Does the video game; Left Behind: Eternal Forces, scare you?

Question

it is a Born-Again Christian video game where you are fighting the antichrist in a spiritual and physical war. Basically, millions of Christians have been taken to heaven by God. There are millions of people left on Earth and you have been left to help convert the remaining people to Christianity. You can convert people or kill people that don't convert. Once you kill someone, you have to re-energize your "soul points" by bending down and praying.

How is this different than what we are fighting in the middle east? Is this teaching our children fundamentalist views? Is it OK to kill people that don't believe what you believe? Should I get my gun now to protect myself against Born-Again Christians?

I'm a programmer and I need to continue work on my video game where you are a coke addict. Basically, you have sex with prostitutes, rob banks, do drugs, and kill people for sport. I hope to have it finished soon. If the Christians can create evil games, so can I... Thoughts?

Thanks for the book free_spirit...no really. I'm really going to read all that cr*p. Let me start right now... Why do people even do that? F*ck sticks...people that leave 6000 words "cut and paste" answers are f*ck sticks...

Answer 1

I have not played the game. Have you? I only know I have read the book it is based off of and I do know Revelation from The Holy Bible. In the End Times, the only people left on earth were nonbelievers of Jesus. There will be a rule by the AntiChrist. The earth will be divided into two groups, those who choose to follow God and those who choose to follow Satan. It is a literal battle of good vs. evil. The Christians are not killing for the fun of it. The Antichrist will order all those who do not take his mark to be killed. It will come down to be killed or defend yourself. That is what the game has to be about. You are twisting it to suit your own agenda.

God still loves you!
Merry Christmas.

Answer 2

This is no way different than these muslim fanatics and their jihads. It is basically promoting the same thing.

In relation to games like GTA, kids KNOW it is wrong for ppl to go around stealing cars and shooting at cops because it is against the law and you will goto jail if you re-enact the stuff in the game.

On the other hand, you have this game, LEFT BEHIND. unlike GTA, people who are christian actually believe that one day this whole magical war will actually take place. christians actually believe it is true! It is already scary enough to live in america and live amongst a HUGE population of delusional religious people that think someone that never existed will one day come out of the sky and save all the people that believe in their religion, while everyone else is destined for torture and damnation. Now they have a game for their already indoctrinated kids to play that actually allows them to go around and slay the non-believers. I know it is only a game, but some people don't think so. Are they training people to be Christian terrorists?

Basically, games like the one you are developing right now is MAKE BELIEVE. It is just a game, while games like LEFT BEHIND have a religious/faith based motive which people can actualy relate to in their daily lives.

Indoctrination is very scary. When parents read their kids fairytales and the bible, the only way kids know that fairytales are n't real is because the parents TELL them it isn't real. If parents read fairytales and bible stories simultaneously, the child would not be able to distinguish between MAKE BELIEVE and REALITY.

Answer 3

I am a Christian and I think this video game is OUTRAGEOUS!

I have not seen it up close and personal but I have seen stories on the news and clips of the video.

Jesus Christ did not kill people who didn't convert or choose to follow Him while He was on earth!

Killing is killing is killing....period...to attempt to justify it in any other way is wrong.....morally wrong....and you're right, they might as well create a game where you are a coke addict who has sex with prostitutes, robs banks, do some drugs and go kill someone, and then "re-energize" your "soul points" by bending down and praying!!!! It's ridiculous!

Better hurry and get your game done before they steal your idea!!!

Answer 4

Wow? And people wonder why our youth are so eternally crazy...we tell them video games will rot their mind...yet our army and now zealot religious factions are making video games as a way of recruitment and training...

I wish people would make up their minds (our government is spending $90 million in anti-video game program...yet the Gov --army-- has a very advanced trainer at www.goarmy.com)

Christians say no to violence...but war against evil and those who aren't good enough to be saved? this is okay? Where's the praise-Jesus phone-line where I can call and give money so some guy with a shiney watch and his purple-haired freak-show wife can cry and pray for me?

I wish to place a mirror up for those who think this kind of mind-frigging is okay...and hypocrisy is only for others...I wish this would happen...hey, I know...I can make a video game waging bloody war on the evil-fundamentalist er, well....but then I would be just like them.

So...yes. the video game scares the poop out of me. People that talk about Christianity and make this game...getting rich of this game...while still judging others and calling them evil...this scares me even worse...

Oh, and the first guy who answered...what a wanker...get your own thoughts please, and just don't regurgitate what someone else said....you make me sick with your insipid prattle that isn't even yours...bastard. love Jesus and wave a-s-s clown

Answer 5

wow...i did not know the game actually has the "convert or DIE" stuff in it...see i thought the idea of the game was kinda funny and i didnt take it seriously since i knew it could never compete with other MAJOR games....not even close! but "convert or die" idea changes everything! sure other games are violent have sexual content...etc...BUT...because when people play games like gears of war or grand theft auto....people know its not real; kind of like watching an interactive movie. movies are fun...but we know theyre based of fiction. this game however is based on religious beliefs and people ACTUALLY BELIEVE in things like the revelations, antichrist, being left behind...etc. so thats what makes this game so wrong and SCARY. and the religious folks wonder why some people think theyre crazy.

Answer 6

Yes, to quote gamespot, don't hate Left Behind because its a Christian game hate it because its a horribly done video game.

The principles behind the game are common, we see this in crusades, jihads,etc. Why should that scare anyone? We can kill cops on video games for money...I would actually prefer to have a game were you can kill evangelical Christians...the last boss would be Pat Robertson!! I see your point of view and your rational logic will never penetrate through the thick headed evangelist person...

Answer 7

Part of me thinks that its not that big a deal - after all, we can car jack people and kill whores on GTA San Andreas....

But after consideration, I can see how this is much worse. Kids that play GTA understand they are playing a game and that car jacking and beating ho's is illegal. Kids that are indoctrinated into a faith ACTUALLY BELEIVE what they are taught and told... And, this game is in relation to their faith - so it gives them the false idea that killing someone who opposes your faith is a-ok. And that scared me...

Answer 8

Don't forget--you can also play as the Antichrist in said game and kill Christians.

Which I don't entirely understand. Wait...scratch the "entirely".

Answer 9

Well the game you're working on sounds like fun. HA! It really does, even though it's disgusting; I can't wait until it comes out. About the game that game that you're talking to, yeah, it sounds as scary as hell. WTF? Those games really exist? Did you make those? What the hell man?

Answer 10

no and here's why

Forbidden generosity.-- There is not enough love and goodness in the world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.129, R.J. Hollingdale transl.






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Christianity's Origin


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Christianity as antiquity.-- When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.405, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.

from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, p.23, Walter Kaufmann transl.


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Change of Cast. -- As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.118, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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Blind pupils. -- As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.122, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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Speaking in a parable.--A Jesus Christ was possible only in a Jewish landscape--I mean one over which the gloomy and sublime thunder cloud of the wrathful Yahweh was brooding continually. Only here was the rare and sudden piercing of the gruesome and perpetual general day-night by a single ray of the sun experienced as if it were a miracle of "love" and the ray of unmerited "grace." Only here could Jesus dream of his rainbow and his ladder to heaven on which God descended to man. Everywhere else good weather and sunshine were considered the rule and everyday occurrences.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.137, Walter Kaufmann transl


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The first Christian. All the world still believes in the authorship of the "Holy Spirit" or is at least still affected by this belief: when one opens the Bible one does so for "edification."... That it also tells the story of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive of souls, of a head as superstitious as it was crafty, the story of the apostle Paul--who knows this , except a few scholars? Without this strange story, however, without the confusions and storms of such a head, such a soul, there would be no Christianity...
That the ship of Christianity threw overboard a good deal of its Jewish ballast, that it went, and was able to go, among the pagans--that was due to this one man, a very tortured, very pitiful, very unpleasant man, unpleasant even to himself. He suffered from a fixed idea--or more precisely, from a fixed, ever-present, never-resting question: what about the Jewish law? and particularly the fulfillment of this law? In his youth he had himself wanted to satisfy it, with a ravenous hunger for this highest distinction which the Jews could conceive - this people who were propelled higher than any other people by the imagination of the ethically sublime, and who alone succeeded in creating a holy god together with the idea of sin as a transgression against this holiness. Paul became the fanatical defender of this god and his law and guardian of his honor; at the same time, in the struggle against the transgressors and doubters, lying in wait for them, he became increasingly harsh and evilly disposed towards them, and inclined towards the most extreme punishments. And now he found that--hot-headed, sensual, melancholy, malignant in his hatred as he was-- he was himself unable to fulfill the law; indeed, and this seemed strangest to him, his extravagant lust to domineer provoked him continually to transgress the law, and he had to yield to this thorn.
Is it really his "carnal nature" that makes him transgress again and again? And not rather, as he himself suspected later, behind it the law itself, which must constantly prove itself unfulfillable and which lures him to transgression with irresistable charm? But at that time he did not yet have this way out. He had much on his conscience - he hints at hostility, murder, magic, idolatry, lewdness, drunkenness, and pleasure in dissolute carousing - and... moments came when he said to himself:"It is all in vain; the torture of the unfulfilled law cannot be overcome."... The law was the cross to which he felt himself nailed: how he hated it! how he searched for some means to annihilate it--not to fulfill it any more himself!
And finally the saving thought struck him,... "It is unreasonable to persecute this Jesus! Here after all is the way out; here is the perfect revenge; here and nowhere else I have and hold the annihilator of the law!"... Until then the ignominious death had seemed to him the chief argument against the Messianic claim of which the new doctrine spoke: but what if it were necessary to get rid of the law?
The tremendous consequences of this idea, of this solution of the riddle, spin before his eyes; at one stroke he becomes the happiest man; the destiny of the Jews--no, of all men--seems to him to be tied to this idea, to this second of its sudden illumination; he has the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, the light of lights; it is around him that all history must revolve henceforth. For he is from now on the teacher of the annihilation of the law...
This is the first Christian, the inventor of Christianity. Until then there were only a few Jewish sectarians.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s.68, Walter Kaufmann transl.


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The persecutor of God. -- Paul thought up the idea and Calvin rethought it, that for innumerable people damnation has been decreed from eternity, and that this beautiful world plan was instituted to reveal the glory of God: heaven and hell and humanity are thus supposed to exist - to satisfy the vanity of God! What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man who thought this up first, or second. Paul has remained Saul after all - the persecutor of God.

from Nietzsche's The Wanderer and his Shadow, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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Christianity's Nature


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The everyday Christian. -- If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.116, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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What a crude intellect is good for.-- The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse origin, and that is why it is so capable of proselytizing: it always could, and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found, and always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning. It is not what is Christian in it, but the universal heathen character of its usages, which has favored the spread of this world-religion; its ideas, rooted in both the Jewish and the Hellenic worlds, have from the first known how to raise themselves above national and racial niceties and exclusiveness as though these were merely prejudices. One may admire this power of causing the most various elements to coalesce, but one must not forget the contemptible quality that adheres to this power: the astonishing crudeness and self-satisfiedness of the church's intellect during the time it was in process of formation, which permitted it to accept any food and to digest opposites like pebbles.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 70, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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The despairing.-- Christianity possesses the hunters instinct for all those who can by one means or another be brought to despair - of which only a portion of mankind is capable. It is constantly on their track, it lies in wait for them. Pascal attempted the experiment of seeing whether, with the aid of the most incisive knowledge, everyone could not be brought to despair: the experiment miscarried, to his twofold despair.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 64, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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The compassionate Christian.-- The reverse side of Christian compassion for the suffering of one's neighbor is a profound suspicion of all the joy of one's neighbor, of his joy in all that he wants to do and can.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 80, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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Doubt as sin.-- Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature- is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 89, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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Other fears, other securities.-- Christianity had brought into life a quite novel and limitless perilousness, and therewith quite novel securities, pleasures, recreations and evaluations of all things. Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment, recreation, evaluation! It even drags them into its noblest arts and philosophies! How worn out and feeble, how insipid and awkward, how arbitrarily fanatical and, above all, how insecure all this must appear, now that the fearful antithesis to it, the omnipresent fear of the Christian for his eternal salvation, has been lost.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 57, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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What distinguishes us [scientists] from the pious and the believers is not the quality but the quantity of belief and piety; we are contented with less. But if the former should challenge us: then be contented and appear to be contented! - then we might easily reply: 'We are, indeed, not among the least contented. You, however, if your belief makes you blessed then appear to be blessed! Your faces have always been more injurious to your belief than our objections have! If these glad tidings of your Bible were written on your faces, you would not need to insist so obstinately on the authority of that book... As things are, however, all your apologies for Christianity have their roots in your lack of Christianity; with your defence plea you inscribe your own bill of indictment.

from Nietzsche's Assorted Opinions and Maxims,s. 98, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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Christianity's Destiny



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Historical refutation as the definitive refutation.-- In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God - today one indicates how the belief that there is a God arose and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous.- When in former times one had refuted the 'proofs of the existence of God' put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 95, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care for ones salvation - all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.27, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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Destiny of Christianity. -- Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the heart; but now it has first to burden the heart so as afterwards to be able to lighten it. Consequently it shall perish.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.119, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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At the deathbed of Christianity.-- Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead - that is the best and most vital thing that still remains of Christianity. But one should notice that Christianity has thus crossed over into a gentle moralism: it is not so much 'God, freedom and immortality' that have remained, as benevolence and decency of disposition, and the belief that in the whole universe too benevolence and decency of disposition prevail: it is the euthanasia of Christianity.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 92, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


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After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.108, Walter Kaufmann transl.


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Bill Curry
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