Humans are going to play games and humans are going to fight. It is in our DNA. It is in our memes. Males are especially prone to these activities. There are a few sports that exist mainly because other folks will pay to watch them; football and boxing come to mind.
One of the reasons that I quit watching football was the level of violence. It is the same with boxing. I understand the attraction, but for me at least, it is appealing to baser part of a human. In my mind there is a real question of ethics when we pay to watch violence. I try to avoid such entertainment, and for the most part I do.
Over the last few years a new sport has come on the scene, mixed martial arts sometimes called Ultimate Fighting. To me this sport is nothing but human dog fighting. The level of violence and aggression is so far off the skill as to be indescribable. It is just short of giving each fighter a knife or chain saw and letting them have it. It is a Mad Max dystopic crowd screaming, ‘Two men in, one man out.” For me it was not a choice to not watch. I could not watch.
An article in the New York Times, Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries, describes a growing movement to combine mixed martial arts and Christianity. To me this was one of the scariest things I have read of late. Take a few minutes and read this.
Now Ol’ Rev. Joe is pretty much an agonistic, and he is certainly not a great biblical scholar. I was, however, brought up in the Christian tradition. I have certainly read large portions of the King James Bible. Somehow or another, my reading of the Christ figure does not include beating each other’s brains out. While I am aware that some readers of the Bible interpret portions that males should have dominion over women, I am not aware of any passage promoting extreme machismo.
Christianity has a very bloody history. There were The Crusades and The Inquisition just to mention a couple. Is this a slippery slope towards something like this again? How far is this from from young Muslim men being trained in Jihad? How far is this from the Taliban promoting their extreme fundamentalist approach to Islam?
On the societal warning scale I am going to color this one yellow with hints of orange.