Bizarre stuff on the Beeb’s website at the moment about ‘Christian Video Games’ which claims that Christian game developers are ‘taking a stand’ against the demonic forces of Doom and Resident Evil.

Even more bizarrely, Rev Ralph Bagley, developer of a game called ‘Catechumen‘ claims that what the market wants is…

“No blood, no guts, no gore,” before adding;

“What we want are emotionally full games that don’t just rely on adreneline.

But hey, lets not stop there ‘cos things are about to get even stranger as after a rambling preamble about early Roman persecution of Christians, the sales pitch for the game goes on to read…

“Catechumen is a first person action/adventure Christian game where your goal is to defeat the forces of evil, descending deeper into the depths of the Earth and rescue your captured brethren.

N’Lightning Software’s Christian Game: Catechumen
Rescue your captured Christian brethren. Your mentor and some of his flock have been taken hostage by the evil Roman Empire, controlled by Satan himself. The forces of evil and darkness will claim a great victory if he does not survive! Take up this quest and fight for the Lord!”

All of which amounts to -

Hey guys, fancy a game of Doom with the blood turned off? Look, seriously its ok? You’re still fighting demons like the in the real thing but its Christian, you see, ‘cos we’ve given you the Holy Hand-Grenade of Antioch instead of the BFG…

And lets not forget the ‘Evil Roman empire’ - what did they ever do for us?

All right … all right … but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order … what HAVE the Romans done for US? - sorry, couldn’t resist, y’know

This is almost as weird as the idiots digging up fossils and then claiming that the dinosaurs died out in the biblical flood or even that they were taken on to Noah’s Ark - there’s even a ‘feasibility study’ on whether Noah could have accomodated them all - only if they were ‘juveniles’ apparently, which conjures images of Kevin the Teenage T-Rex stomping round the Ark and complaining about having to clean out the Brontosaurus pen - and best of all, a Christian Theme Park which shows dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden.

My favorite bit in all this is this wonderful example of spurious logic:

“Creationist researcher John Woodmorappe has calculated that Noah had on board with him representatives from about 8,000 animal genera (including some now-extinct animals), or around 16,000 individual animals. When you realize that horses, zebras, and donkeys are probably descended from the horse-like ‘kind’, Noah did not have to carry two sets of each such animal. Also, dogs, wolves, and coyotes are probably from a single canine ‘kind’, so hundreds of different dogs were not needed.”

Errr….. right. Yeeeessssss!

So what your actually saying here is that Noah didn’t need to take two actual horses, two zebras and two donkeys, he just took two of their common ancestor…

…and the same goes for dogs as well. Never mind the whole business of wolves, coyotes, dingos, jackals not to mention everything from Irish Wolfhounds to the runty lite rat dogs like Chiahuahuas and Yorkies, Noah just took a couple of ancestral canines from which all these breeds and species are descended.

But hang on a second, here. If all Noah took was a couple of each ancestral species and not the full modern day set then how, exactly, did we get from A to B, so to speak, from a pair of antedeluvian canines to the modern day variety of species in all their glorious diversity?

Has God been popping back from time to time for a little carefully re-modelling? Has he been sitting their in heaven and thinking:

‘I’m fucking bored with having only one species of dog so I think I’ll just have a play around with a few new designs, give one or two of ‘em a bit of make over’

Or could it be, instead, that things have sort of evolved along the way of their own accord - which does tend to fuck up your whole argument just a tad and make you look like a bunch of halfwits, doesn’t it?

Whoops, there I go, blaspheming again… but I’ll get to that shortly.

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