When Atheism Entails Suicide

I hold the following train of reasoning: if you have been the subject of unremitting pain for the past 30 years, and have no rational, probabilistic expectation of ever emerging from such pain, then you are irrational in your decision not to commit suicide if you are an atheist/materialist. Just as an atheist who is condemned to, say, a year of physical pain with certain death afterwards is irrational in not euthanising themselves.

Recently someone I know (an atheist/materialist) commented that this was a “sad” way of looking at life. (I’ll leave the philosophical issues with a materialist commenting on the word “sad” to another day). To me it is a sadder state of affairs to endure a lifetime of pain due to an inability to follow the chain of reasoning involved, or to endure it because your irrational brain precludes you from such action despite the dictates of your frontal lobes. Methinks in people whose intellects are capable of following the reasoning, or people whose emotional brains are strong enough to override their intellect, but who do not follow my reasoning, that there are unresolved childhood theistic immersion issues involved.

It’s just simple statistics, people. Not that hard.

This brings you to the vexed issue of “faith”. In my interpretation, you either have been graced with it or not, depending on the path the Universe has intended for you. It’s definitely not to say that people with faith are further along the journey to Nirvana than those without. For me personally, I was a hardcore atheist/materialist from 1990-2002, until, after a year’s worth of intense honours-year formal philosophical training, I had an experiential episode of such gravity that I haven’t gone back since. And that’s what faith comes down to: the experiential, not the theoretical.