Suicide

Pia - Suicide

The Theology Of Suicide

Suicide is the act whereby a person ends their own life.

The Church of Infinite Dimensions celebrates the life of all things. It would prefer that an agu did not end its life early, except in the cases detailed in the sermon on "Assisted Suicide". However it also believes in the right of the individual to determine its own path through life, and it believes that an agu has the right to commit suicide if that is what it truly wishes to do.

Because we have an infinite number of lives, suicide does not represent a final annihilation of all that one is, it is more like getting up and leaving a cinema in the middle of a movie when you can't stand the show. This doesn't mean that leaving early is your best option, perhaps if you had stayed you might have found that the movie improved. Still, there are always more movies that you can go to.

Shortening the life of an agu however means that its tagu in an adjacent Shoku will be smaller to begin with. If the agu died before it was fully mature emotionally and culturally, the tagu will have less character, at least to begin with.

For those that seek to kill themselves to escape their problems, there is no guarantee that things will be any better in the next Shoku. Even though your consciousness departs Orithia, your problems may go with you, especially if they spring from flaws in your character. The Church strongly believes that problems must be faced and dealt with, not run away from.

Reasons For Suicide

Depression

The usual reason for killing oneself, is that one's life is felt to be so unhappy and hopeless that it is intolerable and one cannot stand it to continue any longer. Generally this is the result of a person suffering from depression. But depression feeds on itself, churning the negative emotions and dragging the subject down, in emotional terms, far below the level of unhappiness appropriate to the reality of the subject's life.

It may be that a person's life really is that bad and that hopeless, but such conditions are rare and are dealt with in the sermon on Assisted Suicide. For almost all aga that are physically healthy, especially young adults, the situation that seems so hopeless is, in fact, far from it, and certainly not worth ending one's life over.

To end your life as a young adult, when you are only beginning to come into your own, is the height of ignorance and stupidity. At that age you haven't even found your real identity yet. You don't even fully know what the world is yet. In short: you are in no position to judge whether your life is worth living.

Depression is painful, but it can be fought and it can be beaten. You don't even have to fight it, you can just ignore it and it will go away. Ultimately the sufferer must address the cause of the depression. There is always a cause. It is difficult to face your short-comings, but when you do you may find that you can do something about them. The things you need to do may be difficult, or you may be scared of doing them, but the hard fact of life is that it takes courage and willpower and plain hard work to achieve your goals. No amount of counseling and anti-depressant drugs can do it for you, you have to make the hard yards yourself.

Adversity provides the opportunity for personal growth, and depression is certainly adversity. Don't let it win, its not even real, just an effect in your mind! Understand it, see it as a challenge, find the source and destroy it! It is a weak, cowardly, and in the opinion of the Church: inadequate, excuse for suicide.

Loss Of Face

This line of rationale comes mainly from the Asian races: that one has failed, one is shamed, one cannot show one's face in public, so one must kill oneself. In some lines of thinking one can actually redeem oneself by committing suicide.

Sorry folks, but that is cultural stupidity. If you have done something to be ashamed of, killing yourself isn't going to make it better! There are bound to be concrete, real-life measures that you can take to improve the situation and mitigate your shame.

If you are a student who didn't achieve the marks necessary to embark on a particular career path, so what! Not everyone can be in the top percentile. There may be other ways to get into your desired profession, or you can just chose another profession altogether. So what if you won't earn as much money. The Church of Infinite Dimensions strongly holds that the value of a person's life has nothing to do with the money he earns.

In addition, to insist on being in the upper class is nothing more than snobbery, which is contempt for the majority, which violates the Commandment of respect for all Ura. This attitude is unacceptable in this church.

If you are a business executive who has led his company into a massive loss, killing yourself isn't going to help those that lose their jobs, or investors that lose their money. If you really wanted to atone for your errors you could sell all your worldly goods and give the money to those that you have hurt.

Suicide is a cheap and inadequate way of atoning for failure. This church does not accept cheap and inadequate solutions, this church believes in getting to the nub of the matter and doing the hard work that is necessary to get a satisfactory result.

Curiosity

No doubt we are all curious as to what will happen when we die. That is a large part of why we are in this church, and indeed, a large part of why the Church is here at all. There may be a very few amongst us that are adventurous and impatient enough to cut to the chase and kill themselves early just for the sake of curiosity. Their numbers are few indeed. Natural selection has a tendency to eliminate any genetic predisposition to such curiosity.

However, the Church values curiosity, courage and the adventurous spirit, and if suicide is pursued in this spirit can find nothing negative in the act. Indeed the Church sees such an act as a true expression of the Uru, and were it not for the lost opportunities of the lost life, a cause for celebration.

Notwithstanding this, the Church does not encourage any person to follow this path, nor will the Church provide any assistance. The Church would prefer that the adventurous direct their curiosity in other directions. There will be the opportunity to explore the after-life in due course.

Few there be that can enter into this act in the right spirit and hopefully that is the way it will stay.

Kamikaze Attacks

The idea of this is to use one's self as an intelligent, camouflaged, bomb delivery device, ensuring that the bomb is detonated where it will do the most harm. It is, in essence a military tactic, used to kill or maim multiple enemies and/or destroy infrastructure for the loss of but one life.

Because the primary aim is to kill and destroy, rather than to end one's life, this is not really pure suicide, and doesn't entirely belong in this section. It is far more akin to a soldier volunteering to undertake a mission where he will probably be killed, in order to achieve a military objective.

This case belongs with all the other cases where a person gives their life for a cause. As the disciple John quoted of his master Jesus: "Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends." Although a premature death narrows the character of adjacent taga, (at least initially), the Church of Infinite Dimensions supports the notion of voluntary self-sacrifice for a greater good, so long as it really IS a greater good. To end one's own life in a cause that does more harm than good is doubly wrong.

As is the case with all matters of war: one should be very wary about getting involved.

Conclusion

Unless a person qualifies for Assisted Suicide, the Church regards pure suicide as unnecessary and unadvisable. In almost all cases it runs counter to the spirit of self-reliance that the Church reveres and wishes to instill. It indicates a lack of character.

In short: Don't do it!