These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?" "Believe me, it would be ea… - Iain Banks

I’m just puzzled why I’m here. All I can think of is you still want to know something else. Or is this just the first circle of Hell? Do I stay here for ever being bored to death?

That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

The point is: what happens in heaven?"
"Unknowable wonderfulness?"
"Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change."
"Have you always thought that?"
If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances—and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse—then you don't have life after death; you just have death."
"There are those who believe that after death the soul is recreated into another being."
"That is conservative and a little stupid, certainly, but not actually idiotic."
"And there are those who believe that, upon death, the soul is allowed to create its own universe."
"Monomaniacal and laughable as well as provably wrong."
"There there are those who believe that the soul—"
"Well, there are all sorts of different beliefs. However, the ones that interest me are those concerning the idea of heaven. That's the idiocy it annoys me that others cannot see.