Religious zealotry may be "necessary" to be a "good soldier"

[SoCalDem]

How many people raise their children with this tenet?


"When you grow up, Mommy & Daddy want you to be tough, and go anywhere you are ordered..and be prepared to kill enemies"...

We try (most of us), to teach our kids that most people are good, and that ALL people have value. We teach them to be kind, to share..We teach them to love their country, BUT to question authority at certain times..

Fundamentalist religion and military training have a lot in common. Both rely on "unchallengeable" traditions. These traditions often are handed down through chants, songs, and stories. Many of the younger devotees have no idea when, where, of by whom these traditions even started..They only know that they are trained to accept them without question, and fight to the death to "defend" them, if asked.

The religious aspect of this comes in when the individual soldier convinces himself(herself)that:

1. The "enemy" is sub-human and it's not a real sin to kill that enemy
2. The "enemy" is really out to destroy HIS religion/country
3. The soldier's God will forgive him/her for killing, because it's a "just" war.

Soldiers MUST believe in the "just cause", or most of them could not do what they HAVE to do in a war setting.

There are the psychopaths and adrenalin junkie soldiers who are not religious, and just want to kill something...anything... but for the most part, our soldiers (and all soldiers) have probably been raised to save lives...not take them.

If you TRULY believe that killing is a mortal sin (Catholics do), can you really be sure that killing in wartime will NOT doom you to hell? In the really desperate wars, when it's truly your life or the enemy's, most soldiers will take the chance on the here and now, and let the hereafter wait.

Pre-emptive wars like our loser-leader favors, have got to raise real issues with "normally" religious people.

The zealots are another issue though.. These people can see killing of the "other" (non-believers) as a Christian DUTY..

The Spaniards/Italians saw nothing wrong with killing millions of indigenous people from one end of the western hemisphere to the other, and they were supposedly on a mission from God.

Missionaries have often ended up killing the ones they hoped to convert..

If you fear for your soul, and have a one-on-one relationship with your God, it would be very hard to be a "good soldier" without surrendering at least a part of your soul..

PTSD may just might be the amputation of the soul.. Maybe that's why it's so hard to diagnose and cure..

The zealots may be able to compartmentalize their souls and feel no remorse for their actions, because the brainwashing techniques in blindly following orders can be adapted, and if you accept one, maybe you accept the other without a second thought.

[Solly Mack]

1. My husband is fucked then cause he mocks "true believers"

on a daily basis. And he's neither a "psychopath" nor a "adrenalin junkie soldier"...

What he does have is a finely tuned sense of the sardonic.

[SoCalDem]

2. The "good soldier" part is deliberately in quotes.

I would suspect that most soldiers have no desire to kill anyone. But the hyper-patriots that are worshiped these days seem to be "on a mission".. It scares me.. I was raised an AF brat, and never, ever saw the "soldier-worship" that goes on these days.. To the military people I was raised with, it was a job, and a good deed all wrapped up in one.. ..

[Qanisqineq]

9. As is mine

he writes "The Force" on anything that asks for religious preference and if asked how the army can help him with his religious beliefs (or however they word it), he writes, "leave me the hell alone!"

[Solly Mack]

10. my husband's dog tags say "NONE"..while in Iraq someone asked

him what the "NONE" meant...he said "It's for religion and mine religion is Sex...(pause)... and I'm not getting "None"

which pretty much sums up his religious beliefs...

:)

[leftofthedial]

3. sounds like my former long-time friend

ex-Special Forces, big-time dittohead Kool Aid drinker, Mormon, raised a short bus load of kids to be good little THEM killers.

And THEM includes liberals.

[Hekate]

4. Ideological zealotry sans religion will do just fine

Raising the Talibornagains to political and military power is indeed dangerous to the US, but...

Fanaticism is fanatacism is fanaticism: the true believer gives him/herself over to God or Allah or Big Brother or the State or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat... in any case, to an idea or ideal that surpasses and loses sight of mere individual humanity.

Individuals are then only of worth as they serve to further the ends of God or Allah or Big Brother or the State or the Dictatorship of the Proletriat. The ends are of such overriding importance that they justify any means. Thought crimes, torture, book burnings, desaparacidos -- the history of the 20th century is awash with the blood and burnt flesh of political martyrs, just as the history of the Late Middle Ages is awash with the blood and burnt flesh of religious martyrs.

My heart quails before both religious idealism and political ideology when they are divorced from our common humanity -- what some of us are proud to call humanism, secular or otherwise.

> Some say the world will end in fire,
> some say in ice.
> From what I've tasted of desire,
> I hold with those who favor fire.
> But if it had to perish twice,
> I say that for destruction ice
> is also great,
> and would suffice.
Robert Frost

Hekate

[mmonk]

5. Apparently

Protestant dominated North America had little problem killing Native Americans either. There's less indigenous people left in the U.S. than Central and South America.

[AngryAmish]

6. So communists make shitty soldiers?

Tell that to the Viet Cong, the Red army that defeated Germany etc...

[SoCalDem]

8. Like someone said.. zealotry is zealotry.. religious or not,

but in a country where people are taught that God "hates killing", there has to be some serious brainwashing done to instill enough "righteous" hatred to make them abandon their souls so easily..

[mopaul]

7. tell it to the native americans

your god is a false god, our god will replace your gods. in this there is no compromise. did it to the african slaves too.