How serious is suicide as far as Christians are concerned? I do not believe it can make you lose salvation, because I believe, like all good baptists/ reforms do, that salvation is permanent once it happens. However, why did the Catholics say that is was so serious as to lose salvation? Why do some theologians say it is the ONLY theological question? I mean, come on, murder? Rape? No? Seriously? Why suicide? Why am I even asking all these parallel questions?

Let me begin with an interesting story. Once upon a time, there was a mean bully that hurt a little girl. There was another boy who saw the incident and tried to kill the bully, but was stopped by a teacher. If he had killed the boy, it would have been murder, because it was not the boy’s place to do so. It was the bully’s parents job. But let us not condemn the boy too harshly, for he was noble in his error. After all, the Bible has the Apostle Paul do the same thing when he was Saul… only to a greater degree. He saw a bunch of people he thought were against God called Christians. He killed as many as he could, murdering them, until God set him strait. Were the murders bad thing? Of course! It followed and haunted Paul for the rest of his life… but he was still Paul the Apostle.

Now, where and who in the Bible do we find suicides? Anything come to mind? Well, there’s the other Saul. You remember, the King of Israel? He decided at the end of his reign, in order to keep the Philistines from torturing him, to “fall upon his sword.” His head was then taken off and placed in the temple of Dagon for a spell. That worked well. Where else do we see men falling on their swords? What about the enemies of Gideon, who were so afraid of the trumpets and torches that they all killed themselves. That wasn’t very good either. Nope, not a good ending. So here’s my diagnosis,  suicide, in Scripture, is for the enemies of God. Where else to you find suicide than someone who is hopeless in his sin… in Scripture?

Why would one commit suicide if they believe in an omnipotent God? I don’t mean the heathen, I am talking about saved believers. If you believe God is in control, and you commit suicide, you are telling God directly as you go to His presence, “I don’t care! Your way is not worth it. I’m doing my life my way, and if you won’t let me live my way, then, by You, I’ll die my way. My final act of WILL!” These deaths are NEVER funny. In fact, they are the saddest, most tragic, most morbid deaths of all. If a heathen thinks that their life has no control, and that they are holding onto life by the flapping tongue of a dragon, and if they said, “What the heck, this is too hard. I’ll just let go before I’m dragon food,” I don’t think it is near as tragic. In fact, many can be quite hilarious… Like this one time, I watched a movie… I forget the name. There was this business tycoon who got so fed up with it all that he jumped through a broken window and died. Wait, that’s not the punch line. Few weeks later, this other guy says he’s going to jump through the same window, now repaired. It shows this long scene of everyone but one man staring at him in horror as he runs for window. Won’t anyone stop him? He jumps! … and sticks to the glass as he slides down slowly cartoon style. The dazed man looks up in embarrassment at his failed attempt to see the one man not in horror say two words, “Reinforced glass.”

Let’s wrap this up. 1. Suicide is sin, as any other sin, but with one caveat. Suicide is always direct and embittered rebellion to the very nature of God as far as Christians are concerned. It is, as it were, a second fall, not that one loses salvation, but that they disregard their salvation so they can say, “I did it MY way.” I know Christians that I considered friends that have taken this route, and can not imagine what had made them do this. 2. amongst the heathen, suicide is an equal sin to murder, and… not to kick a dead horse… so I won’t, but you get it. Hoops! that was the name of the movie, I think. 3. To conclude, if you are not a Christian and believe that the earth is over populated and you tell Christians to not have babies and to “leave” the earth, please lead by example. That will give me a few more people to laugh at. If not, however, let me be very… very… clear. Life is worth it. Suicide isn’t. When you ask the question, “To be or not to be?” remember we serve a living, all powerful God who pulls the strings, and that “All things work together for the good of those that love Him, for all those according to His purpose.” I think I quoted that right, but don’t kill me if I messed up. That’s God’s job.

The header image is a crop of one of my photographs. Right now it’s sort of hacked in, as the header image replacement doesn’t appear to be working with the theme; I suspect it has to do with the file permissions we have.

I guess we’ll be back to our regular look after a while. I think…

Update: Demo aborted for now. It appears to not play nice with FD Footnotes. I may try to track down the problem, as Twenty Ten is pretty cool.

Update 2: Turns out it was a conflict with Google Analytics for WordPress, which I installed today. Tracking of outbound clicks and downloads has been turned off, that fixed the problem. We may need to do some investigation into a replacement or just using the regular GA code since tracking outbound clicks is a nice capability.

So… we’re now demoing Twenty Ten again.

Let us examine my vague arsenal of half-facts. One, an oil-rig blew up. Two, there was a pipe sticking out of the ground for our convenience. Three, the oil WAS in a localized location, and it was highly possible to burn most of it off right there, as it was recommended for us to do. Four, environuts said we could not burn because it would hurt the environment. Five, the blame game began and oil is still spilling out of the pipe. I know, it sounds like I’m in the blame game and am against the environuts, but that is not so. I was against them before this ever happened. It was not their fault the rig blew up. As a matter of fact, that is my point. It was old, it shifted, and it blew. A tragedy happened and we are left with a gorgeous hue of orange on the blue and black water. You will pardon me if I sound flippant, or not if you must hate me. So what do we do if we don’t blame anybody? Who will get stuck with the bill to clean it up if blame is not placed? I personally still think we should light a match and call it even. If a hurricane ever came through, it would be the most awesome firework display the world has ever seen. However, if that is voted down, then I say we all split the bill: Mexico, America, and Britain. If we can’t agree to clean up our own boating lake, then how can we agree to do anything? Oh, wait, we can’t. We can’t even agree on what the world “natural” means. “Natural,” as far as I can tell, means from the earth, raw and untouched by man. Well, here you go my friends, and as soon as that hurricane comes through, we can have a natural wonder on the forth of July. I’ll bring the beer if you bring the lighter.

So, have a look at our tag cloud if you wish. It will get bigger as we write more posts. I’ve also added a link on the top nav bar to bring the page into view. Enjoy.

I suppose I should also be announcing this somewhat sheepishly since I forgot about it and realized it today, a few days late. But you didn’t know that. So forget you read this paragraph.

I love studies like these, because most all of us, the normal, everyday citizens of 2010, were spanked as a child, and are obviously more prone to bashing each other’s skulls in than hippies, who never spank their children and are better off for it with their, *wheeze* weed. These studies also show how much we love to blame everything on our parents. “But your honor, you don’t understand, I was spanked as a child, I had to break the man’s knee caps off.” Scary part is… that sometimes works. Oh well, I guess now that I can blame violence on being spanked, I can take that guy out for his french fries. It was… uh… an emotional moment for me… and… uh… you should blame it on my parents. Duh.

So, what is it? A filler text generator with a choice of Lorem Ipsum, English, Jabberwock, or Tagalog. Enjoy. Especially if you miss it.

Update: Here is the official new location, I think. Complete with background image and header (yum yum). It seems to have originally been designed by Rico Sta. Cruz. The source code refers to his old site, ambiescent.com. His new site is ricostacruz.com, and Lorem Ipsum is now hosted at a subdomain there.