Category: Evil

MAR10 Day

What does it take to be a hero? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

You work for a gaming company and you have been given a task. Make a new human hero to fight evil. Okay. You think this could be a fun task. So how will you make your hero?

If you want to make a man, odds are you will make someone strong and muscular. You will make someone who has a no-nonsense attitude. This is someone who can tear through bad guys without a thought. You could also make him a James Bond type who is smooth and seductive and quite the Ladies’ Man. You could make a fighting type like Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris. You could make a Punisher type who would blow away enemies or a Batman type who seems to excel at all of the above.

If you want to make a woman, you could make someone muscular or someone who is more sleek and agile. You could make her a bombshell so that she will stun any man that sees her by her beauty and make all the women want to look like her. She will likely be a great fighter, someone like a Black Widow.

Now let’s look at who Shigeru Miyamoto made.

Odds are, without knowing who this is, he hardly strikes terror in your heart.

Somehow he has taken off. Is he muscular? Nope. Skilled at weapons or combat? Nope. He is actually a little pudgy and his career is a plumber. His sidekick and brother, Luigi, isn’t much better. He’s trimmer and taller, but he’s usually also a coward.

Yet today, March 10th is the day that he is celebrated. It’s known as Mario Day. I tried to see how many games he has had, and all I found was that he has over 200. This is in about 40 years or so. We could say that would be at least five games every year.

Mario has done everything. He has been a soldier, a doctor, a go-kart driver, an athlete in most every sport, an RPG hero, a party game player, and of course, the regular rescuer of Princess Peach. You could pretty much take any game and if you want it to do well, just slap Mario on it.

So what does Mario have to do with Christian apologetics?

In our day and age, it’s easy for us to think that there’s little that we can do to change our world. We can look at Marvel superheroes and think “Yeah, but I can’t do those kinds of things.” Mario is our different figure.

“But he does have power-ups!”

Yes, but if you look at the games and even the TV shows that were made, those power-ups would affect anyone who used them. Princess Peach and Toad could benefit from them. In some games and TV shows, Bowser himself benefits from power-ups. Thus, there seems to be nothing that says only Mario can use these power-ups. If anyone else had these power-ups, they could use them.

What makes Mario a hero for us all is that he is us. Anyone can do what Mario can do. Mario has enough reasons to think that he is not a hero and yet, he keeps going and defeating the enemy every time. He is going against a villain in Bowser who usually has greater resources and power and a personal army and yet, Mario wins every time. (And somehow Bowser gets to play sports, ride go-karts, and play party games with Mario and his friends.)

And yes, sometime this will show up on my new channel. (Please like, subscribe, and share.)

Who is Mario then? He’s you. He’s me. He’s a guy that has a lot of heart. He just wants to go out and defeat Bowser, or whoever the enemy is, and rescue the Princess, or whatever the goal is.

We live in a fallen world and we often think we can’t do anything for the gospel because we are not as great as XYZ. That has never stopped Mario. Mario has always kept going and faced much greater dangers than many of us face.

Mario is a picture for us. We don’t have to work to be like him per se as he has no physique or anything of that sort. (Save his jumping ability) He’s just a guy with an ordinary job wanting to do something great.

I wonder what could happen with our Christianity if we looked at the world and said we just want to do something great and live our lives fighting against the armies of evil.

It’d be nice to find out.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

It’s Okay To Complain

Is it ever allowable to complain? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I have seen a few posts on Facebook lately about Christians complaining. There are two approaches people can sometimes make when someone is upset about how things are going in their life. The first is to say that someone else out there has it worse than you do. The second is to tell you to be thankful for what you have.

Now I am sure that odds are, unless you are in the absolute worst position ever in history, someone does have it worse than you do and than I do. I am also sure that like me, you have plenty of things to be thankful for in your life. I also do realize that in Romans 1, lack of thankfulness is a problem that even leads to the judgment of God.

Still, that does not mean it is never wrong to complain. In reality, we do not live in utopia. We live in a place that has suffering it. Bad things happen in this world. When they do happen, there is no sin in complaining about it. Go read the Psalms some time. How many of them involve the Psalmist complaining about his lot in life at the time?

What we are in some sense sometimes telling people when they are upset about their life is “Shut up!” This is not what we are told to do in Scripture. When someone is mourning, which can include complaining about their pain, we are to mourn them. When Paul writes to the Thessalonians, he tells them that when people die, we are to mourn, but we do not mourn like those who have no hope.

Someone could easily say “Don’t these people realize that their loved ones will rise and live again?” Yes, but it hurts right now. It hurts to have someone you care about and lose them for the rest of this lifetime. If your spouse or parent or sibling or friend or child or anyone else dies, you will be sad.

Sadness is something people have to work through. When i was in the worst part of my divorce, it was good to go to DivorceCare and be able to complain and share grief about what was going on with me. I still have friends from that group. We came together to share our pain and as a result we all managed to work through it better. There can still be times I call the leader just to share something that is going on and I am working through.

If people are in pain, you don’t want to tell them that they’re just ungrateful. That makes it worse. No one likes negative feelings, but it doesn’t mean we live in a dream world where we think they should never happen. Part of our current political climate is some people thinking they should never feel bad about anything. That’s just not realistic.

Of course, there is a time to stop complaining. Of course, we should learn to be thankful. The reality is that we have to realize still that there is pain. Life hurts a lot of times, and that’s not good, but it is acceptable to work through it.

If someone is complaining, one of the best things you can do sometimes in response is say nothing. Just listen. Just be there. There is a time to speak, but first make sure the other person knows they are heard.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Thinking About Villains

What makes for the worst villains? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Last night, I went to bed thinking about villains. I started going through some of my favorite series, namely in the gaming world since that’s the one I’m most familiar with, and started asking what each villain wanted. Let’s start with one of the first biggest villains we know of in this world, King Koopa, aka Bowser.

King Koopa wants to rule the Mushroom Kingdom and kidnaps the Princess regularly. However, something I thought about is that I don’t know of any time where it’s his direct intention to physically harm her. Mario never rescues her and she has claw and bite marks all over her.

Ganon wants to rule the world. Again, part of this involves kidnapping the Princess, and we can say the same thing about him. He might do something like put the Princess in a state of stasis or something like that, but no physical harm to her.

Now we could say that both of these characters wanting to rule the world is evil, but not necessarily. Is anyone wanting to run for president today and lead the most powerful nation on Earth automatically evil? Being president is a good thing. There is no evil in desiring something good.

The evil instead can be how we go about getting what we want, why we want to get it, and if we do get it, what we do with it. If you cheat to get into the White House, no matter how good what you do is and what your intentions are, you have done an evil still. If you have great intentions and get in office honorably, but you do a horrible job, you still have done a wrong.

J. Warner Wallace, detective-turned-apologist, has said that when a crime takes place, at least one of three factors is involved. It can be a combination, but at least one is involved. Those are money, sex, and power. Keep in mind that none of those three things is a wrong in itself. They can lead to wrongs and how one gets them or what they do with them can be wrongs, but they themselves are not wrongs.

In thinking about these aspects and went to my series of Final Fantasy and thought about some of the villains there. In the first one, Garland sought a way to live forever. Is that necessarily evil? No more than wanting to extend your own life is evil. What he did with it was evil.

One of the most recognizable villains is Sephiroth, and yet in his mind, Sephiroth was aiming for a good. He would have seen himself as the hero of the story and the good guys were the villains. This is something we forget many times. The villain does want something that they perceive as a good.

It can be a mistake to say that because someone is identified as the villain, that they are automatically evil. Is the villain of Ferris Bueller really a villain? He’s trying to catch a boy who is doing something wrong. The villain of Short Circuit wants to reclaim a robot that has a nuclear device in him. One of the “villains” of Ghostbusters works for the government and wants to make sure that the strange new weapons of the Ghostbusters are not dangerous to the public. This is common enough that you can listen to a podcast called “The Villain was Right” about villains in pop culture that actually had the right idea.

Yet in all of this, two villains stand out. One from the gaming world. One from the comics. Both are, however, incredibly similar. One is the Joker from DC comics. The other is Kefka Palazzo from Final Fantasy VI. Most of you are familiar with Joker, but here’s a picture of Kefka and you can see some similarities right away.

Kefka is an experiment gone wrong. He was a soldier the empire did their first experiment on to infuse him with magical powers and something went wrong. He got the powers, but his brain snapped in the process. Since most of us know about the Joker, I will give some details of Kefka.

Kefka is a ruthless general who looks down on everyone. People are tools for him. He decides to defeat a castle town by putting poison in the water. When his own men balk at that and tell him they have prisoners there, he doesn’t care. They got what they deserved. When the empire is marching on a town, Kefka tells them to destroy all of it. He is told the town is neutral in the war, and he still doesn’t care.

Kefka is a villain who actually does accomplish what he set out to do. At about a halfway point in the story, he messes with some magical artifacts that brings about the destruction of the world leaving it in a post-apocalyptic scenario. In the new world then, he lives on top of a tower and fires a light of judgment on a town whenever he just wants to. When the party comes to fight him, he says he wants to destroy everything and build a monument to non-existence.

A little about the Joker has to be said. He is the villain that wants to watch the world burn. He is Batman’s greatest nemesis because there is no telling what he will do. He is chaotic and does what he wants and doesn’t care what anyone thinks.

In relation to Kefka, there was a time when the Joker got 99.99% of Mxyzptlk’s power. The world becomes a nightmare as people are trapped in situations where they are repeatedly murdered again and again and Joker eats the entire population of China. The description given in The Dark Knight is accurate of Joker. Some people just want to watch the world burn.

Despite this, there are some things even these villains perceive as good. They never go and off themselves. Kefka says he hates existence, but he never shows any signs of being suicidal. Joker hasn’t had any time like that either as far as I know,

The reality is that everyone has something they still perceive as good and pursue it. You actually can’t pursue anything unless on some level you think it is a good. You could be wrong in that, but you do think it. Even the suicide wants a good. They think things will be better for at least them if not everyone if they weren’t around.

The reality of good and evil on some level are inescapable. Even a villain will pursue what he or she thinks is good. However, the most frightening ones are the ones that ultimately seem to think just some form of chaos is good.

However, there is still often something good that comes from this. This is the time when good guys do rise up. What it takes to stop evil every time is good. In our world today where we see evil seemingly happening more and more, we need more and more of the good to counter it.

From the Christian perspective, we have seen this before. The Roman Empire was not really a pretty place in many ways, but Christianity came and transformed all of that. There’s no reason the same can’t happen today. If anything, we should be even more capable today since we have more knowledge and means than your average Christian did then.

Perhaps we perceive something else as more good than the message we are to share.

Which could make us the villains.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Delayed Gratification

Is it important to wait? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

4,000 pieces of gold.

That’s a hefty price for a young man playing a game, but in the world of Final Fantasy at the time, that was a lot. Gold pieces were the main currency then and at the area of the game you were in, most battles gave 100-200 pieces. You would have to stay at the inn at times to recover which would cost 100 pieces of gold.

However, if you wanted to get the silver sword then, you had to pay 4,000 pieces of gold. Only one person likely in your party could equip it. The next most expensive weapon costs 450 gold. Still, there were other expensive items. A bracelet you could equip costs 1,000 and level 3 spells cost 1,500 to learn and level 4 costs 4,000 to learn.

(By the way, I had to look up the prices of other items aside from spells, but silver sword stuck with me.)

If you wanted to get this sword, you had to work for it. This kind of thing is something called grinding. Why? Just think of how your going to work can be called the daily grind. Some people do it just to gain experience to level their character up. Either way, most people don’t really like grinding. It’s very repetitive.

By the way,  I haven’t even mentioned buying healing items and deals like that for what can essentially be the first dungeon the party goes through in the game.

However, if someone engages in this in many a game, they are prepared not only for the next dungeon, but also for several later dungeons. Those who rush through because they just want to get on with the story are more likely to suffer and in the end, have to do their own form of grinding still when they keep encountering an obstacle they can’t get past and grinding can be much harder later on in a game.

Okay. This is interesting, but what has this to do with Christianity and apologetics?

As I thought about it, it came to mind that this is a lesson in delayed gratification. Consider this. How many problems in our society come because we do not like to wait? We live in an instant society. Everything we want comes immediately. We can put something in a microwave or get something out of the freezer or drive where we want to go and with the internet, we have instant communication. Paul would love to do in the Roman Empire what we can do today.

In some ways, that can be fine, but in others, if we think we have to wait for something, then we will suffer in the end for it often.

Let’s start with money where this started. How many people are in debt today not because they had to buy an expensive item like a house or needed emergency surgery that was really expensive, but because of out of control credit card debt? How many people just buy items constantly and don’t really think about the price?

I considered that my early habits in gaming came to influence my early thinking with money. I learned the value of money there and to this day, I make it a point to have money in the bank and be light with my spending. Because of that, when I do want to splurge, I normally can without much difficulty.

Recently, a friend gave me a pass to the World War II Museum here in New Orleans. I only had to pay for parking. When I was done going through the museum, I got to the gift shop which had books. I bought a couple of them there. It cost me some naturally, but I was able to handle it. This also after having a month where I had to go to the doctor twice for a really bad sinus infection after the conference, the second being a follow-up, and I currently have no health insurance.

Still, I have money in the bank and my money in savings I haven’t even had to touch since moving to New Orleans. I pay my bills responsibly and I use plenty of programs to get free Amazon gift cards and to get deals when I do have to go out into town. My parents were always frugal with money, but I think my experience in gaming where I had to save up to buy things and make sure I always had enough taught me just as much.

Not only that, but I realize that some of my money comes from donors. Thus, I want to make sure I honor the money that is given on my behalf. If you want to become a supporter of me financially, which is greatly appreciated, then you can do so here.

This also works in other areas of our life. Our country has a problem with obesity and most of us are eating not because we are hungry, but because we are bored. We also don’t want to wait, and why should we? We can get fast food which normally isn’t good. I think we all have experienced the event of sitting on a couch or chair watching something or playing a game and just snacking while there. We don’t move much, we exercise little, and what do we have as a result? Obesity.

Finally, what about sex? Who wants to actually have to wait until you’re married? People who went to school with my parents and get divorced are now living together before marriage. In their day in school, that was definitely the exception. Today, it is the norm.

We live in a world of one-night stands and a hook-up culture and why? Because why should we have to wait? It’s just sex. Not a big deal. Right? We say this in an age of single parents, unplanned pregnancies, STDs, and ultimately a miasma of meaningless hanging around us. The sexual revolution has been a disaster.

However, the option left is waiting and we don’t like that. Why have to wait? If you want something, get it now.

Maybe we should return to what I learned so long ago in Final Fantasy. It was hard to work and work and wait before I went into the dungeon in making sure all my characters had the best equipment and spells, but you know what? When I did that, we did much better than everyone else and were more prepared not just for that dungeon, but for every other later dungeon. Also, if I needed to grind again to buy better items, I did it again.

Patience is a virtue we don’t really have today, but we definitely need it. How many of our problems in our society could be dealt with better if we would just learn to wait? How much of what we go through would we be better prepared for if we just waited?

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Playing To Win

How do you approach a challenge? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I know someone here at the seminary who was sexually abused as a child and now has a blog helping others to overcome this. You can see her work here. I read a new post she had yesterday and I started thinking about my attitude as I went through my own divorce.

Something I like about her blog is the idea of describing herself as a brave girl and to let the voice of a warrior be heard. That is a definitive choice on how to describe oneself. She had to make a deliberate choice at one point that she would face what she went through, be brave, and be a warrior and fight back.

I wrote about this before in how I had to make a choice. It would be foolish to deny that the impact of the divorce when it hit me hurt me greatly. I would also be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt me still every day, but I had to make a choice and I still have to make the choice. Will I be defeated by it or will I overcome it?

In looking at Life Is A Game, this book has resonated with me because I had that attitude. Some might think it to be frivolous, but the reality is, it works. We are often told that attitude is a big factor in how one overcomes. If two people of relatively equal health get a cancer diagnosis and one is positive about overcoming and one isn’t, all things being equal, the positive one is more likely to overcome it.

If you’re a gamer like me, you know the idea of what it is like to fight a boss. You enter an arena and all of a sudden this huge hulking monster that practically dwarfs you in ever way looms over you. In reality if this happened to us, most of us would probably be in a total panic. If you’re a gamer though, you can get nervous but you also think, “All right. Let’s do this.” That just ups the challenge level. It actually makes it more fun.

Why not live this way in reality more often? When a huge problem comes our way, why not see it as another challenge to overcome and we’ll be the better for it? Add in also that in the real world, we have the promise of a God in our lives that if we love Him, all things will work for our good. I have referred to this in gamer terms as the ultimate cheat code.

My friend had to make a deliberate choice that she would not be a victim all her life of abuse but would not only be an overcomer, but also help others to overcome. I had to make a decision that I would not be the victim of divorce. It’s why I made it a motto of mine to “play to win” and why I am here at seminary working on a Master’s and talking to a therapist here in person to help me with learning social skills. When I have friends here who help me with various things, these aren’t just friends. These are teammates on the journey. These are party members who are coming alongside and helping me fight my battles. Of course, I help them when I can in return, but I can only speak of what it is like from my own perspective.

To my friends who have helped me on the journey, thank you. I still have friends back in Tennessee and other parts of the world and I consider them helpers as well, and this includes my folks who I talk to every night on my Echo. To all of you out there also facing your own trial, play to win and while there’s no guarantee with someone like cancer or anything else, you can still fight with all your might. We are meant to be warriors.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

The Use Of Entertainment

Why is it that we enjoy what we enjoy? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Last night, in the midst of some gaming and watching some shows on YouTube, I returned to thinking about my life here in New Orleans. I have thought about how our country used to be much more Christian than it is now and yet New Orleans is now known as a hotbed of crime, drugs, and well, we all know what really goes on at Mardi Gras, which should sadly be a Christian celebration. What has happened to this great city and how can we change it?

Then I thought about how it has been said before by G.K. Chesterton that fairy tales don’t exist to tell us that dragons exist. Children already know that. Fairy tales exist to tell children that dragons can be beaten.

Let’s start this with a subject I don’t care for that much. Sports. For the most part, the idea of watching sports should be that someone goes and watches these people on the field and then decides that they want to be like that person and is willing to work out and practice the game too. Now for some, this is impossible and they can remember what they used to do or dream about what they might do in eternity someday. I think of those with severe disabilities or those who due to an older age cannot play like they used to.

Completely antithetical is the picture of someone who sits down on a couch to watch a game and goes through a whole box of Oreos at the same time. This is not to say you have to be a fitness king, but if you do care about sports, you should care about your own physical condition. Sports should get you out of yourself.

With fantasy, it is the same, whether we are talking about old Greek plays, novels like the Lord of the Rings, TV shows and movies, or video games. All of these are meant to give us heroes to emulate and people that we are to look and say “I can overcome what’s in my life as well.” With sports movies, we often have the story of the underdog, such as movies like Rocky or Rudy, where we know that the team or player we want to win will be the hero in the end because they never give up.

In the world of gaming, we have the same going on. A player playing a game can see a boss villain they have to fight that is gargantuan compared to them. In reality, most of us if we saw such a villain would not bother to really try even but start realizing that our time has come. In fantasy, it is the opposite. You are even more certain that you can win and you try again and again and again. The size of the enemy doesn’t make it impossible. It just makes the victory all the greater.

So it is also with every challenge that we face today. The Greeks told their plays I suspect in the hopes of spurring other young Greek men on to greatness. Hebrews tells us a list of heroes of the faith in an effort to say “Be like these people.” Today, we tell stories of people, real and fictional, in an effort to inspire greatness in us.

That should be the purpose of what we do today. If we are captivated by the battle of good and evil on the screen or in literature, we had sure better be fighting it in our own lives. If we believe that the villain can be overcome no matter what, we need to live accordingly as well. It could be tempting to say “That’s fiction, not reality”, but as Chesterton again said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.” In fiction, the characters normally aren’t aware of a supreme deity watching over the story entirely. In reality, we should be, and that should change everything.

Enjoy the story, but also use it. If you care about sports, care about your own physical condition. If you care about the battle of good and evil, be ready to fight it yourself.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 7

What kind of freedom do we have? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

As an American citizen who was born here and has thus far never left the country, freedom is a big deal over here. It makes sense. The Pilgrims who came over here came in search of freedom. Our country fought a war in order for us to be free. We are called the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Many of us like freedom, but we don’t think about what it is. In Castronova’s book, we’re going to be looking at two different kinds of freedom. The former is freedom-of or freedom-to. In this, you are free to do what you want, within certain parameters of course. You are free to have an affair with your neighbor if both of you agree. You are not free to murder your neighbor, even if for some reason both of you agreed to this. (Perhaps a convoluted plot involving insurance fraud?)

This is a freedom we’re very big on today. A woman will proclaim proudly that she is free to have an abortion if she wants. If someone wants to do something that the world thinks is foolish, well it’s a free country. You want to go and eat donuts for every meal every day? You can do that.

Freedom like this is saying you are free to do what you want. Many of us value that freedom. However, there is a freedom that takes it a step further.

Aquinas spoke of a freedom where you can do something free from guilty, anxiety, and stress. This is not that you are free to do what you want so much as you are free to want what you do. It’s like the saying about a job. If you like what you do, you never have to work a day in your life.

What does this have to do with the book’s thesis? It has a lot to say about how we can try to cheat the system. Some will try to game reality to get as much as they can while everyone else around them loses. They are free to do this.

However, there are still some rules that cannot be broken. You cannot put $2 in your piggy bank and then $2 more and somehow have $5. You are free to jump off of a building if you want to, but gravity might have a word to say to you when you hit the bottom. You are free to commit some crimes, but your society might have something to say and put you in jail.

This also has something to say about suicide. You are free to do this, but once you do this, the game is over. Dead men do not play any games.

In our world, we often want the former freedom, but think somehow we can escape the consequences. If you sleep around continuously, you should be able to avoid pregnancy and STDs. You should be able to eat whatever you want and live a healthy lifestyle. You should be able to avoid studying and still be able to ace all the classes that you have. You should be able to be a deadbeat employee and still be kept on board and get a raise.

Such freedom doesn’t really exist. Every choice has consequences. There are tradeoffs with every decision that we make. Some are minor and inconsequential. Some are huge with major consequences.

This means that we have to choose how we will play the game very carefully. We can play as if we think we are an exception to the rules, but reality is under no requirement to comply to that. If we try to go against reality, and I contend that with transgenderism and the redefinition of marriage our society is very much doing that, reality will eventually come back and hit us hard.

We can say God is loving, and that is true, but even love does not mean freedom from consequences. Most of us have been in a position where being loving to someone seemed to be very unloving at the time, perhaps to both of us. It meant letting them suffer with a bad decision. Parents have to do this regularly.

Not only that, we suffer from the bad decisions of others. None of us is immune to suffering. For we who are Christians, it’s extremely arrogant for us to think the Son of God was not spared the worst suffering when He walked the Earth, but somehow we will get a free pass.

I would that every day I could tell you all that I am not divorced, but every day I have to face that reality and it still stings every day. However, under freedom, I have a choice on how to respond to it and my choice is to do my best to live every day and overcome whatever led to that horrible event and work towards my goal of remarriage. It would be great if I lived in a world where I am understood and I don’t have to learn all these social skills that I don’t get at all and seem pointless, but such is not the world I live in.

If I am to play the game well, I need to understand how it works and so do you. This is where our worldview thinking comes into the picture. If we choose the wrong worldview, then we will suffer for it. If Christianity is true and we live like atheism is true, then there are consequences. If atheism is true and we live like Christianity is, then there are consequences. We all must weigh out those consequences and go beyond more than just a strong feeling or hope that one of those is true.

I still choose the Christian side to this day since I am convinced that is where the evidence of reality points, but I know there are still consequences. I have to live a certain way. There are things I can want to do but I cannot do because of the decisions I make. This is something everyone has to decide. Say what you will about Pascal’s Wager, but every one of us has to make it somehow. We all have to say this is how I’m going to believe reality works and I will live accordingly.

However, we have the added difficulty that we don’t agree how the game is played. A few weeks ago, I had a get together over here that involved playing Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. While we all had varying skill levels, we all knew there were rules to the game and it had to be played a certain way. We could have made some artificial rules, such as my being handicapped somehow, but we would have agreed on those.

Our society can be difficult today because we have many vastly different views on how the world works and how to function in it. There are people today who still live as if the world is in a past era and that if you just say what the Bible says, everyone will agree with it. There are some like myself who agree with Scripture, but knows that not everyone else does and you need to be able to make a case from multiple fronts. There are some who think it’s just a book of fairy tales with perhaps some good bits on living, but nothing to live your life by.

And we all have to live together somehow.

This makes freedom hard, but this is how we are all playing the game. Every day we get up and face reality, we agree that we will play. Our job at the start is to find out how we think the game is to be played and do so to the best of our ability. We are free to do as we please to an extent, but hopefully, we will be free from guilty, worry, and stress, and live our lives enjoying what we do.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 6

Do we play by the rules? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Continuing our walkthrough of this book, we now come to a section about rules and why they matter. Many of us play games without rules every day. Nowadays, most video games don’t even come with instruction booklets. When I was growing up, those booklets were a treat. If I found my old instruction books today from the games i got, I would probably look through them just to reminisce.

A lot of games we play are simple enough that we don’t see a rule book. Most people have gone to a sporting event and understood what is going on in the field without sitting down and being told the rules of the game. When I was in DivorceCare and we had a get-together, we would sometimes go out in the yard and play Corn Hole. I never once read anything on the rules of corn hole, but they were simple enough to understand.

In our world, we also have rules for how to play the game. If you’re a Christian, you can find some rules in the Bible, but certainly not all. There can even be debate over which rules apply and when. A favorite of internet atheists is to ask “Well why are you allowed to eat shellfish” as if they have just given a devastating blow to any Christian. (And to too many, they sadly have.)

Also, we have to understand what it is that we’re playing the game for. What are the victory conditions. If you’re playing Mario or Zelda, it’s normally to rescue the princess. If an RPG, it’s to defeat the main villain and save the world. If it’s a puzzle game, it’s to get a high score or finish a certain number of levels. Of course, there can be overlap.

What are our victory conditions?

Like the rules of the game, these aren’t written out for us, aside from Scripture. C.S. Lewis once said that if a ship is at sea, it needs to know three things. Those are how to stay afloat, how to avoid hitting other ships, and why it’s out there in the first place. I still remember the first time I heard that.

I heard the first two and those made sense, and yet the last one was the most important one really and I hadn’t thought about that as something to think about. You have a lot of people today who are health enthusiasts and want to live a long and healthy life. There is plenty of information out there about how to do that, but where is the information on why to do that?

What about money issues? Plenty of people will teach you how to save money so that when you are in your senior years, you can have enough to live on. What is not taught is why you should want that in the first place. This is not to say that people don’t have reasons for wanting health and wealth, but how many people think about what those reasons are?

We who are Christians need to think about this also. Is our goal just getting to Heaven? Then you have the question of why not become a Christian and just kill yourself? Why not just do evangelism by converting people and then killing them immediately so they can get there? Internet atheists are rightly answering this kind of theology with questions like this.

After all, the going to Heaven goal gives us something to die for, but really not much to live for. If you think this world is just going to be destroyed, why bother trying to save it and take care of it? Someone like myself looks at the world and sees the darkness and does my best to say “Challenge accepted.” I was talking with someone within the past week about our city of New Orleans and told him that our city does have huge problems with realities like crime, but that just gives us a chance to shine all the brighter.

If we are playing a game and playing it to win, we need to think about these questions. How do we play it right and what are we playing it for? Without these, we will be less than valuable players. We might even lose the game.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 5

What kind of game are we playing? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I’m returning to my look at Edward Castronova’s book Life Is A Game, seeing as it was highly influential on my Defend Talk. At this point, he is asking what kind of game we are playing. We are going to be looking at three main categories, materialist, subjectivist, or objectivist.

For a materialist game, everything in this game is matter in motion. Suppose you see a drowning child and you jump in the water to pull them to safety. Did you do a good act? Not really. You are matter in motion jumping in to save matter in motion and goodness is not a material property inherent in the matter in motion. If there is any goodness, it doesn’t come from the situation itself.

Actually, Hume would agree with this. Good or evil are often ideas that we throw on the events that we see. We read them into the event instead of reading them out of the event. In a materialist universe, it is not real. I do understand that atheists and other materialists do have arguments for why they think moral truths are real and objective. I just find them all so far lacking.

What about a subjectivist game? In this, we make it up as we go along. There is no real game, but we act as if there is. The closest analogy that comes to mind is Calvinball. Calvinball in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip is supposed to be the game that has no rules.

To be fair, many of us can make up games for us to do on our own when we get bored. Many a family on a long car trip, including my own, did the game of trying to find cars from different states in the country and seeing how many you could find. Children with imaginations make up games quite easily. In essence, most every game we have here to some extent is made up. Chess is not built into the fabric of the universe.

That being said though, once the rules of a game are made, one cannot change them willy-nilly. You cannot sit down to play a game of chess and suddenly decide that your bishops can move horizontally in the middle of the game. Now if you and your opponent want to make up some artificial rules to change the game, you can, but they must be agreed upon.

However, subjectivism doesn’t work because we can’t just make everything up and if we make everything up, we can make up the outcomes to. There is no risk. There is no real way to lose. Besides that, there are aspects of the game we cannot change. No matter how much you protest, 2 + 2 will still equal 4 and no amount of complaining will change that.

This leaves us with an objectivist game. There is something real to what we are doing. There is also something that is real beyond us. This game is not just something material as there is real good and real evil out there.

How do we play this game then and what is the goal? That’s for another time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 4

What is a danger we don’t talk about in our society? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

As we continue our look at Edward Castronova’s book Life Is A Game, we come to him diagnosing a major problem in our world today. We are bored. Now some of you might be odd to think that is a problem. “What? So the remedy to the world’s problems is to just have some fun and all is well?”

Not necessarily.

Let’s start by looking at the problem. To some extent, we all know that he is right. I sit here in my apartment at the seminary. I have a TV with multiple streaming services and free services as well so I can watch virtually anything that I want. I have a PS4 and a Switch so I can play a huge multitude of games. I have the internet so I can find many more things to do. I have numerous books and I have a Kindle so reading isn’t a problem. I have a smartphone with even more things to do on there.

Even if you don’t have everything I have, odds are you have plenty of things. I wager still that you are likely bored sometimes. How many times have you gone channel surfing through streaming and said “There’s nothing on.”? How many times do you open up Facebook and just stroll for half an hour or so because you’re just looking for something?

Castronova tells us the monks actually had a word for the boredom. Acedia. It’s a restlessness in life so much so that just to get some excitement, some monks would actually put themselves in places of temptation. Acedia is a real problem.

We have that problem in our society because there is very little struggle. Our ancestors had to fight and work hard just to survive. They couldn’t go to the grocery store and didn’t have central heat and air and indoor plumbing and couldn’t go from place to place super easily. They didn’t have countless medications to treat most every disease out there.

And guess what happens when you play the game and it gets too easy.

I love doing math, which I’m sure is odd for you, but I would hate the thought of being asked to come and do some math problems, thinking it would be something complex, and get to a sheet of paper that just has adding single digit numbers together. Boring.

Now it could be there could be some degree of excitement in it if, say, I was put in a room with other math geeks and we all tried to see who could finish all these simple problems first, but the problems in themselves are not problems for me anymore. Without challenge, life is boring.

The same can happen in church services. I understand pastors want to speak on a simple level to reach everyone, but you can’t always speak on the lowest common denominator or the people who are not there do get bored. Yes. I get bored often in a church service because very rarely is anything new said.

Now to an extent, there is some good in this. If I stayed at a simple level in theology forever, my life would be lacking. I can even take those simple concepts and go deeper with them. Let’s consider the song we grew up with. “Jesus loves me this I know. For the Bible tells me so.”

Okay. Who is Jesus? He loves me? What is love? Why does He love me? The Bible tells me so? How do I know that’s what it really says? How do I know it’s reliable? How do I know it’s authoritative? Those simple questions can drive you endlessly into deep theology, but if you just stay on the surface, you miss that.

That’s just one of many reasons men hate going to church. This also ties us into quests. We need quests because we need excitement in our lives. We need to be challenged.

If we don’t have that, we fill it up with artificial entertainment. Castronova says that we have sex with one another as if wolves were about to devour our species. (No need for them to. Through abortion, we do that ourselves.) Whereas our forefathers would see sex as something pleasurable, yes, (Aquinas even said had the fall never taken place, the pleasure of sex would be even greater so thanks a lot Adam and Eve.) they also saw it as something deeper, a sacred demonstration of a covenant between two people and a revelation of God Himself. Turn on most any sitcom today and all you see is the pleasure principle.

We have a problem with obesity in our country. We often don’t eat to live, but we live to eat. We gorge ourselves and snack because we are bored. Many people on diets trying to lose weight are often told, and I think rightly, that they are eating not because they are hungry, but because they are bored.

Today, we have people on social media sites doing stupid challenges, like the Tide Pod Challenge, and while these challenges are stupid, note what they are called. Challenges. People want to do something risky. They want a goal to live for. They want something greater in their lives than just 9 to 5.

And often, we will invent grand problems so we can say we are fighting against a great enemy. It’s easy to talk about climate change and present it as a great disaster and then fight so you can say you’re fighting something. While I am skeptical of it, I understand that it can be fulfilling for people to have something to fight against.

Could this also be one reason why wherever the church has it easy, it tends to lose its effect? The church is growing in nations where persecution is rampant. Here in America, persecution is not yet rampant and yet people who identify as transgender, less than 1% of the population, seem to have more say than so many people that say they are Christians.

Without challenge also, it’s easy to wonder what we are living for. I have been pondering lately that could it be part of our educational troubles is our livelihood does not often depend on what we are learning. Do tests really help us learn? I don’t know if anyone has done the study, but I would be curious to see. After all, how many people study hard for a test and then promptly forget it all? They got the passing grade. How many of us passed tests in high school and now don’t remember what we learned?

Could this also be why gaming works so well? In 6th grade I used one of those geo-safari toys, I think that’s what they’re called, and got bored with North American stuff so I went and learned South American capitals. I don’t remember them all perfectly, but I know a lot more of them today than I normally would.

As someone who plays video games, I could still to this day turn on the original Legend of Zelda and go through both quests and find where everything is and beat the game. Did I ever have to sit down and take a test on this? No. I did it because it was fun and challenging and I learned.

When I first arrived at Southern Evangelical Seminary years ago with my roommate who I knew through TheologyWeb, we found we were doing quite well with our peers in knowledge. Why? Because we had been arguing this stuff for years online long before Facebook on that site. (If you want to debate my articles, go there also.) We had to know this stuff and it became a challenge. We used apologetics so much that we just knew it. We didn’t need to take a test on it.

When I was in Greek in Bible College, I did very well. Why? We had Parsons Tutor as our guide and it was a game of sorts and I would keep going through a lesson over and over until I got 100%. The challenge made it fun!

I am not saying this as someone who hates tests. I normally do great on them so there’s no reason for me personally to want to abolish them, but I am asking what really helps us learn and not just for the moment, but long-term?

When I am doing a game also, I voluntarily look up the information and research it. I want to know how to finish this quest? I will look it up. Back in the day also, something young gamers do not understand, we had to buy strategy guides and there was a lot of trial and error. There was no internet to look things up. We had to try again and again and work hard, but it was fun! When someone managed to beat a game, and normally that was me, the game prodigy, that was a cause of awe and admiration. What’s the result? I know this information long-term.

The prescription for our society then? Challenge. We need quests. We need to know what we are living for and why. Every man wants to provide for his family, but he also wants meaning and purpose. Wives will often want to provide and usually by being good housekeepers, but they also want meaning and purpose.

Christianity gives us that and we don’t know it. We sit on it not realizing our birthright. The Christian life is meant to be hard, but should it also be, dare I say it, fun?

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)