On November 25 2012 18:10 Protoss-Bah wrote:
If you take a gun and shoot yourself to the head - just so that you know - you will not die immediately. It might not take long for you to die, but it will take a few minutes of complete pain.

If you use an acid which you think is a "fast death", believe me, you will suffer extreme pain for long parts. Eventually you might die, but in a painful manner.

If you jump off a building --> same thing.

Apparently people here are considering suicide, otherwise this kind of nonsense topic wouldn't even exist. Looking at these kinds of topics just shows me how damn faithless this God-less generation has become but it's all your own fault. A happy person will not even think the thought of suicide - ever. Just know that it's not going to be painless even with the methods you think are "quick".

And you're not going to go down like a "martyr", you're going down like an egoist who hurt his mother, his father, his friends and his surrounding, plus you hurt those people who had to watch you jump in front of the train (again, not an immediate death). And you hurt those social workers who have to clean up the mess you left. A martyr is like von Stauffenberg who sacrificed his life just to try help other people. You could sort of say that J.F. Kennedy died as a martyr. A suicider - dies in disgrace and as an egoist.

The OP highlights some inconsistencies with in modern and historical culture, we glorify the actions of certain castes or members of society when they commit actions of self sacrifice to the benefit of some arbitrary class of people (usually the ruling class), and we demonize others similarly also arbitrarily to our own individual preferences and moral standards. Even if you use the most unambiguous examples of self sacrifice committed by the greatest and most moral examples of human beings, we all have to realize that the motivating forces behind these individuals draw from the same pool of factors (superstition, belief in nationalistic or collective values, self glorification, social pressure and depression, existential value, inflicting terror on others, etc).

Whether or not the logics or assumptions are misconstrued, whether or not their efforts actually make a difference, whether or not the difference even positively affects the future is completely unknown to the individual. It becomes alot more ambiguous the more you consider the actions of individuals who dedicate themselves to a specific cause for their entire life, may it be the most lofty or pathetic of human drives (which is why I intend this to be a series of articles if people are willing to participate in the discussion, to compare and contrast examples). We define a person's achievement in life very much by how he/she died, or how he/she died trying, since death is the logical cut off point of the summation of what a person can amount to be. We plan life around factual inevitabilities and we prioritize factors of our own lives around the inevitability of death.

An individual doesn't need to be personally committed or persuaded to suicide to find this issue important and its implications profound, everyone is reminded in their life of their own morality, often by the death (some times suicide) of those who they are closest to and emotionally invested in. The prospect that others have laid down their lives so that you can have a prosperous future, the prospects that you yourself may be called upon by any number of forces in ambiguous situations to make decisions of self sacrifice with out the ability to determine future events and consequences, these are all aspects deeply woven into every part of human society regardless of cultural or ethical background.

So no I don't think that "people here are considering suicide, otherwise this kind of nonsense topic wouldn't even exist".

dosmoipasto

United States48 Posts

November 25 2012 20:21 GMT

#62

I'm not into this topic focusing on Palestine; it gives people excuses to draw ridiculous racial or historical conclusions. The original suicide terrorists were 1st century Jews. The originals in the modern sense were the Tamil Tigers, a completely secular group.

Here is a mature scholarly work on the subject.

dUTtrOACh

Canada2339 Posts

November 25 2012 20:51 GMT

#63

On November 25 2012 21:11 SiroKO wrote:

Show nested quote +

When you do martyrdom, you decide to end your life as it is now for a greater cause.
Now the question is, what could be the greater cause motivating a well-educated and mentally stable young/middle-aged man that you can't really bullshit with fairytales and who is really enjoying his life ?
It would need to be tremendous. Like, (almost) eternal glory or something similar.

In the real world, such occasions are exceptionally rare.
Thus someone achieving martyrdom without a certain degree of insanity or disatisfaction with his life seems to me impossible.

My problem is the fact that I disagree with the definition you're using for Martyrdom. Blowing yourself up in a crowded market is some straight-up bullshit. Being stoned to death for being the "wrong" religion or believing something different from your persecutor(s) is martyrdom. I'm saying you need to be murdered / tortured for a martyrdom to even occur. You don't do martyrdom - martyrdom is done to you.

What happens when some "well-educated", "stable" individual kills him/herself to damage their enemy is not martyrdom. It's a suicide attack. For people to even equate this with martyrdom is a sign that their society and culture are fundamentally fucked up. Martyrs are victims, not engaging themselves in victimization. I don't know how many different ways I can say this.

Caihead

Canada8550 Posts

November 26 2012 02:55 GMT

#64

On November 26 2012 05:51 dUTtrOACh wrote:

Show nested quote +

If Martyrs are infact just victims, why should it matter what age, class, education an individual is? Why even draw that distinction? Just because you are advantaged in one aspect of life doesn't mean that you can't be penalized or killed for your beliefs. The people who engage in suicide attacks Palestine are not playing themselves as victims, they aren't engaging themselves in victimization, nor should that even matter. A martyr to his/her own belief / cause may be denounced as a heretic or a lunatic by someone who doesn't share their cause or belief, it doesn't matter how reasoned that belief even is. It could be Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake for heresy for defending values of mathematics and science, who repeatedly defended his views with the knowledge that he will be found guilty and killed for it. Or it could be Joan of Arc who is declared a martyr officially by the Catholic bureaucracy with beliefs of visions, divine messages, and divine purpose.

External societal judgement shouldn't factor in to whether or not the act of suffering death in adherence to a cause or religious belief is valid or invalid, because given any arbitrary number of external observers there's an arbitrary number of evaluations on whether the cause of the individual was just or moral. We can argue about whether or not the cause itself is valid or invalid, we can argue about whether it has the intended impact, we can even argue about whether or not the individual is insane or mislead, but we can't deny the nature of it.

I personally think that the entire idea of martyrdom itself is misconstrued and its assumptions illogical, where in an ideal world you should never even need to martyr yourself for a cause because civil discourse should suffice to communicate a message, and that the idea of glorifying or honouring martyrs is detrimental to society instead of actually appraising the values that they stood for. But that doesn't stop the phenomenon of people who martyr themselves.

Martyrdom doesn't need to take the format where one party is stripped of all of his freedom and choice and is the "victim", because if you put it that way, what's to say that the individual wouldn't have chosen to abandon his faith and choose life if he had the choice to? And if he/she made the conscious choice to defend his faith at all costs, why is it that he can not take an active format of suffering / suicide to accomplish it? There's so many varying formats of it, be it civil disobedience and death by starvation or other formats of inactivity, actively placing yourself in harm's way to protect your ideology where you can avoid it, or actively killing yourself to protest a specific message. Whether or not you hurt other people in the process, or if you intend to hurt other people in the process is a subsidiary discussion on the subject of martyrdom, not a determining factor of if the action is martyrdom. Almost all martyrs commit it with the intention of "sending a message" or hurting the oppressive party in some manner, be it loss of support, fear, practical gains in information or tangible objects, or direct physical harm.