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Originally posted by borg
"To compel people to become aware and judge is namely the law for true martyrdom. A true martyr has never used power but has contended by means of powerlessness. He compelled people to become aware. Indeed, God knows, they did become aware- they put him to death. Yet he was willing to have that happen. He did not think that his death halted him in his work; he understood that his death was part of it- that the momentum of his owrk began precisely with his death. Truly, those who had put him to death did indeed become aware; they began to think once again about the cause and in quite another way, and what the one living was not able to do the one dead was able to do: he won to his cause those who had become aware.
"The objection I have repeatedly made privately against those who ordinarily proclaim Christianity in Christendom is that they, themselves surrounded and safeguarded by all too many illusions, do not have the courage to make people aware. That is, they do not have sufficient self-denial in relation to their cause. They are too eager to win adherents, but they want to win them-because this strengthens their cause- and therefore are not scrupulously careful about whether they in truth become adherents or not. This in turn means that in a deeper sense they have no cause; they relate themselves selfishly to the cause they do have. Therefore they do not actually risk going out among the people or abondoning illusions in order to make a genuine idea-impression, because they have a dim notion that it is truly a dangerous matter to make people aware. Mendaciously to make them aware, that is, to bow and scrape before them, to flatter them, to ask for their attention and lenient judgment, to submit- the truth- to balloting, well, this involves every advantage; but yet it perhaps does involve the danger of eventually failing in eternity."
-Soren Kierkegaard

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