People Can and Do Give their Lives for Lies
The New Testament tale that the Jews engineered the
murder of Jesus and he had the last laugh by coming back from the dead is
suspect. The Christians were suffering sectarian abuse from the Jews so
the resurrection would be told in such a way as to vindicate the claims of the
Christians to religious authority and even that their authority superseded the
Jewish authority. The argument was that Jesus was the prophet who came to
update and reform Judaism and it rejected him so its authority from God was
taken from them. There was a political reason or a social one if you like
to lie.
Bizarre amateur psychology from the Christians say that
Jesus must have really risen from the dead for those who saw him died for it and
nobody dies for lies or even for their beliefs. They die for their faith.
Suicide bombers have died for their faith though it was a very weak faith that
they struggled with. If you believe your faith is that important that you
will die for it then you can die for belief.
Festinger as quoted in Doubting Jesus' Resurrection by Kris Komarnitsky: Suppose
an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he
has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because
of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and
undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual
will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth
of his beliefs than ever before....The dissonance [conflict between belief and
reality] would be largely eliminated if they discarded the belief that had been
disconfirmed....Indeed this pattern sometimes occurs....But frequently the
behavioral commitment to the belief system is so strong that almost any other
course of action is preferable....Believers may try to find reasonable
explanations and very often they find ingenious ones....For rationalization to
be fully effective, support from others is needed to make the explanation or the
revision seem correct. Fortunately, the disappointed believer can usually turn
to others in the same movement, who have the same dissonance and the same
pressures to reduce it. Support for the new explanation is, hence, forthcoming."
Strictly speaking people risk their lives for lies rather than die for them. It
has to happen that even if they don't want to die some will die. We risk our
lives and happiness for all kinds of nonsense.
Joseph Smith the Mormon founder was a major fraudster all his life. He produced revelations and altered them afterwards to suit himself. He cheated on his wife Emma with his "spiritual" wives. Before his death he even decided that God was just a man like many Gods - a doctrine contradicting his previous statements that God was an almighty spirit who was present everywhere and that there was only one God.
Yet he risked his life for his religion and his "faith". He wrote in his diary dated Saturday, June 22, 1844, "I told Stephen Markham that if I and Hyrum were ever taken again we should be massacred, or I was not a prophet of God." Soon after he ended up in Carthage Jail, Illinois, and shot dead by a gang. Even and then murdered by a mob. Others who were with them survived the attack, but Joseph and his brother were killed, as predicted." While Smith may have felt he would not be murdered and was simply playing on how the Bible predicts murder as the likely fate of a true prophet (1 Kings 19, Matthew 23:31-34, Acts 7:52, Revelation 18:24). Joseph Smith stands forever as a refutation of those who say that human nature cannot believe its own religious lies well enough to risk its life over them.
Christianity's favourite lie is that the apostles experienced the risen Jesus and bore witness to it by giving their lives. They supposedly proved they believed he rose from the dead by dying as martyrs. They won't stop telling this lie, "People do not die for what they know to be untrue." It's a lie for psychologists have refuted it for years but the Church deafens its own ears.
The apostles died years after Jesus. They had preached
him for decades. If you are lying to yourself and or others over a period of
time you will forget that you are lying.
Self-deception is when we ignore and switch off the part
of our mind that is aware that we are lying. Self-deception does me little good.
The only real reason I engage in it is so that I can be a good liar to other
people. I know or suspect that if I am aware that I am lying, I can give myself
away and even contradict myself and be caught out. The really good liar is a
really good liar for he or she uses self-deception. The self-deceiver then can
easily die for what he or she has invented. For example, Jesus could have
claimed to be God though he knew he wasn't. In time, he came to believe his own
lies and chose to die for his claim to divinity. Don't women stay with violent
husbands because they lie to themselves that it's not the husband's fault or that
they are really good men after all?
In popular opinion, the martyr always testifies to his or
her own honesty when he or she loses his life for the cause. But mythomanics
come in all shapes and sizes. They are self-deceivers who tell huge lies very
well. But one day the web of deception unravels. They know that will happen and
still they lie. They will suffer then. They prove that people do take stupid
risks or futile risks over lies.
Psychiatry recognises the existence of a delusional
personality disorder called pseudologia fantastica or pathological lying.
Suppose there is a group of martyrs. One of them suffering from this disorder
could have been very convincing and been able to talk the others into believing
and into sealing their devotion to the cause with their blood. They could
reason, "I will testify with my blood to what this man says. It is evidence enough
for me that he says it." Or perhaps all he had to do was support them in their
faith and help them strengthen it. Maybe that happened with the apostles.
You find martyrs for all kinds of causes. People
sometimes throw their lives away for the silliest and most hopeless of causes.
People give all their savings away to cults that promise
that spaceships or Jesus will rescue them from this world. They simply don't
want to be here and would make any sacrifice for a religion that tells them
there is hope of escape. The disciples of Jesus thought the world was ending -
they did not want to be here. No wonder if they got martyred!
Had the apostles been sincere they would have done their
utmost to provide character references and affidavits to support their claims
and would have written as much as they could and ensured that their material
would be preserved. They did not. They suffered irrationally by any standard.
God could not tell them how to guarantee that their
papers would be with us forever so they were not in touch with the Holy Spirit
at all. Jesus said that anybody who cannot be trusted in little things cannot be
trusted in greater. And yet his apostles did not prove themselves worthy of
trust.
The apostles could have died for their lies. It is even
easier to die for somebody else's lies - such as Jesus'. Is that what happened?
One thing we do know, there is no record of any apostle
refusing to debunk the resurrection and dying for that refusal. None. There is
more to the religion they founded than the resurrection. Mother Teresa confessed
to being unable to believe but that would not have stopped her dying for the
Catholic Church. To argue, "The apostles died for the faith therefore they
showed they were not lying about the resurrection," over-simplifies.
Do you Christians want your religion based on Jesus or on
the notion, "People don't get martyred for their lies"? The notion is a bigger
foundation to the faith than the resurrection! What a strange religion! What an
unstable foundation!!
The apostles believed. So we are told. If they did, how
strong was their belief? We cannot assume that their faith or belief was that
strong if they were killed for their belief. Religion is full of tales of saints
who struggled with faith and barely believed but who still died for the
religion. People do die for religion who have weak beliefs. So people can die
for lies. All they need to do is tell themselves that the lies are the truth.
