Left Behind Beta Demo

Left Behind Games now offers the promised (prophesized?) playable demo for Left Behind: Eternal Forces, the controversial Christian-themed RTS game where you: "Join the ultimate fight of Good against Evil, commanding Tribulation Forces or the Global Community Peacekeepers, and uncover the truth about the worldwide disappearances!" Though it's not mentioned on the site, AOL Games, where the download is hosted, refers to this as a beta demo. Word is the demo offers four single-player missions and a tutorial.
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Re: No subject
Sep 2, 2006, 02:24
60.
Re: No subject Sep 2, 2006, 02:24
Sep 2, 2006, 02:24
 
If I may again be permitted to use the Catholic Church as an example, to quote from the Catechism

Personally, that sounds to me like the Vatican is trying to justify it's ability to arbitrarily reinterpret church doctrine to suit the needs of the Church. If history has shown anything it is that the Roman Church, like the Roman Empire before it, is run by consummate politicians. Where scripture has suited the needs of the Church that has been the justification for doctrien, otherwise there is always the ex cathedra pronouncement and papal bull.

Why should it be surprising then that they foul up a lot at the beginning, and discover a more "enlightened" (by our standards) set of ethics near the end?

By the end I assume you mean the New Testament, where we find delightful gems of wisdom declaring that the Jews are progeny of the devil:

"Jesus said unto them [the Jews], If God were our Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do do. He was a murderer from the beginning , and abode not in the truth, because there is no turht in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. ANd because I tell you the truth, ye belive me not. (John 8:41-45)"

or

"For ye, bretheren became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost. (Thessalonians 2:14-16)"

It surprises me then, that people who *do* choose to seek the value in it would "disgust" you enough to make these big posts about it.

My issue is that if we are only to treat the Bible as literature, which seems to be how you treat it, then there are far better works of literature to read. The Bible really only needs to be read today because of it's influence on our culture. As an instructor of morality and the human condition we have far better works than the Bible.

Man is a god creating species, but the modern world has outgrown the needs for which gods were originally created. Gods are a relic of our species past, when we needed myth to provide explanation and meaning to our lives; as a species we have always liked to at least think we know. I do not mean to preclude the existence of the divine, that is not something we can test or prove, merely that the conceptions we have of the divine are rooted in a time were muthos not logos reigned.

The great monotheistic religions are rooted in the paganism of the near east, particularly of the Canaanite and Egyptian Pantheons. The gods of both such pantheons were explanations for natural phenomenon. I live in the Santa Clara valley where to the west the hills are green and fertile and to the east the hills are brown. An ancient, ignorant of ecology and climate, would have said that a god of fertility must live in the hills to the west. Perhaps such a god could be persuaded to help the fertility of the ancient person's land. Ritual and cult would then develop around propitiating the deity of the western hills so as to make the farmland fertile. Over time a group of such gods would be formed. To the modern person it is clear that the gods are nothing more than the imaginations of a pre-scientific people. To the ancients however it was real, and one ancient people (the Israelites), having been heavily influenced by both the Canaanites and the Egyptians, would come to worship one god (Yahweh, an Egyptianized version of the Canaanite god El) to the exlusion of all others. In time exclusive worship of a deity would be translated into their being only one deity, and the rest being false. The groundwork is thus layed for the monotheistic religions.

If God of the Bible and the Torah and the Quran, is nothing more than a derivation of some dead Canaanite deity, then what is the sense in attaching any special meaning to him? How is he any different than the god of the fertile green hills to the west? We know that it isn't a god that makes those hills fertile; such a god was just the imagination of a human mind in need of an answer. God as we know him/her/it is no different. Science has made God obsolete for the needs for which he was created.

What about the meaning of life, you say? Yes, religion provides meaning for many people but again we don't need religion to provide meaning. If God as we know him is just a figment of ancient man's imagination, then the only significance that can be attached to his book is the book's worth as literature. Unfortunately for God, humans have proved to be far better writers. Yes, the world is much scarier without God looking after us and heaven awaiting us. But to face the terror of inevitable death and still get up every morning is what makes our species so remarkable. Meaning can be found simply in the remarkability of the human condition and how we continue to seek to better ourselves.

Only man can reason, it is what makes us what we are. When we apply our reason to the need for meaning, the meaning thus derived is all the more human. When we turn to a dogmatic belief taken on faith to provide us with meaning we are turning away from our species highest faculty.

I believe the fate of mankind is to evolve into a higher condition and escape from "the evil that men do". I admit that that is an issue of faith, but it seems to be that reason alone isn't enough to get us over that hurdle.

We all will die someday, and such knowledge makes it easy to give up. Yet most of us don't because we feel that each day offers us the opportunity to improve ourselves. That is the beauty of being mortal: we have room for improvement. If we existed for eternity we would quickly max out our potential. But as humans we don't have the luxury of time. Our time is finite and uncertain; what time we do have is luck. Each day therefore offer the opportunity for improvement as we will never be able to acheive perfection. Does this preclude the possibility of the higher state you speak of? Maybe, but to be perfect would be boring. For that reason we are better than the gods, and with reason we no longer need what they can provide. We do however need other people and it is the relationships we form within our community that is the source of meaning in this life that we can most depend on. Heaven may or may not exist, but the happiness we find with the people we love here on Earth most definitely does. The fragility of human life makes such happiness tenuous but if we can embrace the limitations we face, most importantly death, then we can accept such fragility.

I could go on but I've rambled enough. I suppose my point in all of this was that reason has supplanted the need for gods. God may or may not exist, the divine is beyond our capality to test, but in the end it really doesn't matter as reason has shown that it is the laws of nature that govern the cosmos and not the whims of supernatural forces.

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