A while back, the Way of the Master (Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron) came out with a board game, Intelligent Design vs. Evolution. I imagine the Discovery Institute cringes in pain every time those two clowns associate themselves with their brand, which is good; but you know it has to be an awful, horrible, brain-damaging game, which is bad. I thought about picking up a copy just for the kitsch value, but just couldn’t bring myself to pay them money for it (and now it seems to have vanished from their online store).
But Chad bought it and played it against his dog (his wife was too smart to join in). Surprise! It’s as bad as I expected!
It looks boring, too. It’s an old-school board game where you march around the board by throwing dice, landing on squares that make you answer questions on cards in order to win brain tokens. Here’s a sample question, to give you a sense of what you’ll learn.
True or False? The Bible doesn’t speak of a literal place called Hell. It is merely symbolic of the grave.
ANSWER: False (see Luke 16:19-31). Your eternal salvation may depend on your understanding of this truth. If you answered incorrectly, give two brains to the opposing team.
It’s really a test of your knowledge of fundagelical interpretations of the Bible. Now I’m even happier I never wasted any money on it.
(Also on Sb)
The dog is cute though.
Yes, that sounds right for “ID science,” the importance of the literal existence of hell.
Of course they cringe when those bozos “cheapen” the brand, but with the head of the DI’s CSC, Stephen Meyer, making a little film course called Is the Bible Reliable? (just guess what the answer is), they can’t really complain too much. ID has always been about the Bible being true, even if some IDiots aren’t literalists per se.
Ray and Kirk’s brains would do. Unused, if not exactly top-notch.
Glen Davidson
And the relevance of the hell question to evolution is…?
Sounds like the game is rigged to award brain tokens to creationists…. at the very least, that finally gives them something that resembles a brain.
I like good board games and reason. I’m not sure whether I’d be happier if this assault on reason wasn’t such a piss-poor game.
Call me picky, but that bible passage doesn’t use the word “Hell”. Sure it describes a place, but since it doesn’t call it “Hell” the question is technically true and the game is wrong.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+16%3A19-31&version=NIV
So, if you answer all the questions like a creationist, you end up with all the brains – like a zombie. Kind of fitting, I suppose.
Came here to make a zombie joke. Beaten to it by fresher braaaainssss
Now I’m seeing zombies playing poker. “I’ll see your two braaaaaains and raise you…”
In the future, bad rec room decor will be epitomized by black velvet paintings of creationists playing poker.
Finally a game which is the complete, absolute and total opposite of chess. Even among low-skill players, in chess it’s impossible to cheat but a certain level of intellectual development must be employed to stay within the rules. In this appallingly shallow version of Idjits vs. Reality, a complete lack of intellectual development is required to stay within the rules and it’s impossible not to cheat.
Well, then I’m certainly glad that non-capricious and tyrannical god made this truth abundantly clear to everyone on earth via means that were not dependent on missionaries and literate priest classes or other forms of communication resembling the children’s game of telephone causing friction and schisms, even among believers.
Because, if a god did not do that, s/he would not be worthy of worship, and anyone who did worship such a god should be denounced as a self-serving coward with no integrity whatsoever and hounded from place to place until his or her god took pity on him or her and killed him, if such a god were capable of pity.
Just goes to show – the real target of the ID movement is not us atheists. It’s the liberal christians, who might be swayed over to their more fundamentalist sect.
That passage says that your eternal salvation is dependent on you being poor; the rich are sent to Hell: Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.
It does imply that Dives could have avoided this fate by being generous to those less fortunate, but the only explicit message about hell there is that it’s for people who were comfortable in their mortal life.
Is that really the understanding that Kirk Cameron thinks his eternal salvation depends upon?
I bought this game at a second hand book shop. I don’t think it was ever opened in the first place. It was my noble sacrifice to prevent someone from getting it.
It was pretty lame but we still amused ourselves.
Picture mid game…no we were not drunk, but may have helped.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cozalcoatl/3581020166/sizes/m/in/photostream/
The word hell isn’t really in the Bible. It’s an interesting afternoon’s exercise to browse through a bunch of translations and pick out which ones use “hell” for which terms.
There’s Sheol, the Hebrew land of the dead, which is quite different from classic Christian hell, and Hades, which is the word used for Sheol in the Septuagent (Greek translation of the Old Testament used by the New Testament authors) and which is a mixture of Greek and Hebrew ideas. Then there’s Gehenna, which was where the citizens of Jerusalem burnt garbage, and the pit, the lake of fire reserved for the devil, etc. And then there’s the idea of a final judgment day, which doesn’t mesh with the idea that you find out whether you blew it as soon as you’re dead.
Short answer is that different Biblical authors had different visions of the afterlife and that Comfort has picked out the only passage that has an unambiguous view of the afterlife as a place of agony for the wicked. Even then you can make a case that punishment is not eternal, or that it’s damnation by works, not lack of grace.
A bad actor and a bad street preacher con man come together to make a shitty board game. Again, living down to my expectations of them.
Way of the Master sounds like the name for a New Age group that follows some guru, or something to so with BDSM.
It’s an old-school board game where you march around the board by throwing dice
I thought the whole point of ID is that God doesn’t “play dice”…
I fought the dog and the dog won…