If your house catches on fire, but you decide to stay in it and let the flames consume you, is that not suicide?
So you would say those who were fired upon and did not get out of the Waco (Mt. Carmel) Building complex were suicides, not murdered by an overzealous government?
If your plane is going down, but you decide not to use your parachute, is that not suicide?
70% of the planet is covered by water. In much of the rest of it, for most people, only a miserable death remains from the arctic cold, jungle critters, dehydration in the desert, or an alpine death. Some of us would fight to stay alive and quite probably die a miserable death. Others might accept the more rapid outcome.
If you're about to be struck down with an axe, but you don't turn aside from the blow, have you not committed suicide?
None of those involves compulsion, only acts of misfortune or violence.
This is one reason committing suicide was so popular for early Christians...they recognized Jesus has done so. Remember, it wasn't until centuries after Jesus was gone that the Church politics got involved and reversed things at the First Council of Braga, with the first anti-suicide statement.*
Actually, the church condemned suicide at the Council of Arles in 452, well before the First Council of Braga in 561. Suicide involves committing an act which leads to one's death.
Even the modern iteration of having to push a button or flip a switch requires an act on the part of the person who kills themself.
Being killed by someone else may on occasion be considered self-sacrifice, but suicide? If a soldier is killed trying to retrieve a wounded comrade under fire, is that suicide? How about being killed in action in a volunteer army? How about a First Responder who is crushed by debris? Would you say the firemen on 9/11 were suicides? The priest who gave last rites to the dead and dying who had jumped? Those in the Pentagon who could not run from the office to safety and maybe looked at the oncoming plane? Your examples are flawed.
We don't even have to go to Jesus for that, though. Even Augustine admitted that the coerced suicides were...suicides. For example, the virgins who killed themselves to avoid defilement by Roman soldiers or to avoid being forced to offer pagan sacrifice (e.g., Saint Pelagia of Antioch) were suicides, albeit to avoid compulsions.
Now you are getting closer, because these involve refusal to be compelled to do something.
The bottom line is that we should get angry at those who would try to compel us to action that is repulsive to us.*this was along with things like excommunicating priests who didn't eat meat broth with their vegetables, so it was more politics than Biblically based.
Oh, I'm plenty angry. I never hired anyone who supported Obama, and now the pool of prospects has thinned considerably. That is just one thing going forward.
But I will not be compelled. You can't make me. You can kill me, but you can't make me. There are limits to the power of any tyrant wannabe if people only refuse to comply.
If I am killed for not complying, that is a definitive act by someone else who would perform an act leading to my death because I refused to be compelled to violate my principles, abandon my God, to sin. Had they not performed that act, I would live. My death is the direct result of their willingness to murder me or get me to submit. Failure to submit is not suicide, my death would be murder. Matt 16:25
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
