Sacrilege or Scruples

[parvusvir]

Hi everyone. I was playing a computer game called Combat Arms. It is a first person shooter game and I was playing in a mode called Search and Destroy. In the mode, one team’s goal is to plant a bomb in one of two sites and the other team’s goal is to defend. In each round, every player on both teams has one life. A team wins the game after winning a certain number of rounds.

I was using the default gun in the game which is the M16A3 because I didn’t want to spend my in-game currency on a better weapon. It is a weak weapon. In one game a player called Bob killed me and picked up my M16A3. I asked why he did that through the text chat of the game and one of his buddies jokingly said that he was the best M16A3 player in North America.

In the next game with Bob I killed him with the M16A3. After, I typed “I killed Bob w/ the M16. That’s sacrilege.” He responded with, “lol.”

I felt bad afterwards because I don’t want to get into the habit of making jokes about sacrilege. Is this mortal sin or am I just being scrupulous?

 

[peter26]

Remember the three conditions for mortal sins

Mortal sin is a sin of grave matter
Mortal sin is committed with full knowledge of the sinner
Mortal sin is committed with deliberate consent of the sinner

Anything you do or say without deliberate consent is not a mortal sin. That includes off the cuff remarks like this. I wouldn’t of said this was a “grave matter” either to be honest.

 

[Don_Ruggero]

Hi everyone. I was playing a computer game called Combat Arms. It is a first person shooter game and I was playing in a mode called Search and Destroy. In the mode, one team’s goal is to plant a bomb in one of two sites and the other team’s goal is to defend. In each round, every player on both teams has one life. A team wins the game after winning a certain number of rounds.

I was using the default gun in the game which is the M16A3 because I didn’t want to spend my in-game currency on a better weapon. It is a weak weapon. In one game a player called Bob killed me and picked up my M16A3. I asked why he did that through the text chat of the game and one of his buddies jokingly said that he was the best M16A3 player in North America.

In the next game with Bob I killed him with the M16A3. After, I typed “I killed Bob w/ the M16. That’s sacrilege.” He responded with, “lol.”

I felt bad afterwards because I don’t want to get into the habit of making jokes about sacrilege. Is this mortal sin or am I just being scrupulous?

No. This is not what constitutes a sacrilege. You are playing a game of which I have no knowledge or understanding. It seems the equivalent of a pinball machine game from my era, as best I can tell. That said, in this type of fantasy activity, I don’t see any activity that is remotely sinful in se.

It’s value to the spiritual life…the prudence of spending vast amounts of time doing it… are all other matters and relate to virtue and, therefore correspondingly there is an opportunity for vice, if the game-playing became so inordinate as to foster sloth for example. But I will leave that comment for another day.

 

[seagal]

I don’t know about sacrilege. I’d call it irony