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Game with God
Andrew writes "GamerDad has an article up about how religion is handled in computer gaming, titled 'Game With God'. The article features quotes from Sid Meier, Jane Jensen, Will Wright, Peter Molyneaux, Phil Steinmeyer, and Richard Garriott. Here's a snippet: 'While religion and spirituality add a lot to a game world, they often aren't used effectively. 'I don't think there are any games that treat religion at anything more than a superficial level,'; says Firaxis founder and Civilization creator Sid Meier. PopTop Software's Phil Steinmeyer agrees, noting that 'Religion is ignored in gaming, or if it is portrayed, it's wildly caricatured.'"
It's not like organized religion spends serious time contemplating whether the rail gun or plasma gun is more effective in eliminating aliens. Religion and video games are equally make-believe and there's really no reason we should expect either of them to address the other.
If you have a chip on your shoulder, take aim at Christianity. It's an easy target and you'll get applause from the gamer community for bashing. Every other religion of the world must be treated respectfully, though.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I don't think there are any games that treat religion at anything more than a superficial level
:)
Because treating religion seriously would be nasty and make the game banned quicker (in the overly religious USA) than any "DOOM-induced" real-life rampage would.
The article is clearly written by some retarded Christian (sorry for redundancy, folks). He even cites "and they even reward players with Biblical lessons and scripture" as one of the benefits for the 3D action game. Yeah, that's really deep. Of course, what can you expect from a parental gaming website?
Thanks, but the only kind of serious treatment of religion I want from games is that from the Painkiller where you can pin evil monks to the walls with a stake gun.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Philosophize until you are blue in the face, but the determining factor must lie elsewhere.
Brainwashing via parents and community?
Assuming there is an intersection of game producers and sci-fi fans, better leave it like it is.
Sci-fi usually has lousy depictions of religion, except when made by deeply religious people, and even then...
For example, Anglican CS Lewis' Space Trilogy - _Out of the Silent Planet_, _Perelandra_ (or _Voyage to Venus_) and _That Hideous Strength_ - are great, even if the last one is usually considered over the top. So is _A Canticle for Leibowitz_, by a Romanist whose name I forget.
Even if it never rises from commonplaces, Mormon Orson Scott Card's Ender books are also fair. Perhaps its picture of Romanism is too wishy-washy, either from his sympathy for Romanist Brazil or from fear of being seen as a Romanist-bashing Mormon, but it is not so bad.
Other than that, in otherwise well-regarded works like _Duna_ or Asimov's _Foundation_, religion is just some hierarchical, sacerdotal clone of Romanism.
Not to mention the worse I've ever seen, Arthur C Clarke's _2001: A Space Odyssey_. The movie is useless, the book actually finishes, and it finishes in a kind of mystical scientificism that had been ridiculed by CS Lewis 30 years before, in _Out of the Silent Planet_.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Dude needs to go back in time a few hundred years, go to the middle east, or watch one of those wild eyed preachers rant in tongues! That's the true face of religion. It is kinder and gentler in civilized societies because we're all too fat and lazy and bored and over entertained to really do what X religious text says we're supposed to. (Since there is no measureable cause and effect to judeo christian rules and regulations, people blow it off. and rightly so.) Jeez, watch people speak in tongues and tell me games are charicatures.
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If you want religion, go to church.
If you want to play a video game, play a video game.
Personally, I would like to see more video games that portray religion as the scourge that it is. POSTAL 2 does a pretty good job of portraying the religious as a bunch of loonies.
Why do these religious freaks insist on putting their hand into everything? They want prayer in schools, they want religion in Rock, now in games. Screw them all. Seriously, screw them!
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
9 out of 10 scientists say ...
..." yeah yeah yeah. Let me tell you something. There are no shortage of "scientists" (and I mean that as Hard Sciences, physics/biology/chemistry/etc..) that are devout religious believers either.
Who are these scientists? And what are their degrees? Are the Christian Scientists? Maybe their Scientologists? Maybe they just have a bad sciatica?
Groucho go home! Well I nevah!
In all seriousness I get a little tired of hearing about "my best friend is a scientist and
Some more devout than you would expect!
(yes I know a few personally, but then I'd be a hypocrite for basing my argument on that).
Believing in G_d is not a sign of mental damage. Though I do tend to think (this is only a personal opinion) that precluding the notion of a god all together is a sign of mental damage (at least psychologically). Since all the evidence isn't in yet.
Many great minds believed in G_d (in one form or another), and many of those minds are the ones you claim to be your intellectual forbearer's (Einstein, Newton, Hawking, Galileo). Don't get fooled by elitism. We don't have all the answers, and we are quite frankly overwhelmed by the sheer volume questions that arise(that arise on their own, not through inquisitiveness).
Finally there is more to life than whether a quark is cute or strange. There is an ethical dimension to our lives. And if some one, of grander or lesser intellect than ourselves (isn't that just so arrogant?) should choose a system of belief centered upon an ethical imperative (whether we agree or not) who are we to say they are wrong? After all, we don't have all the answers.
(disclaimer: If someone's religious beliefs include punching you in the face, there rights stop at your face)
I would rather be ashes than dust!
(and it's myriad strange side religions like Mormons and Jehovahs Witnesses)
Those are cults, not side religions of the Christian faith. They are sown in the roots of Satan, much like Islam or Buddism, that give people the appearance of belonging to some holy organization when, in fact, none of them are Biblically-based. Even the Bible says that Satan can appear as an angel of light.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
"when have you heard any non-fanatic religious person say "believe or die," or something to that effect?"
Amusing - defining the requirement for a "non-fanatic religious person". I suppose you can find one, but what's the point?
If you want, though, you can count the Catholic bozos who used to show up on Art Bell's show to promise "earthquakes and darkness" if you didn't "immediately bow down before God". These morons acted like Mafia extortion thugs. If they had spoken to me like that, I'd had beat their asses to a pulp for daring to threaten me.
The history of the Christian religion has most definitely been a study in "believe or die". Ask the Albigenses, the Cathars, the witches, or for that matter, the Jews. The latter is particularly amusing since Christianity was founded by Paul, a Roman double agent who hijacked the Jewish religion and used it to persecute the Jews in the name of their own prophet (who was a fanatical Jew who had absolutely no intention of founding a new religion, let alone one that would persecute Jews for his "execution" - which never happened anyway.) (Not that the Jews didn't deserve it, they were nationalistic assholes like everybody else in those days, invading their neighbors until the Romans, who were really good at it, came down and kicked their asses entirely out of their own country.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Well I don't know about you but religion is the last and only reason why biological science is being railed against and might take a turn for the worse, check out sites like www.arn.org and whatnot for the modern creationist movement based on some convoluted concept of "special creation" of the first cells (in Behe's case) or as some Old earthers in the movement would have it human beings. In fact religion is the cause of a lot of human division in the world where you have a lot of nutjobs believing entirely different things about the origins of humanity, the age of the earth, how long humans have been on the planet, how they got here, etc.
For people that might flame me I do not believe in seperating the bible from history there is no historical or rational basis in doing so I do not subscribe to "different models" of faith (as seen here: Faith and reason - Internet encyclopedia of philosophy that were created because we found out that the earth was old and the bible's history is not history at all. Before scientific times this could be somewhat excused as a culture needs to have some worldview base/common values, history and culture but it's not now.
ID is based off an incorrect and outdated worldview unless you really believe God did the whole job in 6 days a few thousand years ago, global flood, noah's ark and all that (Local flooders: if the flood was local why not just have Noah and animals move, or warp him some place also why does the biblical god a good 99% of the time use nature (or something) as an intermediary to destroy human beings, esp when it's claimed that as god you're omnipotent and have full control over matter/nature's laws?).
Also I want everyone to look up Mathew 8:30-34 you can check out this website. Effectively disproving 1) The notion that Jesus is god (either you believe demon beings exist and cause disease/unnatural/violent behaviour, or christ is not god as god would know such things don't exist) 2) Christ promotes and endorses superstition and ignorance he actually 'plays along' with the excorcism if you don't believe in demons, which is tantamount to lying and bearing false witness which disqualifies him as the Son of god (since lying is a sin!). 3) If he was really the son of god and had eternal life he would have stuck around to make the world a better place, the christians rationalized his death away in the gospels because they lived in hopeless and harsh times, in short they were deluded.
Finally even the OT and gospel authors conclude those who dont view the bible as historical in it's entirety on fundamentals (i.e. the first chapters of genesis, creation of adam and eve, the fall, the origin of death in humanity through 'great gran-daddy'adam's disobedience). Don't take my word for it paul's whole basis for the christian religion was that it was rooted in reality and history (or so he thought anyway). Here's the bible characters own own words on his stance towards the OT (the 'bible' before the gospels were written).
"Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
"Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
"As by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men - . . death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression... [I]For if by one man's offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ".[/I] - Please notice the contrast taking place here it spells it out in HUGE LETTERS that the origin of physical death is rooted in adam not evolution or progressive creation.
See problems with non-literal or theistic evolutionist interpretations of the