The Power of Christ compels your hard drive!

Now I know that if you look at it in tasty pie chart form, the overlap between hard core computer users/gamers and Rapture-baiting Evangelicals makes for a pretty slender slice. Still, it ought to be enough to make this latest news interesting, because nothing raises a nasally hue-and-cry from the joystick set like burying spyware in something they want.

Snicker, if you dare, at this report from the front lines of the battle against the Prince of Lies. The makers of the Left Behind book and film series (aka revenge porn for the falsely pious) have released a video game where, post-Uplifting, you can play foot soldier in God's Rockin' Army back on Earth and plug a few non-believers. You know, like Grand Theft Auto, only instead of earning money and guns as a prize for your bloodlust, you get Eternal Communion With the Almighty. That a young Bruce Campbell and Josh Becker (pals of talented heathen Sam Raimi) already took the much more appropriate title Thou Shalt Not Kill...Except is a tragedy, or more likely, Satan's doing.

I especially like the bit about goat-footed demons emerging from UN peacekeeping vehicles. Fight the real enemy!

Of course, is anyone really surprised that the thing is lumped with monitoring software that feeds information about the user back to Left Behind HQ? With a million copies set to be distributed through mega-churches right alongside the Body and Blood of Christ, it's the threat of Hell itself that will pressure True Believers into exposing their personal computers for inspection and meddling. Seriously, do you want to have to explain to the priest why you haven't killed at least 1,000 atheists this week?

And I'm sure once you've opened a clandestine pipe like that, there's no way at all some enterprising hacker couldn't tap in and start arranging for a little tithe of their own. The Lord will provide a firewall.