When did man begin to turn away from God in such large droves? Was it when we could build walls and no longer needed prayer to protect us from beasts of the night? What about when we could genetically modify crops to grow year-round, and no longer relied on God’s grace to shine his summer light? Or perhaps it was the advent of structural steel, when we could build bridges to span rivers instead of needing our own strength and God’s blessings. And has God turned his back on us in return? Sometimes it’s easy to think so; we have bridges collapsing and mine shafts caving in and skyscrapers rocked by earthquakes. Man’s greatest “feats” are knocked aside like a house of straw. I’ve touched upon disrespecting God’s work before, regarding both his creation of man and his power to create life. These regard the sixth day of Creation, but what about his earlier work? Duke Nukem dishonors the fifth day when he murders a lowly rat. But what about before that? The very first thing God made was the Earth. Does God care about Earth any less than His other creations? Was He just getting the hang of things with that one? First day on the job jitters? Or does the Earth hold a special place in God’s heart specifically because it is His first creation? To all parents, how many of you kept your children’s very first doodles, no matter how rudimentary they were? Does God hate that we’ve industrialized this planet? Probably not. He gave man the foresight to create the wheel, and the wheel made our lives much more practical. What about when we made the axe? It allowed us to cut down trees much more fluently. After that, we always had a fire burning to keep us warm. How about the bulldozer, then? Does God hate watching us plow through a forest, uprooting trees and crushing wildlife? I imagine He at least cringes a little. What does God see when He looks down at His world, and instead of seeing lush greenery and sparkling rivers, the view is blotted out by heavy clouds of toxic ash spewing from rows of smokestacks? How does God feel about the fish, which used to teem in the crystalline waters, that now have to wallow in discolored sludge? Or how would you, yourself, feel at the sight of a bird or seal, once strong and free, now struggling against a coat of oil? Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The video depicts a natural landscape as a team of men turn it into a city. As the name implies, players get materials by “mining” for them. This works when they take a pickaxe, point it as the ground, and pull a cube of stone or wood out. Players then take this cube and many others, and stack them into the fanciful buildings in the video. This is a good metaphor for industry in America: everything comes from somewhere else. In the Minecraft video, there is a massive stone castle. You can imagine an exact cutout of this castle underground somewhere; a hollow gap where all the stone was pulled from. Similarly, if you have a stone driveway, all of that rock was taken out of the ground somewhere on this planet. The stone cannot be just “created” by us in the way that God can create it. Later in the video, you can see what it is like underground where the stone was taken from. It is made into further living quarters. This is very unrealistic, as such a structure would collapse in real life, and people simply cannot live underground. So how far can you dig in Minecraft? Well, the game actually allows players to build portals to Hell, complete with burning brimstone, pools of lava, and shrieking demons. Isaiah 14:11 But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit. I didn’t sit through the entire video, but I watched the player burn to death, saw animated skeletons, and heard what can only be described as the tortured cries of the souls of the damned. Some game. I looked up what other creatures the game pits you against. There are a few uninspired creatures that are bug-themed, a twisted half-man-half-pig mutant, and a shamefully racist Negro figure with long arms and legs. The most horrific of all, another metaphor, this one for man’s treatment of planet Earth, is a monster that rushes the gamer and kills both with a suicide bomb. When I say God Hates Video Games, does He hate games that encourage the -blam!- of Earth? Does He hate when we harvest resources for petty novelties? Does He hate when we clear forests and kill animals to build shopping malls? Minecraft is a parody of man’s self-destructive pride. It’s about how we steal gold from one end of the world to decorate the other. It’s about how we cut down trees to build houses. It’s about how we blow apart mountains to build highways and railroads. It’s about how we try to leave our artificial mark on the beauty of God’s creation. Minecraft should not make us reflect upon the games we play, but the lives we live. When carve out mountains strip mining or gouge holes into earth with our quarries, are we not scarring the creation of God, just as if we were to purposely cut into our arms? We are taught to treat our body as a temple, but perhaps we should start treating this Earth as a temple, as well.