But I think I’d have a real ethical problem role-playing in a world that was Christian-realist. – some dude on RPGnet
There are reasons why I find this odd.
Most gamers will play in a setting where some sort of religion is real. Think about it, this covers any fantasy setting which refers to gods from which player characters can draw magical power or where faith in a god has a direct effect (I’m thinking D&D, Runequest and Ars Magica here)
Ars Magica is certainly as “Christian-realist” as Testament. As are most of the World of Darkness settings.
As someone who would self-describe to humanism (note the lower case ‘h’), I don’t believe in any religions per se because I don’t believe in supernatural mumbo-jumbo that can’t be measured or experienced by me. I’m willing to subscribe to the doctrine of faith in science because a significant amount of science has been demonstrated to me first hand, I’ve practiced it’s lore and, perhaps the best reason of all, it is peer-reviewed.
Why would someone have problems with playing in a world that was Christian-realist?
Well, it has to be some deep seated bigotry there. Why else would someone have that reaction? Did someone persecute him? Or did he just look at the atrocities performed worldwide for the last two thousand years in the name of Christianity?
At it’s fundaments, Christianity isn’t a bad idea. It’s essentially ‘love god, and love other people’. It’s a social religion in that aspect. But like all good ideas, humans manage to fuck them up.
Testament, Creed and Rapture are all about how the GOOD people are gone. These are the people who lived their lives according to the tenets of ‘love god and love other people’. Chance are, these are not your common-or-garden Christians that you’ve come to know and resent. They’re not going to be holier than thou. They’re not going to be the sort who walk past a homeless person without giving up their coat or whatever. So in essence, the people who behave badly to others, Christian or not, are still on Earth.
It’s not a game about religion. It’s not a game saying that Christianity is right. It’s about saying that something has happened to the world and the truly good people have been taken from it (by God or aliens or whatever, it doesn’t matter). And it’s just the rest of us who are left behind. Someone in the thread mentioned a Left Behind RPG. I don’t really know what that is.
I think, perhaps, the poster was comparing Testament and Creed to the Left Behind series of books without any knowledge of what Testament and Creed are about. i.e. a bit ignorant.
I don’t know much about the Left Behind series either except what I’ve picked up in the media. It got a bit of controversy buzz when it was turned into a computer game. From what little I know, it took a fundamental approach to the mythos so that you could get points killing anything not strictly Christan, like Jews. Similar to the same controversy surrounding GTA games.
Why do I get the feeling that Dubya took that computer game very literally when examining the foreign policy of the US?