Everyone Welcomes Death; but usually just the good kind.

Time Index 5:45 is what most strongly caught my attention. Please note that I am not about to attempt boiling Christianity down to one specific function or dysfunction. As I see it, "Christianity" is a theme. Its not really one specific set of ideas, attitudes, or behaviors. So while I am about to address one specific religious set of ideas and subsequent behaviors, I am absolutely not trying to paint all of Christianity as being guilty of this particular set of dysfunctions.

I'm just going to address what Tabor talks about in this brand new discussion.

Deciding on a course of self-destruction results in self-destruction. As this happens, the self-destroyer forfeits all rational and ethical grounds upon which to complain that their life was violently cut short. They chose it. Granted, they were manipulated into it by religious predators. But here, the victim chooses to be complicit in this willfully life-wasting act. So if they think it's "good", then they should not be complaining about how much better off some people are; who aren't throwing themselves away. While all that happened, predators stood back in safety as they cheered on the self-destroyers. Those religious predators used those religious martyrs as a way to manipulate and recruit even more disposable pawns into their grift. This is what Michael Sherlock meant, when he said that "Christianity did not become a major religion by the quality of its truth. But by the quantity of its violence.".
Religious predators carefully provoked political machines into violent response. They did so for the express purpose of then feeding converts into that machinery. They used those deaths as a way to promote their religion as "a truth so true that people are willing to suffer and die for it".

Now, I'm sure we all recognize that this is just one part of how Christianity took root, spread, and flourished.

The larger picture is an even more dramatic mix of utility, beauty, and horror. 

As for religious martyrdom, 
I despise it. I'm not trying to rationalize it. But there is an ugly rationality to it. It's a more sophisticated example of creatures in nature benefiting from luring other creatures to their doom. Should we suppose spiders go to a worse afterlife than the flies they catch? What even *is* "afterlife" but the ego wanting and endless living story of a perpetually satisfying and vindicated "i"? Nobody is afraid to die. We all want to, in fact. Because that's what it means to live. The radiating of a star is the life of it.

The explosion of a star is a greater expression of that life. The dying of a thing is the life. It is the spending of energies in a brilliant display. Life is change. Change is losing the bits and formations of energy that define us. Bad (unwelcomed) Death is different than the good kind of dying. Bad-death is when the lost bits aren't replaced as quickly as they are spent. In contrast, whenever the lost bits ARE being replaced as quickly as they are spent, we are still dying; but that's the good kind of dying. We welcome being the Ship Of Theseus. We go even further, to welcome the replaced pieces being gradually different. So that the ship-of-self is entirely different *eventually*; just not too quickly. Not so quickly that it feels traumatic. We want a purposeful and edifying cycle of gradually being replaced by "someone" else. Although, we take comfort in the paper-thin page of that story were "that is me". It's very comforting illusion to think of future iterations being all the same "i". If it happens too fast, or happens via excessive trauma, that's a bad kind of living. If the entire process ends, that's the bad kind of dying. Being replaced by someone else, one peace it a time, through the process of good living? That is the good kind of dying. If there is an "afterlife", someone not-really-you and not-really-me would arrive there "in our name". They'd carry something of "who we were" forward as part of their "i". Gradually, everything that defines each moment's "i" is replaced by something different.
Gradually, this manifests as "someone" else. 
Think back to the baby you i-dentify with.
They died.
They had to, in order for you to live.
They do not exist anymore "as" who or what they were. They now exist as
* a concept,
and as
* fragments of leftover neurological wiring,
and as
* a narrative premise for some of our other human relationships,
and as
* other forms of energy.
Change is what it means to live. It's also what it means to die. Life and death are two different ways of looking at the same thing. Change is always happening. This is the nature of all things.