While it may be okay to designate those who command suicide terrorists from safe positions as cowards— if any position is safe anymore for those deadly strategists— describing the terrorists themselves as such, going willingly to their deaths, is intuitively challengeable.
     There’s argument though for calling even these front-liners cowards. Through religious indoctrination from an early age, most if not all are said to be convinced beyond doubt that rewards in the afterlife will more than compensate for even the ultimate sacrifice.
     Were they to actually believe this beyond any doubt— assuming that were possible— they would regard death as little more than a quick jog in bare feet through burning sand to a stupendous palace of servants and beauties that they would immediately own all to themselves and forever hence inhabit. Some courage. Anyone could do it.
     Not only lack of courage but outright cowardice, for they’d be skipping the trials and hardships of this world and going immediately to the great reward, with its carefree pleasures and easy wealth.
     Here’s the problem though with calling them cowards:
     Let’s start with the issue of doubt. No matter what a person does there will always be doubt. Doubt is inherent in faith itself. To have surety a person has to play devil’s advocate and defend a belief, in that person’s own mind at least, otherwise it’s empty.
     Even if a youth or group of youths was to be isolated from the greater world— assuming such is possible in this internet-and-movie age— that youth’s internal dialogues, mental discourse— not to mention conversations with family, friends, and classmates— would subsidize a degree of doubt, whether consciously acknowledged or not.
     For an individual with both a modicum of insight and some access to comparative studies the realization would come, albeit slowly perhaps, that religion was essentially a function of upbringing— for any given person the faith for that person is most likely whatever that particular individual was born into and had ingrained during formative years.
     This while learning that religions and faiths differed to the extent that not all of them— if even one— could be entirely right, not excepting in regard to the nature and even existence of an afterlife.
     While a person might believe his or her own religion to be true, such an individual would realize that if by happenstance born into another faith, would just as strongly believe that religion to be true.
     These insights would tend to foster at least a slight doubt about the inerrant veracity of that person’s own faith, including what will happen, if anything, after death. Such a doubt in turn would eat away at certainty of any kind of afterlife, much less the rewards promised.
     During the course of our lives the one object we are most intimate with is our own body. We know how connected we are with it in identity, feeling, presence, and soul. Death— regardless of its aftermath— involves the destruction of this body and our permanent separation from it.
     This alone should be enough to produce rational uncertainty. With rational uncertainty comes rational fear. While irrational fear can be overcome by knowledge, overcoming rational fear requires one thing, and that is courage.