dannyjones: is suicide and act of cowardice? gone through depression and thoughts of doing it. i think its more about despair or ridding of pain.
ColorStorm: No, it's not necessarily / not generally cowardice. Cowardice is the opposite of courage, courage is doing the right thing even in the face of fear. For suicide to be cowardice the person would have to perceive living as being the right thing. Maybe he just considers death to be better for him than having to continue to live. Also, it frankly takes bravery to kill oneself; that's a huge commitment, and death, or at least dying, is really scary, I mean on a primordial level that even applies to people who aren't happy with their lives, or at least it can be for some people.
That's a different matter from whether suicide is ever really the best thing to do, though. A friend of mine has studied the issue extensively, he is very spiritually open-minded like me, and from what he tells me, based on channellings from people who had committed suicide, they generally regret their decision and spend a relatively prolong time in some kind of personal hell, that they themselves create out of their guilt for having given up on life, and that suicide also costs them a lot of opportunity. Also, Neale Donald Walsch says that when the soul is done with the experiences made available to it by its current life, the person will inevitably die. So maybe just being alive implies that not living is not in the soul's best interest at the time being.
I suppose in some cases or some level suicide could an act of cowardice. I remember when I was a kid, living an absolutely horrible miserable life, I promised myself that I would never ever commit suicide no matter how bad it gets. I'm not sure if it was courage that impelled me to do that, but I'm pretty sure it was some kind of passion and strength.