I don’t think the game will convert them to Christianity. If you hold the possibility of a personal relationship to the Christ archetype to be legitimately spiritual, I suspect the game will, if anything, drive people AWAY from Christ.

I do suspect, though, that it will, in general, move them towards a belief in violence as a legitimate way of achieving their own ends. And frankly, it doesn’t really matter whether they practice it literally, like drug gangs, or metaphorically, like, say Enron. The end result is the same.

Christ bears about the same relationship to Christianity as music does to the music industry, or sex to the sex trade.

I agree there’s nothing surprising (though perhaps poetically amusing) about it. Projection might be the single most useful observation Freud made in his life. OF COURSE extremists/fundamentalists accuse their enemies of exactly what they are doing, and OF COURSE they do exactly what they most claim to hate in their enemies. This is what “reactionary” means.

If you look at the neocons’ rhetoric about “haters of America”, it is much clearer when you understand they are talking about themselves. The things that make America great - it’s constitution & legal framework, its richness and diversity of natural resources, its cultural diversity within a shared language and economy, its stunning natural beauty, its love of freedom and communication, its people’s fearlessness towards life and change, its robust system of interlocked local economies, its traditions of self-sufficiency and mutual aid - these are exactly the things the neocons have targeted for destruction from the beginning.

Children are the nation’s greatest natural resource - and you know what we do with natural resources, right?