SUICIDE. The topic of religiously motivated suicide is a complex one. Several of the major religious traditions reject suicide as a religiously justifiable act but commend martyrdom; among them are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These religions distinguish between actively willing to end one's life in suicide and passively accepting one's death as the divine will by means of martyrdom at the hands of another. Nonetheless, the actions of some of the early Christian martyrs and the deaths of the Jews at Masada in 74 CE blur this distinction.

In contrast to religiously motivated suicide one may speak of heroic and altruistic suicide, the act of a person who decides that he or she has an ethical responsibility to die for the sake of community or honor. One must also differentiate between religiously motivated suicide and suicide that may be virtually forced upon an individual by the norms of society...