Well...wtf? As I understand it you are fighting to SAVE the city, even if it is getting destroyed. I don't see why this is so offensive. Ooo, D.C. got bombed in MW2, so what? It's not like it's real. I mean, did they complain when the nuke went off and killed a huge amount of American troops in CoD4? Except for Griggs's mysterious survival.
Modern Warfare 2 Trailer Criticized For "Going Too Far"
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
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*nudge*Caliostro said:
Rather than saying "The people who refuse to accept that something terrible could happen are those that allow it to happen" or "All is fair in love and video games". Instead I'll just say:
"Christian Science" makes me think of dry ice. Or oxy moron.
Christian Scientists [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Christ,_Scientist] are hardly scientists (they don't believe in modern medicine), and they deny the divinity of Christ, which plenty of people will tell you means they're not Christian, either.The3rdEye said:
However, the only real links the Christian Science Monitor really has to Christian Scientist is that a) they were both founded by the same guy, b) there's a small religion column in the paper, which is emphatically not a platform for evangelism and c) editor-in-chief has occasionally been a Christian Scientist.
The paper's actually won its share of Pulitzer prizes, and was one of the few papers that actually provided much-needed objective coverage of crap like Iraq and the like. In terms of journalistic integrity, it's pretty near the top of the pile. This article is pretty bad, but also strikingly uncharacteristic of the paper as a whole.
That said, there are plenty of scientists who are also Christian [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science]. That's a different matter altogether. Islam [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_scientists] probably had more, though, back in the day.
They did kinda miss the fact that a fair chunk of the game does, in fact, take place in the very real, non-fictional city of Pripyat, Ukrane. The article is pretty bad.KiKiweaky said:hmmmm so we can fight over 'unspecified towns in eastern Europe' but not DC.... wash that cabbage water out of your brain.
Its a game people are looking forward to playing. Not a goal people are looking to complete.
That said, the fact that there is a fair amount of discomfort in some circles -implict and explicit- is probably interesting enough to warrant some discussion: Red Alert and Fallout 3 seem to generally get away with this sort of stuff in part because they inject a significant amount of irony into their games. Ignoring the chunks of the first MW that take place in Pripyat (which itself is only really of historical significance), the middle-eastern country that the Marines sections take place in is, in fact, rendered generic, and the rest of the game ranges from "somewhere in Russia" to "somewhere in Eastern Europe" to "Somewhere in the Urals". By contrast, plenty of people thought (and, I would honestly agree) that the way Army of Two dealt with relatively contemporary events was inappropriate and ham-fisted, if not outright offensive. Most games (and other fiction) set in the modern era skirt the issue entirely, using made-up countries, fictional dictators or terrorists, and invented threats.
Why is all that? Why do we feel the need to distance ourselves from depicting "modern" events that hit too close to home, through either irony or genericization or fictionalization, rather than addressing them head-on? Why is World War II basically the last world event that we're allowed to take major license with or invoke in substantial, but serious, ways? Will we ever see a video game about Vietnam? And is this unique to American audiences? Was it always like this, even as far back as things like Red Dawn, or is this something precipitated by the events of the past decade?
On the other hand, we could also just keep snarking about Christians that had nothing to do with this article. Whatever.
I'm going to assume you're vertically challenged and give you a footstool. I know that Christian 'Scientists' are not scientists in the common use of the word, that's why I drew the parallel to dry ice. It most certainly is dry, but only because it sublimates to a gas from a solid. And while it does have a cooling effect, it is not ice, as ice is H20 and dry ice is CO2. I have little interest in the paper itself, because when I find actual "news" associations like the AP and FOX news reporting garbage, I can hardly expect differently from something that claims in it's title to be an improbability.yrogerg said:
I AM NOT EVEN SURE WHAT THAT FOOTSTOOL COMMENT MEANSThe3rdEye said:
As far as the rest, you're sort of missing my points, such as they were. I admit I was free associating a bit. Perhaps a recap:
1) The Church of Christ, Scientist is a very specific religious sect that is only very tenuously considered Christian by outsiders. This is a very different thing from, say, the creationism claptrap.
2) The CS Monitor was founded by the same guy as the aforementioned religious sect, but otherwise has essentially nothing to do with the aforementioned religious sect, and has generally demonstrated itself to be a paragon of journalistic integrity and objectivity in every way that the AP and Fox News are not.
3) While a lot of bullshitty American Christianity misses this point, there have, in fact, been a lot of important scientists who were also Christian. Science, and that particular relgion, are not actually a contradiction of terms.
THE END.
The Dark Ages sucked for Western Europe. But, while the Catholic Church was the dominant political force in Europe during that time period, there was very little about christanity qua Christianity that defined or created that situation. Overall it had a great deal more to do with the economic and political collapse of Rome and subsequent loss of access to a great deal of Greek and Roman thought.FLSH_BNG said:
On the other hand, though, there was the Byzantine empire- the Christian remnant of the the Roman Empire, which, along with the contemporary Islamic empires, are essentially solely responsible for any of that aforementioned knowledge being preserved at all. You have the first European universities, founded by papal bull. And, you do have science that still happened during this time period, unless you believe that Gregor Mendel -an Augustinian monk, you'll note- did nothing of note as far of the field of genetics is concerned, or that various others had no impact of significance [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science] Hell, you know that guy who Occam's Razor is named after? Yup, he was Franciscan monk who lived during the 1200's, and contributed significantly to logic, physics, and epistemology.
Honestly, we do tend to overstate exactly how dark the dark ages actually were. The fall of the Western Roman Empire was obviously a big deal, but there was a great deal of science that happened in Europe. Moreover, due to the fact that the Catholic church was the dominant political force during this time period, it's wholly unsurprising that much of the science that happened during this time period occurred under Church auspices.
That all said, we do owe non-Europeans: particularly the Islamic empires that coincided with the west's dark ages, an enormous debt of gratitude, in that they preserved and continued to advance knowledge in fields as diverse as chemistry, physics, medicine, astronomy, navigation, agriculture, psychology... and all while Europe was in a particularly nasty period of political and economic chaos, punctuated by the occasional plague. And this is also something that's largely unacknowledged, but hey, there it is now.
Is that enough of an answer?
What's worse is how, at least on the school-book level, we continue to paint the transition from the Roman era to the Early Middle Ages as a kind of light-switch moment where all of Europe went from mighty empire to a plagues-and-hovels crapsack-world in the span of a three days in August 410.yrogerg said:
-- Alex
Honestly, I'm pretty sure that's mostly because we try really, really hard to trace the lineage of medieval Europe back to Rome, rather than to the Franks, Goths, Vandals, et al, who were hovelling it up for quite some time even before Rome's decline and fall. I'll concede that from the perspective of Rome, it was a fairly precipitous decline over only a generation or two, if one that was in the making for a few hundred years prior. Truthfully, though, Christianity and Latin as a lingua franka was one of the very few vestiges of the late Empire that Europeans held on to, so it almost doesn't make sense to treat the history of Rome as the history of pre-modern Europe.Alex_P said:
Relatedly, though, yeah. We also kinda forget that the "Roman Empire", which is to say, the Eastern Roman Empire (later, the Byzantine Empire) lasted in some form until the 1400's. If we were actually serious about tracing the lineage of modernity, it would actually devolve from Rome and Greece to Byzantium (later, Turkey) and the Islamic empires, and only diffuse back to Europe after the Crusades.
Hello, I'm a douchebag that believes that when I'M offended it must mean that everyone is offended. As such I demand that Modern Warfare 2 remove it's content and replace it with Bible passages and images of Jesus kissing bunnies (friendly, not sexually). We don't need our children being exposed to realistic violence that effects America, which is why I suggest we all pray for the end times to begin so sweet merciful Jesus can destroy the world and lead us up to Heaven in a magic-car made of gumdrops and marshmallow fluff.
-Bill Donohue
-Bill Donohue
I just hope it's not a private military organization that turns around and fucks over American....