We Will Remember Them...(a not so ordinary memorial)

Today in NZ it is the 12th of September but in Americaland it is the 11th. September 11. Will that day ever mean anything else except death and fear?

I remember being at school on this day 12 years ago (has it really been that long) and hearing, incorrectly, that America had been bombed. The rest of the day went out the window as we sat in our classes glued to the tv watching repeats of the crashes, then people jumping out of windows to escape the fire. The images are burned into my memory and still make me feel physically ill.

Years on now and my view on this historic event has changed. 

It is still disgusting, barbaric and gut wrenching.

It is still a day that is worth remembering.

But as my understanding of world politics has grown so has my compassion for people that I never thought I would have compassion for.

So today I would like to add my own memorial.

"WE WILL REMEMBER THEM"

Today as we remember the planes crashing into buildings I choose to remember the plane hijackers who chose to kill innocent people. I choose to remember all those who have been subjected to brainwashing and have hurt themselves and others in a deluded attempt to do the right thing. I choose to remember their hate, and I chosoe to forgive it as Christ forgave those who nailed him to a tree and then jeered at him as he died.

As we remember the flames that burned with enough force to melt a building I choose to remember those in every country who have burned in the fires of war and terror. I choose to remember Americans, Afghani's, Iraqians, Iranian, Syrians, Pakistanis, African and South American Nations, and every other people, person, mother, child, father, brother, sister, wife, husband who has instigated or been the victim of war and hatred. I choose to pray for those who kill and those who are killed that the justice of God might be known throughout the world and God's peace may reign over all.

As we remember those that were crushed in buildings that came down on top of them, I choose to remember those that see their way of life destroyed in front of them and have no money to rebuild. I choose to remember those that are poor and helpless and do not have an economy or a government that will help them with medical costs and welfare. I choose to remember the parents who watch their children starve because they have been forgotten by the people with money and power. I pray that they may know that God is with them in their suffering, that Jesus suffered as they suffered, that he had no home or income and that he loves them and will wipe their tears from their eyes.

As we remember the nationalism that swept America after the fateful events of September 11 I choose to remember those that are in nations that use nationalism to wage wars and incite the people to hatred. I choose to remember the conditions and environments that breed young people and teach them to hate those from other countries and different religions. I remember those that have never heard of the gospel of peace and instead chose revenge and murder. I pray that God will forgive them, and that they will learn to turn from what they do.

I will remember them.

All of them.

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??

Act of Murder

I just walked out of a movie.

I don't do this often, as I usually am interested in what a movie has to say, even if I don't agree with it.

The one I walked out of however made me so angry that I couldn't stand to watch it anymore.

The movie is called "Act of Valor" and is about real life situations that the Navy Seals have found themselves in. Though I respect the fact that the Seals are the elite of the elite and they have fine tuned their craft until it is an artwork, the fact that their artwork is that of death is something that I find hard to swallow.

In the movie one of the situations is an extraction of a CIA agent that has been captured and is being tortured. The agent is a young woman and will no doubt be tortured until death. The Seals have to infiltrate and extract the woman.

They efficiently get the woman out but in doing so kill many of the workers on the other side. Do I agree with the fact that they were torturing a woman? No at all! But do I think that somehow the Seals are justified in killing people for one of their own people? No!

I find war, or violence between countries, the height of hypocrisy. We tell someone that they are not right in hurting our people so we spy on them. They say we have no right to spy on them so they capture the spy. We say they have no right to capture our spy so we kill untold numbers of their people to get our spy back. They retaliate to the killing of their people...and so it goes on.

Martin Luther King Jnr said once that you cannot murder murder, you cannot stop violence with violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness, only light can do that. 

Too often the ideas of 'an eye for an eye' are taken to the extreme on a world stage to the point where even Christians think that it is noble and right to fight and kill others for the sake of the ones they love and protect?

What about the family of the person you are killing? What about the fear/anger/passion they are fighting with/for? How can you justify their death if it means saving your own?

Jesus taught us to forgive our enemies. If we take that from not just in our own lives but to a global stage, then forgiveness and love cannot lead to violence! They cannot co-exist! How can you shoot someone whom you love and whom you have forgiven? Even if it means the death of those you love? Even if it means your own life?

No one life is better than another, even if that life has been used to hurt and manipulate and destroy. Even if that person's actions are evil, who are we to judge whether or not they should die? Is that not for God to decide? Is it not good enough to live out of Jesus' words to love and to forgive?

As I watched the movie I was struck by the amount of money and effort that is put into making machines that sole purpose is to seek and kill people. It made me think about how that money could be used to support countries where most terrorists are made. If there was nutrition, schooling, safety then maybe less children would grow up with so much hate that they needed to kill. Maybe their parents would teach them to hate others but to love those that helped them.

I see no justification for money and people to be used to kill others. I see no justification for war of any kind. I see no correlation between the story of the Bible and violence. I would give my life to stop others being hurt, but I would never take another's or kid myself that by doing so somehow I would achieve peace through violence.

God has left the Temple

When I was a young girl, maybe around ten, I started what can only be called an obsession. I don't know what triggered it but I can say that every time from that age on when I saw articles or pictures about this topic I would collect them. My mother worried about my fascination, thinking it wasn't healthy for a young girl to be so interested in something so complex, and at times dark, but I kept going. To this day I follow what I can. My obsession is with

The Israel/Palestine Conflict.

I know, not really a usual interest for a young child but something about the fact that no one could agree on what was happening or who was right capture my mind and I have found it only more interesting as I have aged (though I am now aware of the fact that propaganda plays a major part).

The thing that I never really understood was the rest of the world getting so involved in the issues of this small country. America was the mediator (many times) between the two states and tried to help them come to peace. I always have thought, what business is it of theirs?? It isn't their land so why do they butt in an expected the two warring countries to listen.

The thing is, this conflict is so much bigger than just the war within it's boundaries. It has everything to do with Zionism, or the belief that Israel is still the Holy Land, Jerusalem is still the Holy City, and as good Christian countries (so the thinking goes in America) we need to protect the land of God from the heathen Arabs, or at least stop it imploding. There is also a direct correlation for Zionists between the return of Israel to the Jews and the return of Christ. To speed up one is to speed up the other.

I have simplified this somewhat as Zionism is far bigger than just this issue, but I am surprised at how many people I met who don't even realise that they are Zionists! There are so many Christians that seem to just accept as fact that the Israelites are in the right and the Palestinians are evil and deserved to be corralled in concentration camps on the Gaza strip.

There are also many who have sympathy for the Israelites after what they went through in WWII. Granted, the making of a Jewish state on the same soil that their religion comes from seemed to make sense after the senseless slaughter of millions of innocents. The world was trying to do the right thing by a people who had been left to die by the very same people. The problem was, in their guilt, the West didn't ask permission from the people who were living there happily; namely the Palestinians. As a result of their land being taken over and the borders continuously shifting against their favour, the Palestinians fought back.

Were they right to? I don't know. I don't agree with war in any case but if someone came into your home and told you you had to clear out because people who hadn't lived there for centuries were coming back to take over, I might be a little put out too.

But putting aside the rightness or not of fighting back, I want to look at the reasons as to why the West generally supports Israel and vilifies the Palestinians.

The idea that the return of Jerusalem to the Jews and the return of Christ are linked is from Revelation. Now I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone since Revelation was written that truly understands what it is talking about in full. Jerusalem can look like a heavenly city, the renewed earth, and at times a bride (!!), and so taking what it says literally without any proper understanding of the text is dangerous.

The Jews themselves tried to hurry along the Messiah. After their temple was destroyed and they were taken to Babylon in exile (at the end of the OT before the NT), they were allowed to return to Israel and rebuild their temple. This they did but the Messiah did not come. So they tried to be ultra Holy and keep all the Sabbath's because somehow that would get the Messiah to show up. When Jesus finally did come (400 years later) he proceeded to tell off those people that had helped evil doers by thinking that their actions made them holy while they did not love or care for people. I look at Palestine now and ask, is the West trying to bring back Christ through their actions in Israel but by doing so are not loving or caring for the Palestinians and letting evil happen??

I believe that the promises that God made to the Jews are true and still stand. But I believe that they are fulfilled in Christ and have also gone out to the ends of the earth. At the death of Christ, the temple curtain that separated God from the people was ripped. This signified that God left the Temple to dwell in them. This in affect means that Jerusalem, while holy from a historical and biblical view, is as holy today as any piece of land where believers stand. The city itself will always be significant to believers but it is not somehow more Godly than anywhere else.

I am sickened by what happened to the Jews in WWII. Nothing will rectify how most of the world stood back and let that happen. But building walls around slums to keep the Palestinians and Jews separate, or putting fences up and making Palestinians walk through check points, or putting them in massive camps where disease spreads, is not justifiable just because this happened to them. Two wrongs do not make the past ok.

I had a friend go to Israel last year and when they came back they told me that they saw "no holiness in the holy land." There was only fear and hatred, pain and anger.

Bombing people who you believe have done you wrong isn't going to stop their actions. It is going to breed a new generation of children who grow up in fear and who are taught to hate. As they grow older they are going to want answers, revenge, meaning to their lives. And they will take it out on the people who they see to have caused the suffering.

People, if you are Christian or not, there is no justification for anything that is happening over there. There is no one who is acting well, there are none that can claim that they are acting more holy. As people who love others, Christians should be the last to try and justify or support a war where the victims are children and innocents.

God has left the Temple, let's all stop fighting for an empty house.