The Growing Love of Death

The Satan's Final Work

We were struck recently by the declaration attributed to British author, Terry Pratchett in one of the many tributes after his death.  Pratchett had been suffering from early onset Alzheimers.

He also explored the case for assisted suicide in an acclaimed TV documentary. "Either we have control of our lives, or we do not," he said. [NZ Herald]

Herein lies the philosophical and ethical rationale for suicide.
  Man has control of all things to do with himself.  Certainly this includes the decision to die or to live.  Herein, also, lies the explanation of why suicide is becoming more popular and acceptable.  We are grateful to Pratchett for stating the secularist case so succinctly.  We defy any secularist-cum-evolutionist-cum-atheist-cum-rationalist-cum-existenialist-cum-post-modernist to demur.  Suicide is all about autonomous control.  Whether to live or die is meaningless--or equally meaningful (take your pick).  The one is of no more value than the other--only sentimentalists would disagree.  Once you assert autonomous self-control, "life = death" follows. To choose to die is as valid as choosing to live--which is to say that both alike are without any meaning in an ultimate sense.   

Therefore, we fully expect in our Western secularist and materialist world, that the cult of death and dying will go from strength to strength.  The right to die has already been asserted as a fundamental human right.  Several Western countries are rushing to ensure its legal justification.

The secular West hates the living God.  And, says the Word of  this God, "those who hate me, love death" (Proverbs 8:36).  The West's hatred of God is inevitably developing into a cult of death.  The transmission mechanism is an assertion of man's total autonomy over himself--and, therefore, his autonomy over his own death.  Since our death is inevitable, Unbelief insists that at least man can choose and elect when and where to die.  It is, as Pratchett put it, the essence of having control over one's own existence.

G. K. Chesterton wrote:  

Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. . . . (A)ny one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre know how it does work.  That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. . . .  

Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.  The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. [G. K. Chesterton, "The Flag of the World,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 279.]

It is only when we despise human autonomy as a lie of lies that we come to accept that death is the last enemy, but an enemy nonetheless.  It is the last enemy, because it is our greatest, most intractable enemy.  Moreover, death has been vanquished only by Christ Himself. For the Christian, the death that we die, we die to Christ, to honour Him.  It is our last act of witness to Christ amongst mortal men.  We die declaring that our death has already been overcome.  We will be resurrected back to never-ending life.

For the Unbeliever, suicide is a death unto self, to honour the autonomous authority of the self.  It is the last, final act of witness to Unbelief.  Death is as life.  It is neither friend nor enemy.  Therefore life and death are the same.  All is without truth or meaning.  All is nothingness.  Anything different is an illusion.  Bringing men to this point is the Satan's final, greatest work.