Since the man's suicide some left-wing media outlets have tried to portray his action as somehow noble and have gone so far as to claim that the early Christian martyrs did something similar to protest Rome's treatment of them.
They wish to make Bushnell into a martyr, but a martyr is murdered for his beliefs. A martyr is not someone who commits suicide as an act of protest.
Time magazine gets it all wrong when it writes that,
Self-immolation was also seen as a sacrificial act committed by Christian devotees who chose to be burned alive when they were being persecuted for their religion by Roman emperor Diocletian around 300 A.D.This is false. The Christians Time is talking about did not "choose" to be burned alive.
The Time article's claim is based on a New Yorker piece from 2012 which asserted that the early Christian historian Eusebius recorded an "interesting instance of auto-cremation in antiquity."
Here's what the New Yorker writers said:
...around 300 A.D., Christians persecuted by Diocletian set fire to his palace in Nicodemia and then threw themselves onto it—presumably, to express their objections to Roman policy and not to the emperor’s architectural taste.Is this what Eusebius actually wrote? Well, no. Here's his statement concerning the relevant events in Nicomedia in 304 A.D.:
...a conflagration having broken out in those very days in the palace at Nicomedia, I know not how, which through a false suspicion was laid to our people.... Entire families of the pious in that place were put to death in masses at the royal command, some by the sword, and others by fire. It is reported that with a certain divine and indescribable eagerness men and women rushed into the fire.In other words, It's not clear how the fire originated. Indeed, some historians suggest it was set on orders from Diocletian's second in command, Galerius, who wanted a pretense to carry out a more vigorous persecution of Christians.
More to the point, the Christians didn't willingly immolate themselves. They were being forced into the flames by the authorities and chose to embrace an unavoidable death. The comparison with what Aaron Bushnell did is completely inapt.
It took me about fifteen minutes to dig out these details. One would think that a professional journalist would've invested at least that much time in ensuring that he or she had the story correct.
Unfortunately, getting the story correct doesn't seem to be a high priority for many journalists today. It's no wonder so few people trust them to tell us the truth.
