Ultimate sacrifice

I am not sure how responsible it is to write about this philosophical poison but I will try to deconstruct it in a way that will leave you in neutral state before and after reading it.

Before we get to the meritum of this topic I will define abstraction called "scope" (for the lack of the better word). Scope is the relevant range of concepts that are directly related and closely associated with the topic of the scope.

So for example scope of business career would include concepts of job, promotions, salaries, vacations, working benefits... and so on. This abstraction will be important when it comes to determining level of sacrifice. The more you remove from that scope the bigger the sacrifice, goal of ultimate sacrifice is to remove as much as possible in "one move".

If someone asks you what is the ultimate sacrifice that you can make related to your business career, first thing that you will do is to identify most important part of that scope that if eliminated would left the scope almost or completely empty and meaningless, in this case that would be your job.

What is the ultimate sacrifice that human can make? It is obvious right, by removing life from the human being that scope becomes empty and equivalent to the scope of decomposing pile of flesh.

So if your answer is life than you are right... but only if you are atheist.

To determine the ultimate sacrifice, you need to determine the ultimate scope. Atheists are limited to the physical scope of human being, on the other hand for believers there is wider scope that includes the abstract concept of soul and afterlife. The interesting thing is that most believers will have the same answer like atheists because they ignore most important part of their beliefs.

If you were to talk about this question with Christians there is high chance that one of the arguments for life as the ultimate sacrifice would be quote from the bible that says that "there is no greater sacrifice than laying down your life for others". That quote is often stored in their memory as a oversimplified derivation of the real quote:

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

Most Christians would also say that the greatest sacrifice Jesus did was to give his life for our sins, but is that really the biggest sacrifice he did? Scope of God is far bigger than the scope of human being for sure. If you take that into account than answer becomes clear, greatest sacrifice that Jesus did was that he gave up his God powers became a human for 33 years of his whole life. He allowed himself to be weak, suffer and die in pain like human would, he completely emptied the scope of God reducing it to a scope of human and then to corpse for 3 days.

If you are still here, you might ask yourself:
"Why did he say that this is philosophical poison at the beginning, there is nothing toxic here?"

Well, we still didn't answer the main question, what is the ultimate sacrifice human can do?

Imagine that you are a christian during the Diocletianic persecution (303–312) and your neighbor wants to report you to the roman solders, you want to avoid ending up in the arena with few hungry lions at all cost. As a christian, killing the neighbor will put your soul in hell since it is against sixth commandment. Then another christian comes, he takes your sword and says "I will go to hell so you don't have to" before killing the neighbor.

With this logic, crimes can now be the "most virtuous heroic deeds" to correct all kinds of injustices that infuriate you. To make it worse, while browsing the internet this meme found his way to my eyes (image below). That felt like a paranormal event, it is all there in one image, the whole idea that was troubling me for a few months. In that moment my head was full of questions, what is the chance of me finding this marginalized image, how many people think like this, what does this mean, is this a sign that my way of reasoning was right...

Now it should be clear what the sick part of this reasoning is, doing what the devil wants you to do while feeling like a virtuous hero at the same time. This is where my quest for finding an antidote to this idea begins and after thinking about it for few days I think that I finally have the answer.

Ultimate sacrifice is always wrong thing to do.

Fallacy of the ultimate sacrifice is that you are sacrificing whole scope for a concept that is part of that scope, in this case if christian sacrifices his soul his scope is reduced to nothing and in that scope of damned soul concept of a hero does not exist. Imagine if Jesus did the ultimate sacrifice of his Godly powers and existence permanently, as a christian would you like that, can you find any possible scenario in which that would be a right thing to do? Same logic can be applied for christians, scenario that would make sacrificing your soul a "right thing to do" does not exist. Does anything matter if you lose your soul, without your soul as a christian your scope is reduced to nothing yet you would do that sacrifice for the subjective concept of a hero.

As a devils advocate my mind wanted to test the resilience of my conclusion so it came up with interesting hypothetical case:
Image atheist that is captured with his family by terrorists. Terrorists let him choose to sacrifice himself or his family. I previously stated that ultimate sacrifice for an atheist is his life and that ultimate sacrifice is always wrong, but here this doesn't seem to be the case. This got me thinking again, something was wrong and after some time I knew what it was. The concept of a family goes beyond a scope of single man, this means that ultimate scope for the atheist in this case is wider, it doesn't only include his life but also lives of his family. In this binary choice ultimate sacrifice would be the lives of his family, by doing so scope of his life would be empty and that emptiness would be filled with shame and self-hatred which would probably lead to suicide. In the end, ultimate sacrifice is still a bad sacrifice.

I will end with this thought experiment:
Imagine yourself as a part of fictional religion with teachings that eating apples, stealing and throwing any food (including apples) away is sin. You hate seeing people eating apples only because you are a believer of that religion and yet you plan to commit the sin of stealing and throwing all apples in the garbage so that others cant eat them. By throwing food away you can't consider yourself as the member of that religion anymore. Only motive why you did what you did is lost now, you are just a fool who sacrificed everything for nothing left with beliefs that have no foundation and to make it worse you will face legal cares and punishment for stealing those apples.