12-7-2010

The offense in this game is easy to recognize, but the reasons for it may be harder to articulate. Most obvious is the notion of agency, which here is not reflected in playing as Jesus, but rather in playing against Jesus. Another reason is Christ Killa’s iconoclastic violence, intended to disrupt the reception of the image of Christ on the cross by presenting it within the game’s rhetoric as cause for violence. The player has the ability (and within the game’s backstory, the moral obligation) to kill the cloned Jesus figures. So within the fiction of the game, Jesus is the “bad guy” and the player is the “good guy”—one might even argue the messiah. The player’s ability to immerse himself in the imagined avatar behind the gun invites a procedural violence against Jesus, justified by the assumption that he is “just” a clone. By so disrupting the biblical narrative and blending this disruption with agency as Jesus’ enemy, the game invites a blasphemous procedural rhetoric.

Rachel Wagner: The Play is the Thing: From Bible Fights to Passions of the Christ

In her analysis of why, exactly, Christians are hesitant to make a fully interactive and "free range" depiction of Christ, Rachel Wagner discusses examples of when this does happen, and why Christians do not like them. One example she supplies us with is Christ Killa, in which the player is immersed in a story about killing raving clones of Christ. As Wagner points out, this is a form of iconoclasm on two levels: not only is one destroying an image of Christ, but one is destroying how one views Christ. Essentially, the Covenant we form with that image is shattered, but worst of all, it is shattered by the player. This clearly deviates from the linear-pattern devised by most Christians.

12-6-2010

Aside from simply depicting a contrast with the ordinary, however, the liminal phase of ritual can also depict the ideal of the unstructured community, what Turner calls “communitas.” In communitas, in distinction from the hierarchically structured society, all are equal and there is no ranking to give one power over another (except perhaps the authority of the ritual elders). 20 This form of utopia cannot really exist, as no society can exist without structure— but this utopian ideal of communitas is just as critical to the functioning of society as the realism that requires structure, for it reminds a people of their essential unity and

Lyden: Movies as Religion.

In this passage, Lyden refers to the anthropologist Turner, who noted that societies form "communitas," which are momentary breakdowns of authority which make pleasantly allow all to be equal. His example is that of an Indian ceremony, where cast is reversed, the subordinate becoming insubordinate. Thus, for a brief period, a break-down in society is allowed to occur within the confines of a ritual, much like Gerard would argue violence can be carried out ritually to be cathartic.

12-2-2010

"Vengeance, moreover, cannot be claimed until the verdict of one's private oracle has been confirmed by the secret poison oracle of the local prince, for Zande society is an aristocracy in which the ruling class makes all final decisions. If the logic of these oracles, deaths, and acts of vengeance were analyzed publicly, Evans-Pritchard notes, it would reduce itself to an absurdity, because every new death would have to be attributed to yet another act of witchcraft in an endless circle.

Pals, Daniel. "Eight Theories of Religion." New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

In this passage, Pals discusses how Evans-Pritchard's study of the Zande led him to discover their ritual for handling accusations of death and witchcraft, which goes through a series of 1) Personal oracles, and then 2) aristocratic oracles, which have the final say. Evans-Pritchard argues that this is done to prevent logical absurdities from occurring. However, one must wonder if, perhaps, there is a touch of Marx's theories underlying this: that religion can become another facet of power and social structures.