"I am not dying, I am entering life"

[unluckysadness]

Some of you (especially if you're catholic) may know this well known quote from St. Therese of Lisieux

And St. Paul said, "To me, 'life' means Christ, hence dying is so much gain."

And St. Teresa of Avila said, "I want to see God and, in order to see him, I must die."

So for them, earthly life did not seem as precious as we are told... Can we say that they had suicidal tendencies ?

Nevermind, I really love St. Therese's quote which means a lot to me

(I'm sorry if religious threads are against the rules, iI just wanted to share without proselytizing)

 

[Celerity]

I'm an atheist, but the best concepts I feel I got from my Christian upbringing are that life is hard and that there is usually no earthly reward for piety. In fact, being honorable, honest, and just often invites a lot of punishment in this evil world.

Not to hijack the thread, but I feel that worst effect of the so-called Protestant Work Ethic was to provide pseudo-religious justification to the Just World fallacy. In the secular world, Psychology helped to arbitrarily define the norm as healthy and the abnormal as unhealthy. Both ideas preclude a nuanced discussion of morality and fate.

People who are different and meet multiple failures in life just didn't work hard enough and therefore deserve it (Protestant Work Ethic). With health and morality tied to the normal distribution (Psychology) the pervasive evils of the common man are overlooked in favor of scrutinizing those of rare personality disturbances, such as psychopathy.