(June 4, 2012 at 8:13 pm)padraic Wrote: Combat troops MUST feel they can trust their comrades with their life. The simplest way (lots of grunts are REALLY thick) is shared world views,beliefs and values. The range of tolerated variation is very narrow.
I understand what you're saying, and agree with you on most of what you've said on this issue, I would just like to raise a point.
If one is going to trust someone with their life, wouldn't that trust be best placed with someone who doesn't believe they have the upper hand because they're favored by some supreme being? You'd think one would feel safer amongst comrades who were not convinced their life wasn't going to end when they stopped breathing.
I am not saying in any way that soldiers from anywhere care less about their lives and the lives of their comrades because they espouse a belief in a deity/afterlife. That's what's ridiculous about the whole thing.
If you're deity is all powerful and your cause is justified by your deity... if you really really believed that, you'd not worry about little things like saving skin. That's what makes the terrorists so dangerous, remember? This means that the religious bigot soldiers that hate people who don't say they believe in the same things they say they believe are just fake bitches. Fuck em.
If what it takes to survive is to simply communicate verbally that you believe in whatever, do it. The other soldiers who say the same thing are going to be badass and fight like hell no matter what, because deep down they're not dumb enough to put stock in their professed convictions.
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