Suicide

Suicide. The deliberate taking of one's own life is condemned in all religions, although exceptions on the margins (death accepted or embraced for religious reasons) are usually made. In Judaism, there is no explicit condemnation in the Bible, but it came to be prohibited, partly on the basis of the sixth commandment (‘Thou shalt not kill’). However, suicide to avoid even greater offence (e.g. to avoid murder or idolatry) was regarded as praiseworthy: the reported suicides at Masada, to avoid falling into the hands of the Romans at the end of the Jewish revolt, 66–70, remained a model of martyrdom—see kiddush ha-Shem. Among Christians, martyrdom is commended in the pattern of Christ who laid down his life for others, but the deliberate taking of one's own life is condemned on much the same grounds as those of the Jews, but with an added sense of the wrong done to family and society at large. Suicides could not, until recently, receive Christian burial. The sense of compassion and support needed for those tempted to commit suicide led to the founding of the Samaritans by Chad Varah in 1953. Islam shares the same kind of attitude: martyrs (shahīd) are highly commended, but suicide (although barely mentioned in the Qurʾān: see 4. 29) is strongly condemned in ḥadīth.

In Eastern religions, the ambiguous border is not so much between martyrdom and suicide as between suicide and sacrifice. Among Jains, the religious relinquishing of the body is taken to a marked extreme in sallekhanā. In Buddhism, the propriety of suicide to benefit another is recognized. But the consideration of ahiṃsā (of doing no harm to a sentient being) makes suicide generally forbidden. Japanese hara-kiri (seppuku) was originally a social rather than specifically religious act, but its endorsement by Zen Buddhism gave it a religious support.