Suicide is mad logic.
Suicide is demon possession. Or it is madness. It is one, or the other, or both. For how could reason, divine in nature, contemplate its own destruction?
Thus, if one suicides with a “sound mind” he is denied funeral rites as an act of free will as pure evil.
The defense for suicide is then madness. To protect a suicide from punishment and to lay claim to an estate, the family must prove that the suicide was clearly mad even if he was sane and rational.
Medieval legal doctrine established a distinction between felo de se and non compos mentis. If one suicides felo de se, he is a felon against himself and must be tortured and hanged with all property forfeited. If one was determined to have been non compos mentis the treatment of the corpse and the estate was more generous.
In a landmark case, Mary Terry sued the Mutual Life Insurance Company after failing to receive a settlement following her husband’s suicide. The policy contained a provision that “If the said person, whose life is hereby insured … shall die by his own hand … this policy shall be null and void.’”‘ In reviewing the case, the U. S. Supreme Court permitted the life insurance payment if insanity contributed to the suicide.
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Droge and Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity.
Life Insurance Company v. Terry, 82 U.S. 580 (1872)
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Each absolutely outrageous strength is the not without which of its particular story meaning the sensical and satisfying unfolding of words requires at the heart of the story an absolutely outrageous strength properly to harness human hunger to rectify and reshape the human condition. Imagine a story on rectifying the human condition with literally nothing powerful enough to set to right the human condition. That would make for a disappointing story, would it not? And so each story’s storywriter needs an author within the story, the absolutely outrageous strength, to properly rewrite the story of human life by erasing, editing, and overwriting those elements of the story that needs to be rewritten.
In storywriting and in the reading of the story by a reader rooting for the story to end happily the more or less easy task is for everyone to endow with their imaginations whatever is needed on the page and between the lines and at the margins and secret wellsprings in the little holes in each and every letter to find enough purity and powers of just the right kind to be more than adequate to rectifying the human condition.
This is the easy part. The insurmountable challenge is to manifest an actual absolutely outrageous strength that exists, actually, with enough purity and power to act upon the world beyond the page to reshape individual and society, society and species according to the story’s designs on the human condition. For instance, an all-powerful all-knowing all-loving god does not exist, but is wishing or believing it is so and acting accordingly adequate as an equal enough substitute in rectifying the human condition? No, it is not. Pick out your favorite absolutely outrageous strength from the dustbin of absolutely outrageous strengths to put it to a similar test.