By Believers, For Believers or Others With Money
I hate Christian pop culture and the media it produces. Instead of the radical non-conformity that Christ teaches—the turning over of money lenders' tables and all that—money-grubbing regurgitators slap some godly lyrics on top of twenty-year-old, sanitized music and five-year-old logo design and peddle it to those whose faith is strong enough to believe they'll ride jet-skis with Jesus after death but not strong enough to listen to Britney Spears without the fear of losing anything more precious than three-and-a-half minutes of their lives.
That's not to say it's all bad. I rather like (to use music as an example) people like Sufjan Stevens and Pedro the Lion, who seem to be artists that happen to be Christians, rather than Christians who secretly believe that art—or anything that defines the new—is a threat. But I'm a godless atheist, so what do I know? Besides how awesome marijuana is, nearly nothing.
Despite, or because of, my hatred of bad art excused by good intentions, I thought this piece by Tom Leupold on Gamespot titled, 'God games come of age,' highlighting the 4th Annual Christian Game Developers conference, to be right up my darkened, abortion-strewn alley. At the risk of spoiling it, here are some choice quotes:
"The time is short. We don't know how long it's going to be until the Lord returns," Moore said. "If we wait three years to get this game out and the trumpet sounds, it's been a great adventure for me, but it hasn't brought anybody to Christ.
They're creating games like Dance Praise, a PC version of Dance Dance Revolution that features exclusively Christian popular music.
"We're thinking of changing things because the Christians and the Jews are so underpowered," Rapczak said.It isn't clear whether Christians would embrace a game in which a player could play as a minion of the Antichrist, and Rapczak admits there could be some resistance.
Anime-style characters roam a 3-D world, building up "faith" instead of magic power, allowing them to unleash the Finger of God or a Miracle.Why didn't they have easily-read faith meters—sort of a Heads-Bowed Display—when I was fighting on God's team?
There are a few Christians out there who agree completely with this sentiment-- I am one of them. C. S. Lewis pointed out that it is a better use of language to say that such Christians are "bad Christians" rather than "not Christians." Nevertheless, I think that this sort of thing is light-years away from anything Real-- that is, anything heavenly (to again quote Lewis; check out The Great Divorce).
I have a personal deep interest in how many people would be attracted to the philosophy of Christianity if all of the baggage were tossed overboard-- for example, all of the words that you only hear in church. "Baptism," for example, didn't originally have a special meaning outside of common usage. Only through isolation in a religious context did it come to mean something narrow.
Even the name "Jesus" has so much baggage that people are already in a frame of mind when they hear it. The same story about "Bob" might be compelling??
I suppose I should add what I think the unique contribution of the Christian Story is to the set of world-view choices: it is (IMHO) the best at telling us why personality/individuality is so great and how it can and should survive death. Other systems seem to approach the ultimate question with either resignation to entropy/Nothingness (eastern views, naturalism) or else a God-concept and an eternal destiny that resonate with those aspects of man that are fleeting even in this life (for example, a heaven with virgins dancing around you and other such pleasures.)
Speaking of Sufjan, i have been loving Illinois, (enjoy your rabbit, still my favorite) though i think it may put him into a more accessible realm where normals might start to catch on, and of course, the Jesus-Saves set, a friend in Seattle told me that there a number of them at his recent concert there.
Speaking of Jeebus, i once had a dream with a black female representation of a christ, it started off a bit strange (that is sexual, and i not usually having sex with that gender) of course that wasn't the focus of the dream, just the incidental before revealing herself to be one that totally understands and who was there to shine her cosmic glow in dark times. Still she stands out as my primary concept of not just Christ, but true enlightenment (not that i'm certain it exists in the first place). The Ideal she represented was far removed from the concept that Mormonism attempted to drill into me growing up. To risk a foray into hippy-dippyness, she was just there to illuminate matters, and in that light, everything was gorgeous. American christianity on the other hand seems to be rooted in sustaining naivete, and subjugating any personal insight into a group control mechanism, where everyone in that group depends on everyone in that group to stay in line, so that the emotional/psychological dependencies can self-sustain.
EXTREME mountain-dew christianity, seems to me to be just a bad marketing scheme on an already failed product, who's Creator intended something completely different. Instead of true iconoclastic, ecstatic, liberating, unfathomably deep, and extraordinarily intelligent thought, christianity (as is popularly understood today) provides shallow gimmickery, snake oil, and a web of shame, guilt, and fear.