’re just arguing that religion is bad because it caused some people to worry that their relatives were in hell because they jumped, then yes, I would agree that any religious belief or belief system that had that effect is a problem.  But it certainly wasn’t the universal or even the majority reaction to the people who jumped.  No major religious figure of whom I am aware preached that, no church endorsed that, and frankly, I don’t think very many religious people even had that reaction.  I suspect they saw that awful sight and shuddered in horror like everyone else, because they, too, were imagining what an awful choice that would be to make and what awful circumstances could compel someone to make it. 

So you have a reaction by, so far as we know, a very small number of people, and you’re using it to condemn religion.  But your real argument is that taboos against suicide are bad, which is a separate issue—some religions have them, some don’t, and some actually valorize suicide in certain circumstances.  I assume you don’t object only to religious taboos against suicide, but any such taboo?

Interesting factoid re: early Christianity.  During its early/foundation peroid (i.e.: roman persecution -  getting thrown to the lions &/ being used as streetlights) the church was completely cool w/ suicide.  It gave them martyrs & allowed the followers to avoid being eaten or roasted.  But by the 5th century the Donatist sect decided that they’d rather get to heaven sooner instead of later, & the church lost so many followers that Augustine had to come out against suicide.

Making it up as they went along…

@Comment #32: Kit-Kat on 09/12 at 05:17 PM

No major religious figure of whom I am aware preached that, no church endorsed that

Because, as I stated, churches are generally smart enough to know when to bend God’s rules. But it doesn’t take away the fact that God’s rules clearly state it is a sin.

Um, who is making the argument that a person who chooses to jump out of a window in the face of certain death by burning is going to hell?  I have literally not heard one single religious authority figure say this, I have not heard one single religious person I know say this, and frankly, this is the first I have ever heard of anyone anywhere making this claim.  I don’t see this argument being made anywhere (Including in either of the articles linked to by FA).  Can you link to someplace where someone is claiming that the people who jumped from the WTC on 9/11 are going to hell?
Comment #21: Kit-Kat on 09/12 at 05:48 PM

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=482984
“I watched a repeat last night of a UK Channel 4 documentary, The Falling Man. A few tentative identifications were made of the figure in the well-known photo, and they interviewed the family of one of the possibilities. The family were devout Catholics and what particularly interested me was the vehement denial by the daughters that this could be their father, because whatever the circumstances he would never have committed the mortal sin of suicide.  They really did believe that their father would have been condemned to the fires of hell if he had indeed jumped..”

So there’s one family.  I’m guessing they’re not the only ones.

  Unree at 14: What you posted and I posted are not contradictory. What you posted deal with funeral services and the rituals of mourning. What I posted has to do with what Judaism teaches about what happens in the afterlife for those that commit suicide. Judaism is anti-suicide in the sense that it teaches that people should not kill themselves under most circumstances. We don’t believe that people who commit suicide are damned to hell.

  I, too, have an opinion at 6: Thomas Paine, whom I consider to be otherwise very intelligent, had this to say about the differences between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in his Age of Reason: “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrorize and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

In other words he is imputing the worst parts of State Christianity on Jews and Muslims without knowing much about either of the former religions. Thomas Paine was a very intelligent person and he should have known that Jews do not see themselves as constituting a church, that Jews were not organized with each congregation being independent of other congregations and that synagogues had no power to monopolize anything. In fact, the Christian and Muslim governments under which most Jews lived at least nominally supported the idea that Jews should become Christian and Muslims and would in no way grant any Jewish body such powers. He obviously never sat in on any synagogue service because even under the strictest synagogues, the Rabbi doesn’t threaten people with hell.

  And this is from a very intelligent person who should have known better but chose not to in order to condemn all three monotheistic religions equally. I’ve encountered plenty of less intelligent atheists who made similar accusations and assume that Jews interpret the Hebrew Bible with the same ferocity that Evangelicals do and can’t be persuaded otherwise. So I’m not willing to give who ever made this poster the benefit of the doubt. My experience is that many atheists think that criticism of one religion is applicable to all without much curiosity into whether this is true or not. I’m really tired of it. I understand that atheists think that God doesn’t exist but that doesn’t mean that a criticism of one religion is applicable to every religion and I’m tired of my religion getting accused of things we don’t believe in.

I don’t know where I claimed that the person who wrote the post card “struggled,” I never agreed that suicides go to hell, and I certainly never said that there was “no inherent danger in people just making shit up about sin and redemption.”  I really just wanted to know who was claiming that the people who jumped on 9/11 were going to hell, because I had never once heard that argument being made; in fact, in my experience, most people, religious or not, felt horror at the sight and a deep sense of compassion for the people who were in that situation.  This was literally the first time I had heard of any other sentiment being expressed. 

(Also, I read the link to New Advent that atheist posted, and I don’t see where it says that people who jump out of burning buildings are committing a sin.  Honestly, I just don’t see it.  Can you quote the relevant language?)

Interesting factoid re: early Christianity.  During its early/foundation peroid (i.e.: roman persecution -  getting thrown to the lions &/ being used as streetlights) the church was completely cool w/ suicide.  It gave them martyrs & allowed the followers to avoid being eaten or roasted.  But by the 5th century the Donatist sect decided that they’d rather get to heaven sooner instead of later, & the church lost so many followers that Augustine had to come out against suicide.

Making it up as they went along…
Comment #33: Smartpatrol on 09/12 at 06:20 PM

Martyrs are explicitly exempted:

The reason we have advanced to prove the malice of a suicide, namely, God’s right and dominion, likewise justifies the modification of the general principle: God being the master of our life He may with His own consent remove from suicide whatever constitutes its disorder. Thus do some authorities justify the conduct of certain saints, who, impelled by the desire of martyrdom and especially to protect their chastity did not wait for their executioners to put them to death, but sought it in one manner or other themselves; nevertheless, the Divine will should be certain and clearly manifested in each particular case….

Positive but indirect suicide committed without Divine consent is also unlawful unless, everything considered, there is sufficient reason for doing what will cause death to follow. Thus, it is not a sin, but an act of exalted virtue, to go into savage lands to preach the Gospel, or to the bedside of the plague stricken, to minister to them, although they who do so have before them the prospect of inevitable and speedy death…

From the link to the Catholic Encyclopedia atheist provided, at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14326b.htm

I think the worst email I ever got was an infinitely-forwarded glurge (in 16-point Comic Sans, each paragraph in a different color, with animated butterflies):  a series of anecdotes, each no more than two or three lines, about people’s various inconveniences one morning.  One had trouble getting a child to daycare, one had a blister and had to stop at the drugstore for moleskin, one missed a bus, one broke a heel ... etc. etc.  The upshot was that each of these people, but for the annoying inconvenience that held him or her up, would have been in the World Trade Center towers the morning of 9/11.

It ended with the message that when you run into those annoying little inconveniences, just remember, “Where you are right now is exactly where God wants you to be at this very moment.”

I was so consumed with rage, I came within a hair’s breadth of collecting every picture I could find of people trapped in or falling from the Towers and sending them along to the person who’d sent me the previous email, captioning each and every picture with,
“... exactly where God wants you to be at this very moment.” 
“... exactly where God wants you to be at this very moment.” 
“... exactly where God wants you to be at this very moment.”

  Revision to the last sentence of my post: I’m tired of criticisms that aren’t really applicable to Judaism like Jews believe that people who commit suicide are going to hell be applied to Judaism by the critics of religions. If the critics of religion are going to specifically argue against us, I’d at least like them to get the facts right rather than say the are arguing against all religion when their criticism really only applies to one particular one.

@Comment #37: Kit-Kat on 09/12 at 06:34 PM

(Also, I read the link to New Advent that atheist posted, and I don’t see where it says that people who jump out of burning buildings are committing a sin.  Honestly, I just don’t see it.  Can you quote the relevant language?)

Sure. Here’s the link again: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14326b.htm

Here’s what I consider the relevant language:

Suicide is direct when a man has the intention of causing his own death, whether as an end to be attained, or as a means to another end, as when a man kills himself to escape condemnation, disgrace, ruin etc.
...
Positive and direct suicide

Positive and direct suicide perpetrated without God’s consent always constitutes a grave injustice towards Him. To destroy a thing is to dispose of it as an absolute master and to act as one having full and independent dominion over it; but man does not possess this full and independent dominion over his life, since to be an owner one must be superior to his property. God has reserved to himself direct dominion over life; He is the owner of its substance and He has given man only the serviceable dominion, the right of use, with the charge of protecting and preserving the substance, that is, life itself. ...

My reading of this is that according to the Catholic church, it was indeed wrong for people to take their death into their own hands and jump out of an open window to escape a burning building.

Well, what? I was about to note that in fact, the relatives of a man suspected to be the Falling Man in the image were indeed distressed, and insisted that it couldn’t be him because he was a good man, and a good Catholic, and he wouldn’t have jumped.

And then (so I recall from an interview which referenced this photo a few years ago) they talked to their local priest, who, being a real person and not an atheist’s caricature, assured them that God would not send a good man to hell because he jumped from a burning building.

Grassroots priests and nuns - people who come from the same origins as the people they live and work with - generally come up with perfectly humane solutions to hard and painful dogmas. It’s the church hierarchy, safely isolated from the real world, who uphold their dogmas as the only way to live and act surprised when anyone tells them they’re being offensive.

This is the first time I’ve seen such a photo.  Being one frame, it’s hard to tell the motion, but it seems fairly intentional.

Personally, my first thought is ‘what about the fire fighters and emts on the ground?’  It’s horribly hazardous to be throwing things, especially bodies, out high windows.  Which sorta blames them, but in a legal sense, I couldn’t blame them; not only could they not aim, they had little in the way of choice, choosing between burning and falling.

I don’t think, however, I’m in a place to judge someone’s faith any more than someone’s choice to fall from a burning building.  If they go out of their way to be nuisances to people who don’t follow their faith, I think that’s when I’ll place my judgement.

@Lee: I’ve encountered plenty of less intelligent atheists who made similar accusations and assume that Jews interpret the Hebrew Bible with the same ferocity that Evangelicals do and can’t be persuaded otherwise. So I’m not willing to give who ever made this poster the benefit of the doubt.

The point of “Post Secret” is that the creator is anonymous. We can make no assumptions about this particular secret creator, other than the fact that they probably object to the concept of suicide as a mortal sin. We can’t assume that they’re atheist. We can’t assume that it’s a criticism of any form of theism, much less monotheism. We can make no assumptions beyond the fact that someone scribbled this note on this particular image.

Now, of course, different religions have many different views on suicide, hell, and who goes there. Personally, I’m going to request the same courtesy that you demand, because I’m getting a bit sick and tired of people who demand recognition for the diversity of theistic views while denying the diversity of atheistic ones.

“Grassroots priests and nuns - people who come from the same origins as the people they live and work with - generally come up with perfectly humane solutions to hard and painful dogmas.”

...which is exactly why they can’t be trusted to interpret dogma the “right” way.  Dogma must be a one-size-fits-all deal or the next thing you know a bunch of dirty hippies have taken over your nice, white, perfectly authoritarian religion and ruined it by bringing in all that love and understanding and moral relativism crap…

“It’s the church hierarchy, safely isolated from the real world, who uphold their dogmas as the only way to live and act surprised when anyone tells them they’re being offensive.”

Of course.  Hierarchies exist, at least in part, to isolate those at the top from the messy details of real life at the bottom.  Now you’re talking about it like it’s a bad thing.  All they want is to wear those funny clothes, funny hats, and have people treat their every utterance as if it came from god himself.  Don’t pollute their beautiful minds with that reality stuff…

Religion gives people a tribe to belong to, and often it allows them to feel smug for being better (at observing the rules of their particular sect) than everyone else. You can argue that it meets a human need, the need to band together and hate something, but it’s not exactly the better angels of our nature. 

But by the 5th century the Donatist sect decided that they’d rather get to heaven sooner instead of later, & the church lost so many followers that Augustine had to come out against suicide.

In Man Against Himself, Karl Menninger detailed many cases of Christian martyrdom that are plainly cases of self-destruction as willed as any suicide, and I’m sure that most people are unaware of the above-mentioned fact about suicide with respect to the early Church.

Taking as his point of departure andframe of reference the age-old problem of suicide, which he analyzes in characteristic Freudian fashion, Dr. Menninger builds up a complicated conceptual structure( not really—ed) in which he sees asceticism and martyrdom, neurotic invalidism, alcoholic addiction, antisocial behavior and mental disease as so many forms of ” chronic,” progressive suicide, and this not in a merely analagous sense-in which, for example, we say that people, through dietary indiscretions,” dig their graves with their teeth “-but as the actual result of unconscious motivations based on the self-destructive impulse. Even the aggressions of the habitual criminal ” lead to self-destruction in the sense of imprisonment, misery and deprivation.”

So pervasive and insidious is the “death instinct ” that, in the development of his thesis, the author includes self-mutilation, malingering, polysurgery, purposive accidents, impotence and frigidity-classifying these under the heading of “focal” or localized suicide-and a whole range of physical diseases and disorders-denominating these as ” organic ” suicide. In the process he dissects, with his analytic knife, many an established ethical, moral and religious concept, showing, as he claims, the psychopathology underlying much in human behavior that masquerades as virtue.
The book is replete with interestingly presented and well documented case material illustrating the far reach of his concepts.

How and when the aggressive impulses are thwarted in their overt projections and are turned inward, thus leading to self-destruction, is an obscure and highly complex psychological process that requires studious effort if the reader is to grasp the closely reasoned arguments the author employs so engagingly and with such gusto in defending his thesis. These extensions of the psychoanalytic theory of selfdestruction to a variety of problems in human morbidity are not offered as scientifically proven demonstrations, but are rather a compound of clinical
observation and philosophic speculation based on Freudian concepts and, in their deductions, highly plausible and tenable, if we accept the basic premise. It is an interesting hypothesis that stands or falls with the body of psychoanalytic doctrine

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1529515/pdf/amjphnation00998-0074b.pdf

I have no idea how this could be considered a suicide.  There is a tiny nonzero chance that a person leaping out of a building could somehow land and not die immediately due to a freak wind movement, then be rushed to medical care.  That chance does not exist while staying in a burning building busily collapsing.  In addition, medical care would be remote, even if you did survive.  The people who jumped and/or attempted to climb took the best option available.

I’m honestly wondering how so many people are reading this post as saying that the only complaint is specifically with the belief that suicide is wrong.  No, she doesn’t say that all religions think that suicide is wrong.  She never, ever, ever says that.  She uses this example to make a larger point about the kind of irrational thought that, eventually, tends to follow with belief in a supernatural being who has a specific way in which they wish you to live.

But there’s no real evidence that the big lie of religion gives that much comfort, on the whole.  It’s far more likely to give people irrational fears and make them think uncharitable things by suggesting that it’s “god” that told them so.

What on earth is unclear about that?

Crissa @43:  a firefighter indeed died when a falling person landed on him.

Re “Falling Man”: this was one in a series of photos taken of man who fell, and the photographer said that the series makes it is clear that he is tumbling through the air, not dropping straight down; this one photo just happened to line up with the building.

Re the postcard: perhaps what has given it the power to start this discussion is that it can be read as both “the God I believe in would not send this man to hell” and “if this is someone’s idea of ‘benevolence’, then it’s no wonder I don’t believe.”  I hear both tones in my head when I read it.

Re judgment: sometimes it seems that religion is solely for the purpose of passing judgment on others, when I think it’s original intent was to focus on ourselves - our own actions and motives.  I used to joke that when people in the church talked about “outsiders”, it was gossip and judgment, but when they talked about “insiders”, it was just “concern for their Christian brothers and sisters”.  I don’t think it’s funny any more; it’s ALL judgment.

Flora, all of those apply equally to atheists who live in largely liberal communities. As for Amanda’s retorts in this thread, they’re fairly disingenuous. You didn’t say religion was ‘often just as likely’ to give people irrational fears, you said ‘far more likely’. And when you blanket all religions as ‘religion’ then you are stating they’re the same. Why bother to deny it?

I mean, if you want to condemn religion as fake and/or silly, that’s fine but placing blanket condemnations on all religion as a social entity without making any distinctions is hugely simplistic. It’s like someone pointing to all the ills caused by various politicians and governments in various countries and declaring that all politics is immoral and its followers suckers, and that republicans and democrats are the same because it’s all politics and politics is BAD.

As for the central question, it depends on the person. Doubtless there are a few people who believe these people are going to hell for jumping before they died but since I haven’t heard anyone say this, I heavily doubt it’s a widespread belief. That’s probably because most people can see there’s no difference between killing yourself by jumping and killing yourself by staying on a burning, collapsing building.

@51: Flora, all of those apply equally to atheists who live in largely liberal communities.

Yes, because every religious person is a special snowflake while atheists are a hive mind.

You didn’t say religion was ‘often just as likely’ to give people irrational fears, you said ‘far more likely’. And when you blanket all religions as ‘religion’ then you are stating they’re the same. Why bother to deny it?

It’s a lot easier to breed irrational fears when you’re permitted to believe and say what you will and say that no one can criticize it because it is faith, thus immune from the necessity of proof.  Fears that are subject to evidence are permitted to actually be acknowledged as either rational or irrational.  Reality-based living has a lot less room for irrational fear than the model in which you can make up whatever you wish.  That doesn’t necessarily preclude religious people from lacking irrational fears, but it does make it much easier for them to hold them.

  CBrachyrhynchos, you are not doing a good job as presenting atheists as a diverse group by your behavior. You demand respect but give no respect in return. What has my community ever done to your community. When has a Jewish group ever persecuted atheists? Meanwhile, the Jews stuck in Easter Europe after WWII had to endure a particularly intense persecution that was fueled by traditional Easter European Jew-hatred combined with a particularly militant brand of atheism.

  Flora, as long as humans exist than they are going to be tribes. There will be family tribes (clans), ethnic tribes, gender tribes, class tribes, religious tribes, hobby tribes, ideological tribes and sexuality tribes. Many humans need to belong a group that is bigger than their immediate family but smaller than the entire world. I’m one of them. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate tribalism, which is unrealistic and probably unwise, but to make sure that the different tribes at least don’t try to intentionally hurt other tribes if not work together in some sort of harmony. But to turn the different tribes to one mass, that isn’t really that desirable in my opinion because I don’t think it will works and it goes against human nature.

Yes CBrach, because people always use the word ‘equally’ to say how much better one group is than another.

As for the irrational beliefs thing, I agree fully that fear sprins up disproportionately in a lot of religious communities but that has at least as much to do with them being close-knit communities tied up by a single belief system as it does with religion. I respect your overall point, INT, but people decide what is rational or irrational according to their own experience and prejudices, which also influences their interpretation of religion, or any belief system in the same way.

I mean, is bigotry a fear which is based on rationality? I don’t think so and neither do bigots, they see their own hatred and fear as rational judgment subject to objective evidence and rather than ‘bigotry’. What one person sees as rational another will see as completely irrational, and that goes across the cultural, political and social spectrum. That’s not to say religion should be treated with the same respect as science, simply that religious people shouldn’t be seen as being automatically more irrational than atheists because they rely on faith. Liberals rely on faith too. We have faith in the capacity of human beings for positive change, no matter how irrational that seems sometimes, because otherwise what’s the point?

Wow, the straw is really flying here.  I really am not seeing many people actually address what I actually said, however, so I’m going to go ahead and requote it here so that people can take on what I actually said:

I’m generally not a big fan of the notion that big lies are fine if they give people solace, even if it were true that said lies actually did.  But there’s no real evidence that the big lie of religion gives that much comfort, on the whole.  It’s far more likely to give people irrational fears and make them think uncharitable things by suggesting that it’s “god” that told them so. When I first read about how the choice to jump instead of stay in the WTC to burn to death became stigmatized, I didn’t understand it at all. Why were people judging one choice over another in a choice-free situation? Then I realized the role that religious teachings about “suicide” played in the discourse, and, well, I’m too full of disgust to even respond with much beyond “fuck that noise”.

One paragraph, and very little of it addressed.

Here’s some potential lines of attack if this makes you uncomfortable that actually deal with what I said and not what you wished I said:

*Defending telling outrageous whoppers to people to give them comfort.

*Claiming that religious delusions are automatically more comforting than the truth.  Back this up with evidence that the making-shit-up aspect of religion doesn’t compel people to make up horrible, anxiety-provoking lies along with the comforting truths.

*Defending the way that religion encourages people to shun common sense compassion over hand-wringing theological bullshitting about what god supposedly wants, even though your god never actually does anyone the fucking favor of spelling it out, instead acting like an emotional abuser who expects you to guess—-and punishing you with violence if you guess wrong.

Instead, the usual bleating about how not all religious people blah blah blah, even though that’s not what I said.

Oh, c’mon Stubborn.  Provide the evidence for your claim that atheists in close knit communities are just as likely to be up at nights worried they’re going to be tortured for eternity.

Well, of course religious people aren’t automatically more irrational than atheists; there are as many reasons behind the nonbelief of individual atheists as there are individual atheists, and plenty of them buy into various kinds of woo and/or pseudoscience.  Atheism simply precludes one from believing in a deity; it doesn’t even preclude one from belief in the supernatural.  Even hardcore skeptics have weaknesses, being primates with physical brains that are susceptible to all of the same fallacies as all our other fellow primates.  That doesn’t mean that we (skeptics moreso than atheists in general) open ourselves up to them, though, by saying that anything is not subject to critical thought.  We try to limit our tendency toward irrational fear by applying critical thought to everything that we can, and if we fail, well, critical thinking says that will happen, too, and anyone who says otherwise isn’t applying skeptical thinking to their own fallibility and that of others.  We open up our own experiences and prejudices to common experience and, when applicable, to scientific inquiry, if we’re any kind of skeptics.  Religion, or faith, does not do so.

I don’t know that it’s good to say that liberals have faith in the capacity of human beings for positive change without grounds because history has demonstrated this to be true, where history has never demonstrated that an invisible being who is beyond the laws of physics communicates with anyone or exists at all.  “Faith” is the wrong word for it.  I believe in what has been demonstrated to be possible.  I would be an anarchist if I believed boundlessly in the incorruptible goodness of human beings, but, believing in evolution through natural selection, I believe that we’re a bunch of dumb, shuffling primates who, while certainly possessing the ability to be good to one another within our tribes, require further motivation to be good beyond that.  That’s why I’m a liberal and not an anarchist, and that’s why I believe that people are capable of positive change without believing that they will unquestionably engage in it right now.

Just echoing that idea that it would be far more possible to survive the jump than to survive burning to death in a collapsing building.  Goodness knows stranger things have happened.  If left with the choice, I might just hope I land in such a way that I just break all the bones in my body (I’ve heard landing on your feet is most desirable). 

And if you’re religious, who’s to say that these people didn’t say a quick prayer asking for absolution as they were going out/falling from the windows? 

Yeah, Catholicism is big on the pain and suffering.  As a kid I had to go to CCD, and we were going over some stuff about mass.  Our teacher was an eager 20-year-old gal who loved Catholicism, and she told us that when you kneel you need to make sure your butt doesn’t touch the pew.  Well, I had knee troubles from the time I was about 11, and so I said that it hurt my knees too much to kneel like that.  “Offer it up to god,” was her only response.

Yeah, fuck you.  From then on I basically sat forward rather than touch the kneeler at all.  My mom didn’t care because my mom’s not a huge idiot.  I mean, she forced me to go to church even though I hated it, but she wasn’t THAT MUCH of an idiot.

And, to tie that back in, the fact that we don’t open ourselves up to irrational fear, that we try to apply critical thinking and outside experience and science to our own experiences and prejudices, also means that we don’t open ourselves up to comforting lies or non-falsifiable statements.  It’s a double-edged sword, but I don’t find any of the mythos particularly inspiring, anyway.

I’m an atheist because of reading this blog, by the way, Amanda (or, at least, I admitted my atheism to myself, and then to everyone).  I thought you should know that.  I couldn’t rationalize anymore.  Thank you.  The sky is much larger without the comforting lies or the irrational fears.

I never said they were, Amanda! I probably should have explained it more thoroughly but any community based on a common belief system is always going to be vulnerable to an extremist viewpoint where outlying theories aren’t questioned the way they should.

The particular fear is irrelevant, the important thing is that in each case a) the people touting it usually believe it, b) they use it to swing people around to their point of view, and c) it dissuades dissent. Putting it in an atheist vs religious context is wrong, a secular vs religious context is more realistic(though if you want a specific example, the French burqa ban is a good example of anti-religious fear triumphing over rationality). 

And INT, that’s a perfectly reasonable viewpoint but it’s one that’s denied to religious people in these arguments because if they re-analyse any ancient dictats they get accused of ‘making it up as they go along’.

I’m tired of my religion getting accused of things we don’t believe in.

What religious people claim to “believe in” changes as soon as enough of them get called on it and/or it becomes unpopular enough. I’m uninterested in playing a game where the object is for one side to move the goalposts as much as they have to so they win every time.

Stubborn, I won’t accuse them of making things up as they go along any more than I will accuse the people who wrote the books or told the stories. Which is to say, everyone does.  Everyone is making it up as they go along and they always have been.  I don’t particularly care whether they are blindly following a religious book or making up their own ideas; they are either making it up as they go along or following people who did, and neither requires evidence, and both are a problem.

When I first read about how the choice to jump instead of stay in the WTC to burn to death became stigmatized…

Um…what?

Stigmatized by whom, exactly?

INT, what I’m saying is that these arguments don’t allow for nuance in religious beliefs. This idea that anyone with any religious beliefs is religious in exactly the same way and that they base absolutely everything they do in life on some line they’ve dug out and taken out of context. Are there people like that? Absolutely.

Does that mean anyone who’s religious thinks that way? Of course not. Many religious people are smart enough to differentiate between core beliefs (ie. Don’t kill, lie, steal, etc.) and things that were taken as religious practice thousands of years ago and are no longer feasible. To atheists like, say Junk Science, this represents ‘moving the goalposts to win’. 

Amanda, I know you’re unhappy that people are attacking the tone of your post rather than the spine but that’s because many of us agree with the spine (ie. It is morally wrong to say that people who jumped off the buildings are going to hell, people who are religious can often live under the shadow of fear) while seeing the tone itself as the problem. When you call a post ‘Why Religion Really Isn’t Comforting’ and use the blank term ‘religion’ throughout without using any qualifiers then you are referring to all religion as one and the same, blah blah blah. Instead of denying you said it why don’t you simply address it and explain whether it’s what you think or not?

I’m sure that “many” religious people believe all manner of things.  But based on how communities comprised of strongly religious people vote, it’s pretty clear that the vast majority of religious people are blinkered and cruel, and encouraged to remain that way.

I Googled this question as best I could, and all I found was a lot of speculation on discussion boards.

Has any authoritative religious leader suggested that “committing suicide” in that situation would send the victim to hell, or in any way hinder him in the afterlife?

Hell, that’s too limited. Let’s raise the stakes:

Has anyone with a functioning website, now or in the past, who called himself motivated by any religion, expressed that opinion?

And please, Fred Phelps doesn’t count. He probably thinks they’re all going to hell anyway because we don’t stone gays to death or something.

@54: Lee, here’s the deal. If you want to talk about your own beliefs, you have my full support and respect. I’m not a Jew. I don’t understand Judaism. Therefore, I don’t write about it.

But, you want to talk about atheism. And that includes secular Jews, non-theistic Buddhists, UU Humanists, religious humanists, live-and-let-live agnostics, accomodationist atheists, ignostics, and a wide variety of other flavors as well. You made a sloppy and harmful generalization in the service of prejudice, and that makes your criticisms irrelevant.

Anecdata - my mother is a Jewish atheist hospice social worker.  She wonders sometimes if maybe the religious people are onto something, in that, among her clients (that’s both the dying people and their families) there’s a peace and acceptance that she perceives as being directly tied to their faith.  (Of course, then you can get into “opiate of the masses” territory, but that’s another discussion.)  I personally don’t find atheism all that comforting.  Empowering, energizing, awe-inspiring, and full of wonder, but not comforting, not the way my theism was comforting back when I had some.

There’s a big difference between “God loves me absolutely and I’m going to go to heaven when I die and be reunited with all my loved ones and everything will be wonderful forever” and “I am a terrible sinner and I will never be good enough and oh no I once looked at someone lustfully so now I will burn in hell forever.”  I don’t think religion, as a concept, leans inherently more toward one than toward the other.

@55: Stubborn, your argument has become such a cliche that it’s been lampooned in comic strips. It’s something that drives me up the wall in these discussions on the internet. Making a cheap artificial equivalence between both sides doesn’t make you the reasonable person with the moral high ground. It just makes you a different flavor of bigot, one that seeks to gain status by treating both atheists and fundamentalists according to silly stereotypes.

While I’m very sympathetic to the urge to jump and be smashed rather than burn to death, I can’t help but think that there is a level of selfishness involved that is typical of suicide. It’s not like a person can jump and aim. There was a non-trivial danger that they would harm other people when they landed. The jumpers were in a horrible situation, the type of situation difficult to “judge” without having experienced it, but I’m not entirely convinced that a social bias against “just kill yourself without concern for others” is such a bad thing at the end of the day. Would you jump if you were guaranteed to kill somebody else on your way down? I’d hope that I’d have the strength to take the pain of burning/suffocation rather than contributing to someone else’s death. These aren’t easy questions. And I’m not pretending that religion offers good answers. I’m just saying, this post and most of the comments assume that these deaths were taking place in a vacuum, like blowing one’s head off with a shotgun, rather than gassing yourself in the garage and inadvertently killing everyone in the attached house.

And I’m in a bit of a bad mood having read yet another “atheists don’t have ____” argument, in this case over stories and Johnny Cash.

vladimir: It’s great that you’d be so courageous. Did any of those jumpers actually harm anyone?

As already mentioned, at least one landed on a fireman and killed him. So… yes. And I said I hoped, I didn’t say I was certain how I would respond.

Jon Stewart did it again tonight.  He equated the post-9/11 Falwell and Coulter hate speech with the American Atheist lawsuit against the “cross” they found at the WTC site.  If anything, the placing of the cross at the museum was itself an act of 9/11 exploitation and the AA response was an act “to restore sanity” as Jon Stewart would put it.

What on earth are you on about, CBrach? Do you really have so little self awareness that you’re attacking someone as bigoted because they think judging someone on their religious beliefs or lack thereof is overly simplistic? Do you really think a series of posts saying stereotypes are wrong is treating people as ‘silly stereotypes’, and attempting to gain ‘the moral high ground’?

Pretty much all you’ve done this thread is attack the ‘atheists are all the same’ strawman when no one has remotely said anything like that, apart from stating that cruelty and irrationality isn’t limited to religious people (I know, SO controversial).

And if you wanted a link to say the middle ground was wrong you should have used this: http://www.supermegacomics.com/ It wo.uld have carried as much intellectual weight and would have been entertaining to boot, instead of just eye-rollingly smug and painfully sophomoric.

I’m tired of criticisms that aren’t really applicable to Judaism like Jews believe that people who commit suicide are going to hell be applied to Judaism by the critics of religions.

Yes, that would be annoying, had it happened.  But it didn’t.  Amanda noted that religion often amps up people’s anxiety and unhappiness, and used an example of the most dominant religious tradition in the US as an example.  That particular example may not be applicable to Judaism.  Since nobody said it did, I’m not sure what you’re so tired of here.

When has a Jewish group ever persecuted atheists? Meanwhile, the Jews stuck in Easter Europe after WWII had to endure a particularly intense persecution that was fueled by traditional Easter European Jew-hatred combined with a particularly militant brand of atheism.

As you yourself noted, Jews as a group have almost never been in a position to persecute anybody.  I see no reason not to be sure that if/when Jews amass enough power to do so, they will get right on it.  After all, adherents to the two religions most closely related to Judaism do.  As for what I assume you’re referring to—persecutions of the Jews by Stalin etc. in the USSR—as you yourself note, it would not have been possible without hundreds and hundreds of years of Christian antisemitism.  Given the sharp spike in pogroms in the early part of the twentieth century, I’m not sure why a few decades makes so much of a difference as to where, ideologically, we place the blame for USSR persecutions.

There was a non-trivial danger that they would harm other people when they landed.

If I were making a spot judgment, among flames and smoke etc., and the collapsing of a skyscraper I would indeed conclude that the risk of harming another person was trivial.  Nobody was killed by the women who jumped from the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, after all.  And compared to the massive danger of collapsing skyscrapers, I don’t think it would even ping on my radar.

Lord knows (snark) I received little consolation or comfort from Catholicism as a child.

Never a comforting moment, that I recall, a Mass in Latin I didn’t understand, and bored stiff by, there’s that. However, I still remember the attempts to instill fear and/or guilt.

Nightmares from the colored slides of “the damned being tortured in hell” nuns thought appropriate to show to 7 year-olds in Sunday school. (Slides that, obviously, as a adult, I realized were of scenes from medieval paintings—a fine point the nuns never bothered to explain to frightened children.)

I also remember staying home sick from Mass, worried that if I were hit by a truck before I would be taken to confession the next week, I’d be sent directly to hell (yet another comforting example from the local nun Sunday school teachers.)

I remember tuning into a televised Mass (don’t have a clue why a mass would televised be in New Jersey in the ‘50s, but it was.) But still worried that wouldn’t satisfied the dogma or an angry God: would watching Mass on TV exempt me from hell—or at least, assign me to purgatory instead?

Funny to recall 50 years later, ghost stories to frighten children.

But not amusing when I later learned that my devout Catholic mother had committed suicide in 1960.

Clinically depressed, she’d been prescribed “tranquilizers” by a psychiatrist. Barbituates, actually, promoted by the drug companies in the 1950s as a cure for “bored” housewives, and doled out en mass by doctors to women of the period. Barbituates, which medical science later acknowleged deepened depression, rather than providing “tranquility.”

I can only imagine the added mental anguish that would have been suffered by a woman taught to believe she was assigning herself to hell for all eternity.

That, I can’t forgive Catholicism.

@19, Amanda, is there a specific resulting link I should be checking out in your Google search link?  The results are pretty all-over-the-place.

As you yourself noted, Jews as a group have almost never been in a position to persecute anybody.  I see no reason not to be sure that if/when Jews amass enough power to do so, they will get right on it.  After all, adherents to the two religions most closely related to Judaism do.

Not for nothing, but there appears to be a non-trivial element of the population of Israel (which is itself explicitly a Jewish state, and as such arguably institutionally implicit) that is indeed getting into the persecutional thing already, and in fact have been doing so for a few decades.

The point not being the Jews or even Israel are bad, but that people are bastards, and going through hell doesn’t give you a special bastard exemption. I could get into the argument about how centuries of Christian anti-semitism had gotten the ball rolling long before Stalin came on the scene, and I could make the point that Soviet state atheism was sort of incidental to Soviet state tyranny and racism and had fuck all to do with the fact that the country was run by a genocidal fuckhead and his cronies. I could also point out that suggesting that a lack of interest among some internet atheists in coddling your special, oh-so-nice superstitions is persecution and bears any resemblance to the state-sponsored oppression of actual people who were actively held in poverty with their culture and livelihood under constant assault is both stupid and repulsive.

But that would a waste of time, since Lee has missed the whole damn point. It’s bigger than suicide. It is about the failure of religion to fit human lives and human needs, and the pain caused when people keep on trying to force it to.

Alas, Jon Stewart is pretty married to that “both sides” stuff, but at least he keeps his ratio of “people who deserve to be mocked”/“people who don’t” to about 70/30.

I have an incredible fear of falling, but I have to say that if I was trapped up at the top of the WTC and I knew I was either going to die by immolation or die by gravity, I would have chosen the latter.

This religious bs is not about suicide of 911 “jumpers” but about defending the euthanasia and martyrdom stances that came from institution of church not from religion and in my opinion is not so religious.
Euthanasia suiciders and 911 jumpers were in the same situation with the exception of amount of time to think about it. And i do not think “jumpers” really had time or ability to choose. Suicides happen when the mind is focused on a single thought: “avoid the pain” repetition and alternative can not be found, whether or not alternative exists. And they are not going to Hell since it is not a place that exist. Refusing sermons ad burial rites to suiciders doesn’t consider bodies never recovered throughout the history and future that never received burial rites.
I am religious and believe in God in a way that church would call me an atheist and atheists would call me a believer. i believe in God that sets the rules of life and went to rest, not the one that is punishing and rewording me. We do it ourselves by not following the rules of the Universe. We all are interconnected trough singularity gravitation.
I do not believe in Hell or Heaven as a place but as a state of mind. Religion and church hierarchy is not the same. Old Testament is a complete description of the best, middle and worst of Humanity while Jesus gives the rules of the universe.

There’s a David James Smith piece at the Daily Nation that TPM linked to that wrote in depth about the jumpers. In it, there is some documentation that a few of them really did try to climb down the outside of the building but fell.

There’s a video of at least one person in which this appeared to be the case, but I have a bit of trouble believing that a significant number of those who fell and/or jumped really thought scaling the outside of the building would have been possible. But I wasn’t there and I have no idea how being in that situation would have affected my thinking, so I suppose it’s possible.

As to the notion that the falling people who were attempting to scale the outside of the building truly believed that it was possible for them to climb down the outside, if there was even the shadow of a possibility that they could make it why not try?  If you didn’t make the attempt, and instead gave up trying and were immolated, wouldn’t that be considered suicide?  Would your belief in the possibility of surviving be enough to tip the scales of intent?  If you believed it was possible to escape death by climbing, and you chose not to because you were clearheaded enough to realize that it more likely that you would hurt someone else by falling on them that you made it to safety, would that make you a martyr?  In that sort of situation is anyone going to heaven?
It’s nauseating that people will actually debate about that sort of thing as more than a theoretical question.  I’m so far removed from being exposed to people who truly believe in this sort of thing that I can barely even fathom that they still exist.  And yet my mother, who lives in a small pacific northwest town, tells me that a neighbor of hers earnestly believed that crap about Hurricane Katrina being god’s punishment on the wicked, and felt so much better about it the whole tragedy once she was told that by her religious radio commentator.  Religion is such an effective way to victim blame.  Helps you sleep better at night.  Ugh.  How can they stand themselves?
I know, I know, deep denial about what their values really are, what they practice and what they preach.

I’ve encountered plenty of less intelligent atheists who made similar accusations and assume that Jews interpret the Hebrew Bible with the same ferocity that Evangelicals do and can’t be persuaded otherwise.

Well, okay, but gripe at them, not us.  In fact, if you really wanted to open the field up wide, you might try griping at the ferocious Evangelicals too, since it is they, and not we, who are misinterpreting your scriptures.

I went to a burial recently, I guess the comfort part of religion is in saying the relatives that the dead isn’t really dead, not really, he’s just alive in an invisible place. To me, it came across as a blatant insult to everyone’s intelligence (after all there was a corpse right there), but people seemed comforted by the words of the priest. I suppose it has to do with what Amanda Marcotte said about persuasion in a previous post, about just encouraging something that is already there; a craving for the dead person not being really dead.

Is it accurate to say a suicidal person is less likely to fear death than the rest of people? I’m wondering that because people who don’t fear death represent something very dangerous for a business who’s entire deal is built upon fear of death, like the church.

Many religious people are smart enough to differentiate between core beliefs (ie. Don’t kill, lie, steal, etc.) and things that were taken as religious practice thousands of years ago and are no longer feasible.

Well, that’s great for them. Religion hasn’t totally destroyed their sense of inherent morality. They still think human goodness comes from the sky, and they’re just as unprincipled as ever when it comes to making factual claims, but they haven’t turned into monsters. I’ll be praying for them to shake loose the rest of their chains.

And by the way, that’s what “moving the goalposts” means. You get to keep changing your claims and still be right. It’s categorically impossible for you to be wrong.

#82

That number should be 100/0.  And this isn’t really about Republican vs Democrat or conservative vs liberal.  I had no problem with him criticizing Weiner for lying, but when I’m talking about like another ACORN/Shirley Sherrod/NPR situation where he smeared them without going into the facts because it was the news story of the moment.  I still think Stewart is funny, but if he keeps doing this there will be a time where politics stand in the way of me enjoying the Daily Show.

I like Colbert better, he’s a better fake conservative than Stewart is a real liberal.

Is it accurate to say a suicidal person is less likely to fear death than the rest of people?

In my experience, no.  In my experience of suicidal ideation, fear isn’t…I’m not sure I can articulate this well…it’s not…a relevant category.  Like, I’d still be terrified, when in that state, if I found myself in mortal danger beyond my control—say, trapped in a burning building, or attacked by sharks (two of my all-time fears), or having fallen onto subway tracks.  It’s just that, left to my own devices, in that state…I’m suffering and don’t see any prospect of that changing over the next several decades and don’t know that I can face that.

Many religious people are smart enough to differentiate between core beliefs (ie. Don’t kill, lie, steal, etc.) and things that were taken as religious practice thousands of years ago and are no longer feasible.

Sure, that’s nice.  But what counts as “core beliefs” fluctuates from believer to believer.  For liberal Christians, they may be don’t kill or steal, but there’s clearly a pretty large contingent of Christians whose core beliefs include “don’t be gay” and “don’t allow women reproductive autonomy.”  What makes one group right about this and the other wrong?

70: Don’t knock “opiates”. Some people are in lots of emotional pain, and desperate for all the comfort they can get, delusional or no.

@77: Do you really think a series of posts saying stereotypes are wrong is treating people as ‘silly stereotypes’, and attempting to gain ‘the moral high ground’?

When the response is another stereotype, yes.

Some people would rather complain about atheists than try to engage in transfaith community I see. 

Many religious people are smart enough to differentiate between core beliefs (ie. Don’t kill, lie, steal, etc.) and things that were taken as religious practice thousands of years ago and are no longer feasible.

Cherry-picking from religion what one finds palatable is probably the only way to keep believing in it, if one is a decent person.  I’m not sure you can honestly say they are derrerentiating anything other than between what they find exceptable and what they don’t, since religious texts are contradictory, yet usually require complete, unquestioning, unaltered adherence to “count”.

If a xtian theist doesn’t think being gay is automatically worthy of death, for example, they’d be hard pressed to find anything in the bible agreeing with them.  It does, in fact, state very clearly and repeatedly the opposite.  That this one theist choses to think differently simply points to the conveniently nebulous nature of faith.

I would add to all of this that I don’t care if the core beliefs that people pick are nice or not, beyond the fact that, if I have to live with people who believe things that are either untrue or unprovable, I’d rather them be nice.  I don’t care about what is nice.  I care about what is true.  That’s the whole point of the post.  I am not interested in making nice with people who believe in lies just because the lies are nice.  I’m interested in pointing out that it is important that what we believe is true, because the willingness to suspend skepticism for something that you think is nice means that you may very well be willing to suspend it for something that is not-so-nice if it suits your purposes.  Even then, though, the slippery slope isn’t the point.  The point is that truth is important for its own sake.

Vladimir, you’re a fucking moron. You already proved it with your comment some time back sneering at introverts as being somehow lesser than your extroverted self, but thanks for confirming it.

Cactus Wren @ 39:
That sort of denial of one’s own agency reminds me of this old joke:
god granting miracles
A religious man is on top of a roof during a great flood. A man comes by in a boat and says “get in, get in!” The religous man replies, ” no I have faith in God, he will grant me a miracle.”

Later the water is up to his waist and another boat comes by and the guy tells him to get in again. He responds that he has faith in god and god will give him a miracle. With the water at about chest high, another boat comes to rescue him, but he turns down the offer again cause “God will grant him a miracle.”

With the water at chin high, a helicopter throws down a ladder and they tell him to get in, mumbling with the water in his mouth, he again turns down the request for help for the faith of God. He arrives at the gates of heaven with broken faith and says to Peter, I thought God would grand me a miracle and I have been let down.” St. Peter chuckles and responds, “I don’t know what you’re complaining about, we sent you three boats and a helicopter.”

Amanda, you are right on. Thank you.

My (private) spiritual life is very important to me. However, organized religion has the potential for horrible corruption, cruelty, and authoritarianism beyond any other human construct I can think of.

And IMHO, anyone who claims connection to God and hasn’t confronted and acknowledged the problem of cruelty/evil at a personal, soul-crushing level is just following the formulas they’ve been taught. It’s pure, harmful bullshit. Again, MHO.

And it’s true. No loving God would condemn anyone to Hell. No loving parent would send their child there, and any psychotic, sadistic MF’er capable of that kind of crime isn’t worth 2 seconds of anyone’s time, much less ‘worship’.  Better to just be an honest atheist, IMHO. I was for many years, and that was fine. I had a moral compass, a good life, and intellectual integrity, as you obviously do. Thanks for your thoughtful, righteous words.

He wasn’t killing himself. He was escaping intense burning pain and immediate death via the only path he had available to him.  He was saving himself the only way he could.
Isn’t that obvious?

PBS (I think it was Frontline) was airing a special about personal religious responses to 9/11 the other night. They only found one actual atheist to interview, but a few of the religious folks did admit that 9/11 had damaged their faith. These were people who had personally lost someone to the attacks, and who still believed in god but were unable to see him as anything other than a monster afterwards. It was heartbreaking to watch some of these people who had lost children, spouses, and other loved ones, and who were clearly still devastated by it.

Religion comforted nothing. People like to say it does, but I have to believe they know they’re lying to themselves. If you truly believed that your loved one had only gone on to be with god, and that you would be reunited with them very shortly for the rest of eternity, then why would you feel any sadness? My grandmother died a few years ago. I’m fairly certain that I (an atheist) felt the same soul-destroying, heart-rending pain and loss as my (devoutly christian) mother. And my grandmother lived to be 95 years old, and died relatively peacefully; we didn’t even have to deal with the pain and anger that comes with having someone stolen from you by violence. And yet my mother is still a shell of herself, as were the people interviewed in the special. Where was the comfort?

It sort of astounds me that anyone could have lived through the 20th century (or at least have relatives who did) and still never have addressed the fact that there is no justice with god. There is no answer to atrocities that were magnitudes worse than the one we experienced on 9/11. I know people are by nature parochial, and usually don’t try to understand or address something until it happens to them (witness the number of conservatives who suddenly discover that being gay is OK when it’s one of their own sons or daughters), so I’ll cut them some slack. Still, there is no way a loving god exists. The oft repeated mantra that “god has a plan” is complete bullshit. I’ve said it before, but if god is actually all knowing and all powerful, then there is nothing that could be achieved through suffering that he could not achieve without the suffering. If a god exists, the best that you could say is that he is indifferent to us. The evidence, on the other hand, implies that he’s a sadist.

I can’t help but think that there is a level of selfishness involved that is typical of suicide.

There are two things that always cheese me off in discussions surrounding suicide. One is that “suiciders” and “suiciding” are not words. The other is the idea that suicidal people are acting selfishly (or, at least more so than any other random person).

I obviously cannot speak for all suicidal people, but I did attempt suicide three times between the ages of eleven and sixteen. In my own experience, it wasn’t even so much the desire to die but to erase myself from the earth—to sleep until everyone who had ever known me or known of me was long gone. I wanted every memory of me to be obliterated. Since that wasn’t possible, suicide seemed the only other option. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and it certainly wasn’t that I was thinking “only of myself”, it was just an unfortunate side effect of the only course of action I thought was open to me. To my mind, I was choosing the least worst option. I think that’s probably how most people in that situation feel, especially when you’re a teenager and it’s so hard to see further than your own surroundings (and depression at any age makes this nearly impossible). Not to mention that many people believe everyone will be better off without them.

Obviously there are exceptions (suicide bombers, that guy who set himself on fire outside of his divorce/child custody proceedings), but I honestly doubt the majority of people who have made the (to them, sensible) choice to end their lives did so while thinking “that’ll show ‘em”.

Again, religion offers no solace to suicidal people, or their families, and in fact goes out of its way to pile on shame, ridicule, and judgement.

These were people who had personally lost someone to the attacks, and who still believed in god but were unable to see him as anything other than a monster afterwards. It was heartbreaking to watch some of these people who had lost children, spouses, and other loved ones, and who were clearly still devastated by it.

You’re more generous to such people than I am.  Whenever I see somebody who was perfectly happy to believe until something bad happened to them, all I can think is “It was OK when it was somebody else’s kid/spouse/parent who was dying in intense pain?”  When my best friend died, it was all “God has a plan” and “everything happens for a reason” and “she lived a full life,” but when all of a sudden you’ve lost someone, your suffering is so great that surely no benevolent god could have allowed it?  Well, what the fuck did you think everybody else in the world who has lost someone felt like?

EG01,

Well, yes that’s completely true. Christianity is not exactly a system of belief weighed down with a surfeit of empathy. I just meant that, in that moment, watching these people break down ten years after losing their loved ones, I just felt sympathy. But you’re right, people’s ability to ignore suffering until it happens to them is astonishing.

You know, I’ve only seen Amanda Marcotte do Blogging Heads and I wasn’t terribly impressed. Maybe that just isn’t her format. But she is right on target in this post. Well done, Ms. Marcotte. I’ll be reading more of your work.

@102: Suicide as the last resort of the powerless isn’t an unheard-of approach. 

When I attempted, I intensely believed that my death would motivate my extended family, my community, and possibly the government to take seriously my allegations that my parents were broken people, and that this would protect my three younger siblings.  I was incorrect, but I was half motivated to stop living what I saw as a miserable existence and half motivated for other people.

To be fair, suicide became a mortal sin in European culture when the Catholic Church made it one in a deal with the nobility- it used to be that when someone died, their debts had to be forgiven. Poor people trapped in the feudal system and burdened with enormous debt would sometimes kill themselves as a last resort. To further be fair, you would be hard-pressed to find a Catholic clergy person to say that WTC jumpers are going to hell for committing suicide. Beyond that, the view on suicide is changing within the church as society’s understanding of psychology becomes better. A monsignor told me years ago, “Yeah, the Church says suicide is a sin, but not if it’s part of an illness. I mean, there are things that even the Pope couldn’t handle . . . (pause) . . .well, okay maybe the POPE could handle it, but nobody else.” I won’t bore you with Vatican II’s tacit endorsement of the idea of universal salvation. I will only say that religion is part of the feedback loop of culture, and culture changes slowly.