Hedwig

Sweet! Sign me up!! Miller time!

...What?...What do you mean I have to put down Angelina Jolie?

Oh! I get it! Afterlife. Man...I can't wait that long...*sighs and descends back down into the gutter to wallow forever with the other unrepentant sinners*

Megatron

Same here... No way I would put off Angelina.

hinduwoman

well, I have read the koran. All it says about women is that good wives would go to heaven with their husbands. Nothing about their having any studs. Everything is for the men only.

As for jihad, it depends on what interpretation you put on it. For some muslims the bombers might be suides, from their own viewpoints, they are martyrs who have died killing indifdels. So it is straight to heaven.

Hedwig

No kidding. And, really, there's no real reason to. You've seen that girl...either there's no afterlife and hence, no point in putting her off. Or we die, go to hell...and let's face it, we'll be hanging out with her anyway. Only satan could create something that tempting.

lpetrich

I am unwilling to rule out suicide attacks as a matter of absolute principle; however, the targets of many Islamist suicide attacks are another story altogether.

Consider the case of Richard E. Fleming, a US WWII dive-bomber pilot who got a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor for doing a kamikaze-style attack on a Japanese warship when his plane was hit by antiaircraft shrapnel and caught fire.

Yes, he crashed his plane into the Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma toward the end of the Battle of Midway. His plane leaked gasoline, which caused a big explosion in the ship's engine room, turning it into a flaming wreck. That ship was spotted the next day, complete with the remains of REF's plane, and was sunk.

And the kamikaze squadrons are an interesting subject in themselves; they were controversial in the Japanese military, the controversy extending down to the lower ranks in the form of "madmen" (those very willing to let a mission end their lives) vs. "lechers" (those excessively insistent on staying alive). However, the resulting deaths were never considered the normal sort of suicide but dying in battle.

This piloted-cruise-missile strategy was accepted because it produced better results than the usual sort of air attacks, and because a kamikaze pilot only needs to be able to do basic flying, and not aerial combat or bomb dropping. Japan had lots most of its more experienced pilots late in the war, in battles like one that became known as "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot"; the kamikaze strategy worked around that.

All in all, something like 4500 pilots flew to their deaths; most of them were shot down, but enough made it through to seriously damage and sink several US ships.

And what did they expect after death? Mostly joining Japan's other war dead in haunting the Yasukuni Shrine, and perhaps even becoming war gods.

Sorry, I couldn't resist rambling about this subject.