Why do we keep the sacred separate from the profane? So we don’t dirty up the clean things. The clean things won’t make the dirty things any cleaner, but the dirty things sure can mess up the clean things. So we keep them separate. If we don’t, we’re left with nothing but dirty things. And this holds just as true for concepts as it does for objects.
Games are intended to communicate information, values, and behaviors. Board games are especially good at this. There was probably a reason someone made the thimble a “Monopoly” game piece. Perhaps that reason is something worth digging up so we can learn from it.
You might be willing to suffer torture or even give up your own life to keep your enemies from getting what they want. But if your child’s safety or life is on the line, you’ll just fold like a house of cards, won’t you? You’ll do anything to keep him or her in one piece…or will you? What if there’s a fate to be avoided that’s worse than death?
“Lucifer” is a fun show to watch so long as you take it as it is — a work of fiction borrowing heavily from religion — and while it’s troubling to think unsuspecting people might receive their first impression of the devil from it and think, “Hey, the devil isn’t all that bad!” recognize that most of our first impressions of religious figures — angels, Moses, Jesus, God, Muhammad, etc. — don’t come from original sources and have been distorted in some way.
Lucifer has a “super-power”: he can compel people to tell uncomfortable, inappropriate truths about themselves. (Enjoy kitten crush videos? You’ll tell him. You’ll *want* to.) Here we touch on one of the darkest aspects of the Internet: anonymous confession. How much evil has been unleashed in people’s hearts since they’re now able to freely confess evil desires behind a veil of anonymity and, worse, find others who are like-minded?
“In the beginning, the angel Lucifer was cast out of Heaven and condemned to rule Hell for all eternity. Until he decided to take a vacation….” That’s the show concept of “Lucifer” in a nutshell. Is it biblical? Only slightly. *Was* the angel Lucifer condemned to rule Hell for all eternity? No. That’s not biblical, that’s pop cultural.
GAME OF THRONES SPOILER ALERT!!! [UPDATE: Not really.] If you continue reading this post all the way to the end, you will [UPDATE: not] learn the identity of Jon Snow’s parents. If you don’t want the secret spoiled, just bookmark this page and come back to it when the series has revealed it to see how amazingly prescient I am. [UPDATE: I was wrong.]