Ray comfort uses a man's suicide to push evolutionVSgod

[Rev. Rye]

I've looked up Ralph Barton and I've found the full text of his actual suicide note:

"Everyone who has known me, and who hears of this, will have a different hypothesis to offer to explain why I did it,

"Practically all the hypotheses will be dramatic and completely wrong. Any sane doctor knows that the reasons for suicide are invariably psycho-pathological and the true suicide manufactures his own difficulties.

"I have had few real difficulties. I have had, on the contrary, an exceptionally glamorous life as life goes and I have had more than my share of affections and appreciations.

"The most charming, intelligent and important people I have known have liked me and the list of my enemies is very flattering to me I have always had excellent health since my early child- hood. I have suffered from a melancholia which for the last five years has begun to show definite symptoms of manic-depressive insanity.

"It has prevented my getting anything like the full value out of my talent and the last three years has made work a torture to do at all.

"It has made it impossible for me to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. I have run from wife to wife, from house to house and from country to country, in a ridiculous effort to escape from myself. In doing so I am very much afraid that I have caused a great deal of unhappiness to those who loved me.

"In particular, my remorse is bitter over my failure to appreciate my beautiful lost angel Carlotta, the only woman I ever loved and whom I respect and admire most of all the rest of the human race. She is the one person who could have saved me, had I been savable. She did her best.

"No one ever had a more devoted or more understanding wife. I do hope that she will understand what my malady was and will forgive me a little.

"No one thing is responsible for this and no one person except myself. If the gossip insists upon something more definite and thrilling, as a reason, let them choose my pending appointment with my dentist or the fact that I happened to be painfully short of cash at the moment.

"No other single reason is more important or less temporary. After all, one has to choose a moment and the air is always full of reasons at any given moment. I've done it because I am fed up with inventing devices for getting through 24 hours of every day and with bridging over a few months, periodically, with some purely artificial interests, such as a new gal, who unnerves me to the point where I forget my own troubles.

"I present the remains with my compliments to any medical school that fancies them, or soap can be made of them. In them I haven't the slightest interest except that I want them to cause as little bother as possible.

"I kiss my dear children and Carlotta x x x x x x"

Simply put, the reasons he did himself were not out of sheer ennui, as Bananaman implied, but for two intertwined reasons; One: the only woman he ever loved fell for Eugene O'Neill. Two: He had bipolar disorder that he feared would have led to complete mental collapse, and given the state of psychological treatments at the time (bear in mind, that intentionally infecting people with malaria was still an accepted treatment for mental illness at that time), he may have been right at the time.

I might have appreciated his little spiel more if he used, say, George Sanders' suicide note. "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck." I mean, sure, it's still spiritual ambulance chasing, but at least it'll be somewhat accurate (even if his suicide was more motivated by his pride at losing his health after a stroke.)

And, just FYI, Lion IRC, you do have freedom of speech. You have the right to say whatever the Hell you want (as long as you don't threaten harm on another person), and I (and everyone else) has the right to criticise it mercilessly (once again, as long as we don't threaten harm on anyone else.) That's how freedom of speech works. Ray has the right to use some random artist's suicide as just an excuse to preach, and I (and everyone else) has the right to call him out on the fact that it's pretty clear he doesn't give a crap about his life or his work and only wants to use him as a case study in why atheism is bad (and the evidence that Barton even was an atheist is lacking) showing a lack of compassion as transparent as, say, Woody Harrelson's character in Natural Born Killers.