Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the authors of the Left Behind series, have made disparaging comments about violent video games. Now that they’ve got a violent video game based on their novels, though, they’re saying “It’s not more violent than the Old Testament.” Set the bar low, will ya?
(A “Christian hypocrisy alert” isn’t exactly breaking news, is it?)
If you call the Great Flood “setting the bar low”, haha– “c’mon kids, put down Wii Bowling, its time to set all of humanity straight with 40 days and nights of rain!”
Sorry about that, but I think ScienceBlogs is to blame… before my post showed up three times, all I was getting was a weird error message about the document not appearing on the server. Better yet, let’s point at Mr. 7000-fake-votes.
Ho! Ho! Fuqin’ Ho!
Ralph Waldo said it best:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Happy Hollydaze, Not Merry Christmass, y’all:)
We need a Christian non-hypocrisy alert — it would go off less often…
Off the top of my head, and assuming biblical literalism, the total headcount of the OT is about 6 billion.
You would have to play GTA San Andreas (one of the most famously violent video games in recent years) for about 10,000 years to equal that.
Yowza! Ed Brayton has got a very topical instance of Christian hypocrisy. The Discovery Institute, which is now trying to smear Judge Jones on cooked-up charges of plagiarism, submitted a published work to a law review that requires original content.
(sigh) No, it isn’t.
Okay, I derived 6 billion by assuming a more or less consistent population growth both before and after the flood.
The initial population in each model is as close to one breeding pair as makes no odds, and any greater accuracy would require me to either read the bible, research some halfwit’s opinions on the bible, or devote more than twenty seconds to the question.
I’ve had that quoted at me a few times by people who had just made a pig’s ear of something. None of them could tell me what exactly a “foolish consistency” is.
Having just re-read the original essay, I still find it rather unconvincing – something of a triumph of style over content. He hints at good points here and there. And if a foolish consistency is indeed an (excessive) “reverence for our past act or word” I can go along with him. But he then more or less encourages the reader to behave like a prat – much like the people who triggered this thread.
And when he includes Jesus and Luther under “every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh”, he’s well past his sell-by date.
Even leaving out non-enumerated massacres like Sodom & Gomorrah, first-born Egyptians, or the Flood, God killed well over 2.2 million people in the OT.
http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-many-has-god-killed.html
I can’t be the only one who is reminded of the “Simpsons” episode where Maude Flanders dies, and Bart plays a Christian video game with Rod and Todd… whose plot is *exactly* like the Left Behind game — i.e. “convert” the unbelievers. Of course, in the Simpsons game, if you don’t hit the unbeliever hard enough, he becomes a Unitarian…
I’ve had that “hobgoblin” quote thrown at me, too, when discussing foolish inconsistencies with believers. It was regarding a woman’s belief that every fertilized ovum is morally equivalent to a born baby, so I asked her if she mourned every period with a funeral, since, after all, there could be a dead fertilized ovum in it (she also didn’t believe in birth control…). Of course, she didn’t have a funeral each month, which to me said that she didn’t *truly* believe a fertilized, unimplanted ovum was the same as a baby, but of course, there was Emerson :P She believed it when it was convenient to her — namely, when justifying her belief that hormonal contraception and IUDs are a form of abortion — but not when it wasn’t (i.e. every month…).
Meh. Just more of the doublethink they’re famous for, I think.
Next thing you know we’ll have Christian porn videos: “Hey, they aren’t any less racy than the incest, sleeping with servants, coitus interruptus and rampant begotting of the Old Testament.”
Anyone interested can read the Wikipedia link,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrahasis, and see that the flood myth is another story “borrowed” by the ancient
Hebrews and put into the old testament. In the original story with Atrahasis, the flood was in a river, not the whole world. Rivers flood all the time, no miracles needed. In addition, if you read about the Sumerian god Enki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enki, you will see the old testament creation myth of creating man Adapa from the red earth, AND of being created from a rib, AND how Enki confuses mankind’s languages. Also interesting is that Abraham and his father, Terah, migrated from Sumer, specifically, Ur of Chaldees, and would have known of these gods.
The whole basis of the Yehweh belief is a “borrowing” and renaming of Sumerian religions and gods. The old or new testament bible has no basis in reality now, or in the past.
Well not wanting to defend the Christians on a secular website, but I don’t think they are talking about the actual violance but rather the reason or message behind it. I was raised in a Christian home and most stories include the brutal killing of evil men. But that is the key for religious people, they are evil, so it is OK to kill them (in a way). I think Tim and Jerry would try to point out that in games like GTA you kill for money or fun but in their game they likely to be killing out of neccessity.
I’m sure they don’t look at Doom or Quake the same way, yet the storylines of those games also have the characters killing out of necessity.