I really don’t want to offend anyone with this, but it has been bothering me for about a week now.
I was watching 7 days in September on A&E last week. They showed one person jumping from the tower and the person who was filming talked about how he had to turn the camera off because of the horror of it.
Anyway, I said to my sister, “If that person was Catholic and suicide is against the Catholic religon, is that person in hell now?”
My sister said, “No, absolutely not, they were jumping to safety.”
In a million years, I would never have thought that these were not suicides. You’re on the 65th or 100 floor, jumping to safety???
Now, I am not religious but this has really been nagging at me. I’m not sure at all why, but it is.
So, dopers, thoughts? Suicide or safety?
Are there documents that back up your views on this either way?
This may be better suited for IMHO, but given the religious nature, I thought this was a better place for it. If it isn’t MOD’s, please feel free to move it.
Those who are adamant that a person who takes his life is committing a mortal sin, and will go to hell, are basing their belief on church doctrine rather than on the Bible. Scripture is silent on the subject. There are no verses that say “He who takes his own life shall be damned.” According to Scripture, only one sin does not have forgiveness, and that is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (see Mark 3:29 footnote). That means there is forgiveness for every other sin.
Some quote 1 Corinthians 3:17, which says that God will destroy someone who “defiles” the temple of the Holy Spirit. Yet, there is disagreement about what it means to defile the temple. Does this include suicide? Does it include illicit drug abuse (slow suicide), prescription drug abuse, cigarettes (deliberately breathing in poisons that will eventually kill), tattoos, over-eating (digging a grave with your spoon), or alcohol abuse?
God forbid that we add to the pain of someone who has lost a loved one through the tragedy of suicide, by making a judgment about their eternal destiny. God is the ultimate Judge, and we should therefore leave the issue in His hands. It would be wise to follow the biblical example and not come to any verdict in the case of suicide.
Of course, the “sin against the Holy Spirit” is never explicitly defined, either, and it has long been considered that that sin is Despair: the belief that even God (in the person of the Paraclete or Advocate, meaning the Holy Spirit) cannot save one. From this position, despair was seen as the impetus for suicide and suicide came to be seen as self-damning.
That said, the RCC is not going to take upon itself the belief that it knows the heart or mind of a suicide–and the conditions of absolute terror that would have surrounded a person who believed that he or she was doomed to excruciating death by fire would generally cause the church to presume that their will was overcome by that terror and that they had not made a conscious decision to abandon hope.
(I’m sure someone will be along to give their version of the Sin against the Holy Spirit, but you asked about Catholic attitudes toward the situation. (Even if the RCC beleived that the people had despaired, it would generally leave the real decision to God, rather than tring to discern and judge the decision of the jumper.)
How could you doubt that others would debate what blasphemy “really” means in this case? That’s what we do around here.
In the Lutheran and Babptist churches I attended, that scripture was interpreted that “blasphemy” in this case meant “non-belief.”
Horribly enough, though, I did hear a preacher say that the 9/11 jumping deaths were suicides and would be punished accordingly. He said, “In jumping to avoid a relatively short death by fire, they earned themselves an *eternity * in fire.” He went on that they had rejected God’s plan by not accepting the death he had planned for them, and that they should have suffered the agony of the flames as “a testiment to their obedience to Him.”
So you are saying that the RCC doesn’t presume to know people’s hearts and minds in a situation such as this. I guess that I just didn’t realize that they would say, in the case of a suicde, that God would be the judge. Aren’t suicides not afforded burial in a catholic cemetary?
Stay in a building where fire is literally licking at your heels…you will die.
Leap out of a building…you will die.
In the panic of the moment, jumping out of the window may seem to offer the most hope. Perhaps you will land on an awning or a big pile of laundry. Maybe the crowd below will save you. Death may not be on your list of things that might happen to you.
I think your brain shuts off when you’re in such a situation.
If you’re more of a realist, it may cross your mind that death will be more immediate if you jump out of a window rather than letting the fire and smoke devour you. I don’t know how this differs from euthanasia that much (other than the fact that it’s much more of a spontaneous decision), but I personally don’t think someone would be penalized by weighing their options in such a way. Of course, there’s no way I could know. But no one else does either.
Well, at this point, they probably suspected, or at least feared, the place was going to collapse and no one would be able to save them. The smoke as getting very bad, and with the fire they were gonna die anyway. May as well take a leap and pray. People have survived such things before. You might get lucky and land in a big pile of ash and only shatter your legs. When you’ve got ten minutes to live, a very low chance of survival doesn’t matter a whole lot.
And in any event, in this case, you are very obviously probably going to die no matter what you do. Death is immediate and foreseeable in nearly all circumstances. To stay, death, to leap, death. So you may as well choose your own method.
I probably wouldn’t have juped. I’d have tried a macguyver and made an impromptu parachute.
Then I’d have droppped like a rock and died, anyway.
Well, the context of blasphemy of the Holy Spirit does not indicate despair, as it was during talking to the religious people, so I fail to see how despair could even be considered, as all people who’ve despaired were forgiven. So I believe this would be a weak case, since we all go through despair, and if we were never forgiven, no one would be saved.
Lissa, do you know the name of the evangelist who stated that theory? He needs to be tormented for the rest of his days for speaking that garbages where the victims’ families could hear him.
Why call these jumps suicide, to go from a state of apparently zero survival chance (trapped in a burning building) to a state of an apparent minuscule survival chance (jumping from that building) does not make the act suicide in my books. It is like claiming someone who died in a car crash committed suicide, because instead of crashing into the back of the burning vehicle in front of them, they swerved dangerously and their car instead flew over the side of a precipice.
I also don’t see how you can call these deaths suicides. The word suicide implies that they could have chosen to live instead, and sadly that just wasn’t true.
I could have sworn that I remember a high-ranking local Catholic official (like, Bishop or Archbishop) making essentially these remarks, and adding that it’s reasonable to suppose that those victims who retained their wills believed that jumping offered a tiny bit larger chance of living than staying where they were. But I’ll be damned if I can find the statement now.
I fail to see how anyone short of Osama bin Laden himself can be so evil as to pass judgment on those poor brave souls. They were facing a certain death/death situation; the choice to jump was no more suicidal than the choice **not **to jump. There should be a special place in Hell for anyone who would criticize what they did with their last moments in this life.
No, I don’t. I saw it at my grandma’s house. She gets a large package of religious channels on her satellite, and I flipped through them one evening out of curiosity. When the preacher spewed that filth, I was so disturbed that I quickly changed the channel. It wasn’t until much later that I thought to wish I had found out who he was.
Suicides were not, previously, allowed burial in a Catholic cemetery, based on a legalistic “presumption of guilt” mentality that, thankfully, is no longer held by the church. Even people who put a gun to their heads and pull the trigger are generally buried with a Mass of the Resurrection and interred wherever the family wishes, now, figuring that God can decide who did or did not despair and that the presumption in the case of suicide should be toward mental or emotional distress, rather than a presumption of willful despair.
(Which is not to say that someone cannot cite some priest with his undies too tight that did not add to the distress of the suicide’s family by imposing outdated rules or making untoward comments, but the practice of the church has moved away from that sort of legalism.)
The church is still against suicide, but the current Catechism says of
I’m not a Catholic but I believe it was the catholics who came up with the idea of casuistry. Although the word now has a negative connotation, it origianally meant adapting general moral principles to specific cases.
So as far as suicide goes, the principle “Suicide is wrong” is valid. But then there are exceptions. The standard one is the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save the rest of the squad. I think the church also allows for extreme mental illness, but I am not sure about this.
As far as 9/11 goes, I’m pretty sure, given the extreme agony of the situation, and the awful choice the jumpers were faced with, most churchmen would see this as an exception
Yes. According to the amazing article “The Falling Man” in Esquire (linked in a thread by Cartooniverse over in MPSIMS, I believe), at least a few people grabbed tablecloths and sheets and curtains and stuff (mostly in the restaurant, I’d expect) and tried exactly that. And of course, in ten seconds of thirty-two feet per second squared, all those sheets and tablecloths were ripped from their hands.
In my mind, going from zero chance to one chance in a trillion is a move toward hope, not away from it. But then, there’s absolutely no way for me to imagine the sheer incomprehensible terror those people must have been feeling.
Lissa, this atheist hopes that preacher, that hideous excuse for a human being, is chased away from the Pearly Gates by an angel with a taser.
