At least we're hip now

[moggie]

Via Pharyngula, news of a board game about religious violence:

Controversial New Board Game Parodies Religious Violence

A great deal of blood has been spilled in the name of religion over the centuries, and the maker of a new board game hopes that parodying religious violence will bring him Earthly rewards.

USA Today reports that Playing Gods: The Board Game of Divine Domination is billed as "the world's first satirical board game of religious warfare," and includes playing pieces such as Jesus wielding a cross and a chain gun-toting Buddha...

http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/11/18/controversial-new-board-game-parodies-religious-violence

Of course, this puts religious panties in a bunch:

Not surprisingly, Playing Gods is not without its critics. Prof. Carl Raschke, who teaches religious studies at the
University of Denver commented:

[The game] has no basis in historical reality and doesn't actually represent any religion. It just appeals to people who hate religion to begin with — the hip subculture of militant popular atheists. These people are fanatics, for the most part, themselves. Their thinking is rigid and hostile and not much different from jihadists who don't use their minds or study what they are dealing with. They start from their own dogmatic perspective.

Projection much, professor? And haven't you ever played a game before? Historical accuracy generally doesn't feature highly in the list of priorities. Being compared to a jihadist is nothing new, but I'm interested to hear that I'm now hip. I don't think I've ever been hip before, and I'm not sure how to carry it off. Do I need new clothes?

[onager]

1. No basis in historical reality?

Bwah! Now what other subject might we say that about?

I'll think of it in a minute.

Though I'm certainly happy to be part of a "hip subculture." Especially since, if a god existed, I would be older than It.

[progressoid]

2. Yeah - historical reality. The irony is pretty thick there. n/t

[awoke_in_2003]

3. To quote Zaphob Beeblebrox:

"I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis."

[DavidDvorkin]

4. Raschke is a fanatic and a fool

Over the years, he's jumped on various rightwing bandwagons, courting publicity. Some time ago, he was campaigning against devil worshipers who were supposedly behind just about everything in the Denver area.

[charlie]

5. And windy

The expected result, I guess, of mixing religion and postmodernism.

Źiźek’s observation that postmodernism amounts to little more than “late modernism” may be apt in this instance. It was Nietzsche’s implicit rhetorical point in his later writings – and it is the most telling ramification of the poignant parable of the madman - that a Christianity that needs to justify God really has lost God. In its effort to justify God what it is really seeking to legitimate is its own priestly, or “ecclesiastical”, Wille zur Macht. So is a “third space” simply the dialectical resolution of the conflict between assertions of these two congenitally modern spatialities? Or is it a space like no space we have yet envisioned? Theologies and ecclesiologies are nothing more, and nothing less, than elaborations or articulations of certain epochal “topologies,” the semiotic version of the Foucaultian episteme. These topologies can be characterized as “epochal” because they belong not to an era but to a vast range of time in which art, architecture, language, and modes of social and cultural organization are developed and go through their own life cycles in ways that express certain underlying, or indigenous, tendencies. Let us refer to such a topology as an inherent typology or “logic” of historical space. The space of Christendom and its secularized counterpart is both differential and dialectical.

http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2008/04/incarnational-e.html