I wouldn’t willingly die for any of my beliefs. I have some strong opinions. I have values and principles that I uphold. But martyrdom seems like a wasteful thing. A martyr’s death is always at the hands of a human, even if it’s at their own hand. In a sense, every martyr could have been spared.
The victims of an earthquake are not martyrs. An earthquake is impersonal, impartial, hard to predict, and difficult to avoid. It has no cause, and opposes no one deliberately. Those who die by nature’s whim’s were simply presented with an environment they could not overcome. It is hardly their fault, and there is no one behind nature that we can blame.
But humans dream up all sorts of causes, and rules, and policies, and institutions. And it’s those fickle things that make martyrdom possible. It is when one man imposes his ideas upon another with force and impunity that another must die to oppose it.
I suppose the one thing I would be most willing to die for is freedom. But I struggle to see that as martyrdom, or bravery, or necessary. If someone has taken my freedom, then my life is at their disposal. It would not be my choice and I would not go willingly. To fight them at least gives me a chance to remain or become free. The risk of death is not worse than what a cruel captor could inflict.
There are many subdivisions of freedom though, and not all are equal. Physical autonomy is probably the highest, and then comes freedom of thought and speech. Thereafter becomes matters of policy and regulation, which are too circumstantial for me to be principled on, or die for.
We are all born helpless and screaming. Our beliefs, our culture, and the majority of our values and principles are learned. Most of our knowledge is transitional, passed from our parents to us. We stack it in books and index it on the internet. But we made all that. We invented it. We discovered it. Much of it isn’t needed for survival (but it sure helps). We need much less than what we have, and what we’re used to.
This too can be said for our beliefs. We have lots of them, and we hold to them strongly. Some of them are so banal, so irrelevant, so disconnected from every day life. Humans have paid such a dear cost, and still do, for holding so strongly to these beliefs. The root problem is thinking that beliefs are worth that much: Worth the disruption, worth the destroyed relationships, worth the loss of life.
You see, there are people who have bought into such beliefs. Furthermore, they believe that these beliefs are more valuable than their loved ones. Some human or committee has convinced them of some belief, and has convinced them that this particular belief is of such great value. For some reason, us Homo Sapiens are easily tempted into holding strong, arbitrary beliefs.
Imagine having a child that you raise with your beliefs. They grow up and come to disagree. And on those grounds alone you decide: this person, whom I cherish, that I’ve invested time in, that I’ve devoted my attention to, they are no longer worthy and must be shunned. I’ll cut them off till they change their mind. Would you do it? Would you shun them? There are certainly good grounds for distancing yourself from someone. But on belief alone? I think these are not good grounds.
Now imagine that decades after disowning your child on the grounds of belief you learn something. You slowly realize that your cherished, priceless beliefs might not be so certain. And now, you’ve given up precious years of your life for naught. Imagine the Jehovah’s witness who has shunned their unbelieving daughter, realizing that the organization is just a man-made thing, and they’ve rejected their child for years based on the whims of another human being. Imagine being an evangelical Christian, and rejecting your homosexual son, because it’s at odds with what your church teaches (or the bible, for that matter). And imagine concluding that Christianity is just a man-made thing, and you’ve given up years because someone else convinced you it was the right thing to do. And imagine being the parent of an apostate Muslim child, and giving them up to the state, or chasing them out of your home and country and then years later, realizing that Islam and its teachings and traditions are a man-made culture, and you’ve inflicted such pain on someone else’s whim.
For some reason, humans are capable of ingesting beliefs, and then holding to them against their better judgment. For some, no price is too high. Not their friends, or family, their own happiness, or their own life. And they do not see this as a problem, but rather take pride in it. It’s an honor. A virtue. What makes it so?
I think that our current selection of high demand religions have a few winning ingredients in their formulas. The first ingredient is creating a narrative about unbelievers. It makes it easy to label and dismiss them, and it discourages believers from investigating further. The narrative could be something like this: Unbelievers are evil, wicked, untrustworthy. Don’t do business with them! Don’t eat with them! Remind them that they are going to hell, and are in service of the devil. Tell them that they are arrogant, and deceived. The one thing it cannot be is that someone stopped believing for good reasons.
Another ingredient is to completely undermine this one life that we have, usually in promise of an afterlife. One can hope for an afterlife, but any certainty is artificial. We know that we have this one life. How much of it we have left is uncertain. To take the little life we have now in exchange for the mere promise of eternal life is the tactic of scammers. They prey on the helpless and the desperate. Religion’s great trick is to convince you that their promises are guaranteed. And to the Christians who kick back and say that it is, I say this: the suicide bombers, Kool-Aid drinkers, witch hunters, crusaders, apostate disclosers, and Westboro Baptists are all convinced that their particular flavor of belief is guaranteed to be true, and are thus justified in ruining this life for themselves and others. If countless other humans are so certain in their beliefs, and you consider their beliefs false, why not yours or mine? What makes us infallible? What makes us immune to this common weakness of human bias?
A third ingredient is fear. Some implore fear blatantly while others attempt to disguise it. Or it may not be obvious at all until you try to leave. Then fear is used as a catch-all net, a last resort, a final barrier to exit. Christianity teaches you to fear God. It constantly describes the fate of unbelievers to the believers. This makes them feel good, special, loved, saved. It’s love and grace for believers, and even for prospective unbelievers. But for apostates it be hellfire. The unbeliever will have wrath and damnation. It might not be said in this many words, but take heed, lest you become an unbeliever.
A fourth ingredient is authority. From Mohammed, to the apostles, to your local church pastor, all are granted a level of authority that may very well be undeserved. They are revered and trusted, often totally. And people use those positions as a proxy for doing their own thinking and making their own choices. Authority is, once again, granting the whims of a fickle human power over your life. It’s not always bad. And some humans are great. But realize this: you’re allowing someone who has only ever lived their own life, in their own particular context, to tell you what to do, and they might be wrong.
We all believe things, so this is not a treatise against belief. The problem is unwavering, dogmatic belief, that so many think is a virtue. I think it’s a weakness of character.
