Eddie Evans on Hume's work about Suicide and the Soul -- It's all about working papers here.

Call me Eddie Evans. I want to write some thoughts on suicide, and after researching the Internet and many books, I cannot imagine a better source from modern philosophy for information on suicide and its metaphysical issues than David Hume. Assuming that I get this project out of the way, it’s one-hundred-and-one, I’ll look to other sources. It is my belief that we will see a significant increase in suicides because of alienation, economic stress, family failures, and other social problems.

I am thinking, off the thread here (a bit), that it is a great pity we will introduce future generations to bigotry in the form of racism and other evils that need not exist in an open society. How the world would improve overnight if we could end bigotry alone!

Back to Hume’s writing on suicide, Hume wrote five dissertations on suicide and the soul and completed them in 1755. Because of cultural and religious issues at the time, Hume withdrew the first book and replaced it with "Of the Standard of Taste."

Hume says that Philosophy exposes superstition and false religion, and that no other remedy against these two parasites exists. Even experience and good sense fail. Can you imagine that, experience and good sense fail against superstition and false religion?

By way of example, my experience tells me that it is wisest to avoid left turns, so I avoid left turns whenever possible. I will make four right turns to avoid one left turn. Is this superstition or good sense? Now, my honorable wife hangs left turns without the slightest hesitation. She refuses to mend her ways, and I cannot guarantee her well-being if she continues in this short-sighted madness. If I am superstitious because of my left-turn-phobia, is she less superstitious because of her willingness to flaunt disaster? I have the good sense, for sure.

Usually good sense and experience work great for just about everywhere else, but for superstition and false religion. Plan as we might, our history shows that among our greatest thinkers these two parasites manipulated the greatest thinkers' thoughts to the poorest ends. The satisfied, the “happy,” and the well-to-do find their greatest joys “blasted” by the shallow thoughts of superstition and false religion. Bring Philosophy to the helm as a cure to these parasites and a more just outcome is assured, unless the guiding Philosophy is itself so infected.

Methinks that if I could just explain the ways of God to man the parasites of superstition and false religions would collide with national and local cronyism, and thereby create a vortex like a black hole. These three enemies of an open society would exit our existence by their own foul essence.
Ed Evans
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