Does any religion treat suicide kindly?

[Xaeniak]

I'm mainly familiar with Christianity which vilifies suicide, so are there any religions that treat it with compassion? I want a god that personally visits the souls of those who die by suicide, and apologize, and offer anything they can do to ease that soul's suffering before letting it go. Is that not a more compassionate view, rather than saying suicide is an act of evil? If the world is so bad that those living in it can't stand it anymore, that's a failing of the universe against that person, not the other way around.

 

[Ligand]

I was really interested in this question a while back, so I did quite a bit of reading on this topic. Pretty much every major contemporary religion has a negative view of most types of suicide to varying degrees. There are a few exceptions like martyrdom in Judaism, Sallekhana in Jainism, and very limited amounts of suicide in some Buddhist traditions.

You need to go far back in history to find any society where suicide is allowed or actively encouraged. It wasn’t terribly uncommon in Ancient Greece or early Rome for men to kill themelves if they could no longer perform their jobs (due to illness). This is briefly mentioned in “The Republic” by Plato. In “The Republic” it is said that extending the life of a chronically ill person is akin to taking money from the state. These men were often encouraged to kill themselves. Women were not spared either. A particularly horrible practice was that women in these cultures were often expected to kill themselves if they had been assaulted, in order to “preserve their honor.” These are not explicitly religious views, but religion and state/tribal practices were frequently interconnected in early history. So there is good and bad that comes with societal acceptance of suicide.

Interestingly enough, neither the Hebrew bible nor the New Testement explicitly ban suicide. There are good arguments that they ban suicide in a “roundabout way,” but there isn’t any direct condemnation of the act of suicide itself. If you are interested in further reading this is a fantastic resource: https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/

 

[J&L383]

The Bushido code and samurai traditions included a role for suicide under the right conditions. (I went through a period when I watched lots of old Japanese movies, lots of fun!) But it's been outlawed when Japan modernized, although suicide today in Japan is at least on par with the rest of the world.

 

[g04tZ3GVTZ]

on par with the rest of the world.

or more like they’re winning ammaright

 

[anne neum]

any kind of organized religion treats suicide negatively. i find it in a nature of an any big enough system.
if you want more compassionate ones, look for more archaic beliefs, ie animistic or archaic pagan. (not neo pagan)

 

[Cornbread4708]

It is one of the those institutions that profits from labour of man.. why does it go against life?