Would You Give Your Life For a Symbol?

Nope, can’t think of anything.

I’ve thrown out a few copies of the Bible in my time. They were old, ratty and of no sentimental importance.

Fabulous blog, a first time poster. No, I can’t think of anything that’s symbolic and reproducible that I would die for. I agree with you — symbols only have as much meaning as you give them.

Your friend willing to die for The Bible, what surprises me is that he didn’t rationalize that perhaps his god would want him to live, as he could do more work as a Christian on Earth that way.

The PETA Vice President, a diabetic I believe (citation needed) opposes animal testing, but uses insulin, which was created as a product of animal testing. She has rationalized that she needs to live in order to save more animals.

Anyway, yeah… what if it were a Bible in another language? I wonder if that would still have the same meaning to your friend? What if you, an atheist, had transcribed a copy of the Bible? What if you had typed it up on your computer, printed it up, and bound it together? What if a few words are missing from the Bible? Or a few verses? I’d be very curious to what point your friend draws the line.

But something tells me he hasn’t actually thought about this. (When people think, they usually don’t come up with answers like this.)

My life is my most highly prized possession, and without it, I’m pretty worthless. And, after a few days, I’d probably smell pretty bad.

So, with that in mind- no, I wouldn’t die for any symbols. I wouldn’t die for anything, if I could help it. Oh, sure, one could construct a plethora of hypothets “X or your own death”, wherein dying for something is the better option.

But those situations don’t arise in real life. It’s a pretty rare occurrence to be in a life or death situation to begin with. Even more so to be in an either-or-dilemma. By the time you’ve reached that point, you’ve gone so far off the tracks of common experience that I’ve gotta wonder if the whole situation could have been avoided someplace in a previous chain of decision-making.

In short: the chances of you being in a situation where you must die for your cause/thing are very slim; most causes/things are better served by you staying alive. There are no noble sacrifices, only sacrifices.

Since he wasn’t a catholic the wafer was just a symbol. I am sure the Koran is just a symbol to him. But his symbols are not just symbols to him. Maybe the American flag?

Remember the only special interests are the other guy’s special interests, yours are advocates for the cause.

I thought “the word of god” was ethereal, something that is supposed to be kept in one’s heart. What the friend did—claiming to be willing to place a physical object in such high regard that it supercedes a human life—sounds an awful lot like idolatry.

I’m sure, though, that pointing that out to him or others like him would result in emphatic denial.

No symbols – books, flags, crackers, miniature replicas of torture devices, or whatever – are worth dying for.

The best thing P.Z. Myers did during his desecration ‘ritual’ was to include pages from The God Delusion in the mess – I sort of wished he’d thrown some from The Origin of Species in there, too. Not because I disagree or dislike these books, but because it was a great display of how worthless symbols really are. I’m sure it confused the hell out of a lot of his opponents.

I think all these comments have been slowly meandering to your friend’s point. He’s not Catholic, so he sees the wafer as just a symbol; however, the bible is not a symbol. It’s his lord’s ethereal voice. In your scenario, it would be like spitting in God’s mouth. He’d rather die now than die later and have God say, “Dude, you spit in my mouth; you’re so going to hell!”

As George Carlin said:

“[It] is a symbol, and I’ll leave symbols to the symbol-minded.”

I wonder what he would say if ripping out the page would prevent something other bad thing from happening, or if the page could be used to save someone’s life. I can only think of silly examples, like if someone was bleeding and the pages could be used to bandage a wound or something, but you get my point. Would damaging an account of God’s word still be worse than letting someone else (or perhaps multiple people) die? Is there a quota that has to be reached before desecration is OK?

I would probably punch somebody in the face if they tore a page out of one of my books. But that’s because I love my books. I hate it when people fold the corners over on pages to mark their place (get a bookmark, dammit!)

I wouldn’t die for my books, though…not even my first edition signed copy of Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut.

I’m a military veteran and I’m well read on history. Military history is full of soldiers willing to risk life and limb for symbols. In the US Civil War, there was no worse loss of honor for a unit than having their flag captured. Soldiers with the flag would be shot and another would catch it before it hit the ground. That one would be shot and somebody else would catch it. It would go on and on sometimes, I read of one incident where a regiment lost 14 flag bearers in a few minutes, one after the other. Units that lost their flag weren’t issued a new one, they had to capture one. It was a very strong rallying point for esprit de corps. It was a symbol of bravery. Virginia is still trying to have a flag returned that was captured by a Minnesota unit! Minnesota won’t give it back.

In World War II, our most famous photograph is not a picture of a medic saving a wounded soldier or a soldier entering a pillbox, but a group of Marines raising a flag. That flag did raise the spirits of the soldiers and marines fighting on Iwo Jima.

When horror is all around you, being able to focus on something (a symbol, a task) may be the only way to continue functioning.

Will people die for a symbol? At least in the case of our flag, the answer is a clear yes. Would I die for the flag? Probably not.

ubi dubius made the point that I was going to make. So I second his post.

Meh, I knew a few Christians with this mentality. On the other side, I knew tons of Christians who actively worked to dissuade their brothers and sisters from putting so much faith in what is essentially a commercial object. It’s not the book itself that should be important – it’s the ideas contained within. If someone was holding a gun to the head of your young Christian friend, I know few Christians who would fault him for recognizing that a Bible is just a book.

If the ideas and concepts a symbol stands for are strong enough, what happens to the symbol itself should be of no consequence. I can’t think of any mass-produced symbols whose destruction would terribly upset me, although I wouldn’t want to see any great works of art with religious themes or religious landmarks destroyed.

Hemant, it might be interesting for you and your friend to read Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence together. It’s a moving and intriguing story with a lot of relevance to this question.

I’m going to say no. The closest I can come is the following (often attributed to Voltaire): “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” But I’d argue that that doesn’t quite qualify as a symbol.

I agree with John. To desecrate the Bible on threat of death could be seen as denying one’s faith. But there’s nothing holy about the printed pages. They’re just ink and wood pulp, to oversimplify. The holiness is in the message.

Good for Minnesota not giving back a southern flag, the south lost!

Besides, here in Virginia we have tons of Civil War artifacts, and Minnesota doesn’t. I can walk to old earthworks from my house. We don’t need that flag, and it’s nice for them to at least have something for their museums, even if it’s just an old piece of fabric.

Of course, your friend does exactly that on a regular basis. Rips pages right out of his Bible. (I use this as a metaphor in a one-person show on the subject.)

This is especially true if your friend is politically conservative. It is impossible to reconcile the teachings of Jesus with conservative ideology, so if your friend thinks capital punishment is acceptable, for instance, then he’s tearing out the part of the Bible where Jesus says it isn’t. If he’s opposed to universal health insurance, you could argue that he is tearing out the plethora of parts of his Bible which insist on taking care of the sick.

If his shirt has two fabrics, he’s torn out the verse that says he’s not supposed to use two fabrics.

The list can get pretty long, but basically if he’s not trying to live exactly the way the Bible says to live then he’s tearing out the pages.

Symbolically, of course.

I can’t think of any symbol I would protect with my life. If it has symbolic value at all, that means that its essence to inspire isn’t contained in the physical instance that’s in my hands.

Elevating symbols over human life cheapens human life. It’s a tool the powerful use to control the weak and the easily led.

Symbols are just that symbols. It is what they symbolize that is important. The constituion is a symbol of freedom. The freedom is important. Not the symbol.

I always liked the George C. Scott movie Patton where he stands in front of the giant flag and says “Don’t die for your country. Let the other poor bastard die for his.”

The dead are useless. Live and do good.

One of my favorite Survivor contestants (Roger, season 2) brought a Bible as his “luxury item” to Australia, but gladly ripped out the blank pages at the front and back to help with starting a fire. He said in a confessional that he’d have torn the other pages out too, if necessary, and I was impressed.

So many people have killed over symbols – no one should volunteer to die for one.

As an atheist, I can’t think of any symbol I’d die for; the question reminds me a bit of a reader in Ray Comfort’s blog who recently asked atheists if they would renounce their non-belief if they had a gun pointed at their head (and seemed to believe he had made some sort of point when atheists replied, in essence, “Of course!”).

As for your friend…from a Christian point of view, isn’t showing this much reverence to the actual, physical book (as opposed to the ideas contained within) technically idolatry? It seems like the reverence for the deity has been projected onto the materials of the book; as if the book being “The Word of God” elevated it to something more than a mere book, something “Holy”, which would suggest to me that the book is detracting from the reverence for the deity it allegedly speaks for. Did this occur to anyone else? Do any Christians have any thoughts on this?

Couple of things.

1. If I gave him another translation of the Bible (If he had a King James and I gave him a Catholic.) would he feel the same?

2. Does he know that the printing company that prints his bibles on Tuesdays prints Mags like Penthouse on Thursdays?

3. Doesn’t that break a commandment? Thou shall not have idols before me. The Bible, while the word of god, is not god.

4. Would he give his life for a statue of Jesus? How about a painting?

I think this says alot about what he believes in…and more importantly I think it shows that, like most religious people, he wants to show others how he believes more than anyone else. This idea that if I can turn my believe in god up to 11 I get to move to the front of the line when I die.

As for giving my life for a symbol. Um no because by definition a symbol replresents an idea but in not that idea.

Harknights, my thoughts exactly. All I kept thinking was that both the outrage over the cracker and this conversation are akin to idolatry. I honestly cannot think of a single “thing” that I would be willing to die for. People, absolutely. Ideas, quite probably. But a thing? Nope.

No, I can’t think of anything. The most important symbol in my life is my wedding ring. I’d be incredibly upset if it was stolen or destroyed, but to die over it? No. I’m still married with it or without it. It’s a thing. You can replace things.

A thought: we’re all atheists, and we all think we get one life and that’s it. I wonder if it’s different for people who do believe in an afterlife? Is life a little cheaper for them? I have a hard time imagining the answer is “yes”, but then I have a hard time imagining dying for a thing, too.

I spent the last few months in Africa and came home with a hand-carved sculpture of a lion. I’ve made it a symbol both of my own strength and that of teamwork; two concepts which were very important to me on this trip. It’s a symbol of everything I learned and everything I dreamed while over there, a reminder of how I was changed. I look at it and I remember, I look at it and I am reminded- but it’s a carved lion, not the teamwork or strength or dreams it has come to represent, and destroying it would not affect the lessons I learned on the trip. It’s a symbol.

As, in my mind, symbols serve as reminders and reinforcements of aspects of life, it seems kind of pointless to die for them. Life gives the symbol meaning. If I die, the meaning is lost- there’s no one to serve the ideals the symbol professes.

Maybe the difference is that I make my own symbols (it’s fun!), whereas this is a symbol backed by the (in my opinion, misguided) belief and faith of what, billions of people? If one person dies for the symbol it still has meaning to the rest of the multitide, and indeed those deaths may make said meaning all that much more dear to those who live. Maybe, if you really believe in those ideals that lie behind the symbol, if you believe those ideals are greater than yourself, strengthening the hold of the symbol on other people is worth dying for. I don’t know. It’s not to me -I’ve got too much living to do to even consider dying for something that is not itself alive- but I’m an odd one.

Had I been confronted with the choice to convert to [Islam or whatever] or die, I would have chosen death rather than even externally “deny the faith.”

That’s crazy.

If given the choice, yes, yes I would lie to a murderer.

Here’s a question, would Hemant’s buddy kill to protect a bible?

Why or why not?

Here’s another one… suppose I’m going to throw a bible into a pool of lava. Will he jump in to try and deflect it out?

Here’s another, suppose nobody THREW the bible into the lava, suppose it was dropping out of someone’s backpack while hiking at Yellowstone, and it was about to hit boiling mud. Would he jump in at that moment if there WASN’T a bad guy challenging him?

See, I think Hemant’s buddy is just doing some macho posturing for Jesus. I remember being 20 and full of testosterone myself. Young men get a thrill out of imagining scenarios where they bravely stare down the barrel of a gun and flip the bad guy the bird.

When PZ tossed the wafer in the trash, one of the commenters said something about nothing being sacred; toss the wafer, rip up Dawkins’s book or the Koran, burn the American Flag…

I have to admit, my reaction was, no, not the flag. Put a gun to my head and I’d burn it in a heart beat… But, the comparison of the wafer to the flag as symbols gave me a little twinge of how the Catholics must have felt.

That said, if someone burnt a flag, I wouldn’t try to get them kicked out of college or punished, which was PZ’s point.

I remember when I would not even set something on top of a Bible

Tibetan Buddhists I’ve known wouldn’t put anything on top of a copy of one of their sacred texts, either – or put it on the floor, or under a seat, or walk over it, etc.

Hemant, if he’s that hardcore a Christian, he thinks you’re going to hell. And if he thinks you’re going to hell – he isn’t your friend.

Hmm… Its odd that so many religious people assume that we’re so materialistic, when we’re only materialistic when we want proof for something.

These religious types seem to be more materialistically shallow than atheists, as they assume crackers and books are equal to life of any sort. Scary.

We made those things.

I’ll add one more thing (boy am I chatty today)

I shiver, literally shiver, when I think of the risks I might have taken with my life or the huge financial commitments I might’ve made(even more so) based on faith that an all powerful deity would work it all out for good – either here or in the afterlife.

Not for a symbol. Never for a symbol. But for what that symbol stands for, hell yes.

I would burn the American flag as many times as it takes to get my point across, but i would hope that i would not hesitate if such a time came when i would have to give my life for the Freedom and Liberty that the Flag stands for.

The symbol itself doesnt mean anything. It is just a symbol, people have used, regurgitated, and reused symbols over and over (the swastika used to be a good luck symbol). It is not the symbol that you die, or live, for. It is the beliefs, the purpose, and the reason behind the symbol.

Hi Dave, welcome!

Often people pick the view they find most clearly able to be argued and then pick and choose other views to make other points.

You’ve noticed that too, eh?

I just wanted to say that there is no real shorthand way to have the “pz myers desecrated a cracker” discussion again in this thread. To give it short shrift is to do what you warn against, which is to pick the small parts of the whole torrid saga as the ones most easily to be argued. Nuance and context, and the chain of events leading up to the act, are lost.

But, just as you desire people not to impose their beliefs on you and show respect for your perspective, I urge you to show similar respect for the viewpoints of others.

If I may say something… we seem to be dealing with some fuzzy language here.

I respect other people. I respect the right for other people to hold viewpoints other than mine.

I do not necessarily or automatically respect the actual VIEWPOINTS of other people. Tell me a viewpoint, do your best to persuade me, and then I’ll tell you whether or not I respect that idea.

Doesn’t a moral and intellectual honesty demand that we disrespect certain ideas? Even ideas popularly held at times?

Reading what you wrote, I can’t tell if you’re clearly saying that we must respect other people, their right to hold their own opinion… or something else, which is that you are demanding that I respect THEIR opinions.

Could you be clearer? Must I respect the actual ideas of other people not based on the content of the ideas, but rather based on the fervency with which they hold them?

Anyway, thanks for posting here.

a friend of all who share their thoughts without malice.

Appreciated that.

Why would anyone put a gun to his head to make him tear pages out of his Bible if they weren’t trying to force him to make a statement about his faith?

I don’t know about your friend’s reason, but to some people being forced to take an action like that would be the same as denying Christ.

If a gun was held to your head and you were forced to recant atheism and bow down to Jesus / Buddha / Allah, would you hesitate?

Sometimes it’s just the point of being forced to do something that makes it worth resisting.

Siamang Says:

Doesn’t a moral and intellectual honesty demand that we disrespect certain ideas? Even ideas popularly held at times?

Reading what you wrote, I can’t tell if you’re clearly saying that we must respect other people, their right to hold their own opinion… or something else, which is that you are demanding that I respect THEIR opinions.

I understand the fuzziness point you make, in part because I believe that both statements are true in many (most?) cases. Respecting people includes respecting their thoughts – even if you disagree with them. That doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with them. It doesn’t mean you can’t state you disagree with them. Of course you can. But it also means that generally some of the mocking tones we often take (and I include myself in that)around ideas we disagree with quickly descend to personal mocking by default.

At least until you understand another person’s thought well enough so that you can articulate that person’s reasons for holding a viewpoint (which is rare) then while you may still disagree with them, you (and I)have no basis to disrespect them. A few years ago I taught a class in Christian ethics in Nebraska. I asked people to tell me whether they were for or against the death penalty as a part of the first class. I then made them research and write a paper on all the reasons supporting the OPPOSITE opinion. Students hated the assignment. It caused huge angst for them. But what I hoped they would learn is to not just disagree with others but to try to understand them. After checking and listening – some ideas are still wacky and worthy of little attention. But we tend to decide that based on lack of information and curiosity because we let our world view speak for us rather than thinking them through in a more intellectually honest and open way.

Take for example, the tone about how a specific small group of Roman Catholics handled the presence of someone who didn’t think what they thought about communion. It quickly included a somewhat mocking disagreement about the presence of Christ in communion (which is actually a distraction from the central issue which is how the Christians and the atheists treated each other during the incident). Rather than comments on church and state, public funding uses in state universities, treatment of guests in public settings, etc. more than few comments easily descend into what a foolish thing it was to think what Catholics think and so it wasn’t a big deal anyway.

The truth is that disagreeing with the idea doesn’t automatically give us the right to be disruptive in the midst of it. It may in some cases involving intentional civil disobedience. Nor does the presence of outsiders as visitors in public settings give the Catholic Church the right to make a mountain out of a molehill in a campus worship service(which I believe they did in the campus incident and they were wrong to do so).

Anyway, at the moment those are my thoughts as a lurking “friendly Christian.” I hope it clarifies what I meant a bit.

I can’t imagine the thinking of anyone that puts symbols above human life.

Do you really expect believers to be rational?

This is why the belief in life after death is dangerous: people become willing to die for stupid shit.

Quick question: If the communion wafer is the body of Jesus Christ, and poking through it would harm him, what happens when you chew…? >.> Perhaps they should all swallow it whole, and let Christ burn in the acid of millions of stomachs… >.>