Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Game at Church (Halo Game Used to Recruit)

[RamboLiberal]

First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace.

Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.

The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/us/07halo.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

A bit of hypocrisy at work here.

[bperci108]

1. Anything to get the unsuspecting victims close enough to sink the fangs into them...

And bleed their minds, their Joy of Life and their wallets dry.

It's par-tay time -- Let the brainwashing begin!


Gawd, I hate religion.


:puke:

[silverweb]

2. Disgusting.

The twisted rationalizations they use to defend and justify their hypocrisy are just unbelievable.

I'm sure that the boys are at least subconsciously aware of the moral diachotomy. They're not learning the gospel here; they're learning how to evade, objuscate, and make excuses.

[tomreedtoon]

3. It's not a "space" game. It's a "kill" game.

It's a first-person shooter game. There are four actions in it, pretty much taken in this sequence.

Shoot.
Kill.
Die.
Reset the game and start again.

It's a training system for being a grunt in America's future wars. Except that in real life you can't reset the game and start again.

And this kind of crap absorbs the lives of your children. Of course a right-wing evangelical church would approve of it. It trains the kids for what they expect them to do to the church's enemies. (I almost identified those enemies, but I'd get a lot of complaints from people saying that their church doesn't insist on the deaths of this or that belief or that minority group.)