The first half of the second paragraph is tough for me too read out of you. I understand the thought process but why give it the time of day.

For me embracing life means preserving it, I'm far from perfect but I've made it this far.

Most Popular Reasons People Join the Military

1) They are poor and unemployed
2) Patriotism
3) Family Heritage\Tradition
4) See the World
10) To get Laid
55. Peer Pressure
291. Tricked into it
720,000. The discount of alcohol and cigarettes at the PFC
1,000,000. Bunk Beds
10,000,000,000,000) To kill other people

i think that's naive. haven't you ever seen full metal jacket?

Fiction: The perfect representation of reality.

Have you ever seen JFK?

I'll give you that those who join up without mitigating circumstances might be a little more comfortable with the idea of taking the life on an "enemy" but I still think more people are in it for the socks as a #1 reason then to kill another human.

People who want to kill for the sake of killing do so in a much less fatiguing manor.

i did see the irony in that statement, but i think full metal jacket is pretty accurate. the drill sergeant in that movie was an actual drill sergeant they brought in to train an actor but ended up being better than the actor. i've watched that movie with people who have gone through basic training (old people) and they said it was pretty accurate--their goal is to break you. i have also spoken to vets who have killed people, and who have known sick crazy ****s in the army. the reality of war isn't very pretty...

i wasn't trying to imply everyone joins the army just to kill people, i'm just trying to point out that not everyone has an aversion to murder, in an attempts to discern where this aversion comes from.

brain...is...melting...

God's existence is a possibility if one considers the foundations of what quantum mechanics is based upon. If something can be defined through observation, then surely matter throughout the universe is being observed by something as well, otherwise such would not exist because we cannot be there to see it ourselves.

Living life through any sort of aestheticism is simply a means to delude oneself that they are existing in a solid, untouchable dimension. After all, the five (seven if you count your sense of space) senses are only capable of taking in minimal stimuli of what is actually possible to perceive, otherwise we would have a far better grasp of the physical universe around us.

I read somewhere that only 15 - 20% of American soldiers shot to kill during WW2 in both European and Pacific theatres of war.
British soldiers were fighting for very different reasons and a significant higher percentage shot to kill.
Mitigating circumstances has everything to do with it apparently.

I completely disagree that we need the Bible in order to have a sense of morality. Modern Christians pick and choose what from the Bible they pay attention to, and ignore the rest. Does this not illustrate a modern sense of morality that has evolved since the Bible was written?

Stoicism taught such things as compassion years before Jesus was said to have been born, and did so without promising any life beyond death. They did consider it a possibility, and they most likely believed in some sort of god, but so did most every culture in history. Most of these primitive religions are "dead" now and not treated with the same sort of baseless respect as modern monotheistic religions - but if their gods were a figment of their imagination, where must their sense of morality have come from?

Our sense of morality has evolved over time, and it continues to do so. If anything, the Bible and other religious books have contributed to slowing our progress.

All of this is true. I love the R. Lee Ermy story as well, but having known a lot of people in the military the near consensus is the being prepared to kill is a necessary part of training in order to avoid being killed. Preparing someone to do that is a difficult and demanding task, by any means necessary is the protocol. The Drillies have to look at it as potential saving a soldiers life. Quite the opposite of the desire to take a life.