When the Australian Christian Lobby uses an international tragedy to further its own political agenda, and demonise video games, it does Christianity a great disservice – which is a shame because clearly, the ACL does not represent the vast majority of reasonable Christians. Thank God, then, for Nathan Cambell, student at Queensland Theological College – and Christian – who wrote an intelligent, well written open letter to Jim Wallace about his treatment of video games in the wake of the Oslo tragedy.
Earlier this morning Kotaku’s very own Seamus Byrne discussed Modern Warfare 2 and the Oslo attacks with Jim Wallace from the ACL. Just in case you missed it, we thought we’d post the video here.
In the R18+ debate the Australian Christian Lobby has been the one major constant – always in opposition, always in the media, seemingly involved at the highest levels of Australian government. Considering their increasingly conservative message – in the wake of Jim Wallace’s controversial views voiced on twitter – we decided to take an in-depth look at the ACL themselves. Why do they exist? Why are they still relevant? And why should we care?
We’ve had our own issues with the Australian Christian Lobby with regards to video game classification, but now it seems that Jim Wallace is taking issue with Fiona Patten of The Sex Party after she expressed support for a complete overhaul of the classification system, including the introduction of an R18 rating for video games.