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Remarks on Suicide
Robert B Walker, Soquel, CA
The Urantia Book gives humans hope for personal salvation through faith in God. In doing so, it provides many reasons for humans not to commit suicide--reasons that are directly related to explanations of faith itself. Putting aside the moral issue of whether suicide is a faithless act, it may be instructive to enumerate reasons supplied in the book for not ending this earthly life.
From our temporal viewpoint, the book teaches us to relate our 'so short lives' from a projected Paradise perspective. We learn to envisage destinies and long range goals that require thousands of years to complete. Setbacks experienced in frenzied temporal life are not of such significance and do not have the same emotional impact for mortals who grasp this greater continuity of life.
Being privy to vast details about the actual existence of life hereafter diminishes a person's sense of cosmic isolation and uncertainty, allowing some religionists to live as though heaven were now on earth. Learning that what we do not accomplish in this life, we can achieve in the life hereafter, removes a lot of pressure from having to accomplish everything in this life. Our sometimes abortive attempts at psychological fulfillment will be righted by 'remedial' training. For example, those who did not raise a child to puberty and/or marry will have morontial experiences with the approximate emotional endowment that attends these earthly experiences. Knowledge of the gradual re-keying process of spiritual attunement through numerous morontial forms also provides us with a specific sense of place within the universe existence and progression. Seeing such an incremental process functions in the spiritual worlds underlines for mortals the oft used phrase one step after another is the way to achieving the goal, making it mentally comfortable for mortals to adopt this approach when dealing with different temporal goals.
To paraphrase, the book says all that is ultimately important in this life is the survival of one's soul, not the achievement of material or popular success. All else can be made up--retrieved in the life hereafter. It states that what we are becoming slowly and sincerely is the fabric which forms spiritual progress, not that we must be merit scholars or most valuable players today, nor bishops by age thirty or saints by seventy. It also says anyone who pays a modicum of attention to his Adjuster's leading survives this life to go on to an existence not fraught with evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest, or hampered by animal fears. Yes, faith is ultimately the greatest bulwark against despair, but that even a minimal response to God can create and build into an enduring belief which experience can then turn into factual knowledge of spiritual realities also relieves spiritual pressures on mortals to find God, truth and understanding through some dramatic spiritual transformation or experience.
Jesus' life provides vivid example of how to face the vicissitudes of temporal existence with fortitude and cosmic stamina. In describing how he met setbacks in his life by facing them, the book indirectly acknowledges the difficulties with which this life is beset but simply says, "with effort, obstacles will be overcome." None of the celestial writers asserts humans cannot supplement their psyche with the vision of a more peaceful existence after death to bolster their resolve to endure this life, but just by enduring it with determination, growth and spiritual development will result and augment their lives, making temporal existence here meaningful, and hence more satisfying, if not enjoyable.
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