RELIGIONS :
Buddhism
Accepts suicide and euthanasia in cases of incurable illness.
Christianity
In the early Christian era suicide was not only tolerated, but condoned by the church, as a result certain sects such as the Donatists and the Circumcellions jumped off cliffs in great numbers to hasten an afterlife that promised greater rewards than those found on jolly old earth.
Faced with the loss of so many of its members, and rapidly shrinking collection plates, in (about) the sixth century the church decided that anyone else who committed suicide was going to hell.
The Donatists, of whom St Augustine said, "...to kill themselves out of respect for martyrdom is their daily sport." They were noted for jumping from cliffs, and also burned themselves to death in large numbers.
They are probably best known for their practice of stopping travelers and either paying them or threatening them with death to encourage them to kill the, presumably, heaven-bound martyr. The Donatists were eventually declared heretics and suppressed with a notable lack of Christian charity.
Confucianism
Accepts suicide and euthanasia in cases of incurable illness.
Hinduism
Hinduism allows suicide in a few rare cases.
Islam
Islam condemns suicide severely.
Shintoism
Accepts suicide and euthanasia in cases of incurable illness.
SOCIETIES :
Ancient Egypt
Suicide in ancient Egypt was viewed as a neutral event, because death was merely a passage from one form of existence to another. It was simply a means of avoiding, disgrace, abandonment, guilt, cowardice, or loss of a loved one. Or an expression of general mistrust of the world.
Epicureans and Stoics
The Epicureans and Stoics considered suicide an appropriate escape from the sufferings of this world, especially physical illness and emotional frustration.
Ancient Greeks
Various Greek philosophical schools of thought rejected (Pythagoreans, Aristotle), conditionally accepted (Plato, Epicureans) or approved of (Stoics, Zeno) suicide.
Isolated Tribes
In a few isolated parts of the world. Certain tribes have never had an incidence of suicide. The Yahgans, of Tierra del Fuego, the Andaman Islanders, and some Aborigine tribes are examples.
Israel
In ancient Israel suicide was taboo. Because god had made the world, it was supposed to be good {the world} however there were exceptions such as aposty, to avoid capture, expiation of serious sin.
Japan, Hara Kiri
In Japan, ritual suicide became known as hara kiri. It was accepted and respected. Not only that, it was expected in some cases, such as, dishonor, and to avoid being taken prisoner.
Nineteenth-Century Europe
Among military officers in nineteenth-century Europe, suicide-by-pistol was the expected response to inability to pay gambling debts.
Ancient Romans
The Romans followed the Greek lead in these matters, particularly that of the Stoics. "To the Romans of every class, death itself was unimportant. But the way of dying, decently, rationally, with dignity and at the right time, mattered intensely."
Scythians
Scythians considered it an honor to commit suicide when they could no longer keep up on their nomadic travels, while "death, passively awaited, is a dishonor to life".
Vikings
Vikings felt that Valhalla, with its perpetual Feast of Heroes and Gods, was reserved for warriors who died in battle. Suicides were second-best and might get to sit below the salt; people who died in bed could eat with the kitchen help and sleep in the barn.
Death is before me today, Like the recovery of a sick man... Like the longing of a man to see his home again, After many years of captivity...
--Man Disputing over Suicide with his Soul (Egypt, ca. 2100 bc)
The oldest known reference to suicide is Egyptian; a fragment is quoted above. There are seven suicides in the Old Testament; none of them are criticized in that document.
In the New Testament, the suicide of Judas seems to be implicitly condoned, it's mentioned without comment in Matthew 27:3, as a sign of his repentance; not until much later did the church claim that Judas' suicide was a greater sin than was his betrayal of Christ.
Early Christianity was strongly attracted towards suicide, perhaps because the act was often indistinguishable from martyrdom, and, "...even the death of Jesus was regarded by Tertullian, one of the most fiery of the early Fathers, as a kind of suicide.
He pointed out, and Origen (another major early Christian theologian) agreed, that He voluntarily gave up the ghost, since it was unthinkable that the Godhead should be at the mercy of the flesh."
While early Christianity accepted suicide, it condemned killing of others, including warfare, self-defense, and capital punishment. After all, Jesus had taught non-violence: "Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also....I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."
This was taken seriously by the early Church Fathers, for example, Tertullian, who asked, "Can it be lawful to handle the sword, when the Lord himself has declared that he who uses the sword shall perish by it?"
However, as Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman empire, its views on suicide gradually changed, until suicide became a religious sin and a secular crime in the sixth century. In 533, Christian burial (a requirement for getting into heaven) was forbidden to suicides who killed themselves while accused of a crime.
In 562 this was extended to all suicides, regardless of the reason or circumstances. In 693 even attempting suicide became an ecclesiastical crime punishable by excommunication, with civil consequences to follow.
St. Augustine, in the fifth-century book The City of God, was the first Christian to make a blanket condemnation of suicide. His only biblical justification for the change was a novel interpretation of the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill"; his other reasons were, as Rousseau noted, taken from Plato's Phaedra.
Ironically, this well-intentioned and humanitarian opposition to suicide eventually degenerated into "...legalized and sanctified atrocities, by which the body of the suicide was degraded, his memory defamed, his family persecuted."
Suicides were buried at crossroads with a stake through their bodies, and their property confiscated by the State. Perhaps the ultimate irony was the execution of people for the crime of attempting to commit suicide.
A Russian exile in England, Nicholas Ogarev, wrote, "A man was hanged who had cut his throat, but who had been brought back to life. They hanged him for suicide. The doctor had warned them that it was impossible to hang him as the throat would burst open and he would breathe through the aperture. They did not listen to his advice and hanged their man.
The wound in the neck immediately opened and the man came back to life again although he was hanged. It took time to convoke the aldermen to decide the question of what was to be done. At length the aldermen assembled and bound up the neck below the wound until he died. Oh my Mary, what a crazy society and what a stupid civilization."
We have progressed far beyond such barbarism, and no longer condemn failed suicides. Now, for example, if a death-row criminal attempts suicide, every effort is made to save him (or, rarely, her), so that a civilized, state-approved execution can be carried out.
The early Christians agreed that death was unimportant, but for entirely different reasons: they wanted to go to the glory of heaven and saw no good reason on earth to wait. Life was a gateway, filled with sins, snares, and temptations, all leading to eternal damnation.
Thus they often invited persecution as a path to martyrdom, which automatically wiped the slate of any old sins, prevented new ones, and guaranteed a seat in paradise.
This was carried to its logical conclusion by a sect known as the Donatists, of whom St Augustine said, "...to kill themselves out of respect for martyrdom is their daily sport." They were noted for jumping from cliffs, and also burned themselves to death in large numbers.
They are probably best known for their practice of stopping travelers and either paying them or threatening them with death to encourage them to kill the, presumably, heaven-bound martyr. The Donatists were eventually declared heretics and suppressed with a notable lack of Christian charity.
Much later, the thirteenth-century Albigensian (aka Catharist) heretics in southern France were slaughtered with incredible savagery, also, in part, because they sought martyrdom.
This sin compounded their damnation for other theological errors, for example, they had the temerity to believe that religious orders should actually practice their vows of poverty. Not until the late renaissance, a thousand years after Augustine, did people again dare, very cautiously, to argue the case for suicide in Christian Europe.
By the sixteenth century Roman and Greek philosophy had been rediscovered and the unconditional condemnation of suicide was being questioned. In Holland, Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly (1509), in which he defended suicide which was committed to escape an unendurable life. Soon afterwards Sir Thomas More, in his fictional Utopia (1516), proposed suicide for the purpose of euthanasia:
"They console the incurably ill by sitting and talking with them and by alleviating whatever pain they can. Should life become unbearable for these incurables the magistrates and priests do not hesitate to prescribe euthanasia....When the sick have been persuaded of this, they end their lives willingly either by starvation or drugs, that dissolve their lives without any sensation of death. Still the Utopians do not do away with anyone without his permission, nor lessen any of their duties to him."
Shakespeare (1564-1616), always theatrically pragmatic, portrayed fourteen suicides in his eight tragedies without condemning them, asking instead, "Then is it sin / To rush into the secret house of death / Ere death dare come to us?"
John Donne wrote the first English defense of suicide, Biathanatos, in 1608, but had second thoughts (as well as a job, Dean of St. Paul's, that required staying on good terms with the Church) and found it expedient to wait until after his death to have it published, in 1644. Other justifications of suicide followed.
In the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", traditional beliefs were re-examined from a rational, empirical, and skeptical perspective. Theological arguments against suicide were challenged, suicide was claimed to be a human right, and the subject became a secular matter as much as a religious one.
Of course, the traditional views had many defenders. For example, the renowned religious leader John Wesley (1703-1791) said, with dubious logic, that failed suicide attempters should be hanged. Similarly, the eminent legal authority William Blackstone (1723-1780) asserted that suicide was a crime against both God and King.
And the illustrious philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose writings remain unsurpassed in incomprehensibility, used suicide as an example of moral error that could be demonstrated with his logical rapier, the categorical imperative.
During this time, the brutal treatment of suicidal people eased in some parts of Europe. For example, the laws against suicide were relaxed in France at the time of the French Revolution; and the Prussian penal code of 1794 (influenced earlier by the "liberal" monarch, Frederick the Great, and then by the French Revolution) did not punish attempted suicide.
In England, however, trying to kill oneself remained a felony until 1961 (and was only de-criminalized to encourage people to seek treatment), and anyone aiding, abetting, or counseling a suicide or attempted suicide is still subject to 14 years imprisonment.
The Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Byron, Keats, and Shelley in England, Lermontov in Russia, Chateaubriand and Lamartine in France, Novalis and Goethe in Germany) went further, and glorified suicide as the heroic last act of a free man.
Thus, from antiquity into the 19th century, suicide was mostly a philosophical, ethical, religious, and legal issue; the concern was: under what circumstances might it be forbidden, acceptable, or even desirable?
Starting in the early 1800s, it gradually became a sociological/statistical inquiry and a psychological one: who killed themselves and why they did so. The focus changed from philosophy and theology to the social conditions and personality traits associated with suicide.
More recently, with the advent of "anti-psychosis" drugs, such as Thorazine, in the 1950s, the concept of a biochemical basis for behavior has become increasingly persuasive.
One of the effects of these changes has been to largely remove suicide from the category of "moral crime." Instead, the fault has been shifted onto society, mental illness, or biochemical imbalance, things for which an individual can hardly be blamed.
Thus, if suicide is involuntary and beyond an individual's control, rational or moral arguments against it will be useless. The only moral question, then, will be that of intervention, abstention, or assistance by individuals or society-at-large.
While today most people still consider suicide an abnormal, destructive behavior that should be prevented (except, perhaps, with the terminally ill), its failure is no longer punished, or is it rewarded?, by death. And so we progress.
some info on this page is from encyclopedia of death
by robert kastenbaum & bernice kastenbaum
some info on this page is from suicide and attempted suicide
by geo stone.