Christian Guilds Article

T

TheChad1215

Member
I don't know how many of you have heard of/read Penny Arcade (it's a web-comic usually having to do with the gaming world), but they had linked a pretty cool article to their site today:

It was by 1up, another online gaming news site, and had to do with the existance of Christian guilds in online gaming. There's no direct reference to Guild Wars or anything, but it's a great article, I think. Here we go:

The Article!

See ya!

-Chadley

**edit** The article was actually in Computer Gaming World and then copied to 1up... just in case you care...
 
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yeah, Iremember reading that article before, but I didn't see the side article before. good read. nice to hear some people there I talk with and stuff.
 
It's why I'm here

I was actually reading that article and it's what got me looking for a Christian GW guild, and I found you guys. PA has over 150,000 readers (of which I happen to be one) and their mention of Christian affiliated guilds is a pretty significant thing. Their humor may be crude and, in some opinions, obscene but their hearts are in the right place. People who run a charity and use their clout with a community that wouldn't normally give (gamers) is like people squeezing some money out of rocks. Those guys are alright in my book.
 
Finally got a chance to read through the entire article, and found it pretty interesting.

This might not be totally related to the GW chapter and better suited for general or religious discussion (moderators, have at it), but I did take issue with a comment by Troy Lyndon, the CEO of Left Behind games:

"Many people seem to have this misconception that somehow Christian means nonviolent."
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"Misconception?" I dunno...I think his arguement is pretty weak, pointing to the violent old testament or Gibson's Passion of the Christ as proof of Christianity's...I don't know what. If he was going to explain a christian gamer's stance on violence in games or the apparent contradiction of being both a peace-keeping christian and some one who plays a violent game, I wouldn't have started off like that. Not with Jesus teaching followers to turn the other cheek or stating that those who live by the sword will die by it.

I don't need an explanation of why some don't find it a contradiction. I'm just upset that he chose to argue that Christianity is - what, full of violence? Teaches violence or is comfortable with it? - to prove his point. Am I off base here or what?
 
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ahh.. but Jesus also told his disciples to buy a sword...
that and turning to cheek has nothing to do with violence, but humility. slapping isn't meant to harm the person, but to insult. Jesus made no remarks regarding an actual attack.
 
Wishanem, welcome to these forums. Did you also apply for membership and get an invite already?

(Tough keeping track of who's who in-game from these forums.)

wishanem said:
I was actually reading that article and it's what got me looking for a Christian GW guild, and I found you guys. PA has over 150,000 readers (of which I happen to be one) and their mention of Christian affiliated guilds is a pretty significant thing. Their humor may be crude and, in some opinions, obscene but their hearts are in the right place. People who run a charity and use their clout with a community that wouldn't normally give (gamers) is like people squeezing some money out of rocks. Those guys are alright in my book.
Click to expand...
 
ArchAngel said:
ahh.. but Jesus also told his disciples to buy a sword...
that and turning to cheek has nothing to do with violence, but humility. slapping isn't meant to harm the person, but to insult. Jesus made no remarks regarding an actual attack.
Click to expand...

"Blessed are the peace keepers", right? "Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."? The golden rule (Treat others as you would have them treat you)? That sounds like non-violence to me, not just humility.

You're right, he did tell Paul to go buy a sword (Luke 22:36) for protection. At the same time, I don't think you could characterize the whole of Jesus' ministry and message as being pro- or tolerant of violence, can you? He taught peace and love.

I dunno...I guess I'm just a peace-nik and I just disagreed with that guy's argument. I think he could have done it better coming at it from another angle, one that was less prone to falling apart when questioned by a non-christian on the subject.

A better arguement would have been "it's a game", and each Christian makes their decision over where the line is on what's fantasy and what's reality. The Men of God clan only plays history-based FPS games, arguably more violent in it's presentation than Guild Wars, while we have no problem playing fantasy RPGs with Necromancers on the "good guys" team, who sacrifice blood to cast spells, something that would make others raise their eye brows.

To argue that violence has a home in the Christian faith, I think, is going the wrong direction and is misleading.
 
misleading, yes. but what he does is confront a stereotype that christians are against any violence and gore. sometimes it is necessary.
once example of this is when I was doing the small group for my church's jr. high group (I'm a youth leader), I was explain the crucifixition. one of the girls was freaking out when she heard what happened, saying "Isn't this Christian?!?!"

my overall point is, sometimes violence and gore is necessary. sometimes we need to defend people. sometimes peace keeping means fighting. what is so holy about watching your friend get attacked and doing nothing about it?
 
I'm actually a little bit put off in this article by the blatant misuse of statistics. It's pretty inaccurate that 75% of the country is a Christian. However, it is accurate to state that 75% of the country claims to be a Christian. This article assumes that anyone who claims to be a Christian is a practicing, church-going, devout and pious Christian, hence the claim that a large percentage of gamers are "actively religious." That's wildly inaccurate.

The statistics for this article come from the sole questions "Do you believe in God?" and "Would you call yourself a Christian?" These do not necessarily answer the questions "How do you connect with God?" or "What have you done for Jesus lately?"

As far as violence is concerned... there's no way to take anything that Jesus said to justify violence as a means to any end in increasing God's kingdom. (Archangel, you were mentioning that violence would have to exist in order to at least be able to explain what the crucifixion was, but that does not condone any act of violence on a Christian's part. Your arguments are slightly skewed for that reason) At least, not in the real world. However, we're talking about a video game world. If you look at the problem objectively, there are some who have more violent tendencies that would actually be affected by violent games. These are the people that should not be playing violent video games. If something causes you to stumble, you don't want it around. However, for those people who aren't affected by violent images in video games, there's no reason to claim that it would be a sin to play them.
 
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So, should Christians exist in a state of total and utter passitivity?

How about my son? Should I never respond with violence towards him? Regardless of your feeligns about it, corporal punishment is still violence.


Can violence serve the greater good? Or is it something totally and utterly wrong? Shall the Christian police officer or soldier, never raise their gun? Willingly throw themselves into the line of favor, with a proverbial song?





Truthfully, IMO, it's all a matter of scale. Christians are to be pacifists on a personal scale. If someone attacks me, then I don't attack back, defend myself from harm, sure, but physical attacks, are not the only attacks possible. But on a community or national level, Christians should never be pacifists. We should always strive to protect our family, our homes, our country. No greater love has a man, like that of the one who lays down his life for his neighbor and all that jazz.
 
Ok I see where you're coming from with punishment for our own children, law enforcement, and other such punishments. And I also agree with you that I should reduce my statement that "no Christian should use violence as a means to any end" to "Christians should refrain from violent acts unless absolutely necessary, such as to protect themselves or others from harm, and loving scolding of own children."
 
When it comes to the nation vs. nation, my country vs. your country, it's a tough call, for me personally anyways. At the church I've been attending, the pastor did a sermon on violence and he said that when you look at what Jesus said, he really did preach non-violence to the point of being crushed underfoot and beaten. What you do with that is up to you I guess, where you draw the line, but that was the preferred solution, according to Jesus.

Thankfully, people throughout history haven't followed this to the T. If good people didn't fight back, there would be no good people left in the world, they'd all be dead many centuries ago.

But I guess it's important to remember that Jesus wasn't giving instruction to nations, he was giving them to individuals. It's difficult, I think, to take something that's meant to be dealt with on a personal, local level and then extrapolate that into hard and fast guidelines for what a nation should do when faced with conflict. The factors of scale and complexity add problems.

Anyways, when faced with real life conflict on your door step and in your community, each of us will draw our own lines in the sand; whether to lie down and take it, do some kind of passive resistance or join in the battle, and I think there will be people in all those areas who are Christians who will think they're doing the right thing, and that line is probably going to shift from situation to situation, too.

Side note on the statistics thing: I think it's pretty hard to classify a Christian any other way than to ask them if they consider themselves Christian or not. Not you, not me nor the census taker will really know the truth, because we don't know a person's life story, what has happened to them up to that point in their life and where they are in any kind of spiritual journey. None of us can judge, only God. I mean, who's going to decide whether somebody's "christian enough" to make the cut? So, asking "are you christian" is pretty much all we got to go on when you're trying to classify people in the quickest, most efficient possible manner.

Irregardless of what exact stats the author was quoting, his point was that there are a lot of christians in the US and there are a lot of gamers in the US and somewhere in there, there must be an overlap, of which the ToJ, Men of God and others are proof of.
 
Agreed. There are members of the gaming community that are Christians.

Now, take the given statistic: 75% of the Country claims to be a Christian.

Do you really think that is true? How could it possibly be true? Because people, when asked, will claim to be a Christian. It's the "family values" view that many Americans take on, whether they actually believe in it or not. I guarantee you that it's an image thing for more than half of that 75%. You need to understand that the question asked was not "Are you a Christian" with that much weight in the question. I've looked into this statistic before, and the line of questioning is weighted to get a more positive response (and shock the world):

"Do you believe in God?"
"I would say there is a God, yes."
"And would you consider yourself a Christian?"
"Sure. I would say I'm a Christian."

I agree with you on one point: they don't address to what extent the person is a Christian, so there is no telling at all whether they actually are. But we all know that there are certain beliefs that need to be intact in order to claim the "Christian" faith. They're part of ToJ's charter. So what I'm saying is that the statistic quoted in this article is very inaccurate as a measure of actively religious Christians. The writer makes the assumption that everyone who claims to be a Christian is "actively religious." But the truth is, he didn't put each one through the real tests of belief: 1) Accepting Christ's forgiveness of sins through his atoning blood, 2) Belief in the resurrection of the body of Christ, and 3)God's rule and reign in both heaven and on earth.
 
yeah, I agree that the statistics are misleading.. but then again.. most quoted are.
alot of people claim to be christians, but really are not. there seems to be this misconception that you inherit religion from your parents, much like your ethnicity and the old junky car.

anyhow, in my defense:
Archangel, you were mentioning that violence would have to exist in order to at least be able to explain what the crucifixion was, but that does not condone any act of violence on a Christian's part. Your arguments are slightly skewed for that reason
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no, my statement about the crucifixition was to portray the stereotype that evend depicting gory situations is unchristian.

the only statement on violence I made was the one where your friend was attacked.
 
yeah, I agree that the statistics are misleading.. but then again.. most quoted are.
Click to expand...

What's the joke..."Did you know that 80% of statistics quoted are incorrect?" Something like that. :)
 
Hey, statistics are fun. After all, both water and oxygen have a statistical death rate of 100% (everyone who has died, has consumed both water and oxygen).
 
Not so, Kidan!

I can think of at least two people who consumed water and breathed oxygen and never died-- Enoch and Elijah. That would make the correct number 99.999999999999999998%. Of course, this is balanced by the fact that Jairus' daughter and Lazarus were both raised from the dead, and therefore died twice.
 
no, sry, the number should be way under 50%. keep in mind, there are more people alive today then there ever was before. and if they're alive now, they obviously aren't dead, leaveing with you a 7 billion number you ignored in your statistic...

now, we have proven our point about statistics...
 
Actually, my statement was more along the line that "Everyone that has died, had consumed water and oxygen, therefore water and oxygen have a 100% fatality rate."


This excludes both the living and Elijah and Enoch.



hmm...chuck norris.....Ok, how's this, Chuck Norris is a pansy.
 
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