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No, you can only sacrifice a permanent when a spell or ability explicitly tells you to, either as part of the cost or as part of the effect.

Just to give a more in-depth response..

1) You NEED a spell/ability to force you to sacrifice anything. You can't just randomly do it with no apparent reason.

2) No, you cannot respond to costs being paid. Abilities with "Sacrifice a creature:" requires you to sacrifice a creature as a cost to put the ability on the stack. Now because you can't respond to costs being paid, you cannot activate both abilities of the two creatures as the soonest time you could do this is after the ability's been put on the stack but at that point, the cost has been paid and the creature you sac'd before is already dead.

3) Yup, there's no reason why it wouldn't work. Act of Treason works great with Birthing Pod too.

4) Nope, unless you have a spell or ability to sacrifice a creature before the end step then it won't work. It also has to occur before the end step actually begins.

5) Again, you can't randomly just sacrifice it to have it do its one damage to something. There has to be something to sacrifice it to such as a card like Viscera Seer or possibly a spell like Goblin Grenade. Note: If Goblin Arsonist dies from combat (and assigning one point of damage to whatever it blocked/was blocked by) then it does indeed die and you can assign that one point of damage to the creature that blocked or was blocked by it to deal a total of 2 damage to it.