Suicide Ain’t Painless

May 12, 2009

Today's Reading: 1 Samuel 30-31 and Mark 6

I think the theme song to the MASH television show and movie has lyrics. In fact, it does, because I just verified it. The song is called “Suicide Is Painless”, and let me say that title, as a statement is a lot of B.S..

If you think suicide is painless, then either you have no experience doing it, or you do not know someone related (either friend or familial) to someone who has committed suicide.

I can understand why people commit suicide. Who hasn’t wanted to give all their problems the big brush-off the easy way? The problem is, I’m just not willing to roll that die.

Sure, you could get boxcars and everything the atheists say is true, and there is no God and no heaven. All your problems will be solved, but there will be no blessings to take their place. It will be this big black void of nothing.

Yet what if you rolled snake eyes. You lose! Sure, all your problems will also be gone, but you will now have a new one. Being surrounded by the burning fires of hell. This assumes that the Christians are right.

This is why I can’t understand why Saul wanted to kill himself during a big battle. After all, he was going to die anyway, I think what he wanted was to control the pain until the big sleep. He suspected that his captors would probably abuse him, and he was probably right.

What a difference between him and John the Baptist. Here was a man who told the king news he did not want to hear, knowing full well that he might experience his death because of it. And yet he did it anyway. Now that showed guts.

Just the other day, I realized how my life was going to end: I will die. I don’t know if I ever brought this up, but I received a great revelation from the Ice Age Testament, in the book of Scrat. Some of you may recall in the opening, how the weird saber-toothed squirrel tries to bury in acorn, and inadvertently starts the Glacial Drift. Now, Scrat faces several death-defying obstacles, and he miraculously survives.

Then he gets stepped on by a mammoth. That is life for you. You eventually get stepped on by a mammoth. The fact that it happens at the end and not in the middle just makes it funnier, but in no way lifelike.

The truth is we don’t know when we are supposed to die, but we should know that it is for a greater purpose other than a punchline. Trust me, you will die exactly when you should. There is no point ending the movie too early.