Train up a child

And today, a video game review.

This may perplex any who know me, because I never got the hang of Space Invaders and the whole point and shoot little pixillated people thing doesn't do a lot for me. But this one speaks for itself.

It's called "Left Behind: Eternal Forces", and it's on sale now, and I swear before God I am not making this up.

In "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" the scenario is that the Rapture has occured and all of God's Chosen have been lifted up into Heaven, leaving the rest of us to suffer the torments of the damned in something called the Tribulation*.

Anyway, you get to play as a foot soldier in a Christian paramilitary group, fighting to establish the dominion of Christ over post-Rapture America. From what I can see - and I haven't played the game - you get the usual high-tech weaponry which you can use to kill those who resist becoming Born Again.

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it (Prov. 22:6)." And he'll be able to afford some real guns. Good to know.

I don't know who the people who are shot are meant to be, but what I was taught - and there is a lot of overlap between the group I was with in my teens and the ideas in this game - the enemy was the Jews, the Catholics, the Muslims, the homosexuals, the evolutionists and apostates. I used to stand on a street corner and bellow about all this.

Here are actual examples of the kind of stuff I used to hand out, while scurrying commuters avoided me and occasionally shot me glances of what I thought was the torment of a soul unsaved but I now recognise to have been sympathy. So now you can read the stuff I handed out and be saved at in the comfort of your own home or workplace: the Gospel truth about whether all Catholics are going to hell, whether Muslims are going to Hell (hint - it's the same answer) and whether evolutionists are going to Hell (Hell is apparently fairly capacious).

Anyway. I have to go off and repent now. I think, from memory, that the apostates occupy a circle of Hell* relatively close to the atheists, sodomites and blasphemers, so I reckon I might be able to wave to a couple of you through the sulphurous fumes.

Actually, I just looked this up in Wikipedia, and it's more confusing than you might think - give it a look, it pays to think ahead, see what you should pack and so on. Depending on the rating scale the various demons use, I could end up in the Second, Sixth or Eighth Circles. A lot of what I thought of as the classical sins - like apostasy - don't correlate with any specific Satanic suburb or piece of Infernal real (or unreal) estate.

Maybe that's teh secret - commit sins that weren't really invented back then. If the infernal administration is anything like as slow as SMACHEADs, you might slip between the legislative cracks.

Anyway, apparently we get to see corrupt politicians immersed in a lake of boiling pitch. I have started compiling a list, but I'd better get back to healing the sick.

Thanks for listening,
John

* Attack by tribbles.

Actually, this kind of thing has always struck me as the worst of what theology can offer. It's the imposition not only of human qualities onto the divine, but of the nastier and grubbier of those human qualities. What you get in these cases is a fairly transparent and sadistic revenge fantasy projected up onto the Big Screen and thereby absolved of any moral responsibility. Like religious homophobia and racism, the believers can claim that it's God's will, not theirs that is being done, and thus the actions are unchallengeable.

Calm down boy.