Martyrdom: Does Suicide Validate Christianity?

"Would pious Christians go to their death for a story they made up, just a nice story? Because lets face it, most early Christians went to their death defending this claim. I mean, would someone do that for a pious legend that they made up?"

In a YouTube video, the Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron argued that his “beliefs” were true because it was impossible to believe that Christians would be willing to die for a "pious legend that they made up.” In truth, however, people die for pious legends all the time. And Christians just as much, if not at times even more so, than others.

The first problem we need to address with Barron’s statement, however, is who is the "someone" he is referring to here? 

On the one hand, there are two different kinds of "someone," but you wouldn’t know it from the way Barron appears to treat them as one and the same. Those two groups are comprised of those who make up the “pious legend” and those who then die trying to prove (and mostly to themselves) the legend is as true as it is sacred. The two are rarely ever the same, and to build an empire requires both.

Christianity, after all, is simply a world building religion, one that seeks to induce the return of a "king of kings" to rule over the globe for a thousand years, as their Bible proclaims he will, but only after the world has been sufficiently Christianized to ensure he won’t be crucified all over again upon his return. And to “make straight the crooked path” for the return of their King (an idea lifted right out of “The Iliad”), Christianity has been crucifying anyone who refuses to bow down to their “king of kings” – witches and heretics, homosexuals and atheists, in other words - for centuries.  

On the other hand, if the "someone" is a lunatic, they might do just that, much like terrorists of every sort do, and in the same way thousands of women were executed as witches, either because they were crazy or because finally confessing to being a witch was the only way to put an end to the suffering they were being subjected to at the hands of the Christians who were accusing them of being "witches" or heretics. In fact, the "someone" might simply be the victim of the people who were as afraid of Christians as Christians are afraid of witches, heretics, atheists and homosexuals. Indeed, that was exactly what happened to Jesus himself, who was also called a madman, at the hands of a mob of "true believers" who feared his message.

Those confessing to being witches under torture illustrates yet another problem Barron fails to address with his claims: false confessions. This happens when people claim something they either know, or certainly should know, is simply untrue.  While the notion that someone would confess to a crime they did not commit may seem counterintuitive to casual observers, the reality is that false confessions occur regularly. According to the Innocence Project, of the 258 DNA exonerations they have handled to date, 25% have involved a false confession. At a significantly higher risk of falsely confessing than average are the mentally ill, intellectually disabled, and juveniles. Over 60% of the first 66 confessions proven false by post-conviction DNA testing, for example, were given by juveniles or the mentally disabled.

 All of this means that, while Barron wants his audience to “believe” that people (i.e., “someone”) wouldn’t die for a pious legend they (a different “someone”) simply made up, the undeniable truth is actually, "Yes! Yes, they would!" In fact, these two different groups of “someones” have been doing both throughout history the world over.

In addition to virtually all of human history illustrating the willingness of people to die for pious legends that were simply "made up," which every Christian admits is true by denying that any of the other gods throughout history were as real as their own, Barron also never addresses the double standard his claim depends on. If we should accept Christianity is true simply because of people’s willingness to die to prove it’s true (at least to them anyway), then why should such acts of suicide not be seen as equal evidence for the truth of other claims?

 Do the 918 people who drank poisoned flavor-aid in 1978 validate the claims of Jim Jones?  Did the series of mass suicides from 1994 to 1997 validate the Order of the Solar Temple? Were the claims of Heaven's Gate’s followers, that they were "exiting their human vessels" so that their souls could go on a journey aboard a spaceship they believed to be following the comet Hale–Bopp, validated after 39 of their followers committed suicide? In fact, like Origen and other Catholic saints, some of the male members of the group even underwent voluntary castration in preparation for their new life. 

If anything, all acts of martyrdom serve only as evidence of the authenticity of Ix Tab: the Mayan goddess of suicide. What such acts prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, is how the need to believe something can be so strong in some people that they are willing to overlook any double standard operating in their reasoning  to embrace death for their beliefs rather than admit they, like everyone else on the planet, are merely human. Ironically, Christians define such thinking, which they insist is an extreme act of arrogance against their God whenever it is practiced by anyone else, as an act of humility. Talk about a miracle of double standards!

In truth, intellectual humility can best be summed up by Bertrand Russell. "I would never die for a belief," said Russell, "because I might be wrong." Practicing that kind of humility is why Russell never considered flying a plane into a building to prove the "truth" of his beliefs, if only to himself.