Re: [Audyssey] games and religion

[ari]

Good one Wil! But, I hate to really throw a spanner in the works here, but 
what I find interesting is, and I'll tell you guys why I think it's rubbish, 
but as a liberal Christian myself I find it weird how some Christian pastors 
who claim that somehow playing some games actually loosens evil spirits, or 
makes you vulnerable to becoming possessed somehow. This is especially so 
where I live, because in Africa many people have very strong beliefs in 
spirits and evil forces being able to influence the world. Like, I know you 
have them in America as well, the people who say you listen to the music, 
when it gets played backwards you get the hidden messages? I'll tell you why 
I don't believe the whole thing about spirits and games, because if it was 
so, Phil and Dark and everyone who likes and does fantasy RPG's would have 
been really mentally disturbed by now! You just need logic and balance. I 
won't say that elements in games could influence you or could disturb you 
mentally enough into taking up wrong spiritual practices, but it is for you 
to not allow that, like I would consider a game that had something like 
glassy-glassy to be uncomfortable for me to play, since I believe that is 
wrong in real life that is not something I would ever want to dabble in. If 
I think a game could be spiritually disturbing for me, I just don't play it. 
I remember, and this was even a long time after the Berlin Wall came down, 
in my defense I was only 9 years old, didn't understand politics and was 
very impressionable, but at school we had this weird old guy who loved 
teaching us, probably from an old sylabus written during apartheid gave us 
Life Orientation, and one of his favourite topics was the evil influences 
computer games had on people. They were iether introduced to the West by 
Leftist and Soviet Russian forces to lead us away from our Christian values 
through brainwashing, and some aparrently were openly from the devil, 
apparrently he claimed that there was a game where you had to go into 
churches and break things. It's disgusting to make little kids like that so 
paranoid and even a bit fearful, but I was lucky enough to have a great 
older brother and friends who told me that normal games are not like that, 
that games are actually good, and that, at that time you'd hardly ever see 
games with such disturbing and wrong themes for me in the shops.
Ari 


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