Princeton Grad Student And 'Brilliant' Programmer, Dies In Apparent Suicide

I agree with cookiecaper. I've never seen mars. I believe (blindly) that the books, pictures and lectures I've seen are real, and that other people's pronouncements (from NASA, etc) are real too, so I believe (ie have blind faith) that mars is real. I _assume_ (ie have faith) that I could do some research and become a little more sure.

Heck, that goes for atoms, electricity, just about everything. All I KNOW (without getting existential, etc) are things I've personally experienced. Everything else is pure belief (and blindly at that) based on trusting the sources.

Faith consists of believing something without reference to reality, i.e., divorced of reason.

A scientist engaging in an experiment is attempting to gain knowledge, and he may expect the experiment to go a certain way, based on what he knows.

Someone engaging in faith says, "I believe this, just because I want to." There is no reference to knowledge, reason, or reality. It's putting an "I wish" over "It is."

To engage in faith is to surrender your mind. To surrender your mind is the most basic kind of evil there is; it's anti-human life.

If you are actually interested in thinking about this further, you'll probably find my cousin response (i.e. responding to another child of this comment's grandparent) highly relevant.

Probably some if them are, but I think most are reacting negatively to the suggestion that no one who kills themselves is smart. Note that this is different than saying that the suicide itself is a 'smart' decision. Perhaps they feel it is disrespectful to a former friend who's intelligence they respected?

The OP seems to equate 'smart' with evolutionarily successful. While there is no question that removing yourself from the gene pool before reproducing is lousy evolutionary fitness, I can certainly understand looking at the world and deciding that one just doesn't want to play that game.

For the most part I think the downvotes are because the post is offensive and lacks insight, not because people are applauding suicide.

Obviously, we disagree. Some may do that and call it faith, but people who are serious about faith do not believe without reference to reality or reason. Their faith is also predicated upon facts which they already know -- for instance, almost all people have an internal feeling that there is a God to be found out there. As such, based on their previous spiritual experiences, they will hear some information, believe that it is plausible and aligns with the things they already know, and act upon it, until their faith becomes knowledge on the topic, either affirming the original faith or negating it (learning something is true or learning something is not true).

In religious circles, one that believes things merely because they "want to" is not considered faithful, but ignorant at best. God has given reason to man and He expects man to use it. You may feel personally that a belief in any spiritual realm or being is unreasonable, but almost all people, historically, and to a somewhat lesser extent, contemporarily, disagree with you.

You're demonizing faith as an entire principle because some bad dudes have couched their badness in religion. It is common to attempt to shroud filthiness in virtue; most people find spiritual matters somewhat confusing but also consider spiritual teachers most noble, and that makes religion and false piety an excellent cover for corruption.

However, not every religious person is bad just because some "religious" teachers exploit and denigrate and abuse the trust of their perishoners ("false priests", as they are called).

Your attack on "faith" as a concept is silly; faith is often used in reference to religious circles because there seems to be some contention among modern persons whether it is worth having any faith in spiritual information at all, and they therefore assume their faith in scientists or physical teachers is not faith, but "reason", or something like that. Faith is a belief in a thing that has not been proven and a set of actions that seek to discover the reality of that belief one way or another. Anything that is eventually proven is proven because of the faith of its provers -- someone has to believe that an idea may have some merit in order to test it and discover if it is real or not.

Religious faith is necessary among all men because spiritual proofs are communicated "spirit to spirit", and as yet, man does not know how to transfer these or write a mathematical proof of spiritual truths learned personally. This, however, does not mean that faith is not necessary in non-religious fields. A small degree of faith is necessary to believe even things that have obvious and blatant proofs available.

The "anti-faith" thing is a silly and petty demonization and misappropriation, promoted by those that hate religion, and I don't really see the point in it, other than an attempt to make those that believe in religion and exercise faith in not just temporal, but also spiritual, matters appear "unreasonable" or stupid. And that's just not the case.

The opening of the note is my favorite part:

"I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I'll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it's true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning."

It occurs to me that suicide was widely accepted in many cultures, for a long time, certainly in pre-Christian Europe. Roman generals might kill themselves after their forces were routed, if they feared being captured. Japanese samurai might kill themselves after defeat, even if they evaded capture. Christianity brought in a belief that most of the time suicide was wrong, but many Christian writers allowed for some exceptions. In his book "The Education of a Christian Woman", published in 1547, Juan Luis Vives praises the mass suicide of women in a Greek city whose walls were about to fall to seige. He argued that it was better that they die with their honor intact. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=sy...

I say all this to suggest, the current trend in psychology, which views all suicide as irrational, is perhaps somewhat misguided. There are surely times when a person is in so much pain that, barring any hope of ending that pain, suicide becomes a rational option. We have, in recent years, begun to accept this line of reasoning as it applies to end-stage cancer patients, and others facing terminal diseases, but if you allow that this reasoning is valid anywhere, then you have to allow that it is valid everywhere that certain conditions are met, in particular, a great deal of pain, and no hope for ending that pain.