> So unless your religion says that suicides are punished
Most of them do in one form or another, especially the Abrahamic tree.
Most of them do in one form or another, especially the Abrahamic tree.
Not actually true, otherwise all Buddhists would become monastics, which they don't.
Buddhists believe that positive karma is accumulated over many lifetimes, and negative karma is extinguished after periods of suffering.
In Buddhist thought, it's often enough to simply live a reasonably 'good' life, then you'll be reincarnated into a heavenly realm, or possibly another human body, etc... There are degrees of everything, and very few Buddhists (if any) believe they're going to achieve liberation after only a single lifetime. Even the Buddha was thought to have lived hundreds of lives, eventually culminating with his miraculous (by traditional accounts) life 2500 years ago...
Though what you've written here doesn't contradict my current mental model of Buddhism, I might have been wrong in assessing Buddhist's motivation as universally being about eventually ending suffering. Maybe some are content with a good, pleasurable existence, and not necessarily Nirvana? Though the fact that not all Buddhists are monastic doesn't in itself imply that - even if being monastic leads to more quickly achieving Nirvana, maybe some Buddhists don't feel that they are in such a rush, at least in their particular lifetime?
> There are degrees of everything, and very few Buddhists (if any) believe they're going to achieve liberation after only a single lifetime.
That's why I wrote """eventually escaping suffering"""!! I said nothing about escaping suffering in the span of one lifetime. Only that they choose to devote their life to the goal of eventually achieving this "escape". Note that I contrasted this goal with people who commit suicide; people who commit suicide - because of depression and suicidal thoughts - do it to escape suffering in one particular lifetime. Hence, why I contrasted this with Buddhism as "a more immediate suffering". I thought my choice of words, to deliberately contrast these two kinds of sufferings, would be enough to get the point across to someone who understands Buddhism (probably better than me). But I guess you were in a lecturing mood. Good for you, buddy; we've all got to have hobbies. And web forums are as good a place as any to do that.
Please follow the Hacker News guidelines and refrain from personal rudeness when posting here.
Buddhism doesn't categorically outlaw suicide but it's against violent or angry suicide and it definitely proscribes suicide as a way out. The bad karma you were trying to escape, plus possibly more, will be waiting for you on the other side. The self-immolating monk, Thích Quảng Đức, might turn out OK if he had compassionate intentions; but in general, suicide is still very bad.
The people that I mostly have in mind are people that bet on Pascal's Wager. People that are not necessarily Buddhists, or even religious to begin with. From their standpoint, it might not be that crucial to bet on Buddhism, since it they're wrong they won't have to pay for it for ever and ever.
(Gotta say that I was surprised to see M. O'Church talking about Buddism, btw.)
At any rate, I don't think humans are capable of comprehending eternity, so I'm not sure how meaningful Pascal's Wager really is. While there's objectively a huge difference between 10^14 years of torment and an eternity of it, I can't say that I can begin to fathom either one.
Judaism doesn't either. That's a Christian thing, not an Abrahamic thing.