"Christian" Game Not Very Christian
Posted by: Greg Bulmash in Dangerous Thoughts, Politics & ReligionTwo groups have called for Walmart to remove a violent "Christian" video game from its shelves.
The game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces
Sounds cool until you get into the details. The way you battle the forces of the Antichrist is to try to convert them to Christianity... or kill them. Yes, folks, it's Resident Evil meets the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. Convert the ones you can, kill the ones you can't.
But it's not just teaching violent intolerance for non-belivers. It's also teaching anti-globalization, ethnic intolerance, cultural warfare, and worse.
The Antichrist just happens to be... the Secretary General of the United Nations, and his minions are primarily composed of rock musicians and people with middle-eastern last names.
According to the article, the president of Left Behind Games, Jeffrey Frichner, says that having the Antichrist's minions bear Muslim-sounding names is "obvious", the reason being "Muslims are not believers in Jesus Christ."
It doesn't explain why the Muslim-sounding members of the Antichrists ranks aren't mixed equally with Ranamurthas, Goldbergs, Kojimoris and other "others" from the billions of Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists, etc. in the world who don't believe in Christ. But even more problematically it expresses a very dangerous and frightening world view: If you don't serve Christ, you serve Satan.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, one of the huge buzz-phrases was the "undecided voter". Apparently in this Christian world view, there are no undecided voters, no moderates. You're either Christian or not, and if you're not, then it is perfectly valid to kill you and then wash away the sin of murder with a couple of prayers.
As many people (and t-shirts) have said: "The Christian Right is neither Christian nor right."
Bertrand Russell, in his famed essay "Why I Am Not A Christian" stated: "There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment."
That is also my big problem, not with Christianity, but with certain Christians. There is no way that the beauty of God's love and Christ's love can be reconciled with the pure ugliness of eternal damnation. No loving parent or loving shepherd could reconcile that either. When you punish a child, the idea is to teach the child, to use a brief period of negative reinforcement to stop bad behavior.
Making the child suffer needlessly or suffer pain or harm that is significantly out of proportion to the "crime" is considered to be child abuse. So if I am a child of God who has lived a good life, and He throws me into Hell for all eternity merely because I didn't give proper respect to His son... God's a child abuser. He's as bad as one of those scumbags you see on the news who broke a baby's ribs, punching it because it wouldn't stop crying.
Do I believe that God's a child abuser, that He's as bad as that drunken baby-beater. No. God is supposed to be immune to our weaknesses. The only reason for condemning an otherwise-good person into eternal torture is that you have serious anger management problems. But if God is supposed to be immune to our weaknesses, how could He have an anger management problem?
I've always been told that the New Testament represented a shift in mankind's relationship with God. It went from the world-flooding destroyer of Sodom and Gommorah to the kinder, gentler lamb and shepherd. It went from the God who made the Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years to a forgiving God who looked at your heart and understood that it's not easy being all pink flesh and wobbly bits.
"Accept Christ or suffer eternal damnation" didn't come from Jesus. It came from dark-age power-hungry upper-class twits who were trying to solidify the power base of the Church to get back at their fathers and older brothers who cut them out of the family business.
Despite the corruption of his message over time by politicians in cassocks, there's a lot of good to be found in Christ's words. But there's a lot of good to be found in a number of holy books, and there are very very good people in this world who are never ever going to believe in Christ.
To take the view that these people are evil or need to be converted is not only ignorant, arrogant, petty, and stupid, it is insulting to God. Anyone who buys into the kind of poison this game espouses needs to understand that when you do, the answer to "WWJD" (What Would Jesus Do) becomes "he'd beat the shit out of babies."
Is your savior a callous scumbag child beater? No? Then avoid this game and don't fund the jerks who would spread the gospel of Baby-Beater Jesus.
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Just wondering if you've ever read up on Islam or read the Quran?
Essentially God sent down many messengers over time, some with major messages, some with lesser messages. There were all sent to guide the people to the right path. The old testament was sent to the christians as one of the messages. Then God sent Mohammad to reveal the Quran to the people.
Essentially each version was a more complete set of rules which come in succession to each other.
Well enough of that if you care about learning the Truth, then researching is up to you.
BTW Thanks for the PHP Scripts
Loved the help!
I've read up on it, and Hinduism, and Buddhism, and a few others. Been a mythology buff since I was 9 and always found religious philosophy fascinating. I've read up on lots of religions and have seen how every one goes horribly wrong in the wrong hands, but is a beautiful thing in the right hands.
This has lead to the point where the only people I trust less than lawyers and politicians are prophets and their self-appointed keepers of the faith.
Islam has its beautiful notions and wonderful followers. It also has Wahabism, the Sunni/Shiite split, and millions of back-assward, impoverished, under-educated, superstitious trailer trash who believe whatever the latest power-mad mullah believes will further his ambitions.
Then again, so does Christianity. The one saving grace of Judaism is the Muslims and Christians have worked so hard to kill off the Jews, that even if it has the same proportion of dumbasses as Islam and Christianity, that's like enough to fill a meeting hall at the community center.