Cookie Consent

Friday, May 30, 2014

The Martyrs Were Suckers

      Being a martyr is an extremely unwelcome thing today.  Estase remembers a discussion in a history seminar about resisting Hitler.  One student said something along the lines of "But they had to participate in the Holocaust.  They would have been killed if they didn't."  Estase responded that the worst the Nazis could have done to a resistor is kill them.  "But they couldn't do that!," was the response.  Several students seemed to believe that there was a broad category of things you could be "forced" to do.  Estase responded that the only things a person had to do were be born and die.  He also said that it would be far better morally to be killed for refusing to cooperate with genocide instead of going along with genocide and then being executed for it.  In one case you would die with a clean conscience, and the other you would die with a guilty conscience.  By this line of reasoning, the early Christian martyrs did the wrong thing by dying rather than worshipping Roman idols.
       Estase does not have a Twitter account, and the reason why is that it facilitates superficial snippets and these snippets all too often are sarcastic and abusive.  One person on Twitter, going under the name of KeKe Dat Bitch, unfavorably compared Martin Luther King to Nikki Minaj.  This girl said that MLK was a criminal (owing to his incarceration), and Nikki has her own clothing line! (Oooh!)  When a rap star who made millions for negligible work is regarded as better than someone who risked his life repeatedly seeking equitable treatment for black people, there is something very rotten in Denmark.  It is yet another sign that martyrdom is an unpopular vocation today.
       Others on Twitter include Catholic Bishop John Wester, who tweeted that it would be wonderful if people first thought of Catholics as "joyful."  Bishop Wester is on record for saying that the problem with Obamacare was that it didn't include illegal aliens.  It is people like John Wester in the Catholic Church that are most averse to martyrdom.  Why, Saint Stephen made a colossal mistake!  The reason he was stoned was no doubt that he failed to exude enough joy!  The Catholic Health Association in Scranton supported Obamacare even as they knew it would drive them out of business.  If this is martyrdom, and not a conscious decision that Catholics shouldn't run hospitals, this is for the reader to decide.  One may follow KeKe, and say that becoming rap stars with a clothing line is far preferable to being a nun in today's world.  Or, like Bishop Wester, they might conclude that the only job of a nun is to be "joyful."  At any rate, don't make a fuss.  Do like the University of Notre Dame, and have Obama come tell your graduates that Catholicism isn't a satisfactory system of belief for young people.  The martyrs, after all, were suckers.

No comments: