Getting The Kids Back To Church

First of all,  sorry for the lack of recent updates, but I’ve been working on a new collaborative science and scepticism site.  It’s called “The Twenty-First Floor”, where all that is good shall be praised and all that is evil (from Jenny McCarthy to Mike ‘Health Ranger’ Adams) shall be put to the sword. Please take a look!  Or don’t.

Anyway, the clock of moral panic has once again struck “video games” and the Church of England’s general synod have dutifully rushed to defend the innocence of the nation against this grave threat to the keystone of society. Tom Benyon, a former tory MP, terrified the synod with his assertion that violent computer games could cause “nightmares”. So frightening are these games that Mr Benyon had, at obvious risk to his own sanity, made a compilation of the most horrific video games scenes he could find and offered it to the Church’s council to watch “should they have the courage”.

Severed heads being used as footballs, a woman being burned alive, chainsaw murders, even rape are, Benyon informed the synod, regular features of our children’s leisure lives and the effects of such media are manifesting in crime figures which are “rising year on year”. No need to acknowledge that crime is a complex social concept which cannot sensibly be attributed to one factor, and certainly no need to mention the fact that no causative link has ever been demonstrated between violent media and crime, the church has a panic to stoke!

However, it seems to me that if the church should want to protect the fragile and malleable minds of the people from the pernicious influence of violent media they have bigger heads to chainsaw off than “Mortal Kombat”. There’s a horrifically violent and outlandishly disturbing piece of media which is actively taught to children by those with whom we trust their moral and personal development. Something that sells far, far more copies than “Grand Theft Auto” and has a wider reach than even the fearsome Dhalsim.

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by continuing to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. So let’s just get straight on with casting an eye over some of the violence in The Bible.

Seeing as the Bible is quite a lengthy piece of literature and is drenched in gore from its vicious commencement to its Dali-on-a-bad-trip blood-soaked ending, I’ll stick to just the first eleven* books (excepting “Ruth”, which is kind of like a biblical Mills & Boon) and choose only the most absurd, bizarre or amusing example from each book.

Genesis

Lot, one of God’s favourite people ever, is visited by two angels. When word gets out around town about this a gang of rapists appear at Lot’s door, demanding they be allowed to have sex with the angels. Clearly, raping an angel would be a terrible thing, but Lot doesn’t want to just tell the gang of violent sex offenders to fuck off (or implore the angels to use their holy magic to get rid of them), so he appeases the mob by handing over his two virgin daughters instead.

Exodus

There’s lots of murder and genocide in Exodus, but the strangest and most disturbing act of violence has to be when God, the most merciful, decides to kill a whole bunch of little babies to make a point about how powerful he is. When there are no little babies left, he starts killing animals instead.

Leviticus

A sizeable part of Leviticus deals with God’s graphic instructions on how to slaughter animals. Not for food, nor for clothing, but just because God likes it when people butcher animals in his name. Later on he demands that homosexuals be killed and threatens to send wild beasts to murder the children of those who don’t listen to him.

Numbers

More purposeless animal killing. Then the Israelites complain, quite reasonably, that they have nothing to eat or drink in the desert. It’s not even so much a complaint as it is a plea for help. Anyway, God sends “fiery serpents” to attack them for whining. Many are killed.

Deuteronomy

In Deutoronomy, God explains that if a man believes his wife was not a virgin on their wedding night, and the wife’s father cannot produce evidence of her virginity (a bloody sheet), then the woman is to be stoned to death in front of her father. Fair’s fair. Later, he promises to send wasps to kill anyone who inspires fear in his followers.

Joshua

God finally delivers on his promise to kill people with wasps. He also threatens to torture anyone who commits transgressions against him, even if they repent.

Judges

Samson, a prototypical terrorist, catches three hundred foxes, ties them together, sets them on fire and releases the burning animals into his enemies’ cornfields in order to destroy their crops. The biblical terrorism continues when Samson commits literature’s first suicide attack.

1 Samuel

God dislikes the Amalekites because of something that happened hundreds of years before any of them were born, so he orders Saul to murder every last one of them – men, women, children, cows, sheep – the lot. Saul only kills most of them, and God falls out with him. Later Saul’s corpse is beheaded and the head and torso are used as warnings for anyone who might consider not becoming a cold-blooded murderer of innocent people on God’s command.

2 Samuel

God kills another little baby because of something its father did. Amasa is disemboweled and left to writhe, dying, in a pool of his own blood. Later on, a man is beheaded, and his head is thrown around.

1 Kings

God demands that anyone who urinates on a wall be killed, and tells that the corpses of these criminals shall be eaten by dogs and chickens.

2 Kings

Elijah burns fifty-one men alive to prove that he is the prophet of God. Then he does it again. In a separate incident, Elijah’s disciple, Elisha, is being made fun of by some little children. So God sends two bears to tear the children to pieces.

All in all, God kills more than 2.3 million people in the Bible (not including the flood or any of the cities he demolishes). I think you’d struggle to find a more violent or morally confused text currently legitimately available in any school in the country.

It’s the children I feel most sorry for, though. Seeking out the cliched, £50-a-pop, age-restricted, thrills of violent video games when the really meaty, really imaginative, really gut-wrenching stuff is sitting right under their noses in a big, dusty, boring ol’ book which plenty of kindly, unassuming, coffee-morning-and-jumble-sale types will gladly give them for free.

Dwindling congregations? The church really have missed a trick here.

*cos if I’d picked ten I’d have had to miss out the child-mauling bears…