"What goads one man to suicide goads another to renewed life"

After reading David Warren's latest column, I had to learn more about Tomas Masaryk the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, a statesman, philosopher and sociologist, who had a most remarkable and exemplary life.

Karl Popper, The Prague Lecture 1994

60 years ago, there lived in the Hradcany Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the great founder of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and its Liberator President. I deeply admire Masaryk. He was one of the most important pioneers of what I have called, one or two years after Masaryk's death, the Open Society. He was a pioneer of an open society, both in theory and in practice; indeed, the greatest of its pioneers between Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.
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Never was a new state – after all, the result of a revolution – so peaceful and so successful, and so much the creative achievement of one man. And all this was not due to the absence of great difficulties; it was the result of Masaryk, s philosophy, his wisdom and his personality in which personal courage, and truthfulness, and openness, played so conspicuous a role.

According to Wikipedia, his doctoral essay at the University of Vienna, was on the phenomenon of suicide which became a book, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization and that is what David Warren references in The killing fields.

That suicide is the ultimate subjective act, and thus, in effect, the final act of narcissism, was among the striking observations of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.
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It was Masaryk's thesis that suicide rates, already at historical highs, and climbing, in the more industrially advanced parts of Europe by the 1880s, would continue to rise through the decades ahead, with decreasing religiosity and increasing modernization.
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This was not so much a question of religious denomination, as of religious practice. There would be a rough, inverse correlation between church attendance and the suicide rate. Later statistical studies have borne this out, and Masaryk thus stands among the few sociologists whose work retains any empirical value.

Masaryk grasped the difference between depression and hopelessness, which we like to slur over today. Depression only makes one accident-prone; the real self-killer is the absence of hope for the future. This is a distinction that has been vindicated in psychiatric studies of the dying; it points directly to a dimension of human life that is irreducibly moral and religious.
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People kill themselves for all sorts of stated reasons, but what goads one man to suicide goads another to renewed life, and the only sound predictor is religious formation.

That's an astounding conclusion, "what goads one man to suicide goads another to renewed life"  and the only sound predictor is religious formation.  Without formation in and practice of  a religion, one has no tools to battle despair, meaninglessness and hopelessness. 

Warren himself concludes in a column whose main focus is euthanasia, the euphemism for murder.

The many symptoms of civilizational decay that lay partly concealed beneath the surface of society only recently came into full view, in the open pornography, the open nihilism, the despairing flippancy, visible throughout our contemporary public life. But the pond was long draining, and it is only now we see fish flopping in the mud.

Euthanasia is the final "life issue," the clincher for what the last pope called "the culture of death." Even when legalizing abortion, we agreed only to the slaughter of human beings we could not see. It was still possible to look away, to pretend we were not killing "real people," only "potential people." But when we embrace so-called "mercy killing," we embrace slaughter not only for the sick and old, but ultimately, the "option" of easy suicide for ourselves. It will be hard to go lower.