[Oberon]

Sounds to me that you are, what we all have been and are, still formulating opinions and views on the world.

You are correct in what you think, and equally you are wrong, as am I, Skybird and everyone else who has posted in this thread since everyone will always have differing viewpoints.

I have a great deal of respect for Skybird, I don't follow his beliefs on Muslims, so we agree to disagree on that, but we share a lot of similar beliefs on humanity and its chaotic ways. He believes in sorting out problems here on Earth first, I believe that we have to have one foot on this world and one on the next if we hope to survive the next millenia. If everyone agreed on everything, the world would be a very boring (but perhaps more peaceful) place.


In regards to war and its glory, I naturally defer to those who have witnessed it first hand, but I understand what you mean. Many of us here play Submarine sims, like Silent Hunter III or IV, we are well aware of what the real men went through, yet we get a thrill of achievement when we finally nail that merchant on full realism (manual targetting) or when we finally evade that escort after six hours of trying to keep as silent as possible. We care little for our little virtual men and their psychological well being because it is a game, a well crafted game but a game at that.
I, in my lifetime of playing games, must have sent hundreds, if not thousands of people to their deaths (and yet I've yet to come across a sim that simulates the letters that you'd have to write out to the family), heck I even developed the nickname of 'Haig' during a certain murderous game of Men of War, but only sometimes do I sit back and think 'I wonder if that dead bunch of pixels bleeding in the snow there had a family?' because if I thought like that all the time...I honestly don't think I could play another game that involves people or creatures being killed.

It's hard not to glorify war, or believe in a form of romanticism of wars gone past, of the 'Knights of the Sky' of WWI, or other various acts of battlefield chivalry. It's hard not to do so because it's a much easier thing to swallow than the cold hard truth that war is about killing more of the other guys than they kill of you. You can wrap it in conventions, dress it up as a righteous cause, but the cold hard ugly truth is still there, and the reason we keep doing it is because it's in our nature, our entire history has been built up on achieving safety for ourselves and those close to us, that's safety as in, safety from violent death, safety from hunger, disease and thirst. So, we see a resource that someone else has, and we want it, that someone else got that resource through the same thinking as we have, so he doesn't want to give it up...and thus war is born.
I would dearly love world peace, I would love the only wars to be fought as those on computer screens...but it isn't going to happen, it would fly in the face of ultimate human nature, and so what we do is we get by how we can. For some that's believing in the glory of war, for others it's a duty, neither of which are wrong, for they are exactly what we make them to be, at the end of the day though, war is war, and it doesn't matter what we believe about it, all we can do is try to keep some sense of humanity attached when interacting with it, as well as staying alive.

Apologies for the wall of text, I tend to go on when I'm tired, thankfully I'll be hitting the sack in just over an hour so you'll have some reprieve from my words.