I appreciate the responses, but I don't "feel" much better :-) I wish, as I imagine many of you have wished at times, I could get a direct answer from heaven. That would be nice, wouldn't it?

I tend to have the kind of conscience that once it begins to feel unsettled, almost anything short of certainty can't pull it out for fear of being wrong... which then leads to thoughts of "The Lord will hate me..." which stirs up another battle of the mind.

And consistency is hard on this issue. I mean really, if my rationale is sound, and it sure seems sound, then the same would surely have to apply to my hacking people with battle axes and shooting countless people in video games. But alas, conscience is a key element in all of this, but so is maturity and so is freedom. The difficulty is sorting out what is what.

To be honest, I'm bummed. I think I'm going to have to give up playing Magic the Gathering because I harbor some doubt about it. But on the other hand, there's a part of me that still thinks, "Look, it's fantasy," and "it seems like playing it would be fine." In other words, if my rationale is correct, I don't detest as I should.

Austin

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Austin Brown
Deacon in New Life Alliance Church (C&MA), Logansport, Indiana
Student: Whitefield Theological Seminary, M.Div program