In Game out of heaven

My question today is this

If i hit a pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto the video game
And i dont care if they live and or die, and they do die if i hit them well enough or repetatively. Does that mean ethicaly that i should go to hell for killing and not repenting?

They say you can think about killing and not doing it and its not a deadly sin. But if i do it in a video game and personify my thoughts into a game that allows me to kill again and again and again isnt that the same thing as doing it for real moraly?

no :smiley:

but the mentality and non carying is the same of a real murder and a video game murder. one would think it does more dammage to think about killing than to physicaly do it since thinking about it leads one to doing it.

As much as I know, sin also consists in how the soul changes after that certain act, here hitting pedestrians in GTA. For one, I don’t think video games bring you any closer to God. On the contrary.

what a dumb question

It’s relative. It’s all relative.

Seeing as it’s a question about sin, you’re best asking a theologian rather than a board full philosophers. Perhaps God disapproves of this “virtual murder”, perhaps not, though I don’t remember seeing him mentioning anything about GTA in the bible. :wink:

However, it’s a question of morality - rather than sin (two very different things in my opinion) - then no, I don’t see anything wrong with running over pedestrians that don’t actually exist beyond the code that gave rise to them. You could even argue that you’re acting morally, because everytime you turn on the computer you’re giving them a life - albeit a short and bloody one - that they would never have otherwise had. You create Vice City when you like, breathe life into its inhabitants, then murder them according to your will - much like God himself then? No, I fear I’m taking the analogy too far. :wink:

Anyway, as I see it, there can be no thought crimes. I can imagine murdering someone, or even act out a murder on a computer, but so long as I have the ability to discriminate between the world that exists on my side of the computer, and the world that exists within it, then I fail to see a problem. Morality has more to do with the treatment of other people than with the treatment of ones self - so long as your actions (or thoughts) do not adversely affect another individual, I fail to see why you should have a case to answer to.

Sorry, don’t quite get you.

Thinking about murdering someone (or acting it out on a computer screen) may cause you to murder that person at a later time, but when physically going through with murdering someone, obviously the fatality rate is going to be much higher.

There’s been much made of the connection between video-games and real-life immorality, but, as I see it, it’s a pretty thin one. The advocates of this theory fail to differentiate between cause and correlation: I would argue that a naturally violent person is more likely to play violent video-games, but I don’t think that playing video-games are quite so likely to turn an otherwise passive individual into a mass-murderer.

Living in a society with lax gun laws, for instance, is far more likely to see a congenitally violent person (whatever that may mean) act upon his murderous desires than all the video games in the world combined. People may not kill people, but people cannot kill 20 people a minute with their bare hands.

Er, sorry for going off topic… :confused:

On the subject of Grand Theft Auto, has anyone played Vice City yet? Is it any good? I got bored fast with the first three but I have heard that Vice City has some interesting additions. BluTGI? Anyone else?

Whooo boy! Vice City is excellent, and that’s all i’ll say

This is all we need!

A new RSPCCGC, Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Computer Generated Characters.

Be aware of this new form of Hippy! They love hugging CG trees! :laughing:

PV

to question further on this issue would be to ask;

would the person playing the game act in exactly the way,
being a virtual situation the game player is freed from the many constraints of morality.

not that the game player is in any way immoral, but in game play they are free to act without the moral considerations to such acts or actions.

games or ay of the other reasons that are used like television or films, to justify why society acts in such ways are just evading the issue. there are no excuses to why inhumane acts occur.

they do because we still have to learn to love one another as much as ourselves.

and maybe hugging a tree now and again may do more benefit than imagined

yoda