Processing our mortality

[LadyForCamus]

I wonder sometimes if any religious folk out there harbor a secret fear of their promised-land.  Trying to imagine what the experience of being with god is like must be as futile an exercise as trying to imagine non-existence.  They, themselves, often purport that god's greatness is too powerful for our mere mortal brains to comprehend, so I have to think there must be at least some degree of anxiety attached to the notion that when you die, you're leaving what you know, and are familiar with, and crossing into the unknowable.  

If there's something "out there," and it involves immortality, it's unlikely to involve our status in the well-meaning struggle of hairless monkeys. I cant imagine how sex would be reconciled-- you gonna show up in heaven and have Gramps at 20 years old, packing wood in his 1940's vogue golf pants? Is Tomb Raider-era Angelina Jolie going to be okay with me trying to rub baby oil on her 24/7?

Nah, you have to be 100% right on this. Whatever might be there, it's not what's here, and whoever that dude is, if it's human, it's not me. Soul or no soul, experience or no experience, bennyboy has to metamorphose into something radically different at best, or just disappear.

I think it's reasonably fair to assume that even if suicide wasn't a sin, most theists wouldn't be leaping off bridges left and right in their unbridled anticipation of heaven.  Evolution via natural selection has grounded us all firmly here, philosophical positions notwithstanding.  

My view of the idea of sins is that they are the animal instincts gone too far for well-being-- gluttony, sex obsession, etc. They represent a loss of control of consciousness over the unconscious impulses. Suicide, unless it's done in a chemically-imbalanced depressive state, can't be that-- it is an overcoming of animal fear on a philosophical or social basis.

I wonder, is there such a thing as suicide not driven by a chemically imbalanced depressive state? Factors such as drug abuse and prolonged physical suffering can bring about the same storm of chemical imbalances seen in clinical depression.

I'm thinking of the recent "right to die" story about the 27 year old girl who had terminal brain cancer, and was granted the legal right to end her own life at a time of her choosing when the physical and emotional anguish became unbearable. Is there a line to be drawn here? She must have certainly fit the diagnostic criteria for clinical depression, but do we consider her choice a rational and philosophical one, compared to...say...Robin a Williams', who was suffering from Lewy Body dementia?

Life and death, like almost anything else, look very different the more you zoom in or out on them, and even some of those moral issues with family and so on really look more and more like emotional reactions on the chimp-brain level than ration arguments for struggling on.

I think there is a moral case to be made for the cessation of suffering, but I'm not sure it's ever truly rational, given the state of mind a person must be in, in order to come to that decision. Maybe the distinction to be made is not in whether the reasons for suicide are rational, but whether the source of that individual's depression is modifiable. If that makes any sense? lol.