Pensees: Ridiculous Contextualization

One of the things that jumped out at me (notice I didn’t say “surprised me”) was Focus on the Family’s position:

Focus on the Family, a large evangelical organization, said it was trying to balance the game’s violent nature with its popularity and the fact that churches are using it anyway. “Internally, we’re still trying to figure out what is our official view on it,” said Lisa Anderson, a spokeswoman for the group.

Sad.

Bob, I guess we need to identify what “violence” is before we can discuss such harsh criticism of a video game. This weekend we had a 45 on 45 paintball competition with my men against a local church we are helping plant. We shot painful projectiles at over 300 ft. per second at each other for 4 hours. We enjoyed each other, we connected, we prayed together. It wasn’t done to “reach” the unbelievers though many were there. It was done because it was fun. One person did ask how we can promote violent activities and here is where I can only be amazed at Christian ignorance. We are not really killing each other, nor imagining we are. We are playing tag with paint from a distance. “Violence” means to harm other people out of anger or for the sheer pleasure of hurting them. I’m sure some play paintball with the simple intent of causing painful sores on others, but saying the whole sport is wrong because of a couple sadists is horrible application of Scripture.

Halo 3 is a game of capture the flag, invasion of territories, and team based objectives. It is no different from live capture the flag, kick the can,freeze tag, football, boxing, or any other sport which involved beating the other side. It is a perversion of the game and judgmental to place on people a motivation of fantasy literal killing simply because they are playing a game.