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.
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