Life after death
"Rest after toil, port after stormie seas
Death after life - these things do greatly please"
General Sir Richard Dannatt, an unapologetically evangelical Christian, has said that we owe it to soldiers to tell them there is an afterlife, when we ask them (as we do, daily) to risk their lives carrying out government orders.
This is a sticky one: Army Chaplains today have to deal with a wide range of belief systems, including no belief at all; some young men may never have given it a thought, others may be intelligently and militantly atheist.
One blog heartily approves; on the other hand Arrse, the splendid "Army rumour service" website, is so far mainly scornful - having a particular dislike of an army evangelical movement - "They refer to death as being 'promoted to glory', which I find rather chillingly similar to islam's '72 virgins' nonsense..... How patronising can you get, implying that squaddies are incapable of reading the bible without help?"
Views on the afterlife: Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish...and of course the atheist point of view which - expressed eloquently here - admits that we know nothing but says that the afterlife provides excuses for not improving the present life - "if there is a heaven, it is better for our time on earth not to believe in it". Most believers would disagree.
