unscriptured

Posted in unscriptured, by Toby T, Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 12:01 am.

Christian religions, and I assume many others, have an injunction against committing suicide. So do many legal systems. I asked God why this is. He told me that the official reason for religions has usually been one of two things. The first is that our lives belong to God so we don’t have the right to choose when to end them. The second is that God has planned his own way for us to die and we shouldn’t go against his plan. The legal reasoning goes more along the lines of making sure that someone doesn’t manipulate us into killing ourselves so they can get rid of us without having to face the consequences of committing murder.

All of that made a certain amount of sense, but since I’ve already established that God doesn’t have a divine plan that goes to the level of detail of specifying how and when we die, I knew that going against his plan wasn’t a valid reason. So I followed up on the part about our lives belonging to him. He pretty much said that as individuals we just aren’t that important that he’s going to raise killing ourselves to some exalted level above the many other things that we do wrong. Basically, he said that what we do to ourselves isn’t as important to him as what we do to each other.

So what if someone killing themself deprived their kid of getting enough to eat? Well, then the bigger sin was depriving their child, and it didn’t much matter what the mechanism was.

Then I realized that God had said that he was telling me what the official reasons were that were given by the religions, so there had to be some unofficial reason.

So I asked.

God told me that real reason generally had a lot more to do with perpetuating the power of the people in charge of the religion. The best way to indoctrinate people into a religion is for them to be born into it, to be raised within it. Because of that, the most successful religions tend to have rules that favor having kids. Suicide takes people out of the pool of eligible parents. For that matter so does effective birth control and homosexuality.

I was starting to feel an awful lot of cynicism, so I decided it was time to commit conversational suicide. I changed the subject.