My Thoughts on Suicide: In Memory of Christian Taylor

               Recently, a friend and colleague of mine committed suicide. His name was Christian Taylor, and undergraduate student at Texas A&M University. Christian, in my experience, was a generally happy guy who loved to ponder scientific and philosophical questions. We shared the same office since the beginning of the summer and as a result had quite a few interesting discussions while working together. On October 15, Christian ingested sodium cyanide, he was rushed to the hospital and he went on to be with the Lord on October 17. While attending his funeral, another friend of mine asked me if suicide was a sure way to hell. I disagreed with him and explained my reasons. I would like to repeat these reasons here as a tribute to the memory of a friend.
                Now as I said, I don’t think that suicide is a sure way to hell. By my beliefs, there is only one sin that can send someone to hell. This sin is dying an unbeliever in Christ. By this, I mean that if you leave this world and you have not accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you will be eternally cast away from the presence of God in a place known as hell. This being said, I do view suicide as murder against oneself and the admission that you do not trust God to bring you through whatever trial drove you to make this choice. If you are a Christian and make this choice, I believe that you are forgiven, but I certainly wouldn’t want to face my heavenly Father on judgment day and tell Him that I didn’t trust in his plan for me while on this earth. Now some may argue that suicide was part of God’s plan for that particular person. This may seem like a valid point until we consider that nature of God. God is the ultimate representation of good and cannot by his very nature compel us to perform evil.

                That all being said, Christian committing suicide was indeed a tragic event and I wish it could have been avoided. Alas it has happened and it has affected his family, his friends, and his coworkers. I pray for peace during this hard time for all of us. If you are going through a difficult time and you have thoughts of taking your life, I beg you to reconsider. Not only are you removing any hope of your situation improving, you are also making a selfish choice that will break the hearts of more people than you think. While you may not see it, God does have a plan for you and He will bring you through these hard times if you will allow Him to. If you are struggling in life, please consider allowing Christ into your life to grant you peace beyond understanding. May God bless you and have a good rest of your week. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First post in 2 years, catching up on life, reflections on fatherhood

          To those of you who are still following me and came back to see this post, thank you for stopping in. It has been 2 years since I last posted anything to this page (little over actually since my animal suffering post was July 10, 2021). I fell off writing because my wife and I were going through one of our biggest challenges we have faced, the supposed impending death and miscarriage of our second child, Austin. I say supposed because God is good and Austin survived long odds to not only make it to term, but he is a happy almost 2 year old now. Our daughter Abby is also doing great, almost 4 now, and she loves her brother fiercely. This particular post won’t necessarily be focusing on an apologetics topic (I hope to tackle the origin and uses of different Bible translations soon), I want to do use this post to tell that story of Austin’s miraculous turn around in the womb, and reflect on what all God has shown me and grown me in during almost 4 years of being a father. I to
Read more

Evidence to Support Creation/Intelligent Design

                During my post concerning education, I made comments over how evolution can be taught in a classroom without affecting the worldview of the students. Thanks to the comment from someone on the article, I got to thinking about the opposite side, creationism/intelligent design. How could one introduce these theories and ideas without imposing a worldview on your students? Now unfortunately I cannot think of a way to introduce these views without introducing some sort of God, but they can be introduced by using the Deistic God, who is an impersonal being that started the universe and then left everything alone within this creation.   A deistic god does not push a specific worldview per say, but it does point toward a supernatural being that cannot be scientifically proven in the classical sense, so some people may already be throwing up their hands and claim multiple problems with teaching these ideas in school. The two big objections that pop into my head are by usi
Read more

Thoughts on the Problem of Animal Suffering

              YouTube atheist Cosmic Skeptic uploaded a video entitled “Christianity’s Biggest Problem”. He definitely caught my attention for the title and because I recently gained some respect for Alex as he had a recent discussion with William Lane Craig and that discussion turned out very well. To spoil Alex’s cryptic surprise, he believes that Christianity’s biggest problem is the problem of animal suffering. In Alex’s view, he believes that because animals experience gratuitous suffering (resource depletion, death in wildfires, long drawn out deaths to predators) that it is evidence that God does not exist, and that Christianity is false. I admit that I hadn’t really considered this problem, so I have gone looking for resources, and I would like to present what I have found here as possible avenues in which we can answer this particular problem. The first line of response I am borrowing Sean Luke, a comember of CAA: Christian Apologetics Alliance on Facebook, who left this com
Read more