In my project, I wanted to explore the notion of sacrifice in relation to Christianity, specifically looking at the idea of martyrdom. I wanted to contrast this with Bataille\u2019s ideas on religious sacrifices and his notions of the sacred. My aim for my project was so that I could understand the reason as to why people are willing to sacrifice their lives for their beliefs. To understand martyrdom in Christianity, I decided to look at their beliefs and values that they uphold and teach. I then looked at the meaning of martyrdom, and how it has changed from meaning martus, \u2018to witness\u2019 to die for a purpose or a cause.
\nTo illustrate this point, I looked at Simone Weil as an example. She starved herself to death as a protest to the treatment of French citizens under Nazi-Germany. I wanted to explore her biography and her philosophy so I could understand her values and her beliefs. I then wanted to contrast Christian thoughts, with Bataille. He argued that sacrifice is religion portraying the heterogeneous. It breaks the means-end lifestyle for those who witness it, however, for the person martyring their self, he argued that they want to do it to break away from \u2018things\u2019. After looking at Bataille, I wanted to finally look at Yukio Mishima. I wanted to see whether his death was for a greater \u2018good\u2019 or belief he supported, or whether it was an attraction to the heterogeneous. <\/p>\n
Key Books for my Project
\nChristian Beliefs and Martyrdom\u2014 \u201cChristian Beliefs and Modern Questions\u201d by O.Quick-Chase and \u201cMartyrdom\u2014The Psychology, Theology, and Politics of Self-sacrifice\u201d by R.M Fields.
\nSimone Weil\u2014\u201dSimone Weil\u201d by S. P\u00e9trement and \u201cGravity and Grace\u201d by S. Weil
\nBataille\u2014\u201dTheory of Religion\u201d by G. Bataille and \u201cAfter Bataille \u2013 Sacrifice, Exposure, Community\u201d by P. Ffrench
\nMishima\u2014 \u201cLife and Death of Yukio Mishima\u201d by H. ScottStokes and \u201cThe Sea of Fertility\u201d by Y. Mishima<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Natalie Stamp, 2009, Stage 2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[540,22,128],"tags":[47,174,544],"class_list":["post-1853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-540","category-abstracts","category-stage-2-abstracts","tag-bataille","tag-religion","tag-sacrifice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8792"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}