TRUTH AS WILLINGNESS TO KILL AND BE KILLED:
(KOENIGSBERG'S LAW OF SACRIFICE)
From Paul Kahn, Sacred Violence

The sacrifice of the self is the creative act of destruction that is the “realization of the sacred presence of the sovereign. Lincoln at Gettysburg spoke of those who “gave their lives here that the nation might live.” The sacrificial death of soldiers—both of the Union and the Confederacy—constituted the “consecration of the battlefield.” At Gettysburg, dead bodies on the battlefield—created a sacred space by “making present the sovereign.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident….” However, the truth that is held to be self-evident by one political or religious community is not “self-evident” to another. Self-evident truths are not scientifically verifiable. Rather, a transcendent value becomes true to the extent that a people are willing to sacrifice for it. One gives up the finite self for a sacred ideal. Giving up the self in the political domain, Kahn says, take the form of a “willingness to kill and be killed.”