If you’ve been reading my blog for any good amount of time or you know me in real life, then you are fully aware of both my strong faith and love in entertainment. While I’m pretty conservative on some things, I guess you can say I’m pretty liberal in my entertainment choices. I basically like everything or at least will give it a chance.

I fully respect your right to not want to watch, read, or participate in something because it conflicts with your beliefs whatever that may end up being. You are perfectly in your rights to not want to do something that you are uncomfortable with or that you feel may cause some sort of harm to you.

What I don’t understand is why there are so many Christians that are so judgmental of others for their entertainment choices or the fact how negatively vocal they are when it comes to things they don’t like.

I was reading the Facebook page of a Christian based entertainment review site. Now I normally have no trouble with the actual reviews themselves. The reviewers cover pretty much everything in movies, TV shows, video games, and music and usually give a fair review of the content. Their target audience is quite conservative so they tend to give more of play-by-play of content IN their review (ie. sexual content, language, violence) vs their overall opinion. Sometimes it can be a little too broken down for me (ie. sexual content = characters hold hands) but I still appreciate the fact that they will still go review rated R movies or play video games rated mature M. Why? Just because someone is a Christian doesn’t mean they are going to stop doing these things plus what may not be appropriate for one person doesn’t mean another person isn’t going to enjoy it.

But even though these reviewers understand it, apparently sometimes their audience does not. And that is what frustrates me. The attitude that some Christians can have towards other people who don’t share specifically what they believe in. The Facebook comments from the entertainment site wanted to make me punch a hole through a wall because I could just feel the close mindedness and judgmental attitudes of some people.

Like banning books. I never can understand the practice of this especially when I find out that the parents wanting to uphold the ban have NEVER READ the books they want to ban. You don’t want your kid to read it? Fine. But who are you to say that no one else can?

Growing up there were some things that my parents didn’t want to expose us to because they felt it wasn’t appropriate at our age. And that was fine. Whether or not we actually were, we were still minors living at home so they had every right to impose that on us. But did they ever try to force their particular rules on other people? Nope. Did they condemn others for not sharing their same opinion? Nope. Did they judge other Christians for letting their kids do what they wouldn’t allow us? Nope.

It just amazes me how quick to judge some Christians can be and how they don’t seem to realize how callous and judgmental they look. If the point of our faith is to show the rest of the world that how different we are from those that don’t share our beliefs, being the stereotype that drives away those who we would like to reach out to, is NOT the way to do it.

I could go on about this for a long time and I may write more posts about this in the future regarding certain types of media or how just because something is Christian doesn’t mean it’s artistically something I want to support. I have issues with legalism because it goes against everything that I believe about what my faith really stands for. So consider this just a warm up post for posts later to come.