Suicide-by-cop is a common and disruptive event in our society, as forcing the hand of society to put one out of one's misery appeals to a certain type of person. While at first it may appear that there are no commonalities between the mass shooter who intentionally goes out in a hail of gunfire and the religion of Christianity, I will at least attempt to show that a non-murderous suicide-by-cop bears a striking resemblance to the story of the death of Christ, and that religions which place an emphasis on living for a future life can easily manipulate people to die at the hands of a power the group is struggling against for the sake of a name that lives on after death.

I do not advocate here for anyone to actually engage in any behavior that could get one killed or to be a martyr for any cause--but simply to show that in our society, the stories we venerate and the gods we worship provide the perfect psychological formula for violent martyrdom. In living for a future life or a mere name that is immortalized, people constantly go to their graves.

In the story of Christ as we hear it, we have someone who did not commit suicide by cop per se, but suicide by blasphemy against religious authority. Replace "cop" with "Roman soldier", and you have a better understanding of the similarities. The protagonist felt that in fulfilling the prophecies of the Messiah in his own way, he could speak with authority--and he did this by fulfilling each prophecy in the manner of an artist who appropriates the beliefs of his culture and then adds his own twists and commentary on them. Ultimately, Christ could have chosen not to die, to declare previous prophets false and irrelevant, to undo the laws of the previous religion, but instead chose to remain in the tradition and speak within it.

To ride into town, disrupt commerce in the Temple, call the Jews of his time a brood of vipers, and then deliberately engage in behavior that would get him executed seems senseless. He also demanded that others do the same, to value one's life less than the duty he gave his followers to spread his vision of the world at the risk of death, and there are countless people who died horrific deaths because of Christ's desire to be God and to be worshipped above all things.

If the story is correct as we are told by Christians, he was the first Christian, and thus led by example. Many Christians even died on a cross like him, hoping to gain eternal life, having been told to resist authority and practice an illegal, underground religion that would see its adherents defiant in the face of authority, fearing the eternal penalty prescribed for death as an apostate more than any torture the Romans could dream up. So, Christianity recklessly spread through the Roman Empire as an underground movement where people did just what people who commit suicide by cop today do: go in front of Earthly authority and engage in behavior that would cause said authorities to kill them.

Does this not seem a little bit like a suicide cult? Those who died through martyrdom, intentional or not, were venerated. Such behavior was celebrated as warranting Sainthood, and everyone celebrated those who had been brutally murdered by the authorities. It was the highest Earthly goal of Christianity, the one that warranted the most veneration and immortality: to engage in a behavior that would get one killed. Is it any wonder that people raised in a society dominated by Christian values sometimes deliberately get themselves killed by authority, then?

Christ did not advocate violence against others, although the list of Christians who have committed violence is very long. Christ did promise to return as a judge who would condemn all non-believers, who would judge the living and the dead, and who would commit the violent act of eternal damnation, at least through proxy. So, there is at least the blueprint for a violent, suicidal martyr when one shuffles all of the ideas of Christ around in someone's mind.

These ideas are also in the minds of fearful, insignificant men who want to make a lasting impact on the world, to judge and condemn others, who suffer from a lack of hope for the future, and have a strong disregard for human life on Earth. If suicide-by-authority has already been done by so many Christians, one is hopeless and misanthropic, desiring to be remembered, and thus believes that to die is to gain, it makes sense to such people to die in the most spectacular, humanity-condemning manner possible, acting with disdain for not only one's own Earthly life, but the lives of others as well.

These different ideas and tendencies floating around peoples' minds are manipulated by ideologues to produce extremists and cause chaos. Other ideas that float around the Bible include racism, genocide, misogyny, rape, castration, sexual repression, blood sacrifice, homophobia, slavery, authoritarianism, theocracy, aggressive conquest, capital punishment, and other pleasantries. Some combination of these ideas can easily sway the young and credulous to act in violence, and the Internet provides many havens for these ideas to flourish. As they develop and combine into different ideologies and cults, we see that someone going on a suicidal spree of mass murder is not nearly as incomprehensible as some make it out to be, and should even be expected.