Christianity

As I sat in church today, something important occurred to me: Christianity is R-rated. We have concerned , often Christian parents running around talking about how violent video games are turning our nation's youth into angry, killing machines (who will nevertheless avoid the draft). How can children be raised properly when they're exposed to shoot-'em-up movies and inappropriate video games? My answer is this: the same way they've always been raised.

I find the rants from angry parents about children being exposed to adult material sort of hard to take seriously because of the hypocrisy involved. While not wanting your child to grow up thinking it's okay to shoot someone and steal his car, to think that you can hit reset and bring someone back to life, kids are already in trouble. You bitch and moan about the games your child plays (with the aid of the devil-spawn parents of his friends), but your son has spent at least an hour of his life, every Sunday, staring at a man NAILED TO A PIECE OF WOOD.

I've been staring, since I was a baby, at a sculpture of an undernourished, bleeding man with metal spikes driven through his palms/wrists (depending on the church) and feet and open wounds in his scalp from a crown of thorns. That's normally the sort of thing you'd relegate toR-rated movies ( The Passion of the Christ was, in fact, R-rated), but it's okay because it's associated with your religion. My church sponsored trips to go see The Passion of the Christ, thus fully endorsing the presence of Christians of all ages to come enjoy the R-rated movie.

And personally, no aspect of my childhood, beyond my Catholic upbringing, involved discussions of sex. None of the children's shows hinted at it. And I wasn't curious about sex until health class in school, so my parents never had to come clean with me or make up awkward lies about magical, baby-delivering birds. Yet before I understood it, one of the main facets of my faith was belief in Mary's immaculate conception. The phrase was meaningless to me for a long time, but there it was. The topic comes up, in one form or another, in every sermon. It's not as blatant as the social interactions in Grand Theft Auto, but for the children more curious about what was going on in church than I was, it could get sticky.
"We're excited because she had a baby without, um, having the stork deliver it."

"Why is that exciting?"

"Because you can't normally have a baby if the stork didn't deliver him."

"Why?"

We forget, as we get older, that children aren't, in fact, stupid. They can figure things out, and when they discover that the stork delivering the baby is in fact some sort of euphemism for insemination, the stork being sperm. There's also a good chance that they'll be able to figure out that life isn't like Halo and not think that it can be applied to life. So try actually talking to children once in a while, don't always think lying is the best, most simple course, and the kids might be alright.

And I realizing that sheltering a child from the world's evils isn't just a Christian parent's concern and that not every parent has unreasonable expectations for the level of protection a child can be provided with. It just seems strange that no one thinks anything of having children talk about and stare at a man being brutally tortured and killed every week while raising a fuss about the occasionally sexual nature of the Sims. But there are some benefits to being inculcated into a religious dogma, to seeing Jesus being martyred: I saw that death was ugly and undignified; sometimes we need exposure to appreciate the shelter. I think it's a parent's responsibility to explain that there are people in the Middle East who lead lives independent of active hate and bombs, that you shouldn't beat someone and steal his car, and to have some trust that they did a good enough job.

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