No pain is always existentially better than eternal pain, or extreme pain. Only a thoroughly deluded fool would ever think otherwise, and they could only believe such a thing on the basis of assumptions and preferences since it is false by logical necessity. This still does not mean that suicide is a morally permissible escape from the potentially overwhelming, penetrating suffering of conscious existence. Oh yes, the dead, according to the Bible, really are dead and do not experience anything positive or negative whatsoever in Sheol (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Job 3:11-19, Daniel 12:2, Psalm 6:5, and so on). As Job longs for in Job 3, death Biblically brings relief from all agony; it is not anything awful compared to the dreadful pain of life. Self-murder is still murder, and murder is still a sin (Exodus 20:13, Deuteronomy 5:17), despite how it is obvious to any rational person that it is logically impossible for either biological death or soul annihilation to be the worst status. Suicide is not a permissible escape from life simply when life is difficult.
The Bible does not teach that killing alone, including murder, is the worst treatment of a person. By prohibiting certain actions directly or indirectly, it teaches that some things are intrinsically unjust and thus to mistreat someone in those ways, at least by going far enough past the moral boundary, is worse than outright murdering them.
Deuteronomy 25:1-3--"When people have a dispute, they are to take it to court and the judges will decide the case, acquitting the innocent and condemning the guilty. If the guilty person deserves to be beaten, the judge shall make them lie down and have them flogged in his presence with the number of lashes the crime deserves, but the judge must not impose more than 40 lashes. If the guilty party is flogged more than that, your fellow Israelite will be degraded in your eyes."
Killing people, however, is regularly prescribed by God in the Bible (Exodus 21:12-17, 22:18-20, Leviticus 20:9-16, Deuteronomy 20:16-18, 22:22-27, 1 Samuel 15:1-3, and more) as a crucial, inflexible part of justice when inflicted using the permitted methods of capital punishment and when meted out upon the right offenses. Obviously, Yahweh is not against merely killing people in itself. Still, according to Deuteronomy 25:1-3 alone, as well as the mildness and infrequency of the other prescriptions of physical punishments in Mosaic Law (Exodus 22:22-25 [1], Deuteronomy 25:11-12) and the command to not add or subtract from divine commands (Deuteronomy 4:2, 12:32), it is plain that the Bible teaches without saying it all at once that many tortures are unjust and thus universally evil, while killing is never disproportionate to any sin when deserved. More than this, the second death in hell really is the second death (Revelation 20:15, 2 Peter 2:6): death is what all sin ultimately deserves (Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 1:32, 6:23), just not always through the premature means of human infliction.
As for murder being the worst sin, it is already clear from the aforementioned passages that killing can be justice as opposed to many tortures, and murder on its own is merely killing, albeit unjust killing. However, aside from the logically necessary truth of prolonged or extreme tortures, and especially eternal torture, being worse than murder/death, the Bible gives an example of something that it teaches is at least equal to murder at a minimum. The Bible has to be consistent with the independent, self-necessary truths of logic in order to even be possibly true. It simply does not conflict with anything that has to be logically true about the very nature of death and suffering. The only way for murder to be worse than rape, among other things, is for a thing like the latter to be done prior to murdering someone, which means the illicit killing itself is still not the worst part. At the very least, the Bible does say that rape is never lesser than murder, and logic requires that it can be far more serious.
Deuteronomy 22:25-26--"But if out in the country a man happens to meet a young woman pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die. Do nothing to the woman; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor,"
Here, rape is said by direct comparison to be no less severe than murder, though it could be far worse because murder ends pain, while rape causes it and leaves a person to live with it for the rest of his or her hypothetically long life. Such things as this would be unjust to do to anyone for any reason, always deserving death as affirmed by Deuteronomy, yet the painful sensations of an eternal burning would be collectively worse than any singular rape because they would never end. Now, the human dead do not go to any immediate afterlife of torment according to the Bible, whoever they are, and there is no eternal torture in hell. It is a place of cosmic execution (Matthew 10:28, John 3:16, 2 Peter 2:6). Death is justice for sin, with some being so severe that they deserve premature killing by other people ahead of natural, biological death, but death is also not the worst fate possible. As I have said, this last idea is true and knowable due to reason separate from whatever the Bible teaches, but, alongside all of the direct and indirect doctrines I already drew attention to, Revelation 9 explicitly describes a setting where people wish to die because of their great suffering, but they cannot for a period of five months. Five months is like a moment compared to eternity, yet it is very plainly taught that the pain in this judgement on the world is worse than mere, quick death, though endless suffering is entirely unjust by logical necessity and according to the Bible's teachings, and this particular one-time judgment is not. Some things worse than death are utterly contrary to God's nature and are both universally condemned as human practices in Mosaic Law and never inflicted by God; this is an atypical exception to the latter.
Revelation 9:3-6--"And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were not allowed to kill them but only to torture them for five months. And the agony they suffered was like that of the sting of a scorpion when it strikes. During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them."
Ironically, some people would still think that murder or death is worse than any duration or category of torture. In fact, these idiots might actually say, as I have had someone tell me to my face, that murder and death are worse than any torture of a person, because those who die unsaved go to hell, where they are supposedly tortured forever. Now, the wicked, unrepentant dead are not tortured forever (Daniel 12:2, Matthew 10:28, Luke 13:1-3, John 3:16, Romans 6:23, 2 Peter 2:6, Revelation 20:11-15, and so on), but aside from this egregious misrepresentation of Christianity, the idea proposed here is that death is worse than torture because death leads to a torture worse than death. What incredible hypocrisy, for this idea contradicts itself by holding that torture is less severe than death because death will bring about torture [2]! This idea also falsely conflates the act of murder and the supposed eternal torture afterward, when murder itself can still be wholly minor compared to torture. Of course, it would not be relevant if the ancient Jews or modern Christians or anyone else subjectively feared the eternal loss of conscious existence as worse than torture, because torture is objectively worse in many cases. This is a matter of logical truth, not subjective preference.
Now, many people overlook how death is only positive or negative, whether morally or existentially or pragmatically, compared to some other contrasting or hypothetical fate. Death is objectively worse than just being lightly struck by a fist, though true metaphysical death would entail a state of no pain and even the slightest blow can involve genuine pain. Losing one's life is objectively less severe than being raped for three hours straight, or than being kept alive in torture forever, as evangelicals tend to asininely believe will happen to the wicked in Gehenna. Such a thing is both logically incorrect, in that eternal torture could never be just due to its inherent disproportionality, and rejected by what the Bible does teach. Again, never is more than 40 lashes or any sort of unprescribed torture just, no matter what someone has done, and for many people, God simply says to kill them. This does not mean death cannot be terrible. It is, again, positive or negative only by comparison to something else. Dying on Earth is worse in one sense than a thriving life with a subjective sense of fulfillment even if there are relatively minor emotional or physical pains; living on Earth to be physically abused every day across 50 years, or with such health problems that breathing is always excruciating, is far worse than dying.
Similarly, being burned to death in hell instead of entering New Jerusalem to live forever in bliss, free to partake in any nonsinful pleasure, is a horrible outcome. Being burned to death in hell even over 10,000 years is very minor compared to consciously existing forever in even slight annoyance, because the pain in the latter example is still infinite and thus greater by default. No matter what the Bible teaches, and it does teach that there are things worse than death and more unjust than murder, death is by logical necessity nowhere near as terrible a thing as many kinds of torture or as any kind of endless suffering would be, which could never be justice anyway because it is always disproportionate to any instance of wrongdoing. Some types of treatment are nonetheless inherently unjust by Biblical standards regardless of the recipient and their misdeeds (again, see Deuteronomy 25:1-3). Even if the Bible was demonstrably false in all of its religious doctrines of which their falsity is logically possible, it could still only be true that some acts like rape, however brief they are, and some things like eternal torture, no matter the method(s), are/would be worse than just dying or even being quickly killed illicitly by murder.
Logic, people. It is very fucking helpful.
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