How about "I ain't fighting in this war because it is against my spiritual and ethical beliefs. But I will serve in your hospitals because it isn't against my spiritual beliefs to do that."

So I have to disagree with you DougR, and pretty vehemently, too. There are many, many people in the world now who have very strong spiritual and/or ethical beliefs, but who do not belong to any particular organized religion. I'm one of them. It would be no less wrong to expect me to violate my spiritual and ethical beliefs by making me kill people (especially if it's for any reasons other than the protection of liberties), than to expect me to violate religious beliefs for those reasons.

And I will take any challenge to my right to hold and honor my spiritual and ethical beliefs in the same way that a member of any organized religion would take a challenge to their right to practice and observe their religion. And by that I mean that I would not take such a challenge lying down.

The only difference between spiritual beliefs and religious beliefs in this context is the presence (or the lack of it) of a larger body that is built upon the shared spiritual beliefs of the group, and in some cases, the reliance upon a book or document of some kind as "proof" of the validity of the spiritual beliefs of the group.

Conversely, it could be argued that governments have a pretty wide door to go through when determining what constitutes a valid reason to send the citizens of their countries to fight in wars. I think it could be argued that the Vietnam War was entered into by the US on some pretty shaky moral and ethical grounds. The Gulf War also.

As much as I hate to say this, sometimes it's our own government that is the biggest threat to our liberties and to our democracy. And at those times, it's the ones who refuse to cooperate who are fighting in the front lines in the battle to preserve and protect the very qualities (freedom, liberty, democracy, etc.) that we say make our country great. At those times, it's the resisters who are defending our country and everything it supposedly stands for.