[quote=@catchamber] I hope you don't find my argument to be an emotional one. I also hope that you recognize my desire for people to both live and die as they please, so long as they don't harm other people. [/quote] What you said, is solely an emotional argument...there is no facts or evidence presented in what you replied to me with. You also clearly ignored parts or didn't read the inconvenient truths that this isn't a victimless crime. The law knows that, and people who aren't moral cowards or duplicitous know that too. https://www.voanews.com/a/suicide-has-ripple-effect-on-families-communities-societies/3501763.html (Just one of many examples/stories.) Even fucking Vox.com knows it. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/23/7868621/suicide-help 1) We don't have the right to suicide Suicide hurts other people terribly. For some it is fatal: Throughout history people have noted that one suicide can lead to more suicides, in all sorts of groups. After the publication of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, some young men across Europe killed themselves dressed as Werther, or holding the book, and by many accounts there was a rise in suicide in countries where the book was available. Now modern statistical studies repeatedly demonstrate the existence of suicide clusters, each representing a real rise in the suicide rate in certain high schools, colleges, regiments, and towns, age groups, and professions. You may remember headlines, over the past few decades, about suicides among farmers, policemen, among teens in the eighties; at certain colleges, or in a particular college dorm. Recently there have been major headlines about a shocking rise in suicide rates among baby boomers, military personnel, and Native Americans (especially the young). There are a variety of indications of the significance of influence. In the 1970s researcher David Philips, now a sociology professor at University of California San Diego, followed the rise in suicides after the death of Marylyn Monroe and other celebrities and called it the Werther Effect. The rise is strongest for those of the same age and gender as the celebrity. Beyond celebrities, studies show a robust correlation between media reports about suicide and an increase in actual suicide in the area that hears about it, again especially among people of the same age and gender. Media influence on suicide seems especially potent with adolescents and young adults. There is even a dose response, such that more exposure to such news leads to more suicidal behavior. Victor Hugo rejected suicide because, "As soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is murder." And Jean Jacques Rousseau had a wise character tell a younger, suicidal friend that suicide must be rejected for many reasons, including that it might cause more suicide. Suicide is too harmful to be a right. 4) Suicide is among the top ten killers of Americans In 2000 the number of American suicides was 30,000, and it began rising. The last full count was in 2012, and it was up to 40,600. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15 and 24. In a recent study of college students, suicide beat out alcohol as a cause of death. Meanwhile, most suicides are older white men. Women attempt suicide more, but men die of it more. That's most likely because men have more access to guns; in 2010 suicide accounted for 61 percent of gun deaths in the US. Suicide kills more than murder. When people try to kill themselves and survive, they overwhelmingly report being glad they lived As for war, a 2012 study showed that more US military personnel died of suicide than of combat or transport accidents that year. (The numbers for 2013 just came out this week: while active military suicides are down, there has been a rise in suicide among reservists.) In the general population suicide recently out-killed car accidents. The World Health Organization estimated that the global rate of suicide is up 60 percent since 1945. In 2010, in the developed world, suicide became the number-one killer of people ages 15 to 49. Except for the three worst years of the disease, it has killed more people annually than AIDS. Worldwide we are at a million suicides a year. 5) Suicide is often impulsive, such that if the impulse is thwarted, the person lives When people try to kill themselves and survive, they overwhelmingly report being glad they lived, according to studies and observations by suicidologists. A follow-up on 25 years of people who tried to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge showed 96 percent alive or having died of other causes. We often think of suicide as the unavoidable end point of a life-long battle with agonizing depression, but it often isn't that, or isn't only that. Recent humiliation or loss is very often a determinant. We think of military suicide as the result of PTSD and other direct results of the wars, but note that the study on military suicides in 2012 showed that a full third of the deceased had never been deployed, while more than half had recently suffered the loss of an important relationship, or a humiliation at work. A recent study of police suicides showed that 64 percent were described as "a surprise." There are news reports of popular and successful college students who gave little sign of depression suddenly ending their lives. If part of the problem is that in certain groups, at certain times, suicide seems like a popular option, it is useful to name that and to be ready to resist it. If you do not want to someday die of suicide, tell yourself now that you are on the lookout for such inclinations and that you are prepared to reject them. But I don't really feeling like dwelling on this, because I'll be repeating myself. So, I'll just again point out while keeping it purposely brief. If anyone wants to die so bad, they can wait to die like everyone else. Hell you even have the right, to drug and drink your way into an early grave. But suicide, is harming others. Society in general, ones close to you emotionally and the medical field limited resources. All my sources are already available. Look at the cost suicide burdens the medical field, when that is actively taking money away from other ventures of sick people who need care, because according to Penny. Religious sacrifice basically is just as substantiated as cancer, or not getting an Xbox for Christmas for getting the axe, when it comes to allowing and wishing people to die just to bring down society by having everyone witnessing raised fatality rates. And if you think suicide bombers are something that shouldn't be judged, because they have the right. You're just as abhorrently wrong (and just as morally repugnant) as Penny. Even pretending to think this is a sensible idea, shows complete utter lack of tact or secondhand knowledge of human relationships, society or the medical field. (also I know this isn't coming from the religious lense, but when I know atheists out there have minds like this...really hard to take the atheists have morals thing very seriously at times.)