Living for Your Beliefs: Right or Wrong?

[ruby_duby]

"Dying for your beliefs does not make sense- it is better to live for them."
please can you post your views about whether you think it is wrong or right and why.
thanks

 

[russ_watters]

The point of dying for your beliefs is to enable others to live with them.

 

[selfAdjoint]

There are two ways to die for your beliefs. One is martyrdom, to publicly persist in your beliefs in the face of threats of death and to actually submit to being killed in testimony of your beliefs.

The other is when you actively take your own life, like the Buddhist monks who incinerated themselves in protest against the regime in Saigon during the Viet Nam war, or like Yukio Mishima who commited seppuku in the headquarters of the Japanese army to protest modernization.

I believe the first is more defensible than the second, and probably has a better effect in publicising the beliefs. People are always of two minds about suicide, and this dilutes the intended message.

 

[Microburst]

"Dying for your beliefs does not make sense- it is better to live for them."

Given the option, they would rather live for them, it’s usually when they run out of “options” they chose death. I think whoever wrote this quote has never truly understood the nature of a struggle or belief. You can never judge intent of ones action unless you are in his shoes with his frame of mind.

 

[Polly]

There is a time to live for your belief, there is a time to die for it. What is important is never be afraid to live for it nor to die for it, and having the wisdom to tell when is when.

 

[Dayle Record]

I see the real problem, is having to die for someone else's beliefs.
And a really unbearable problem would be, having your children die for someone else's beliefs.

 

[Dissident Dan]

Of course, if one has the choice to live or die for your beliefs, and each method is equally effective, it is more rational for one to choose to live. Even if faced with death as the only option to forward a cause, I doubt that I would go through with it.