It's not at all analogous to the soldiers, because the soldiers do not believe that when they are killed they will be reborn in glory.
You really have no clue what being unto death means. It's really weird, like seeing a donkey trying to count.
----- Original Message ---- From: James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tue, January 12, 2010 9:41:47 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Individualism and psychiatric treatment
Doss: 'Religious believers in impending armageddon are optimists, not pessimists.'
Up to a point, Lord Copper.
There is something liberating, I guess, about the anticipation of armageddon. It says that all this is just illusion, or temporary (so that trials and obligations in the present are less onerous). But that is not really optimism of any normal kind, since it sees its reward in the Day of Judgement, not this world. It is also kind of barking.
There is a similar kind of solace that people took from impending annihilation in wartime. Soldiers would say, 'we are dead men on leave' - meaning that having cheated death so far, they were living on borrowed time. It would be liberating, but also rather dangerous, since 'dead men on leave' were apt to take crazy risks. When he was with the Bolsheviks Victor Serge found he would think of himself that way. The Nazis also embraced a kind of deliberate policy of burning bridges in the later part of the war, and celebrated a cult of death in the SS. Heidegger theorised a philsophical equivalent of this as 'being-towards-death'.
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