The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
Chuck PalahniukI have been astonished that men could die martyrs
for their religion--
I have shuddered at it,
I shudder no more.
I could be martyred for my religion.
Love is my religion
and I could die for that.
I could die for you.
My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet.
Tag: love self-sacrifice martyrdom
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Søren KierkegaardTag: truth martyr martyrdom tyrant
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They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience.
Mahatma GandhiTag: satyagraha martyrdom
There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.
Albert DietrichTag: war principles pacifism martyrdom misattributed-to-albert-camus
Be of good comfort, Mr. Ridley, and play the man: We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust never shall be put out.
Hugh LatimerTag: last-words persecution martyrdom john-foxe
Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.
The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?
Tag: friends fanaticism christianity patriotism war death religion childhood self-importance suicide sacrifice principles torture soldiers martyrdom theocracy orwell martyrs masochism ugliness november boyhood comrades self-abnegation causes christian-martyrs conscription kamikaze memorials poppies suicide-attack
In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part by far.) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least.
Christopher HitchensTag: war death martyrdom bullets near-death-experience 1992 churchill causes bosnia bosnian-war john-burns mortars sarajevo siege-of-sarajevo
One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.
I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.
Tag: children christianity war religion atheism jealousy suffering punishment self-respect bible jesus arrogance grandmothers holocaust wine rabbis martyrdom survivors secularism exile judaism theodicy 1967 false-modesty masochism jerusalem six-day-war passover-seder hellenism passover hiwi-al-balkhi biblical-covenant divine-retribution edith-stein gentiles rationalisation western-wall will-of-god
As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next.
Ibn WarraqTag: death sex language scholarship islam koran martyrdom martyrs raisins virgins suicide-attack christoph-luxenberg criticism-of-the-koran destructive-cult houris syro-aramaic-reading
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