Where Are the Free Speech Martyrs? – David Wootton thumbnail
Where Are the Free Speech Martyrs? – David Wootton
lawliberty.org
martyrdom involves a deliberate act of refusing to conform to the demands of others. Thus you can’t accidentally become a martyr. I am using the word “martyr” in a secular sense. Those prepared to die for their principles, and especially those practising non-violence, are offering themselves as secu
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  • martyrdom involves a deliberate act of refusing to conform to the demands of others. Thus you can’t accidentally become a martyr.
  • I am using the word “martyr” in a secular sense. Those prepared to die for their principles, and especially those practising non-violence, are offering themselves as secular martyrs: I’m thinking of the suffragettes on hunger strike, of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King.
  • The nearest to a martyr for free inquiry is young Thomas Aikenhead, executed for blasphemy in Edinburgh in 1687. Aikenhead held that “it is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth, and to seek for it as for hid treasure.”
  • Enlightenment authorities had no desire to make martyrs, and Enlightenment philosophers had no desire to be martyrs.
  • the double truth theory

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