The Gospel and Geordie Shore

It has been a long time since I wrote a blog. This is due to the fact that I have been finishing my Masters Thesis. Now it is done!!! Handed in and everything!!! So now I am back and ready to look at life, the gospel and everything!!

Tonight I am home alone with a lung infection while my man goes out and plays a gig. That means that this lonely heart is flicking through the channels and wondering why there are so many crap shows on! I have hundreds of channels and nothing to watch!

Geordie Shore flicked across my screen and, like an idiot, I decided to kill a few brain cells by watching it. If you have never seen Geordie Shore a) don't and b) here is a short synopsis:

4 guys and 4 girls in Newcastle, England (also known as Geordies) are put into a flat Big Brother style and then they drink, have sex with each other, have dramas, and drink some more. It's quality stuff.

Maybe my lung infection has spread to my brain but I started to wonder why this show existed. Can that many people find this show interesting enough that it warrants not only this show but Valley Nights, Here Come the Geordies, and Ex On the Beach (all spin offs)?

The crazy thing to me about this show is the way that every single one of the members has sex with each other, despite having partners and/or sleeping with others of the team, and yet they all get upset about relationship failures. If one of the girls sees her man of the hour hooking up with another girl they go psycho with rage, but then do exactly the same thing back.

It made me wonder, what does the gospel say to people who live like this? How can Jesus reach people like this who spend most of their time drunk out of their minds and having sex with random people?

The funny thing is, I have quite a good insight into this as I was once one of those people. I like to think I wasn't as bad as these guys but the reality was that my life hung on alcohol and boys. 

What I recognise in this show is the desperation that all of these people have for someone to love them. Even if it starts with a one night stand, the reactions show that each of these guys and girls have a desire to be loved, to mean something to the person they are sleeping with. They pretend not to care when they get rejected or cheated on, but it doesn't quite work and they inevitably end up in tears or in a rage.

Ultimately, these people are lonely and desperate for love.

They fill their lives with alcohol and sex thinking that these two things will make them feel less lonely, make them feel loved. One girl said tellingly that she wasn't use to guys not paying attention to her so when a guy she liked ignored her she felt lost and confused. She has equated sex and sexual attention as love, and when that doesn't happen her whole understanding of herself and her life is called into question. 

The gospel would say to people like this that they are loved, that they don't need to give their body to find love. Yet, Christianity is not a faith that is based on extreme sensory experience. Faith does not feel like a drunken party, and being in love with Jesus is not the same as having someone sexually attracted to you. So faith can seem boring compared to a life full of sensual desire.

The challenge that we face in professing the gospel to a generation that is fuelled by drugs, alcohol and sex, is that we first need to explain what love actually means. We are speaking a different language to them when we say the word 'love'. To them love has always been used to get them into bed, as a way to manipulate. Love in terms of the gospel is the exact opposite of this. There is no manipulation involved, merely a desire to bring wholeness to a persons life.

So what do we do with that? 

I believe the first step is to live out gospel love at all times. Being Christians who get drunk or sleep with people outside of marriage is not necessarily bad for our own faith (though I would argue it still is) but actually shows people that our understanding of love through Christ is still not enough to overcome the sensual temptations of the world. Through our actions everyday we say whether or not the love of Christ is something that overcomes the world, or is merely something we profess with our mouths but not with our lives.

With people who spend their life seeing another, false form of love lived out, it is through our every day actions of real love that will show them a alternative that is worth living.

Too many Christians think that getting drunk and having sex with their partner outside of marriage is either ok, or not ok because the rules say so. But actually it is about whether or not the love of Christ is something we take seriously, that impacts our whole life and becomes a testament to a world that has gone crazy on its own desires.

Once we recapture what it means to be loved, then maybe we can start reaching those who are so desperate for it.

Perhaps it is when we start taking seriously the love of Christ in our own lives that this will start to impact the lives of those around us. We don't want to offer Christianity as a Jesusified version of a drunken party. We don't want people giving up drugs just to get high on the Holy Spirit. We believe that Christ's love offers an alternative to everything in life because it transforms life to the point where sensual desires are not the be all and end all.

I watch Geordie Shore and feel deeply sad for the young girls and guys on the show who don't know love and appear to have no one living it out in front of them. I pray that one day someone will be salt and light to those people, and until then I hope I can be the same for people I meet in my life.

Gaming Crisis

As many of you know, I have spent the last year working on a thesis about video gaming and Christian ethics (for related posts see here, here, and here). Apart from this meaning that I haven't blogged consistently for a while, it has also lead me to conclusions that I never thought I would reach. I am, in fact, having a GAMING CRISIS.

When I first started out on my thesis, I was pretty sure I knew where I was gonna end up. I am a pacifist by faith and by nature and the violence that I saw on video games haunted me. Watching my hubby and his friends play Black Ops together really use to bother me, even though what they were 'killing' was a) zombies and b) pixels. My first inclination was to run away and hide.

So when I started talking to hubby and friends about their gaming I was pretty sure that it was wrong. I thought it only glorified violence and killing and that didn't sit well with how I understood my faith and the person of Christ. I also just didn't think it was normal for anyone, no matter what faith, to enjoy watching others get killed, pixelated or not.

I was a student who started on research believing I knew what the conclusion would be. Hopefully I am not the only one who has ever done that.

Colour me shocked when I realised about two months ago that I was changing my mind.

Thanks largely to the work of Kevin Schut and his book Of Games and God (if you are into this kind of stuff seriously spend the few dollars to get this book, it is epic and so well written and easy to understand!) I started to delve into the world of Christianity and gaming and the beauty that there is in this art form. Schut, to my delight, didn't gloss over the difficult questions of violence etc, but rather engaged with it in a way that showed deep commitment to his faith and deep consideration of his love of gaming.

In short, his book blew my mind....and changed my thesis.

I began to seriously consider if I was one of those Christians that I had always despised. You know the ones. They are outside stores that are selling GTA with signs telling people how evil gaming is. I never wanted to be one of those people and yet my attitude was such that I was closed off to the idea that gaming could be anything other than violent and disturbing.

Meet my gaming crisis.

It is rather like a faith crisis, when you suddenly realise that everything you ever thought about the Bible was actually taught to you by a broken human being and maybe they didn't have everything right and maybe, just maybe, you know nothing at all about anything. That was my gaming crisis in a nut shell. I realised that I had formed my biased opinions on a small segment of gaming that I had seen and then blindly applied that to everything without stopping to ask if I actually knew what gaming was.

I was adrift in an ocean of gaming uncertainty.

To some extent I am still there. My thesis is not complete. In fact I am due to start writing my concluding chapters next week. Though I am excited about the discoveries I have made, I am also very uncertain that I really know anything about what I am trying to say anymore. All I know is, my conclusion will not be the same as I thought it would be.

I guess that is the nature of true research.

I have even started to game a little. I have started with Skyrim as my first game because of the possibilities that it offers. I am not tied into a particular character, nor do I have to engage in killing if I don't want to. It is perhaps a baby step, but it is something. This has come about due to the fact that Schut argues that you can't engage with a medium if you aren't involved with it. My friend Kent will be face palming right about now as he has been saying this to me for years, and I simply ignored him, so sorry Kent, I guess I couldn't ignore it when it was in print from a scholar of media haha.

So where does this leave me??

I HAVE NO IDEA!!!

Give me another two months to complete this thesis and I will get back to you. 

Just know, this crisis may end with me playing Black Ops after all.

Thesis Update - Halo, Skyrim, Heroes and Saints.

As you may be aware if you are reading this update, I am doing my Masters thesis on biblical ethics and gaming (see link here if you want the low down).

I love getting into reading and trying to take what people have already said and apply it to what I am thinking about. Yes, I am a nerd. I am doing a thesis on gaming!! I think NERD is really an understatement.

Anywho, I have been reading aaaalllloooooooooooot for this thesis already and am really interested by the ideas that are coming out. And as promised, I am going to share my musings with you lucky lucky people.

Got your snacks and beverages? Ok, let's get this thing underway.

A am currently totally in love with the work of one particular ethicists called Samuel Wells. Particularly his book called Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (which can be found here).

Mind blowing stuff I can tell you.

The overly simplified version of his argument is that "ethics presupposes context, and an understanding of context presupposes narrative; yet if context is to be understood as genuinely communal, and ethics as genuinely interactive, then narrative must be understood as drama." (59)

So what he is saying is that ethics needs to be for people in a time and place, and you only understand that time and place if you understand the story that brought the people to it. You with me? So if that time and place is for a community (not just an individual) and ethics is something we do (not just think about) then the narrative is not just a story that people tell, it is one that is lived out and one that ethics has an impact on.

You following still?

He goes on to argue that for ethics to really really engage with a community (in this circumstance a Christian community that uses the Bible as Scripture) then the Bible is not a text that we memorise and then act out, as a drama would imply. Rather, it is a story we immerse ourselves in to the point where we know it so well we can improvise while remaining faithful to the text, to God, and to our community.

Like I said, this dude blows my mind! Loving it!!!

So even though that in itself is an amazing concept, it is not what I want to look at today.

What I want to engage with is Wells' idea that secular ethics is looking for heroes, while Christian ethics is about making saints.

Bear with me, all will be revealed.....

.....now.

Well's talks about how Aristotle, the Father of ethics, talked about virtues as the way a character of a human should be, rather than ethics being about decisions we make in crisis situations.

Virtues = character.

He held up as the pinnacle of a person who had mastered the virtues the idea of the 'Hero'. The Hero is someone who is strong and brave. They protect the weak and use their strength for good. They rely on their own strength rather than on the weakness of others, and if the fail it is catastrophic for not only themselves but the people they are protecting. The best death would be one in battle, as it takes the most courage to go out and fight so to die this way would be exemplary. 

The Hero = Superman (Christopher Reeves style)

On the other hand you have Aquinas, one of the early church Fathers. He liked the idea of the virtues but he changed them around a bit and said that instead of heroes, the biblical values built Saints. The Saint is someone who is serving of others, filled with the fruits of the Spirit (love peace patience kindness etc), and the virtues help them to follow Christ. 

For the hero the story is about them. For the saint it is about God.

For the hero the story is about celebrating their strengths. For the saint it is about celebrating faith.

The hero will die fighting in inevitable conflict. The saint will die as a martyr because they refused to fight for they believe that Christ has already won.

Hero = Soldier

Saint = Martyr

So this got me to thinking:

What stories are games portraying? Who are they honouring, the saint or the hero? What are they teaching us is the better thing to be?

If you look at any game you can see that it is the Hero that is celebrated. You need to fight well, protect others, be strong and courageous. Death isn't really wanted, but you can rejuvenate and better to die in a battle that to not battle at all.

Gaming loves Heroes.

Because really, what kind of game would it be if the main character was a saint who didn't fight!!?? It wouldn't sell, people don't want to be that character.

And I think that is the thing that most interests me about all this. That deep down we all want to be heroes. We don't want to not pick up a sword/gun/laser and not fight. We don't want to be seen as weak and pathetic. And gaming latches on to that need in all of us to be the hero. We won't accept that maybe only a few people ever will be real heroes, we want to be it too!! We won't accept that in this life there may not be opportunities to be heroic, we want it now!! And we certainly don't want to be told that we SHOULDN'T be a hero, that it is opposite to the biblical message.

So where this has left me is wondering if there is something to being a hero in games that is redeemable. Can we live out of a belief that would have us be martyr's but play games where we get to feed the fantasy of being the opposite?

Can we reconcile the Hero of gaming and the Saint of the Bible??

The Perfect Woman (part II)

You would think that Christian males would have a different expectation from women than the world does (see previous post). Even though the Proverbs 31 woman would never exist (or, if she did would burn out within the year with all the things she has to manage!!) The interesting thing about her is that she is fundamentallya wise business woman and a loving wife. So I would expect Christian men to want women who are wise, are business women, can look after themselves and are devout Christians and loving wives. In fact, now I think about it, most of the Christian women I know are like this!

But alas this seems not to be the case. When was the last time you heard a guy talking about what he wants in a wife and saying "I would love to marry a CEO of a company, a really wise business woman"? Or "I would love to marry someone who was really good with finances and could bring in money too"? No, it is more likely that you would hear dreams of ladies on the street and freaks in the bed, or someone who will stay home with the kids, or even someone who is submissive to the head of the household. I have even been told in a church that I am far too outspoken to ever be a good wife. I grew up with a mother and father who would tell me to have my hair done and makeup on and dinner ready for my husband when he got home so that he wouldn't 'wander' (I kid you not).

So do Christian men really have a good understanding of what a woman should be or have they too be blinded by the media and pornography?

It is a sad day when I hear christian women talking about having to give up their political advocacy when they get married because hubby probably won't like it. When they are taught a very mixed and confusing message about what it means for the man to be the 'head'. Or when you hear them lamenting the fact that they probably won't find a pure christian man as most of them have been addicted to porn at some point or another and how they worry about how this will affect the males view of what they should look like or do in the bedroom.

When I read the Bible I find a God who honours strong and courageous women. A God that gives them dignity and respect. A God who values the sanctity of sex and marriage and abhors the use of women for sexual gratification. The examples given to us of women in the scriptures are all very strong and working to the best of their ability in an environment that would tear them down. Is it a coincidence that the first person to be included into the elect that left Egypt was a woman, a gentile and a prostitute? God does not advocate for women to be weak and spineless and to fit a mold of what she should look like. And frankly, if God likes strong, opinionated, brave women, is that not what his male followers should want as their partner?

It is hard being a woman sometimes, hard trying to fit in the world and hard trying to fit into a church whose saviour understands men well but never came as a woman.....but maybe that is a topic for another post

The Perfect Woman (part I)

Have you ever watched tv ads for men and women's fragrances? on the one's for men they will have an ordinary looking guy spraying on some body spray or another and women will literally flock to him for his smell. guy+spray=hot women.
on the one's for women the already skinny, pretty, perfect woman will spray on something expensive in order to catch one particularly hot male. woman+goodlooking+skinny+rich=one man.

You will never see an ad with an ugly or normal looking woman (what ugly or normal means is open to interpretation too). you will never see her with many men, as opposed to the men who have hundreds of women running to them for their smell. you will never see her in dowdy clothes, hair not done, in a bad mood or makeup not on. You will never see the man running to anyone less than a super model.

Or take chick flicks for example (the female version of porn yet far more subtle). the woman is always beautiful or is transformed into a beautiful, graceful woman. the jackass always ends up being a misunderstood male who just needed her help to find his way. She is always demure and more often than not, if she is in a high powered job, comes across as a bitch who needs the man to show herr some fun in order to loosen her up. she saves the man and he saves her. any arguments are brushed over with the man forcefully taking her in his arms and kissing her because all she needs is a man who will take control.

The perfect woman is therefore: skinny but a great cook, earns her own money but is never tired or grumpy, always has high heels on and never has sore feet, wakes up ith her make up on, is strong yet demure, is high powered yet has leisure time, dotes on her man and can put up with his crap with no complaint.

She basically doesn't exist.

And yet this is what we, as women, are being fed. And it is what men are bein fed to believe about women. I often have talks with my male collegues about the underlying sexism that is still apparent in our society and I either get a response that makes me out to be a raging feminist or one that tries to explain that its not really what men want either.

So which one is it? Am I being overly sensitive toward this issue? Or am I voicing what many people want to say and yet don't know how? And if I am, how on earth do we stop the trend?

For more info visit www.misrepresented.org