The epidemic of 'antidepressant'/ SSRI-triggered suicides by hanging: hidden in plain sight

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The suicide by hanging of Robin Williams while (reportedly) being treated for depression brings this to mind, Williams apparently following the similar and very rare suicide method used by Mick Jagger's girlfriend, L'Wren Scott.

http://wp.rxisk.org/mothers-little-poisoner/

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The overall suicide rate is going down, but the rate of suicide by hanging is going-up

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2859465/

There is a stereotypical pattern of SSRI triggered suicides - which used to be rare but is now becoming much more common:

http://davidhealy.org/left-hanging-suicide-in-bridgend/

On March 17th L’Wren Scott hung herself in her Manhattan apartment. She hung herself from a door handle. Hanging with your feet or body on the ground is a classic antidepressant MO when it comes to suicide. Hanging in this way led Pfizer to claim that Matt Miller, a 13 year old boy, hadn’t committed suicide but had died from auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong. It has led people in Bridgend and Wales to speculate on the influence of Satanic cults to explain the rash of bizarre suicides there. What happens is this. Antidepressants trigger thoughts of self-harm. These thoughts can vary from the mild to the malignant. The drugs can trigger thoughts like this in perfectly normal people, who have rarely if ever thought of harming themselves. Partly because these are such unfamiliar thoughts, someone like Matt Miller, Yvonne Woodley or L’Wren Scott can play with them by attaching a noose around their neck and leaning forward to see what it would be like. But leaning forward like this can put pressure on the carotid bodies, cause a person to lose consciousness, slip forward and asphyxiate.

From http://wp.rxisk.org/mothers-little-poisoner/#sthash.pwEs4jZy.dpuf

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The rate of prescription of drugs as a whole is going down, but the rate of prescription of antidepressants (SSRIs and similar) is going up, and probably faster than any other  major group of drugs - despite its being three decades since their introduction.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/20/antidepressant-use-rise-world-oecd

This is almost-certainly due to drug dependence.

It is difficult to stop taking SSRIs after taking a significant dose for several months to due withdrawal effects - which may be severe.

http://www.benzo.org.uk/ssri.htm

Therefore, once people have been on SSRIs for a while, they tend to stay on them forever.

Prescriptions for SSRIs therefore accumulate: each new antidepressant user tending to become a permanent user, each new prescription for antidepressant tending to become a permanent prescription.

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(To summarize a lot of literature) SSRIs overall cause, and do not prevent, suicide.

Suicide rates are known to be high in people with moderate to severe melancholia/ endogenous depression - but these severely depressed people are very rare (less than one percent prevalence) and almost always treated as hospital inpatients; and SSRIs are ineffective (they do not work) in inpatient, endogenous depression.

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In practice SSRIs are given to a large group of about 15 percent of the population outside of hospital, in general practice and outpatient psychiatry - people who suffer unpleasant symptoms such as anxiety, worry, severe and unpleasant mood swings, chronic unhappiness, guilt and so on - people in distress but people who continue to live at home, continue to look after themselves, often continue to work.

This group of SSRI-users do not intrinsically have a raised suicide rate - if they were not taking drugs, they would be no more likely to kill themselves than normal controls.

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It is thoroughly established that SSRIs increase suicide rates.

http://www.healyprozac.com/

This was known during their pre-marketing trials. It is officially acknowledged that SSRIs should not be given to children and young people due to increased suicide risk

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/InformationbyDrugClass/ucm096273.htm

There are plausible pharmacological and psychological reasons to explain why SSRIs can trigger suicide, and these symptoms have also been found when healthy volunteers take the drugs as well as among patients with psychological symptoms.

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So, SSRIs do not prevent suicide, and they are only useful in a group of people who do not have a raised risk of suicide; but SSRIs are dependence-producing and prescriptions are growing faster than any other major drug, and they do increase the risk of suicide and the suicide is often of a violent, unusual, impulsive nature (most stereotypically casing death by asphyxiation by hanging from a kneeling position) and the suicide may be out-of character for that person, and indeed comes out-of-the-blue.

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In conclusion there is a very high visibility epidemic of what look-like SSRI-triggered suicides, now becoming visible among the rich and famous who are reportedly being treated for depression, and who kill themselves violently and unexpectedly; and yet this epidemic is hidden in plain sight.

It as if we cannot believe that a drug prescribed officially and with good intentions cannot do harm!

It is as if we assume that powerful, mind-altering, dependence-producing chemicals are necessarily innocent until proven guilty - merely because they are prescribed by a doctor!

Indeed these antidepressant-triggered suicides are generally spun into indicating the need for even-more antidepressant treatment - more treatment to 'prevent' the suicides which were actually triggered by antidepressant treatment.

The situation is Kafka-esque: the more treatment-triggered suicides, the more demand for treatment - the more suicides... 

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The bad news is that suicidality is also a probable side effect of some other types of antidepressant as well as the SSRIs; and also of the antipsychotic/ neuroleptic/ 'mood stabilizer' group of drugs - which are heavily and increasingly prescribed(in multiple combinations - often five drugs together!) for the vaguely-defined pseudo-diagnosis of 'Bipolar Disorder'.

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The take-home-message is that all powerful drugs have serious possible risks as well as bad inevitable side effects - and all psychoactive drugs create dependence.

Therefore they should only be used carefully (prepared to stop at signs of trouble, or when not clearly effective), at as low a dose and for as short a time as possible; and when the hoped-for benefits outweigh the certain risks - which, in practice, means only when the psychological illness is severe, debilitating, incapacitating.

And (in general) drugs which cause severe definite present side effects and have dangerous risks and cause dependence - should not be used on the excuse of 'trying to prevent future problems'.

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Assisted Suicide (personal and national) is inviting evil into the heart

Is suicide a sin? The answer - as nearly-always - depends on the motivation. 

But if our assumptions are that this mortal life is for our learning - so that we can have useful experiences and learn stuff that is necessary (or at-least very beneficial) - for salvation and resurrection to eternal life...

And if we also assume that God is the creator who sustains our life, and that God loves us each individually as divine children...

Then the usual baseline assumption must be that we remain alive because we have some-thing important we can and should be learning from our life. 

Therefore, to plan a suicide will typically entail a refusal to learn from our mortal lives, which is a rejection of God's plans for us; and the more planned, the more pre-meditated, the suicide - the more likely this is to be the case. 

And when suicide is 'assisted', then actual evil has become involved in the motivation; because assisted suicide is done by a bureaucratic System; and bureaucracy is essentially evil in its nature and effects: plus our actually-existing System-bureaucracy in The West is anti-spiritual, anti-Christian, and pro-Satanic.

So - of its nature - assisted suicide amounts to an act that is both (almost always) evil in motivation, and also an invitation of evil into the heart. 

National suicide is the failure of a culture, a society, to reproduce itself - both materially and spiritually; but most obviously the national suicide of chosen sub-fertility... That is, a societal decision not to have children even at the minimum replacement level - and 'chosen' strategically; despite the availability of sufficient (indeed excessive) national resources; and despite national prosperity, comfort, peace etc. - which ought to support greater levels of child-rearing.

Sub-fertility (now universal in all developed nations, and increasingly gross - especially among native populations) is diagnostic of a profound spiritual malaise that amounts to a covert desire for cultural self-annihilation - i.e. suicide. 

Such strategic suicide is an act of defiance against God; and a deliberate refusal to learn whatever God has created and maintained the nation for. 

National - like personal - suicide by deliberate sub-fertility is an invitation of evil into the heart; as is apparent from the demonic ruling class who now administer and control all the Western nations. These evil Beings (mostly human, some demonic) are invited, tolerated, enabled, trusted, cooperated-with, and actively approved by the intellectual-class servants... 

And these national leaders are easily able to persuade an already self-corrupted populace to accept their inverted value system and become further corrupted. The populace now widely espouse a morality that despises the national culture, loathes patriotism, and which values and privileges any alien over natives.

Our current subsidized, organized, and sustained mass immigration - and the values that justify and sustain it - is therefore an instance of assisted suicide at the national level.   

In sum: when suicide is a sin (a deliberate turning away from God's creative intentions), then this is because of its motivation; but assisted suicide is always a sin, because the motivation is strategic hence responsible, and is compounded by its being an invitation to evil. 

A culture of suicide

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We live in a culture of suicide: a culture in which pleasure is the only good must inevitably be a culture of suicide since pleasure cannot be guaranteed - and when life has more suffering than pleasure, and the future prospect is bleak: why not suicide?

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It is ironic that when 'life' - vitality, gratification, comfort, fun - is the primary goal, then the opposite predominates.

So that the whole argument boils down to short-termism versus long-termism.

The short-termist lives on a knife edge; but usually obliterates suffering ASAP with technology or any other available distraction.

The long-termist response is that when suffering overtops pleasure, then suicide should be considered seriously, and postponed (never utterly rejected) only if the long term quantity of pleasure outweighs the short term quantity of pain.

(But why should we suppose that gratification is arithmetical?)

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"But, who knows what the future will bring... The safest thing is to die now, before there is a chance for anything bad to happen..." This sounds like parody - but surely it is precisely mainstream belief of teenage ethics, mainstream pop culture ethics, mainstream media ethics: the positive value placed on a beautiful corpse.

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Then there is the intense interest in euthanasia, when pleasure is insufficient to compensate suffering then die; indeed why not die - get yourself killed - before you get to that point, to be on the safe side.

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(Of course, it is equally insane to hold the view - which seems mainstream in the Roman Catholic Church, that it is on the one hand a duty for society to do anything and everything that the application of modern technology can devise to sustain human existence, and at the same time to regard the hastening of death - for instance by withdrawal of this modern technology - as utterly morally abhorrent.

(Apparently - by this reasoning - people must intervene technologically to prevent corporeal death, then must sustain at all or any cost whatever form of living-death may be a consequence of such intervention.

(But this is monstrous nonsense, and is indeed a variant of political correctness. A proper moral perspective on death surely entails an understanding that there is a right time and situation to die, and right level of intervention to prevent death - varying by context - and an acceptance of fate insofar as it can be discerned. And a recognition of the moral chasm between killing and letting-die.)

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What is remarkable is that suicide is not endemic.

But maybe it is endemic, in the sense that political correctness is suicide - since any self-blinding, mandatorially non-consequential reasoning is implicitly suicidal.

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[Note added - plus of course, the endemic suicide of awareness - the suicide of awareness from continuous distraction by compulsive and continuous usage of the mass media and electronic interpersonal communications, organized busyness, overwhelming pleasurable inputs including - junk food/ high cuisine, intoxicating or energizing drinks, drugs, sex, dreamy physical pleasures such as baths and sunbathing, exercise, shopping, fashion, fantasy... or whatever. Without the ability for most modern secular people most of the time to escape at will into such immersive stimuli - so abundantly provided by modern society - it is likely either that 'things would change' or else that actual physical suicide would be much commoner.)

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(The politically correct are engaged in creating a society which they, personally, would find intolerable. How do they imagine that they would cope? Answer: they won't cope. They imagine that will either let themselves die or, if that is too slow or creates too much suffering, they will take matters into their own hands.)

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I strongly suspect that a suicide fantasy lies behind the hedonism and political correctness of modern society. The idea that if, when, things don't work out - and it is time to pay the costs of recklessly self-gratifying and evasive policies, then there is a 'way out'.

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All of this depends on the belief - unique to intellectuals living under modernity - that the soul is unreal and that there is no existence after death.

A belief in the unreality of the soul is a crutch to hedonism.

Extinction after death is the 'get out of jail free' card for political correctness.

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Suicide and sin - and what attempted suicide sometimes tells us about belief in the afterlife

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Is suicide sin? I believe that the correct answer is that it may be.

(Wrong answers are that suicide is always a sin or never a sin.)

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Patients suffering from the rare condition of severe endogenous depression, including psychotic depression, are experiencing what is perhaps the worst of all forms of human suffering - and have the highest suicide rate of any groups.

Endogenous depression comes upon people - often out of the blue and without any sufficient precipitant - like being struck-down with an illness: indeed endogenous depression bears all the hallmarks of an illness come upon a person, and will spontaneously resolve after about a year (assuming the sufferer is still alive, has been kept alive).

It is among these people where you sometimes see mercy-killing-suicides - as when a loving mother smothers her sleeping children then kills herself because she perceives the world as so utterly horrible a place that she wishes for nothing more than to protect her children from it.

Now, I would have thought that this (extremely rare) kind of suicide cannot possibly be regarded as a sin from a Christian perspective - it is an absolute tragedy, but (so far as we can tell) there is in it no trace of pride or defiance.

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On the other hand, the 'attempted suicides' (or parasuicides) which are so frequent an occurrence (I used to see several 'overdoses' every night when I was 'on call' as a junior doctor - only a small proportion of whom died) are typically and very obviously sinful since they were often motivated by hatred and the desire for revenge.

(e.g. A person who said they were thinking 'this will show him' as she took the tablets. Or another who slashed his wrists reportedly thinking, 'she'll be sorry now!')

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Suicide can be an existential act of defiance against God - it can be an ultimate destruction of Good in which a person takes a step further from polluting and defacing their God-given body, to actually destroying it. Suicide can be a prideful assertion that this life, this body is mine - to do with as I wish up to and including annihilation.

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But is it annihilation that is being sought by the suicides among endogenous and psychotic depressives? Sometimes, probably, but is hard to say as a rule - clearly it is escape from this world which is being sought, an end to suffering without hope; but from this into what?

Extinction or perpetual sleep, perhaps; or escape to a better place?

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But what is fascinating is the implicit, sometimes explicit, sense that parasuicides (attempted suicides) often report that after they have killed themselves, when they are dead, they will still in some sense be around to observe the consequences (e.g. gloating over the misery and guilt of those who have been hurt by their suicide).

Clearly, there are some people - people who are apparently non-religious and anti-Christian and indeed acting under wicked motivations - who have a deep underlying assumption that when they kill themselves it will not be the end: that death is not extinction.

They 'believe' this assumption of an afterlife, in the sense of belief meaning 'live by' - thus they live-by this assumption of the reality of a life after death, even to the point of killing themselves (or trying to) on the basis of this assumption.

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This is one line of evidence that belief in 'life after death' (that death is not the end of experience) is pretty much built-into humans (or most humans) and that the modern profession of disbelief, or profession of belief that death is extinction, may be a shallow, artificial and weak cultural construct.

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Since Social Justice/ Political Correctness/ New Leftism is essentially a suicide cult (not a religion) - what next?

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In response to my post arguing against labeling New Leftism (or modern Liberalism or Progressivism) as a religion:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/is-social-justice-political-correctness.html

Alan Roebuck, at The Orthosphere, extended the argument to label the modern Left a suicide cult:

http://orthosphere.org/2015/05/21/contemporary-liberalism-is-a-suicide-cult-not-a-religion

Suicide cult seems a reasonable, two-word, working definition of what Christians are up-against - encapsulating the standard, view among all mainstream and powerful leaders such as politicians, officials, educators and the mass media.

So let us proceed on that basis: that what we are dealing with in the modern Liberal, Progressive Left is a type of suicide cult; and plan accordingly.

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Evidence that the Left has, over the decades, evolved (or mutated) into a suicide cult is abundant - the Left has lost its utopian aims, and has become almost entirely oppositional and destructive, Activism is about hunting down and destroying dissent - no matter how small scale, nobody is exempted, and there is no sense of proportion.

Actual advocacy of death is currently focused on the extremes of life  childhood and old age - with encouragement of contraception, abortion, sterility or the smallest-possible families (in a context of media, official and educational-institutional encouragement to frequent and unconstrained sexual activity).

At the other end of life there is a long-running and unrelenting campaign for the elderly, and terminally- or incurably-ill people who are experiencing (or expect to experience) low quality of life to 'have the right' to be humanely murdered in order to shorten, minimize or avoid suffering.

In sum, the modern Left does not offer any basis for living the examined life among the intellectuals, and is experienced among non-intellectuals as in violation of common sense and direct personal experience. It survives on the basis of bribery and distraction, and gets its motivations by inculcating guilt (among the elite), resentment (among the masses) and open-ended entitlement among a coalition privileged 'victim' groups.

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As the triumph of the Left becomes more complete two things will happen:

1. The gross inadequacy of its world model as a basis for human life will become harder to conceal.

2. By its continual encouragement of destructive resentment and entitlements and paralysing guilt; the Left will destroy its own basis to provide the resources necessary to bribe, distract and cocoon the population.

If this happens gradually and linearly, then the dependent majority can be sustained for a considerable period by concealed inflation and borrowing and ever-increasing expropriation of an ever diminishing productive minority. By the time the real situation is apparent, modern society will be hollowed-out and cannot recover - and Christians will be reduced to a tiny, crushed and exploited minority.

But if the situation gets worse suddenly and exponentially, then awareness of the situation may dawn before destruction is fully advanced, and there may be a window for mass repentance and Christian revival: a Great Awakening.

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The real Christians need to be ready for this, if it happens - every Western Christian will need to become a missionary to the best of his or her ability. The situation will be made difficult by the rising of Antichrist figures - fake Christians, who are perhaps 90 percent Christian but the missing 10 percent is the essence - lacking which the do more harm than good (as is their intent).

But the flip-side is that real Christians may be 90 percent non-Christian - but the 10 percent of Christianity that they do have is precisely the needful!

Having said this, missionaries can only help with the consent of those they are trying to help; and the biggest obstacle is (what seems to be) the corrupt and depraved state of the mass of the modern population - their moral inversion; their rejection of virtue, beauty and honesty; their embrace of wickedness, ugliness and lies.

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In the end, and whatever the society he dwells-in, each individual is responsible for his or her own salvation (salvation cannot be forced-upon him); and God will sooner or later bring each and every Man to a point of realizing this as a fact, and one which requires a choice: yea or nay.

But Christians can help influence this choice, at this point of decision; by planting seeds of good doctrine, good behaviour, and the example of soft, open, and warm hearts. Our love will be communicated to those who need and would most benefit from it, by invisible and unknown means.

Each soul, as it hovers on the crux of decision, will be able to take this Christian work into the balance.

So the answer to the question - What should Christians do, confronted by the vast power of a majority suicide cult? - is simply to do the right things, as ever, and as much as you can, and in whatever situation you find yourself...

And derive hope from the faith that all good is noted and used, nothing goes for nothing, under God's all-seeing eye.

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Suicide Pills will be welcomed by many/ most of the public, for at least three reasons

When (not if) the plan for mass free distribution of painless-suicide pills gets unveiled; it will be welcomed by many or most of the Western public - for at least three reasons:

 

1. Fear: Because so many people fear that they will suffer while dying. 

It doesn't matter that prolonged or extreme suffering is usually preventable - because some risk of a painful death cannot be eliminated... except by pre-emption. (Prevention is the best cure!) 

And 2020 shows how easily extreme fears can be whipped-up by the Establishment, and how resistant the most-terrified can be to reason or reassurance...

Probably because - in a world that believes death is annihilation - health has taken the place of religion (including for most churches); and current suffering (of almost any degree or duration) becomes regarded as an intolerable violation.

 

2. Altruism: Because some people regard the death of people such as themselves as a benefit for the world. 

"With me and mine out of the way; there will be more for everyone else."

Indeed, plenty of people claim to regard human beings as a plague on the biosphere - whose elimination would be better for all other living things... and much better for The Climate! 

Thus suicide is an expression of ultimate altruism! In a world where avoidance of suffering is the highest value - the best way permanently to reduce our carbon footprint, to walk lightly upon the earth, to minimize finite-resource consumption - is to offer our own death as a willing sacrifice to the goddess of environmentalism.

3. Despair: Because the mass majority are materialists who, at bottom, regard reality as purposeless and meaningless; and who therefore live only for the satisfactions of this-life. 

Such people have no strong reason to stay alive - because their life is going nowhere except death, and has no meaning except whatever comforting "delusion" they themselves try to invent. 

Therefore; as soon as life starts to go badly - overall; then why bother with it? 

 

For such reasons as the above; I suspect that plans for mass provision of painless suicide pills will find themselves pushing at an open door. 

Especially if the Western Establishment succeed in escalating the Fire Nation and Arrakis conflicts into all-out world war - with its high-likelihood of causing widespread violence, disease and famine; then the Western masses will be biting-off the hands of state-sanctioned death-draught feeders, in their eagerness to get hold of the medicine.

Indeed; it seems far more likely that the masses will protest against the ineffectiveness (or "inequity") of suicide pill distribution, then to protest against the Establishment encouraging suicide. 

Phase Two begins... Be not afraid, do not despair!

Spiritual preparedness is primary; the crisis and incipient collapse has been unleashed only because the demonic powers have decided that the West is ready for it.


Phase One was corruption through the sins of lust and greed - the sexual revolution and consumerism.

Phase Two has just begun: corruption through the sins of fear and despair (and make no mistake: these are sins).


Our only antidote to fear and despair is perfect love, faith, trust in the promises of Jesus Christ - that we can follow him through death to eternal resurrection in Heaven..

All that happens in our earthly mortal life is directed towards that ultimate destination.

Lacking such a perspective; fear and despair (and therefore deliberately-chosen damnation) are highly likely, if not inevitable.

(Which currently explains the demonic strategy.)


Assuming I am correct about the shift to Phase Two (long-prepared) - here is a prediction:

Look-out for the moment when the mass media start discussing/ seeding the idea of escape by suicide (for those who haven't already thought about it) as a response to the crisis and collapse - then (deniably) encouraging suicide - finally preaching suicide as a public duty.

Note: As with all sins; it is by motivation that suicide is sinful; e.g. when suicide is a response to  ineradicable and spiralling fear and despair with the objective of destruction of the soul, the self. This class of suicidal act is self-damning - because a consequence of (and an expressed belief-in) materialism, nihilism, denial-hatred of God and divine Creation; and rejection of Christ's offer of resurrection into Heaven. 

Zooey wins! - and, explaining Seymour's suicide

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I have just re-read (for the first time since I became a Christian) JD Salinger's three most religious stories: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, Zooey, and Seymour: an introduction.

I enjoyed them all, but most appreciated Zooey.

RHTRC struck me as a perfect short story, but - in terms of Salinger's ouvre - transitional; Zooey is IT, a perfect short story that is uniquely and 100 percent Salinger; and Seymour crosses the line from short story into a kind of fictional essay.

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As well as its brilliant character delineation, dialogue, density and description; I was fascinated by the religious aspect of Zooey - and the light it shone on the big unifying question of the Glass chronicles: why did Seymour commit suicide?

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Zooey begins with Salinger's characteristic eclectic, syncretic 'perennial philosophy' New-Age-ish -type spirituality; and builds towards Salinger's most wholly-Christian epiphany - the famous Fat Lady parable at the end.

This trajectory is one which is - apparently - undergone by Franny, Zooey and Buddy; but not by Seymour.

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Seymour's suicide was - I believe - caused by what Walker Percy termed the 're-entry problem.

(see WP's Lost in the Cosmos and my earlier blog posting http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/03/re-entry-problem-for-artists-and.html )

This is intrinsic to any worldly spirituality - perhaps to any non-Christian religion - which does not include a heavenly afterlife with a process of theosis - or movement of the human towards becoming a Son of God.

Seymour seems to have had only a vague kind of transcendental belief (he does not quite seem to believe that Truth, Beauty and Virtue are objective, real - and to the extent he does he regards them as immanent - within nature - rather than supernatural).

Indeed, Seymour's spirituality is characterized by a belief in reincarnation rather than afterlife.

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Yet reincarnation (even if true) is no answer to anything - or rather it is merely a superficial answer to specific questions (such as explaining a person's character and behaviour) not ultimate questions.

Reincarnation merely pushes the problems of life backward or forward, without providing any understanding of the human relation to The Good, to reality, to meaning or purpose.

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Seymour argues (I think) that this worldly life here on earth is perfect - if only we looked at it correctly.

The fault is with people and their perspective.

But Seymour apparently couldn't get the right perspective and keep it. He could get himself into the correct frame of mind for periods, but would at some point have to re-enter the perspective which saw the world as mundane, painful, full of ugliness, lies, cruelty, short-termist selfishness.

And it was this re-entry which he found unbearable; and which (it seems to me) led to his suicide.

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Seymour simply could not live up to his own ideals, his own aspirations - could not maintain his own temporary achievements.

And, lacking a conception of Original Sin, and lacking a belief in the possibility of Christian salvation - he had nowhere to go, nothing to turn to but (as he imagined) extinction and (he hoped) an end to his own suffering.

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What do You think about thinking?

Clearly, there is something wrong withthe thinking of modern Man: I think we can agree about that - but what should be done about it?

Many mystical/ spiritual people are set against thinking, as such - they regard thinking as the basis of illusion (maya) and alienation, and therefore they try to stop thinking.  

Stop thinking and just be is the kind of advice.

The most usual method recoemmended is practicing some method of meditation.

But (unfortunately) for modern people the most easy and direct method of stopping thinking is intoxication; which is probably why the Eastern spiritualities of the Beatnicks and Hippies swiftly became drugs-orientated.

So; if stopping thinking is the ideal, then methods such as intoxication, deep sleep (or anaesthesia) are the most reliable methods; and death (i.e. suicide) is the most permanent. Suicide (or attempts at suicide) is not all that unusual among those who seek not to think - and suicide is made much more likely by most types of psychoactive drug usage.

The great breakthrough of Rudolf Steiner, in his first four books culminating in The Philosophy of Freedom, was that our proper goal should be almost the opposite: he argues that we need to trust our thinking much more fully than we do at present - and to strengthen and expand thinking.

One point is that if we mistrust our own thinking, we deal a deadly blow to ourselves - consciousness becomes alienated from our selves (our true and divine selves), as well as from the world. If we cannot trust thinking, we cannot trust anything - since everything we know comes through thinking.

The task is therefore ultimately to ensure that our thinking is trust-worthy - and in the meanwhile to learn to distinguish trust-worthy thinking from the kind of thinking that is not trustworthy (which is - for most people, most of the time - our ordinary everyday thinking, which we know from experience has something wrong with it).

I have termed this trust-worthy thinking Primary Thinking - and regard it as our consciousness of the real self; our awareness of God-within-us; an experience of the divine way of Being, in which a god knows explicitly, and is therefore able to be free.

(Since un-conscious knowing is not free.)

This idea of Steiner's was - I think - something new under the sun!

Instead of regarding the thinking Ego as The Problem which ought to be deleted; we regard thinking as The Answer.

We should try (as it were) to go through the Ego and out the other side. By which I mean that we ought to regard Primary Thinking as potentially a higher form of consciousness than either divine Ego-less hence unconscious Being on the one hand; or the mainstream modern state of alienated, solipsistic, relativistic and despairing consciousness.

The intent is that by strengthened and expanded thinking we should become aware of the divine that was previous unconscious to us; and therefore become able to join with the divine work of creation - rather than being unconsciously immersed-in and swept-along-by the divine. 

And one consequence is that our persepctive becomes pro-life. Fantasies of disovering the truth by not being fully human - by deletion of thinking through meditation, intoxication, or death - are replaced with an imagied future in which our thinking is as powerful as our instincts and emotions; and expanded to includes all that is deepest and best: the spiritual as well as the material.

Utah, antidepressant prescription and suicide rates - brainwashing in action

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Supposedly, the US (predominantly Mormon) state of Utah has the highest rates of 'antidepressant' prescriptions per capita, and also the highest rate of suicides, among US States.

I can't track down the original studies to check these claims  - but 'everybody' believes this, so let's assume they are correct.

What all this is supposed to reveal, according to the brainwashing media interpretations, is that behind a facade of cheerful efficiency Mormons are 'really' miserable.

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What the data actually reveals is that:

1. Per capita 'antidepressant' prescription has nothing to do with need - in particular nothing to do with 'depression'.

(Not least because the most used so-called 'antidepressants' - i.e. the SSRI groups such as Prozac - are not antidepressants; and are demonstrably ineffective against real (endogenous) depression. They are actually emotion-stabilizing/ serenic agents - when they work.)

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2. So-called 'antidepressants' of the SSRI-type cause suicides.

This is not news, it has been known since the drugs were trialled, and has been public knowledge for more than two decades, and 'black box' suicide warnings now appear on the drug information inserts.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041203100252.htm

*

Therefore, the proper interpretation of the Utah numbers is that

1. The Utah population is prescribed a lot of antidepressant drugs which they don't need and are bad for them - presumably because it is profitable to do so - and plausibly because the Mormon population are so health-careful, and have been deceived into believing that antidepressants are necessary for their health.

2. This massive over-prescription of 'antidepressants' is causing a vast epidemic of suicides in Utah - this is consistent with the well-known pattern that SSRIs on average cause suicide, rather than prevent it.

(Because that is what a mass of research has been telling us for the past generation).

*

So, brainwashing in action and effective on a massive scale!

The facts are widely known, and as solidly-established as medical science ever gets; but nobody is joining the dots!

That is how mass media indoctrination (manipulated by Big Pharma) works - the relevant facts are clear and widely available and the implications are in-your-face; but spin focuses public discourse on irrelevant facts and fake explanations.

The scandalous situation that the Utah population are victims of mass medication-caused suicide is converted, at a stroke, into just another anti-Mormon sneer and snigger.

Brainwashing.


**

For access to the mass of evidence on this topic - you can word search and browse http://davidhealy.org/.

**

Every life is a failure?

*
I am re-reading Colin Wilson's easily book Religion and the Rebel (1957) which begins with an autobiographical essay describing the period of his teens and early twenties when it seemed to him that every human life was a failure - and his own determination not to fail.

I can remember feeling almost exactly the same way - and indeed I think it is an almost inevitable perspective for any reflective atheist who sees human life purely in terms of mortal life - and excludes the possibility of a pre- and post-mortal life.

*

The basic problem with all mortal lives is death - and that is why from a purely mortal perspective all lives must be seen as a failure.

Because when mortal life is all there is, then there can no 'right time to die'.

Death either leaves unfulfilled the potential of early promise, or cuts-short achievement at its peak, or else it comes after achievement has declined - and after a period of dwindling, suffering, dependence...

*

This leads to the temptation of suicide (or indirectly engineering one's own death) among those who wish their life to make a satisfying trajectory and whole, by timing their own death.

(This, for instance, seems to have been a Samurai ideal, and is also found among Western 'Romantics' of the past couple of centuries.)

Well, that is the theory - but if we are honest with ourselves - at a gut level a life terminated by suicide does not really strike us as a success; even a calm or a more-or-less calculated suicide such as Arthur Koestler and his wife's suicide pact; or an indirectly by self-engineered demise like Lawrence of Arabia killed by habitually reckless driving, or the multitude of those who die of 'accidental' alcohol or drug overdoses in a context of deliberate addiction.

So, from a secular perspective, all biographies are tragedies of one sort or another; all lives are (more, or less) wasted.

*

So, when is a life not a failure? The answer is that some lives are a success when considered from the context of eternity. If we take a step back from mortality, we see that mortal life looks very different.

From the perspective of a believer in pre- and post-mortal life, mortal life is a finite episode in an unmeasured 'eternity' coming both before and after. Such a period is of extraordinary significance, however it turns-out - and at least some human lives can be seen as extremely positive in their nature and achievement.

Indeed, it may well seem that many, perhaps most, human lives have been successful in these eternal terms - in other words, success in life is that we are in a better situation at the end of our mortal existence than we were at its beginning.

Of course, by this account, failure is also possible; which is why success from an eternal perspective is an objectively meaningful evaluation - and not merely a matter of sticking-on an arbitrary 'success' label.

*

What exactly is wrong with (mass) euthanasia/ assisted suicide/ humane murder?

Mass euthanasia - humane murder, or "medically-assisted suicide"; is already established in many nations, and will probably expand to become the statistically-normal cause of death.

The reasons are 

1. That the ruling class want this to happen; and 

2. That many people in The West want it - for themselves. 

And they want this, because their fundamental understanding of human life - including their own lives - is that it is purposeless and meaningless. This conclusion (whether explicit of implicit) is almost inevitable when our society assumes (as well as argues) that there is no creator God - therefore no purpose generally or for individual persons; no spiritual world; and no possibility of existence beyond death. 

Without meaning or purpose, life is merely a matter of current feelings - a balance between pleasure and suffering. 

Many people live in fear of suffering; and because they are so afraid of future suffering and will do almost anything to avoid the unbounded possibility of sufferings; they have rendered themselves willing dupes to the machinations of evil. 

Religious prohibitions against suicide have near-zero traction nowadays; because most Western people solidly believe (and our society assumes in all its functional systems) that death is followed by total annihilation.

For such people, the "problem" is therefore how to die without suffering; and this seems to require that they will be humanely-murdered by... someone else; ideally, killed just at the point when the prospect or actuality of severe and lasting suffering becomes probable.

People also believe (or, at least, behave as if they believe) that this point can be established, and suitable death-inflicting mechanisms decided, by a sufficiently rigorous bureaucratic procedure.   

Against this there are explicit religious prohibitions - but hardly anyone nowadays takes religion seriously when its demands conflict with perceived personal interests or societal pressures. 

Also against this is a deeply buried, inarticulate, usually uncommunicable gut-feeling of the wrongness of a world of bureaucratically-decided death - no matter how painless it might be. 

Yet this feeling of wrongness, probably because it cannot be coherently expressed in the context of modern ideology, is too feeble to counteract the strength of social pressures when these are implemented in laws and procedures; and when endorsed by officialdom, mass media, celebrities, and peer group/ neighbours. 

I therefore find it useless to argue against those many who advocate the introduction, spread or normalization of assisted suicide; because the arguments I can use all assume the atheist-materialist utilitarian world view - and thereby actually worsen the underlying spiritual problem. 

The bottom line is that if you regard your life as purposeless and meaningless, then naturally it becomes merely a matter of subjective expediency how and when you die, or get killed.

When life has no meaning, death can have no meaning. 

When life is a matter of being got-through as pleasantly as possible; then the same applies to death. 

To tackle the real issue requires deepening the discussion to a metaphysical level, the level that addresses the ultimate nature of reality and our relationship with it. 

Unless someone is prepared to have such a metaphysical discussion, then nothing substantive and positive can be done for them. 

And this applies at the societal level, even more than at the individual level.

When people are trapped by their false bottom-line assumptions, then nothing helpful can be done that fails to confront the falsity of these assumptions. 

And for that to happen, absolutely needs their cooperation in the process. 

 

Never Left Bereft: the (unrepentant) prodigal son as a stereotype of modern life

The story of the prodigal son and his father is about Man and God. No matter what mess, what depths of depravity he falls into by his choices, the son will always be welcomed home and taken-in by his father.

Our situation is the same... and yet we don't ask for that help which would so freely and lovingly be given. Because to do so would mean admitting that we had been wrong; and an explicit admission of error and sin is the one thing that modern Man refuses to do (even unto death).

(This shows why pride is the core sin.)


No matter how far we have fallen, no matter how terrible our situation actually is - we are never left bereft by Jesus: always he is there and ready to lead us to life eternal; but we must acknowledge his reality, ask for his help. Jesus helps by consent and desire; he cannot help those who turn from him, hate him, deny him. 


Modern Man is too proud to allow himself to be the prodigal son. No matter what depths of misery he sinks-to by his own choice, he will not turn-to God - just as he will not turn-to his family. The two refusals are related.

I often read biographies (and I have know the same in real life); and it is striking how often modern people leave home, fall into sin and find themselves in a situation of - by their own accounts - extreme poverty, violence, loneliness, misery, depression and despair... such that they consider suicide (either actual suicide; or the covert suicide of alcohol, drugs or repeated patterns of reckless courting of violence and disease). They are - by their own accounts - actually living in a verson of hell.

Yet, it often emerges that the whole time he was in this (self-described) hell; there was a family back home who would have wanted nothing more than to welcome and take-in the prodigal, feed and shelter him, love him.


In few things is the evil of modern mainstream official (mass media-bureaucratic) life so clear; as the fact that this refusal to acknowledge error and sin and seek help with 'the father' (and mother) is regarded as admirable, a strength to be emulated.

The idea propagated is that it is better to die alone, in misery and despair, by slow- or fast-suicide; than to acknowledge the error of an hedonic, responsibility-avoidant lifestyle (sex, drugs, violence, rock and roll - or whatever).

This is how we have come to the point of officially-funded, propagandised and (increasingly) mandatory celebrations of unrepentant prodigal status - the many demonic festivals of Pride. That these festivals are celebrated by self-styled 'Christian' churches, tells us all we need to know about such churches.


The parable of the prodigal son is also a picture of how and why people choose hell and reject Heaven; because Heaven and hell are a choice, rather than a judicial judgement.

Another (spiritually lethal) deficit of modern people is that they affect not to understand why anybody would choose hell, knowing the nature of Heaven; and yet here we have it, in our daily lives!

Even in this mortal life we see people choose a version of hell - despair, nihilism, spiritual death; when all the time an actual living, loving family (an imperfect Heaven, but the closest picture we know) is ready to welcome them.


Note: Nowadays, the prodigal 'son' is perhaps most-often a daughter. 

In Case of War, take the Suicide Pills: When Social Apoptosis meets spitefully destructive totalitarianism

A few months ago I formulated the term Social Apoptosis as a model which may help to understand the way that Western Civilization is eliminating itself. 

The idea is that in the individual cells of multicellular organisms, or individual organisms in social animals such as humans; there are evolved mechanisms by which individuals (and probably groups of such individuals) delete themselves from society, by choosing not to reproduce. 

Such apoptosis can be understood as intended to pursue "strategic", long-term and overall benefit at the expense of short-term and individual benefit; so that the individual has some kind of built-in "programme" to sacrifice its own survival and reproductive prospects in order that larger goals may be achieved. 

 

Something of this kind certainly seems to be at work in Western Civilizations; both individually - where a majority of the native populations choose either not to reproduce at all, or to be subfertile (with much below replacement levels of offspring). 

Modern societies exhibit little in the way of what used to be regarded as natural instincts for self defense or survival - there is a much greater observable concern to avoid avent moderate or brief suffering and pain than to stay alive and leave-behind children. 

(The idea that it would be thought necessary to encourage people to defend themselves and their conditions, or to have children, would have seemed bizarre to most humans throughout history!) 

And apoptosis apparently also operates at a societal level, where whole nations (essentially all Western nations) have for some decades tolerated, and often enthusiastically embraced, multiple policies whose consequence is self-extermination - even when self-extermination is explicitly stated and aimed-at. 

 

Of course; there are many other external and top-down factors at work. But I feel that there would have been a great deal more in the way of mass resistance and refusal if it was not that so may individuals and groups apparently regard themselves are deserving of elimination. 

This widespread sense that "we" - as individuals and societies - deserve to be eliminated, meets with a leadership class that is increasingly motivated by a spiteful desire for destruction. 

A leadership class that demonstrates an implicit - and sometimes explicit - personal satisfaction at the suffering of individuals, and the decline of social institutions. 

 

One reason why unrestricted world war is now such a high probability, is this combination of a Western Civilization that feels it ought to be eliminated, and is motivated by the desire for elimination; with a totalitarian leadership class that would enjoy creating a situation in which this elimination would happen on a rapid and massive scale - accompanied by the greatest possible degree of human fear, misery and suffering. 

 

(While it is only The West that is ruled by a class many of whom are actively seeking destructive war on any excuse, or none; it only takes one side to make a war. Or rather, the only alternative to war in such circumstances, is passive acquiescence to being genocided.)

 

In a spiritual sense; this is understandable in terms of the elimination of religion, and indeed the reality of the spiritual, from the minds of modern Men. 

Our publicly operative metaphysical assumptions are utterly nihilistic; we are taught and believe that there is no purpose or meaning to our lives, or indeed to life itself. All is accident and determinism.

In The West it is fashionable, and publicly approved, to regard Mankind as a plague upon the planet - and the universe... 

The obvious conclusion is that we should eliminate ourselves. 

 

This is our situation here and now; and one reasons why the prospect of explosive and wholesale destruction seem to be increasing all the time.  

An implication of this spiteful-suicidal synergy is that The West will continue to destroy its own military capacity, even while trying to escalet wars on mutliple fronts. 

So "They" want war - but they are Not planning to fight a war... 

What does this imply?

 

To me it suggests that if, or when, They get the war they so much want, involving Western populations who deeply feel that they deserve to die; instead of trying to win the war by fighting - the leadership class will implement a mass distribution of "Suicide Pills". 

Thus there will be a war, and from fear and despair, encouraged by a monothematic propaganda onslaught; the Western masses will kill themselves in droves - the Suicide Pills enable the masses to kill themselves without suffering, and fear of suffering is the only thing that stands between many people and desired annihilation.

That is my prediction. Sooner or later we will be hearing about a plan to distribute Suicide Pills, freely, to the Western Masses - to be used "compassionately" in case of the third world war that is the leadership class's major current project. 

 

Of course, painless death will rather thwart the desire to inflict suffering - and the sadistic demons won't like it... 

On the other hand, the Master Agenda is that of Satan - and that is self-chosen damnation, of which a pretty reliable preparation is to die in deliberate and unrepented sin. 

To kill oneself in fear and despair (and, probably, in a state of seething resentment against God and Jesus Christ) is itself a rejection of Heaven, and the willed choice of Hell.   

Why Sorathic evil is, and must be, the End Stage (The example of Saruman)

I have recently written about Sorathic evil - the purest, most negative and destructive form of evil; as being the direction in which the world is going, here-and-now. 

But, Sorathic evil may be hard to understand. We are used to explaining evil actions in terms of fulfilling personal desires - whether the 'Luciferic' desires of immediate gratification by lust or cruelty, or the longer-term 'Ahrimanic' desires of power and control. 

It seems hard to imagine why 'mere destruction' would motivate someone when they might instead fulfil their desires? 

 

Well, it does happen. Perhaps if we introspect honestly, we can recognise the Sorathic within ourselves, as at least a momentary impulse?

An example are those resentment-fuelled spite-fantasies directed against people that we hate, or even who merely annoy us in some way that gets under our skin. For instance; day-dreaming the wish that somebody we have come to regard as smug, entitled, arrogant, privileged - will suffer massive public humiliation, fatal illness, or agonizing violence. Or somebody who 'thinks they are beautiful' and you 'wish' they would suffer a disfiguring accident that would make them hideous. Or when the idea flashes into mind that maybe I should kill myself and leave an accusatory suicide note; so that he/she/they will suffer lifelong agonies of guilt ("That will show them!").

If you can recognise any or all of these scenarios, then that is an example of the Sorathic evil in you. What identifies them as Sorathic is that the primary satisfaction is in the misfortune of others, rather in gratification of oneself. 

Indeed, someone in the grip of Sorathic evil might plot and scheme, expend time, money and resources - and maybe even take risks to his own health and safety - in order to inflict harm on others. 

Cutting off your nose to spite your face is the proverbial expression of Sorathic evil - although this makes a paradoxical quip out of what is truly the worst kind of evil; and such mockery misses that this 'nose-cutting' is exactly the kind of thing that people will do, when in the grip of Sorath. 

Saruman, in the Lord of the Rings, begins the story as in the grip of typically Ahrimanic evil. Saruman is a very 'modern' figure in the world of Middle Earth; an industrialist with a mind of 'metal and wheels', who even talks in slippery, euphemistic, manipulative management-speak. He works by surveillance (the palantir) and seeks control; even going to the trouble of creating the race of Uruk-Hai; a more obedient and loyal kind of orc-Man, who will stick to orders.  

But evil is a downward path - unless there is repentance: and that path has a slippery slope. 

Ahrimanic evil (while it lasts) retains some Good - insofar as order is better than chaos - and requires virtues such as prudence, hard work, loyalty, obedience...

When Saruman is defeated, he has a chance for repentance; but rejects it. Stripped of power, he refuses to recognise any wrongdoing. 

In particular (and this is amplified in the posthumously-published notes of Unfinished Tales) Saruman is spitefully-motivated against Gandalf. By the end of Lord of the Rings, Saruman has come to exemplify Sorathic evil - since he lives in order to hurt Gandalf, and - by proxy - the hobbits who Gandalf loved and cared for. 

The Scouring of the Shire is a representation of how the brief interlude of Ahrimanic evil administered by Lotho Sackville Baggins, gives way to a frenzy of destructive Sorathic evil when Saruman arrives. 

At first under Lotho - trees were felled to fuel furnaces; later under Saruman ('Sharkey') trees were felled because this would make the hobbits miserable. At first the rivers were carelessly polluted by the outflow of productive industrial processes, but later they were polluted because it would render them hideous... 

Evil as a means to an end, as a by-product; was replaced as evil for its own sake.

 

In his final speech, Saruman reaches the end-point of Sorathic evil when he deliberately courts death by stabbing Frodo in front of the army of hobbits. 

Having reached a point where he cannot destroy the Shire, Saruman tries to saddle the hobbits with a legacy of guilt and regret for having vengefully committed 'deicide' ('god-murder'; in that Saruman is a minor god; a maia or angel).  

But Frodo is protected by his mithril mail, and pardons Saruman - thwarting even his intended indirect 'suicide by cop' and inflicting a further wound of obligation upon the wizard. Yet this act of mercy only increases Saruman's resentment. 

The end-stage of Sorathic evil is despair, and the only perceived 'solution' is suicide. 

Thus Saruman (semi-deliberately) goads Wormtongue into killing Saruman; and thus the wizard 'finally' achieves his own death by that means.

 

Looking at Saruman's descent into Sorathic evil, it is striking how very small, how petty the wizard has become compared with the proud, powerful, 'wise' administrator of the grandiose, world-dominating schemes of his Ahrimanic phase - just a few months earlier. 

And indeed, Sorathic evil can only tend towards being small and petty, because it becomes less-and-less capable of the deferred gratification needed for making and sticking-with complex, long-term plans and manipulations. 

From this we can see that evil cannot go straight to the Sorathic extremity - without rendering itself ineffectual.  Lucifer and Ahriman are needed in the earlier stages to break-open the Good and allow the Sorath in*. 

 

Thus Luciferic and Ahrimanic evils alternate until they have created a situation of vulnerability where Sorathic destruction can take-over. 

On the other hand, the descent from Ahrimanic into Sorathic evil may be very rapid indeed - some historical examples suggest that it may happen in just day, or even hours - so that great tyrants may die suicidally while wishing the like destruction on everybody and everything else ('after me the deluge' - as a desired outcome). 

At the societal level, we reached the threshold of Sorathic evil within only months of the triumph of Ahriman...

 

In the West, we had the Luciferic promises of the 1960s - of a world of unrestrained hedonism; leading incrementally, decade by decade, to the Ahrimanic global prison of 2020 with promises of a world of omni-surveillance and totalalitarian-control (a system, apparently, pioneered in China to be rolled-out everywhere else). 

Yet, such was the triumph of evil and the feebleness of spiritual opposition in this atheist, materialist, leftist-corrupted world; that as the year reached its second half there was already evidence of merely, pettily destructive Sorathic frenzy - with violent riots, destruction, arson, terror, rape and murder; being not just officially funded, organised and defended; but publicly-advocated and approved. 

At a micro-level the brief "all in it together" spring solidarity of March-May devolved into the masked mutual hostility and informer-culture of the summer onwards. 

This happened even though such a spread of chaos erodes the very basis and capability of the global coup and its carefully-constructed Ahrimanic System!

 

The Sorathic spirit can also be seen in the apparent-gratuitousness of using surveillance and control technologies and enforcement for crushing society, church, education, sports, theatres, music, cinema, museums, singing and dancing - and finally Christmas.

In a single year has been wrought a truly colossal destruction of Culture. 

A genuinely Ahrimanic spirit would be subverting and using Culture to monitor, manipulate and control the population... Ahriman would exploit Culture to 'keep people happy' (in a bread and circuses fashion) while explicitly and covertly feeding them pro-System propaganda. 

But the Sorathic spirit of resentment and spitefulness is ever-increasingly getting the upper hand, and engaging in dysfunctional destruction for its own sake. The Sorathic spirit is destroying the Ahrimanic apparatus in all its aspects (including police and military functionality) - destroying, but not replacing. 

 

Because the world is so advanced in evil; such a Sorathic destruction of The System is not any kind of liberation, but a progression of evil delivering the world into chaos: a world of end-stage Sarumans, pursuing personal, petty grudges spiralling downwards into the finality of despair and suicide.  

(And a despairing, or spitefully-motivated, suicide is - surely? - a choice for damnation.) 

So, although the Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic types of evil fight each other, this conflict is not a negation - but the advance of evil; because evils don't cancel, they synergise. 

 

We cannot defeat Ahriman with Sorath, one cannot be played-off against the other - but only with God. 

If The Ahrimanic System is destroyed by Sorath, then we would be in far worse spiritual situation than if The System remained. 

Yet such a Sorathic collapse looks like a distinct probability for 2021...

 

If we want to resist Sorath spiritually - in our-selves, in our societies; this can only be achieved from a base in The Good. 

If we want Good (i.e. Godly) outcomes; the negative can only be defeated by the positive. 

The only true enemy of Sorath is Jesus Christ.

*I got this phrase from Ama Boden. Thanks!

Why should I care if the Christian Churches have committed mass suicide (and hardly anyone noticed)? But I do

The Christian churches around the world have committed mass suicide by suspending sacramental activities (such as the Mass and weddings), by ceasing all meetings and visits, by shutting their doors.

(And not merely for a fixed period, but churches are 'suspended' until further notice - and will resume only when permission comes from the secular authorities - perhaps when/if 'the crisis' is declared to be over. So far this looks like six months, others say a year - but maybe longer? Just think about that, for a moment.)

To me this event - which has already happened - is By Far the single greatest catastrophe in the entire history of Christianity.

The greatest both in scale and scope; but also because it was self-inflicted, and indeed done with virtue-signalling and moralizing zeal from the church leaderships.

Yet there seems to be near zero recognition that this has-happened (past tense: it is the situation here and now); 1800+ years of institutional history has ended; the suicide is done and dusted and we are watching the early stages of rigor mortis - soon to be followed by putrefaction.


But why, it may be asked, should I personally care about this - when I am someone who practises a largely unaffiliated Christianity - when (apparently) the devout church members themselves don't care much?

The reason I care, and that this business has greatly distressed me; is that most of the serious Christians I know-of are members of churches, and active in their churches. By my judgment, serious Christians are distributed across many different Christian denominations - but they all seems to have been affected by this mass unilaterally-imposed withdrawal of their churches.

Such people are no placed in a serious (and very sudden) dilemma: Christianity or The Church; yet such people are not accustomed to separate the two; so this is a Huge deal.

I can see that the immediate (stunned) reaction of such church Christians is to deny the significance of what has just happened; to 'pretend' that the cessation of churches is merely a sensible and temporary expedient in response to an unique and time-limited crisis.

But the situation is not necessarily any of these things - and even if it is; the churches have placed themselves firmly under the spiritual authority of the secular arm - and done so voluntarily and in advance of even the slightest degree of coercion. Church leaders have declared that when churches are most needed, other things are more important: material expediency trumps spiritual neccessity.


As this horrible reality sinks-in; it will cause the crisis of opposition between Church and Christianity - between loyalty and obedience to an authority that does nothing and has (without objection, with enthusiasm) divorced its flock; or striking out into uncharted waters to find God and develop a relations with Jesus alone. (With barely time to grieve.)

I care, therefore, that the faith of serious Christians has been - without any significant warning - attacked by their own churches at exactly the moment when such faith is most threatened and most needed.

That is why I care. Because I care about the spiritual well-being all serious Christians of all denominations (and none), and I regard their salvation as seriously imperilled at this time. And their own churches are, substantially, to blame.

From euthanasia to assisted suicide... Not so much a slippery-slope as jumping off a cliff

I have been observing the suicidal-turn of Western culture for considerably more than a decade. Its beginnings lie back many decades ago, while I was still a medical student. 

At that time, the issue was called euthanasia, and was focused upon people whose suffering was regarded as severe and intractable, and who were incapable of killing themselves - and their Right to have somebody-else kill them. 

More recently, there was a focus on dying "with dignity" - which meant without suffering; so that the debate expanded to include people who could kill themselves - but apparently only in ways that would cause them pain or suffering. The Right being requested was for somebody-else to kill such people pain-lessly, instead of them killing-themselves pain-fully. 

Now, we call it "assisted suicide"; and have reached the point where there is no question of "need", but instead the Right demanded is to be killed pleasantly by somebody-else. With the picture painted of a happy death by drowsing off into permanent sleep while outdoors in some beauty spot - such as a National Park. 

When the question of creating a bureaucratic system for legally allowing some people deliberately to kill other people; there were warnings that this was morally a slippery-slope. 

Well, if we examine the rationale behind such proposals, and the speed with which the Right to be killed has expanded from a handful of people per nation to... everybody; the issue has turned-out to be more like jumping off a cliff from strict-morality and unfortunate necessity, plummeting down into pure amoral (i.e. immoral) convenience and consumer choice. 

The reason for allowing legalized murder has gone from being a last-ditch and desperate remedy for those terminally ill or agonizingly suffering, to a lifestyle preference.    

This is one of those (many) situations in which a top-down strategy meets mass acceptance; because in our Godless materialistic society, the bottom-line for values, for morals, for laws is simply utilitarian human psychology - that is, what people want, what makes people happy, what makes them feel less miserable... 

And this is a matter of inference, unsupportable assertion, and subjective opinion. A situation in which the apparatus of propaganda and ideology has the greatest scope; and where the prevalent sins of this age - fear, cowardice, demotivation, resentment, dishonesty and (most of all) despair - can operate freely and without trammel. 

Unless the trends reverse (and encouraged by deliberately engineered war, civil violence, disease and starvation); we will surely soon be seeing suicide become a publicly explicit and media-favoured lifestyle strategy; with the Western bureaucracies providing whatever necessary facilities. 

In the spiritual war of this world; to have mass suicides of people for such reasons as loss of all hope, fear of the future, refusal to tolerate the possibility of pain, and despair at the present - is a Big Win for the powers of evil. 

Because these would be deaths happening in a state of self-chosen damnation: that is, dying while decisively rejecting the reality of God and the promises of Jesus Christ.

There is, I believe, the maximum possible scope given us for post-mortal repentance (however we die). Death is not the end...

Yet our decisions in mortal life make a permanent difference; and to leave this life in such a spiritual state as (apparently) those who express a desire to be killed pleasantly while contemplating a beautiful view...

Well, this is very far from a fertile seedbed for repentance.   

The coming cult of altruistic/ suffering-avoiding suicide

Modern Western secular man explicitly and as an inward experience feels himself to be worthless and evil, and deserving of (what he imagines will be) annihilation by death.

He is afraid of dying, however, and is increasingy clamouring for widespread and convenient euthanasia (humane murder, suffering-free legal-murder) - and specifically wants this for himself (not just for other people).

On present trends there will soon and increasingly be a kind of 'cult' of suicides among the baby boom generation - suicide seen as a public duty, a positive act: an act of ultimate altruism.

This will first emerge among the elderly intellectuals of post 1945 generation as they hit their late seventies; but will soon spread to ever younger and fitter people as a morally-admirable safe-option - the logic for this is already in-place.

As such Western people die, they will do so with much public boasting, a smug and warm glow at their own generosity in 'making way'; and in expectation of the gratitude and admiration of the population that they have brought-in from elsewhere to replace them.

The younger migrant population, of course, never had any intention of supporting, nor indeed the ability to support, a truly massive, alien, older generation of Westerners through long, unproductive and dependent old age. The idea is indeed ridiculous (despite that so many people seem to believe it).

The dawning prospect of a slow death of suffering from starvation and neglect will only increase the mass desire for pain-avoiding suicide among the declining natives - and encourage people to dress-it-up in a pseudo-morality of self-sacrifice - the kind of thing modern elites are so expert at accomplishing.

The Absolute stupidity of (totalitarian) bureaucracy

There is an absolute and ineradicable stupidity at the heart of The System: the bureaucracy that controls our totalitarian society. 

This is something that I observed first-hand in the year and a half I worked in the National Health Service administration. What is characteristic of the stupidity is a conviction that because we need it to be so, then it can be so*. 

When The System finds some-thing necessary, then The System will believe that it is possible. 

Indeed, The System cannot comprehend that what it regards as necessary, is actually impossible - because The System only takes regard of itself. 

The System is its own world; and works by assuming that itself is the whole world. 

So that when The System recognizes something as necessary, or even as simply desirable - then The System also automatically-intrinsically regards that something as possible. 

We see this characteristic everywhere - or, at least, we can see it if we stand outwith The System, which apparently not all that many people can or do (or even want to do). 

We see it at the large scale and at the small scale of bureaucratic operations. 

At the large scale there is the colossal socio-economic phenomenon of the Global Climate Warming/ Change Emergency; by which something not-a-problem, and anyway immeasurable (i.e. the temperature of the earth/ocean surface/ atmosphere is not measurable coherently); and which has unknown determinants; is claimed by The System to be understood, predictable, and controllable (by The System) down to fractions of a degree... So The System regards the climate problem as solved and it is all a matter of implementation. 

On a smaller scale there is the current wave of AI ("Artificial Intelligence"), which The System believes it needs in order to exert what The System regards as the necessary degree of monitoring and control over the mass population. And the fact that "AI" cannot by its nature possibly work in the real world for such purposes, and therefore it does not work; is unknowable by The System. So The System regards the AI problem as solved and it is all a matter of implementation. 

And implementation of such schemes is also something that The System knows how to do, to its own satisfaction, by the means it has generated internally. 

So that the actually accelerating collapse of social order and capability in the world outside The System, and that this collapse is actually caused by The System, simply does not register; because it is not part of The System.

From inside The System, the only "real" problems are ones of implementation: the problem that "people" simply aren't properly doing... whatever it is that The System currently wants them to do. 

Which means that the only "real" problem for The System is that of monitoring and controlling "people". 

And thus the circle is completed.    

 *The specific instance when this became clear was when I was questioning a government minister in a meeting at the Health Authority. The NHS bureaucracy had set as a numerical-monitored-target, that national suicide rates should and would be reduced. I pointed-out that this was nonsensical, because nobody knew how national suicide rates could be reduced. The minister rather impatiently explained to me that it was necessary that Psychiatric services had a target (or else they would be neglected), and this was the only suitable measurable outcome; so now it was "up to us" to discover how to reach that target - i.e. how to reduce national suicide levels in line with the targets. In practice, The System generated some (totally conjectural) methods that it believed ought to work. These were accepted (eagerly) because something must be done. The hypothetical notion was, basically, prescribing more antidepressant drugs (because that must stop suicides, right?... Ignoring that the SSRI drugs actually increase suicides, which was what happened in the real world). And so drug-pushing was the policy which got implemented. At least until The System changed the targets, for reasons of its own.

Note added: The above is a soft version of the Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann - which is summarized and developed in the Appendix of my (pre-Christian, and leftist) book The Modernization Imperative.  

"They" Want Us Dead - but dead too-late, too soon, and dying in fear and/or despair

The subject of death is becoming mainstream in modern materialistic culture - but, of course, death is framed by our evil-motivated Leadership class in ways that (if the frames are accepted) with induce us to choose damnation instead of salvation, and such as to corrupt as as much as possible. 

There are many aspects to death. One is that, in this entropic world, we will die. Another is that we dwell in God's continuing-creation, and God therefore can influence the way we die. And then there is our own freedom. 

I therefore assume that God (by his creative work) engineers the best "time to die" for us; within the constraints of entropy and the freedom of other beings (including, but not only, human beings). The best death is when - from our freedom, we willingly agree that this is the time to die - at which point, the process of death (which happens in time) will begin. 

But this best way to die is precisely what the weight of modern culture attempts (on the whole very successfully) to thwart - by two main means (although there are many others). 

The first is to induce us all to cling to life, for as long as possible - so that we will not consent to die when it is "our time" (and God will do everything possible to ensure that we - and those we love - know it is time). Hence the clichés such as "stay with me" that present dying as always a failure of will, a giving-up in despair. 

A good deal of modern health services are built on exactly this assumption - that everybody ought to want to stay alive, at whatever cost, for as long as possible -  hence the truly vast expenditure of health and social care in sustaining human life far beyond its biological span. 

But the vital thing to remember is that this artificial sustaining of life is only possible because that is what so many modern people are choosing. It is not difficult to die, and people will die when they are ready - when, at the deepest level, they have chosen to die. 

The other corruption is to regard death as something that ought to be done with the minimum of suffering, and therefore - to be on the safe side - we need to arrange to be murdered (assisted dying) before there is "too much" suffering. 

This discourse is rooted in extreme and chronic (existential) fear - the fear of what might happen to us...

Combined with such an extremity of fear of suffering that even a few minutes of pain (such as might result from actual suicide) is intolerable to contemplate... 

Ancient Romans used (apparently calmly) to kill themselves with a sword or knife - but modern Man demands (literally demands, as a human right) painlessly to be murdered by someone else, with legal approval, by some technological contrivance that is claimed to eliminate suffering. 

In the materialist culture of the mainstream West, there can be no conceptualization of faith and trust in God; not even trust that God will ameliorate our subjective experience of suffering at the time of death (as seems to happen in so many animals). 

Neither do we trust God to know when it is our "time to die" and will provide us with that knowledge when the time comes. 

Consequently there seem to be a lot of "bad deaths". One is the death of someone who is clinging to life for every last moment until overwhelmed by entropy - and total body failure supervenes - and whose soul is, presumably, dragged "kicking and screaming" into the after-life state. Which seems like a very bed preparation for the choices to be made at that phase of our lives. 

Another bad death is one who mistrusts God, or more the reality of God, and dies in a despair so profound that he cannot summon the courage to anticipate enduring even a few moments or minutes of suffering en route to the after-life.  

Another bad death is suicide; which is death too early - before the "time to die" - which happens when suicide is motivated by sin - sins such as fear, despair, or resentment ("that will show them!") 

A common things seems to be the death of those who have rejected their "time to die" and who have chosen to live on in a state of what must therefore be unrepented, hence probably cumulative, sin. In other words, who have (for weeks, month, perhaps many years) been progressively corrupted in soul by their embracing of fear and despair; such that when they eventually die they are significantly worse people than if they had died when God believed that they should best die. 

If such a corrupted soul accepts salvations in the after-life - which opportunity is, of course, open to all - they they will take much less of themselves through resurrection to eternal life. 

What I mean is that we can only take-forward what is good in us, and must leave-behind what is not-good. So those who die later will need to repent more and therefore shall take-forward less than if they had accepted death when God chose was the best time. 

(In other words; if there is a best time to die; then dying later than that time will be worse; when best and worse are judged by post-mortal and Heavenly standards.)

If we accept this idea of there being, for each person and spiritually-speaking, a time to die - and that this time is known by God; then it is indeed obvious that there is vast current propaganda otherwise. 

A denial of there being a time to die. 

And the colossal cultural effort to persuade people that their time of dying is an event to be decided by anything-other-than God: e.g. by "individual choice" of mortals who have accepted/ chosen annihilation after death (i.e. choice in context of materialist metaphysics); or chosen and administered by The System in some combination of Global Establishment/ State/ Law/ Media/ and Health (or Death) Services.