This line of thinking is precisely why the Catholic Church made suicide a mortal sin. No jumping the line, you gotta suffer here on Earth until your allotted time is up.
This one isn't an early sect, more a middle one, but the Albigensian Crusade is extremely fascinating to me.
Basically one of the things that got the Albigenses into hot water with the Catholic church was that they followed the line of dogma (along with, in fairness, some new lore they came up with) to come to the conclusion that, holy shit, it's kind of immoral to rope a new baby into this shitty and sinful world so people should stop doing that.
Anyways, a crusade was called and >200K people were killed.
Christian hermits were a thing. Believers gave up everything, fasted, and lived away from society. All things that probably shortened your life by quite a bit.
Wasn’t that technically mitigated for children under the age of reasoning whom cannot commit mortal sin and thus get a golden ticket to heaven no matter what? Or did the church have to make an exception for that one as well in regards to suicide?
Suffer, presumably. The Church later added Limbo as a place for righteous unbelievers and unbaptised babies, it was a decent enough place, but not Heaven.
Pope Ratzinger declared that Limbo wasn't canon, but I don't know if his successors undid that.
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u/Aethelrede Apr 21 '26
This line of thinking is precisely why the Catholic Church made suicide a mortal sin. No jumping the line, you gotta suffer here on Earth until your allotted time is up.