Another socialist blog

Left Behind: Eternal Forces is something different: a right-wing Christian violent video game. Not something you see every day. Based on a fundamentalist interpretation of Revelation, the game pits players against the Antichrist’s team. You convert the enemy characters to Jesus, or kill them. There’s a good deal of killing.

You can choose to play for the Antichrist’s team, but that team cannot win.

The Antichrist is of course a fictional Secretary General of the U.N. His team includes fictional rock stars and anyone with a Muslim-sounding name. The game’s publishers piously insist they are not fomenting hatred against Muslims, which is about as convincing as George Bush saying his “crusade” isn’t anti-Islam either.

George W. Bush started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because God told him to do it, in Bush’s own words.

“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God,’ ” said Nabil Shaath, who was the Palestinian foreign minister at the time of a top-level meeting with Bush in June 2003. Mahmoud Abbas, then Palestinian prime minister and now the Palestinian Authority president, was also present for the conversation with Bush.

“God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …’ And I did.”

No wonder he used the word “crusade” to describe his plans. I wonder if God personally approved the torture and murder of prisoners, too.

Franklin Graham is in the news again. The Christian evangelist, who famously described the entire religion of Islam as “wicked and violent”, had this to say about Hurricane Katrina:

There’s been Satanic worship in New Orleans. There’s been sexual perversion. God is going to use that storm to bring a revival. God has a plan. God has a purpose.

Reasonable people could hear that and interpret it to mean that Graham thinks Hurricane Katrina is God’s way of punishing New Orleans. Even if you think God hates sodomy, this idea doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, since the French Quarter, symbolic if not actual center of “sinful” activity in the city, was largely spared by the hurricane. Graham denies the indefensible divine punishment idea in an interview with CNN. Maybe he just thinks that the hurricane simply provides an opportunity for gays to be made unwelcome, or homeless, in a reconstructed New Orleans.

As Kansas’ School Board stages a one-sided hearing on evolution versus creation (one-sided because the pro-science side refused to participate), it’s nice to have this article from Scientific American handy. It is aptly titled 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense (pdf).