I wanted to reply to this email first as it convicts my spirit. I get tempted to judge those boys murdering Muslims in Iraq and sometimes I refuse to see that they often go to fight from a sense of duty. I once did the same- but I only killed the enemy in my plans, plotting, scheming, and dreaming. I fantasized destroying Commies for mommy and longed to kill gooks... I even held in my heart a great disdain for liberals and longed for the day that they could be rounded up and moved to a mountain or an island somewhere and then... like bugs destroyed like vermin that they are... But...Before I ever followed those orders... I died in a cornfield near Toledo... No one ever died because of me or did they?

I have a greater sense since returning from death that I should have done more to tell those boys that the cause that they are considering fighting for is not ordained by their God..or is it? I am not sure if their God is my God anymore. I think going to heaven made me realize that the God of this world is a mighty God indeed and one who crushes His enemies like a fodder for his jealousy... and this is the God who I believed in when I was seventeen... Only still...in the stillness of the night...with the sheets pulled up over my head..the God I prayed to when I was a child... this was not the same God who it was my duty to defend...Somewhere along the way, my God changed from being a God who protected me into the night to one who hated Godless liberals, Muslims too, Atheists, Communists, and peace loving Jews... and all along the way I still thought I was a "good person." But was I?

I, unlike those farmer's boys, who join the infantry and go to war,,,discovered the wickedness of war... from those who planned them. I watched how they deceived the enemy and even the public through their TeeVee. And how they planted wolves called pastors and preists...rabbis and clerics...I still went along and was qite prepared to kill from the orders of my President, my pastor, and my conscious too. But when did it become okay to justify evil to protect the greater good? This is something that men in conservative think tanks understood. And I was brainwashed into thinking those prideful thoughts...that America was right; that was until that fateful day... I returned to my broken, bleeding, dead body///entering back in and gave it life...

"Pride is concerned with who is right. Humility is concerned with what is right."

My visit to heaven humbled me. All of that pride never made it you see... not the least little bit-none- No duty...No honor...no Country... There was not any least little part of these in heaven... In heaven there was no duty... each soul is there of their own free-will. No soul stays in heaven because it is their duty. The second some soul has any second thoughts about staying in heaven... they leave...as simple as that...and they fall back into a burning wyrm... are born into a body that some day will die... No honor is required... Honor comes from pride...There is no pride in heaven... Our stories are an open book... There is no nationality in heaven, no race, no color, nor creed. Every soul there is made out of light... I know somehow this place where love is...love is the highest aspiration and love is told in my sacred religious texta and even if it seems strange to me in words and ways of thinking unfamiliar to me... the beliefs of my nation's enemies hold love in high esteem too... but somehow, somewhere, I switched Gods from one who is love to a lesser God somewhere, somehow along the way.

But returning to this world- who am I to judge another man's pride? I was just like them... willing to kill anyone that anyone pointed me toward and call it "my duty." I would bomb the whole world for the honor of my President; I would have pushed the red button of doom to kill them...let them die for their country before I died for mine...even if it were just two seconds before...we all died... just as I saw in my return to earth...it was the end of mankind gone up in flames... but long after this even..love is all that remains..

Your letter about those soldiers who do what their country asks of them made me relaize that there are young men in most every nation who are caught up in something embedded in our psyche... a false perception of a universal struggle... If they could see that love is all that remains when this world is long gone...they would put away their guns... but in that lower part of our reptilian brain- that fight and flight response that tells us to avenge our injuries by taking an eye for an eye... and on some level this may be why... we...much of mankind...have that basic instinct for survival and it has proliferated into billions and billions just like you and me... only... when it is done in herds...tribes and nations... as packs of wolves... what once may have been a reaction to escape extinction.... makes men forget what is right from that which is certainly wrong.... and in our forgetfulness... we as a herd trample our own respect for the dignity of life...

In my youth, I once believed that only those just like me were loved by God but as I had children of my own, I started seeing the likeness of my children in those children of men I once thought were not like me. It takes a lot of training called brainwashing and perhaps the breeding instinct that comes from testostorone that changes those little children with beautiful smiles and dreams of dancing and laughing... playing joyfully with my child...into men who kill other human beings but wherever it comes from... I believe mankind must learn to discern the difference between the two voices both calling themselves God.

The God of the gentle child or the God basic survival and opression... which will we call God? But they choose young men to fight their wars as they are not fully capable of securing a mate when they make their decision to become the pawns of Kings and Presidents...CEO and Senators...and in this confused state of finding where they belong in the world... learn to obey the commands of the "true believers" of war... "Lifers" I was on my way to becoming a "lifer" before I died and returned from the grave.

Now today I know of a God who is love...but how do I say to a farmer's boy that his son does not believe in the same God as I? But on some days...we do pray to the same God...so I hold my tongue and walk on by....

rudi

rudi