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I used to be really good at being God.

At least, that’s how I thought of it when I played Sim City in my younger days. I’d plot out the land with high density forests, flowing streams that poured down mountains, and rolling hills that would fall into the ocean border on one end of my screen. It was beautiful; Pandora beautiful.

Then I would efficiently deface that work of art with my very own Sim City. A baseball stadium here, a few sky-scrapers there – all those engineered works of art. You could be God and a city planner all at once. But if you just wanted to be God, well, here’s your chance.

Just yesterday German based FIAA GmbH released the beta version of The Bible Online: Heroes, the first installment of a series of MMORTS (massively multiplayer online real-time strategy) “games” based on the Bible. And you’re like, whaaaaat?? It’s actually pretty simple. Just think Sim City or The Simms, but for Genesis. You can play the role of Abraham or another tribe leader: build a society, declare war on other society, even manage a budget. But as Rachel Wagner in Religion Dispatches points out, you get to play the role of God and that of Abraham. You’ve got to think that Isaac scene gets intense.

It raises some questions about how playing this game will sway one’s interaction with the Bible. The game will not be replacing old narratives; rather, it allows players to create new narratives in the gaps of stories. What is this kind of modern-day midrash?

I already tried to start my own account, but it doesn’t look like FIAA is allowing use from my “region”. I haven’t quite figured out what that region is, but I’ll look into it. Comment here if you have any success in the sandals of Abraham.

Other Links:

CNBC Story

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Rabbi Moses ben Maimon a/k/a Maimonides

The New York Times features an op-ed piece from Andrew Baker this morning that should serve as a stirring reminder of the importance of shared religious heritage and diversity. It regards the difficulty of restoring the yeshiva and synagogue of Maimonides in Cairo, Egypt.

This is not, however, simply a story of how difficult it is to secure government funding for historical or architectural restoration. At least, it is not only that kind of a story. The story of restoring Maimonides’ yeshiva carries important messages about history and religious diversity. All in one building, we can see a microcosm of conflict between what we’ve dubbed a shining star of the modern Islamic state (that is, Egypt) and its troubled relationship with its own Jewish heritage.

Baker’s article aptly lays out the history of Maimonides and of the Jewish population of Cairo, so I will not belabor that history in this short article. I do want to point up the narrative nature of history here. We must endeavor to preserve the fact of humanity’s religious diversity in history from the narrative aims of a dominant state apparatus. This is not only true for the Islamic-Jewish tension in Egypt: it is equally true for the United States. We must continue to write humanity’s religious diversity back into the dominant narrative of history at every opportunity or we risk really and truly losing that rich expression of human longing for connection with the transcendent.

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