I do think it will be very hard to walk the “neutral” line.
As others have said, many (not all) Christian readers might keep thinking, “God would just kill these conspirators! The story should be over in 2 seconds! He would never let these atheists devise their plan in the first place, much less let them get even close to accomplishing their goal!”
And many (not all) atheist readers might think, “What a huge waste of time. We aren’t even sure that Jesus ever really existed as a person. With that being the case, would killing a woman living 2,000 years ago even affect the spread of the Christian religion? If Jesus is just a myth, or just an example of how to live, this won’t accomplish anything. Why not use this technology for more productive purposes?”
All of this being said, it’s a creative and controversial idea. I don’t know if the “third rail” subject matter would cause too much backlash or not. It’s funny; plenty of pro-religious movies have done well (like Mel Gibson’s movie), but you toss out the idea of a story that might be viewed as anti-Christian, and people get all offended. All viewpoints and worldviews are subject to scrutiny and even criticism. To me, no worldview is “off limits” from a story like this. A worldview that cannot be subjected to, and stand up to, scrutiny and criticism from others is a very weak worldview.
But you need to be realistic in considering even if the negative feedback is unreasonable, it will certainly still be there, possibly in excess.
Edited to add: Assuming the atheists are smart, which I assume they are if they made such a machine, they would have to consider the historical implications of trying to destroy the rise of Christianity. Obviously there are many pros and cons attached to the history behind it, but would there be concerns about loss of more info during Black Death and Dark Ages in general, lack of a strong counter force to Islam, etc, etc?
Sorry, but why would a group of atheist want to kill someone they don’t believe existed?
Or are they of the historical Jesus kind?
The majority of atheists believe that Jesus existed. They just don’t agree that he is the son of god as they don’t believe there is a god.
It’s an interesting idea, it just seem to perpetuate all the negative stereotypes of atheists, as people who are angry at God, instead of not believing in him, and runs the risk of offending the religious at the same time.
Again, they are not angry at god. They want to remove the idea of god - at least the Christian god, as they believe it could improve the future (present) without religion playing such a strong role. Extreme atheists… I don’t think such a group really exist!
There are many possible what ifs. But can you think of a bigger one?
Edit:
@Eric_Moser
Islam arrived around 600CE, and definitely had influence from Christianity. Without Christianity, who’s to say what would have happened? Yes, there would be negative feedback. Again, I wouldn’t release the story without completing it and once complete, reading it should allay any concerns. Lingering concerns after it is completed, as I said in an earlier post, would just be people looking for a fight.
Edit 2: The group of atheists you are travelling with all have their own motivations for the mission. They do not all have the same reasons for being there.
What if Constantine didn’t make Christianity legal (or died before he could). That way, you still get to play around with the whole religion idea, but you won’t offend as many people.
I personally think you could manage to do something interesting and original with the first idea. After all there’s a game about the left vs the right on here and while the thread can get agitated at times the common belief on both side is that its gonna be a really good game. Once you have a demo up and peoples see that you really are neutral on the subject they will understand. If anything you could add an ultimate good but difficult ending where we manages to make peace between science and religion. Its not as if the two were completely incompatible.
I’m pretty interested in the idea of the first game.
I really really like it, and to me it doesn’t seem offensive, because there is a reason, a motive to the story, and as long as that happens, as long as it isn’t a silly reason to attack a religion, any religion (or lack of), it’s cool, because of the discussion it generates.
I think that we should probably get a better idea of the game before labeling it. Play it before we judge it.
We can understand in many ways what @andymwhy is trying to say, to resume of the game, but we will not fully understand it without playing and really seeing his concept, the world he has created, the reasons of everything.
And it should be cool to discuss it, we are all civilized, we can do it without attacking each other.
While that sounds great in theory, I think the controversy wouldn’t be allayed until the game is completed. I have the possible endings already complete in my mind. No demo will let you know either way what they are going to be…
Plot twist: aliens attack and we gotta team up with virgin mary and the radical atheists to save the world. In the process mary ditch joseph, fall in love with one of the atheist and end up raising a science jesus.
I’m going to approach the subject from a completely different angle.
I personally loathe games that tell me I can play personalities A, B, or C, then turn around and say “Haha! Fooled you! Personality C doesn’t count!”
If the game only continues when my MC makes a certain decision (i.e. takes a specific #option at a specific *choice,) that decision ought to be either independent of my MC’s personality, or made before the game actually begins, limiting my MC’s personality options to only those which would take the relevant option in the first place. And no, I don’t consider kidnapping, blackmail, or death threats valid reasons to force an MC to make a specific choice independently of the MC’s personality.
Even setting aside the religious aspects, the group of time-travelers are explicitly planning to murder someone in cold blood. A young adult—or a child; depending on exactly how old the target is at the point the time-travelers enter her life. To join this expedition, an MC will either have the personality of a cold-blooded sociopath willing to watch the innocent die “for the good of the rest,” or the personality of a self-righteous vigilante willing to get personally involved in stopping what effectively amounts to a murder-cult.
There may be a handful of other personalities that would join such a murder-quest, but there are an awful lot of personalities that would never even consider such an activity. I strongly suggest you set up the intro so those personalities are screened out immediately.
I’m leaning towards the Zombie game just because killing the Messiah of a major religion might be taking it too far (I am 100% fine with it, but all it takes is that 1 person…)
I will definitely continue the series, but I want to take a break first. Don’t worry, whatever I write next, Kepler comes after!
Edit: Actually, I think my mind has been made up!
I don’t think that the world is quite ready for me to write the Assassination of Mary, Mother of Jesus just yet. It is also a major story that would take a lot of mental effort. As such, I will place that idea back in the box for now and start the zombie game. I have a lot of planning done for the zombie story and it is actually very light-hearted which should make it faster to write.
Writing this zombie game will also mean that I can start CK62e: Old Home much sooner.
For those still interested in the Assassination of Mary, Mother of Jesus, for major plot reasons the game starts for the MC in the year 2030. I plan to write it before then!
So you do not think extreme atheists exist, but plan to have a group of them in your story willing to kill someone they know to be innocent to further their belief structure? Isn’t that sort of exactly what extremism is?
I am glad you’re putting it on the back burner. You’re a talented writer, and I’m looking forward to seeing the zombie story you cook up.
And for the record, aside from the whole “God would stop it” argument, there’s another one: it didn’t have to be Mary. God picked her, but even with as much banging as there was in olden times it is fair to say there was at least one other good-hearted virgin out there. Mary wasn’t necessarily picked because she was special, she was more or less precisely picked because she was not. She was a nobody. That’s the point. And the thought behind the David thing was to nip the whole family line in the bud. I love me the Terminator movies, even the much-maligned third one. But if you are already doing the Sarah Connor as Mary thing, you might as well fix one of the odd plot foibles it had: why go back to 1984 and kill Sarah Connor when you could go back further and kill her great-great grandpappy in a time before pipe bombs and shotguns, so your robot assassin would be even harder to kill? Of course Skynet had a hard time identifying Sarah, but that never made much sense either. By comparison the direct lineage of all these people is in the Bible, so Super Atheist Whack Squad 7 would have an easier time going further back the line. Would have made the Terminator comparison at least slightly less direct.
And I think we all know if Mary gets bumped off and for whatever reason Jesus is never born, it’s just going to be replaced by Brianism instead. He always looked on the bright side of life, you know.
Wouldn’t the assassination of a fictional character be a surprisingly short and unsatisfactory story anyway? Though I’d have loved the twist where you seduce Mary and she just makes up the whole ‘immaculate conception’ thing to hide it from her dullard husband.
I actually dislike most time travel stories but I really really don’t care for Zombies either so I’m just here to amuse myself. Though I do sympathize with being torn between two stories.
