Suicide is painless

I have been reading mystery books lately. In a sense all books are mystery books, they all address the mystery of life. Sometimes we call them “romance novels”. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl and they live happily ever after. Where is the mystery in that? The mystery is in how the story unfolds.

A woman I know likes to read the end of a book before she reads the beginning. That way, if she thinks the ending sucks she doesn't have to waste time reading the book.

This tells me that she is avoiding two things, suck ass endings and “wasting time”.

Desire and aversion, the two greatest motivators in life.

In one mystery book a detective buys a gun for a woman who has cancer and wants to commit suicide. The ruminations of the characters in the book made me wonder. The hero or protagonist doesn't make judgments. His friend is Catholic and discusses dying without confession or absolution. If you kill yourself the friend says, you can't confess and be absolved of your sins.

In Masada people couldn't kill themselves so a couple of soldiers killed them all.

That got me wondering. What is the difference?

Lets suppose someone gives you poisoned kool aid to drink and you drink it. Why would anyone give you poisoned kool-aid? Could you really believe it was poisoned? Suppose it really wasn't poisoned? Suppose some moron doing research just told you it was and it was really just a sedative that put you to sleep.

Some dork actually did an experiment like that. He wired a button to a scream machine and told people to push the button and make their friend scream.

Now personally I would have pushed the button down and held it down forever. I wouldn't believe that the button was hooked to anything that hurt anyone. I would be more interested in watching the behavior of the moron telling me to push the switch. How long would it take him to tell me to let go of the switch?

Stupid test. Why would anyone in their right mind believe that they were torturing someone? It would take an idiot to believe that.

Torturers get off on torture, not on watching someone else torture someone. Voyeurs like watching scummy things and I suppose some of them get off on making someone do something they don't want to do. By pushing the button down and holding it down I would take that away from an idiot who thinks he is making me do something I don't want to do because obviously I could care less.

Even when something is obvious people will think “it can't happen to me” and I am no different. If someone smokes and the smoking kills them did they commit suicide?

How about if someone crosses the street and is hit by a car? Did the pedestrian cross the street?

How about if a smoker is hit by a car crossing the street?

I get away from all those stupid judgments. I just figure that God will sort it out and I think God sorts things out based on the internal motivations of a person.

Desire and Aversion. If someone has a desire to die is it the same as having an aversion to living?

If you kill someone because you want them dead or because you don't want them breathing the same air as you does it matter?

I think it does. I think God looks inside each of us and determines our motivations. If our motivations are to control ourselves I think God looks at the situation differently than if our motivations are to control someone else.

Long ago a “witch” or psychic or whatever told me something that I have used throughout my life. She told me that some people believe that there is no good or evil. She told me that was wrong. Good was doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, making our own decisions for our own lives. Bad was taking away someone else's control over their own life. A love potion, she told me, was black magic because it takes away the control people have over their own life. Healing someone was white magic because it gives people control over their own life.

It is popular these days to think Good and Evil don't exist. That is crap and not just because of what the witch taught me, because of what God has taught me and life has taught me.

If the moron doing the torture test had gotten me as a subject I would have skewed his results to show that people would respond to authority even if they “knew” they were causing “harm”.

Yeah, right.

Sometimes I read that people don't believe in their mortality. I always new I would die. Sometimes I wanted control over the time and place. Sometimes I want to see it as a surprise. I am told that is “normal”. I am told not caring much is not “normal”.

I could take a different viewpoint. I could say that suicide is “wrong” because lazy “aristocrats” need plebeians or proletariat to harvest their crops and produce the things they need. If the common person took control of the time and place of their death it would make it hard to force them to live lives of “quiet desperation”.

When I was younger I used to laugh at times other people wouldn't because other people never got the joke. I still laugh at the “wrong” things sometimes. I learned that if I spent all my time laughing at people they thought I was weird. At some level I think I project the knowledge that everyone is hilariously stupid.

Essentially I am a monkey watching other monkeys and laughing at how stupid we are. People don't see that, they see someone looking “pained” (and you would be to if you spent all your time trying not to laugh at everyone) and think I must be “unhappy”.

Maybe I am “unhappy” in their “world”. Pretty judgmental, but, who cares when I am trying so hard to bite my tongue and keep from laughing in their face.

Laughing in peoples face is kind of rude, you end up spitting on them and usually people don't get the joke.

It used to bother me that people take themselves so seriously. People who were “bigger” and “stronger” would beat the crap out of me when I was a kid because I was laughing at them. I never cared much about that crap or people who were trying to get me into fights taking about my mother or other crap like that. I just figured they were hilarious idiots that couldn't get the joke.

Sometimes the frustration would turn into anger and I would find a way to react to their stupidity.

If people expect me to care what they think they ought to care what I think. Do unto others as they do unto you. People really don't care what anyone else thinks though. People don't really care what I think and I really don't care what other people think.

I do try and to encourage people to think in different ways and often people are insulted.

It used to frustrate me that no one cared what anyone else thought and that everyone was so stupid, making decisions without having educated themselves.

Some people use the phrase “paralysis by analysis” to describe people who educate themselves before making a decision. Not making a decision is a decision. People can make decisions without information and with information. The information can be correct or incorrect and people can second guess the decisions all they want.

In the end, ignorance is a way of life for everyone and thinking you can get away from ignorance is stupidity.

There is a rock with some runes on it that some farmer in Minnesota came up with called the “Kensington Stone”. Geologists who have studied it claim it is old. Archaeologists claim it is a hoax. Someone has to be wrong, some has to be right. In the end, who really cares? Maybe you do, maybe you don't.

Lets suppose the witch was correct. Let suppose that being in control of your own life was what matters. I used to study a lot of Zen. There is this guy, Thich Nhat Hanh, who wrote a bunch of books. Somewhere in the meditation and the study I figured it out. Life is about choice and all we should control were our own choices. In other words what the witch and the Bible both told me were true.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love others as you love yourself.

If we take that as the ultimate law, Mother Theresa might just end up in hell.

Why? Because she treated others better than she treated herself. She sacrificed so others could have. Did they have have more than she did? Did she really treat them better than she treated herself? Did she sacrifice any more than the people she worked with?

No suppose we feed ourselves but we don't feed everyone else. Do we go to heaven or hell?

Mother Theresa sure didn't feed everyone else, just the people she did feed.

I don't worry about it because God knows and I don't.

Embracing ignorance?

No. I just know that no matter how much I try I can never have all of the available information to make a decision.

That is the difference between God and people. People will always make decisions in ignorance and God will always make decisions having all of the available information.

Ignorance is amazing, isn't it?

When I was younger everyone used labels, on themselves and on others.

Once I was talking with this gay guy and he was being a real jerk. He was trying to get a rise out of me by being outrageous. You probably know the kind, they want to label you and more than that they want you to label yourself.

This guy is coming on to me and grabbing my crotch. He said something like how do I know I wouldn't like it if I hadn't tried it. I said how did he know I hadn't. He asked “did you?” and when I said it was none of his business he started calling me “gay” and a “self hating homo-phobe”. I told him he was an “asshole” and he said I was “gay” again, as if that was a dirty word. I said, “no, I'm just me”. He said I could be me, and that me was gay. He just went on being an asshole, as if everyone had the responsibility to explain or defend or force their own sexuality on everyone else the same way he did.

The guy couldn't accept that I was just me and he was just him.

It always feels good to beat the crap out of a judgmental, self-hating asshole which is what I considered that to be. Getting frustrated, letting the frustration turn into anger, letting the anger turn into action of some kind designed to influence or effect some person in which the frustration is embodied, self satisfying, it is kind of like jerking off.

That particular little experience taught me a couple of different things. People were just people. Stupid losers were always going to try and label everyone into little boxes. “Gay”, “judgmental”, “self-hating asshole”. Some people have more boxes and some people have fewer boxes.

To me, people became huge three dimensional “stars” composed of an infinite amount of “number lines” Imagine a number line with desire at one end aversion at the other. You are a “star” with your position on that number line in the center. A longer “ray” sticking out in one direction and a shorter “ray” sticking out in the opposite direction.

In reality, what I envision is much more complex because things are not really one of two choices, there are an infinite number of three dimensional points in each “ray” and everyone is composed of an infinite number of “points” in an infinite dimension of possibilities. Kind of like each “position” on an issue is a “star” and a person is composed of an infinite number of “stars”.

Stars twinkle, the “rays” always changing and really they are all the same clouds of gas. People became kind of like peas, some with slightly different shades of color.

The number line simplifies the concept, the infinite number of points in the finite set of numbers between zero and one for example, if you can conceive of such a thing. The infinite contained within the finite.

So, getting back to the suicide in the book, is suicide a sin? Is suicide wrong?

Good question. I don't know. I think it depends.

You could argue that life is choice and all we control is our own choices and that any choice taking us away from God's will is “wrong”. So if we go outside with wet hair and catch pneumonia and die we go to hell. Maybe we went outside to save a child's life? Maybe we went outside to save an animal's life? Maybe we went outside to earn a buck?

You could argue that life is choice and all we control is our own decisions and God will be happy with any decision we make that does not either control or take control away from another person's free will. So then deciding when to die is “good”.

If God believes we have the right to make our own decisions and we stop someone else from committing suicide is that sinful?

I think that sometimes it is, based on the individuals intentions. Not the expressed intentions, the internal intentions that no one can ever see.

Is suicide a sin?

I think that sometimes it is, based on the individuals intentions. Not the expressed intentions, the internal intentions that no one can ever see.

People justify the dumbest crap. We can't know what their intention really was or is.

We remain ignorant. Always.