In the News: Dad links son's suicide to 'The God Delusion'

[karadan]

Suicide is generally inexplicable.  Really, it's just what happens when a person's ability to cope is outweighed by the pain (emotional, physical, etc.) he is experiencing.  I suspect PTSD from his war experience to be a strong contributing factor.

I suffer from PTSD and sometimes, my trauma has caused me to have some highly illogical emotions.  I've contemplated suicide quite a number of times.  Oddly enough, I never contemplated suicide while I was on the street or in the midst of that personal war.  When I was in survival mode, I was incredibly, unshakably practical.  However, once I got back to physical safety and comfort my traumas surfaced, still surface.  Once you stop thinking about how you are going to survive from minute to minute all the shit you've experienced comes crashing down on you.

I feel empathy for the poor kid's suffering.  With a fundie family he stood little chance of getting support for emotional trauma or mental illness brought on by his wartime experiences.  Without a real outlet, the young man probably suffered horribly, steeping in a pressure cooker of inescapable emotional hell.  

I don't really believe anyone can come back from a war without suffering mental or emotional harm of some kind.

You had post traumatic stress? Did you go to war?

My father was in the army. He never went to war, thankfully. He was a helicopter technician. He did, however, have friends who came back shells of their former selves. To him, it was heartbreaking. He watched helplessly as some of his oldest friends divorced from their wives and became alcoholics because they had no proper counselling and had no real coping mechanism.

That, in itself was a trauma for my dad.

I'm so incredibly fortunate that i've been brought up away from such atrocities. I can't imagine what it must be like for a generation of people who've grown up in Iraq or other countries facing the blight of war.

My grandfather had PTSD from WW2. The only thing he ever told my mother about it was, he saw his best friend get blown up on HMS Ajax. That was it. everything else was buried. He was amongst the thousands who stormed the beaches on D-Day. I'll never really understand what he must have been forced to cope with.

It is totally heartbreaking.

[Kylyssa]

You had post traumatic stress? Did you go to war?

I was homeless as a young woman which caused me to be repeatedly assaulted including one brutal assault which left me in a coma for about 8 days. The injuries incurred (both physical and mental) during those assaults probably caused me to be homeless far longer than I might have been.

[karadan]

You had post traumatic stress? Did you go to war?

I was homeless as a young woman which caused me to be repeatedly assaulted including one brutal assault which left me in a coma for about 8 days. The injuries incurred (both physical and mental) during those assaults probably caused me to be homeless far longer than I might have been.

Wow,

That is sad

I hope everything is better for you now, than it was.

[MikeyV]

this is so sad and frustrating.  maybe if the guy had felt he could go to his family or friends and discuss his feelings and doubts, this would never have happened.  i bet he felt he'd be alienated if he tried to talk about it.  it's really unfortunate that he had to feel so alone.

I have the feeling you are right. Of course, we will never know.

Those of us who were once under the christianity delusion know that shedding it is a difficult proccess, made even harder by fundie relatives. The isolation this guy must have felt...

[PipeBox]

OK, I'm just gonna say it, maybe the son couldn't cope with the implications from TGD.  Maybe he made some bad inferences based on faulty reasoning or general ignorance.  Maybe he had been wanting to kill himself his entire life, having been miserable in a very deep and personal way, and he only found he could after he no longer believed he was going to hell for it.

It is entirely possible that the son's death resulted very directly from reading TGD.  So I say we admit it's possible.  It's still no different from a martyr throwing their life away because they believe a holy book, or the the son killing himself because there was a gun handy to do it with (which I'd deem far more directly responsible).  It's tragic, but it isn't a sign that we should ban supposed holy books, cars, guns, alcohol, or TGD.  It's just an object, it's up to us what we do with it.  Time to stop blaming objects for the choices made by people.  Unless the object in question can never be used outside of a malicious purpose, or the risk is far too great for the time being (plutonium, anyone?), then it's time to stop rerouting the blame.

The father should be told plainly that TGD didn't kill his son, his son killed his son after reading TGD, as well as having breakfast previously.  It's cold, it's impersonal, it's the truth.   I've come close to killing myself a few times, namely during my angsty teen years.  But I never wanted to die more than I wanted to live, at least for someone else.  This guy wanted to die more than he wanted to live.  TGD didn't want him to die more than he wanted to live, he did.

I'm sorry I'm ranting, here, but this is a very important distinction in other aspects of life.  Guns, video games, movies, atheism, and the like don't need to be controlled for responsible, sane, mentally prepared people.

Hope no one takes issue with this post, it sucks that the son died, it really, really does.  If he were my son, I'd be torn apart.  As someone else said, I hope the father thinks him unaware and lost to the world rather than burning in eternal fire.  This probably isn't the case, but I wish it were so the situation would be slightly less tragic.

That is all.

[bowmore]

Time to stop blaming objects for the choices made by people.

I don't think he's blaming the book, he's blaming the ideas in the book.

I think he's blaming atheism, because he desperately wants to avoid being blamed himself.

[PipeBox]

Time to stop blaming objects for the choices made by people.

I don't think he's blaming the book, he's blaming the ideas in the book.

I think he's blaming atheism, because he desperately wants to avoid being blamed himself.

He'd still be blaming the book for being Lethal Atheism: The Condensed Field Guide.  The book is made out to be a key factor in the suicide.  If it had been said "Atheism and atheist books," it would've been different.  The book is singled out as a malicious source.  You can't get an idea banned from human thought, but you can sue writers and get bookstores to remove books from their shelves, which is probably something the father would like to effect.  As to whether he'll act on it, probably never in any newsworthy way.

All that aside, a google search implies atheists are more prone to suicide.  They're also less violent and commit less crime.  Correlation says nothing of causality, as both atheists and theist tend to scream in this case, it just suggests a link.  And not to sound like an ass, but I far prefer that unhappy people kill themselves rather than kill others.

Maybe it's just as fair to blame atheism, because when his son was no longer afraid of damnation he was finally able to kill himself.  Maybe the idea of atheism depressed him greatly.  Maybe he, based on a totally misguided understanding, wanted to see which side was right.  Maybe it was a combination.  Hardly matters.  The blame lies with the son, no one forced him to do anything.  Was the father supposed to protect him from every new idea, ban every book but the Bible, and hide the state of the world from his son on the off chance that any one of these things inspired him to suicide? No.  We're not going to play that game, where maybe if A, B, and C were banned, or we force people to avoid exposure to D, E, and F, there would be less suicide.  It is unreasonable censorship for things a vast majority of people can handle, in my experience.  The son saw and did a lot of stuff while he was alive.  One or many of these things prompted him to suicide, but the son is in a very small minority.  Upon this prompting, he killed himself, of his own accord, based on what he'd seen.

If the father doesn't want circumstances and ideas and objects to kill people, he better get to work on banning atheism, religion, girlfriends, boyfriends, money, books, language, conscious thought and physical pain.  The short way would be to rig up some kind of feeding system and then put us all in a coma, or some vegetative state.  Then the world would be a better place, where his son couldn't kill himself.  Also, no one would be able to love each other.  But that's small peanuts because we'd all have a pulse until we succumbed to some disease, or malfunction of the feed tube, or some natural occurrence.  Clearly, this is ridiculous, and no sane person would endorse it.  Easier to let as many as 30 people per 100,000 per year kill themselves.  We can seek to reduce the rate through offers of counseling, and by paying more attention to each other, reminding others what they mean to us.  We're not going to start banning things everytime a tragic story springs up.

It doesn't matter if the father is absolutely right and TGD and atheism brought about his son's suicide, it's about what is done because of it.

[VietnamVet-BRIGHT]

The father should be told plainly that TGD didn't kill his son, his son killed his son after reading TGD, as well as having breakfast previously.  It's cold, it's impersonal, it's the truth.   I've come close to killing myself a few times, namely during my angsty teen years.  But I never wanted to die more than I wanted to live, at least for someone else.  This guy wanted to die more than he wanted to live.  TGD didn't want him to die more than he wanted to live, he did.

Well said.  It's also important to note that the story was written and posted by World Net Daily (WND), a conservative news source which promotes fundy Christianity and conservative agendas.  

Notice in the midst of the article ( http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php? ... geId=81459 ) the presence of these hyperlinked words :

Discover how atheism and immorality are being cleverly sold to Americans in David Kupelian's controversial best seller, "The Marketing of Evil."

That hyperlink takes you to this site ...
http://shop.wnd.com/store/item.asp?DEPA ... EM_ID=1679

... which promotes a book marketed by "ShopWND.com" ... The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom  



What is probably most dispicable of all about this story (but not surprising), is that the tragic death of this young  man is being used to anger & motivate conservative/Christian visitors of the WND website to spend money at their marketing subsidiary.

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