I don’t know who this person is nor do I intend to be seduced into signing up for the Times. So I will comment on the words available on this site.
  Most of the reasons giving here for promoting suicide for the elderly are a damning indictment of our society’s care of sick elderly.
And now we will solve that problem—and save oodles of tax money—and get our hands on granny’s bank accounts and home quicker—by pressuring the elderly to hurry up and get out of this life. Granny you’re a bother!  You’re a responsibility we want to be liberated from. You’re keeping us from enjoying the good life with the good health we have been blessed with. You’ve reached the level of road kill so kindly drag yourself off the road and stop being a roadblock that interferes with our fun and games.
  And there is a reason why it is truly religious people who are against policies that promote death and for policies that protect life
Love of life is a continuum—from this life to the next. It is not surprising that most promoters of various forms of suicide (and abortion) are usually, at heart, atheist.
  They won’t admit it but they do not hope for a life after death because they hate this life and want other people to join them in
hating life.
  Hating life to the point of loving death as the solution to all difficult issues such as unwanted pregnancies or full beadpans.
That so many in our post-Christian age do not see this is merely an indictment of the coming age where human beings will considered as just so much materialist garbage fit only for the garbage removers as soon as possible..

Ridiculous, thoughtless, ignorant, imaginatively impoverished…but apart from that it was all good stuff.

But, believers apart, for everyone else there is no philosophical reason against suicide that I can see.

The sound you are hearing is Cicero’s facepalm.

“Religious people may think it wrong, although I have never quite understood why.”

Perhaps it shouldn’t surpise me, but it always does that commentators are happy to weigh in on things they are too lazy to study to find out why the position they oppose is supported by others.

And that goes for lazy editors, too.  Why publish something that proclaims its ignorance?  Of course, in our society, there is no stigma attached to being ignorantly critical of Christianity.

pilgrim kate

Who will need suicide when we finally have Death Panels?  Soylent Green, anyone?

Anyone with a soupcon of knowledge is aware that suicide was often a duty in pagan Rome. The wheel turns.

As it used to be for the Innuit and sometimes was in Japan.
When youj became a burden to the community, you simply walked off into the cold. Question: For a christian, is there a difference between commiting suicide for your own relief and committing suicide to benefit others?  Larry

Is not the obvious point that our lives nor the life of anyone else is ours to take - they all belong to the one who gave it to us - God.  So, if one doesn’t believe in God, then why not urging suicide for those with large medical costs for the overall economic good of society and to relieve their own suffering?  Without God, we have those who can’t keep up being left behind to die for the overall good of the community.

The great tragedy and danger is the very concept that suicide can somehow produce an overall good for the community instead of leading us into a house of horrors that only a Freddy Krueger could love.

But that’s not true Deaconjohn. For those with incurable diseases who do not have the money to pay for their constant care, and who cannot bear to have a wife who has no life of her own because she is a 24 hour caregiver, suicide makes perfect sense. Why leave one’s wife bankrupt when it is not necessary?For the Inuit, to walk into the cold is to remove a mouth that must be fed but which cannot contribute to the community good. Here suicide makes perfect sense - even an absolute responsibility. For a Christian, this avenue is closed. For others, it is sometimes logical, sometimes imperative.
Larry

You can put all the frosting on the cake you want, but promoting death or encouraging death, or rationalizing death as a solution to problems is fetid evil. And when it becomes the answer to ANY social problem it spreads, it pollutes, it degrades, it corrupts society and culture.
  The Nazis had a phrase they used to salve their butcheries: “Life unworthy of life.” I know looking at what happened in Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s has become almost a joke to the death merchants of abortion and suicide if you make any comparisons with today. However, it is true—-Those who refuse to learn from history will repeat it.