[Serious] Comfort in Faith at Death

[mordant]

There have been times when I envied people with the faith to believe in a heaven and eternal life there.  BUT when the more Fundamental Southern Baptist zealot-like members of my family were in anguish at the “knowledge” that my brother has surely gone to hell as a result of his suicide, I found some degree of comfort in my own “knowledge” as an atheist that he is just.....gone.

As a side note, not all fundamentalists (arguably, not MOST) believe you can lose your salvation under any circumstance. The teaching that suicide is "the unpardonable sin" (as opposed to all the other things it's been equated with, from masturbation to simple unbelief) is in my experience mostly a product of the holiness movement, particularly of old-line Pentecostals. David Wilkerson of The Cross and The Switchblade fame taught this in an effort to prevent suicides among drug users he was ministering to, for example.

I came out of IFCA churches (Bible churches) and this would not have been a cause of agony for anyone in those kinds of churches. We had other things to torment ourselves with, of course.

Sorry for the loss of your brother, particularly in that way. I lost a brother to a freak cancer, and that was bad enough. To my point above about having other things to torment ourselves with, my brother was so inconsolable at his diagnosis ... and was convinced that his life of righteous living and church leadership had not atoned for the sins of his youth. Those, in turn, were relatively pedestrian things that he was convinced god still held against him. Such as having sex outside of marriage or getting drunk.

Each religion seems to find its own unique way to turn the screws of guilt and shame ...