Jesus Rocks!

When I was in high school, I flew out to St. Louis for a week to visit my childhood friend Glenn.  Glenn would indulge me by playing commodore 64 games for hours, but in retrospect, he was much cooler than that.  By sophomore year, when I was winning science fairs, Glenn drove a motorcycle and could rock GNR tunes on the electric guitar.

Speaking of electric guitars, since there isn't much to do in St. Louis, we went to their 6-flags (because everyone knows Cali roller coasters suck).  While we were there I attended my first and only Christian Rock Concert.  I think the band was called Petra and because it was the late 80's they were a hard rock hair band.  The lead singer was fantastic:

"Your parents don't like your hair? I knew a guy with long hair once.  He spoke out against The Man and stood up for what was right.  They called him a radical, but that man is a friend of mine.  You may have heard of him...  His name is JESUS!!!!"

As an agnostic, I'm ambivalent to the whole God thing, but I get a kick out of Christians every once in a while.  The other day, Karma and I were doing our ususally lap around Rebecca's dirt mall, and we stopped in at Berean to check things out:

Ninety percent of the store was filled with Christian books and DVDs. BORING... I snickered at the checkout displays with their proverb printed candies. Then I wandered into the young adult section. I noticed that they had some cool hot-topic-ish t-shirts, tops, and hoodies. They had trendy graphic art, but featured new testament verses or what I could only assume was Christian rock band names. I liked it.

Then I hit pay dirt! Check out the video games they are making for Christian kids:





But that's not all!!! We've also got PRAISE HERO!!!!



Cloud Nine Games is behind most of these knock-offs. The CEO seems like a little bit of a douche claiming that he thought up of a christian guitar game before Guitar Hero came out, but whatevers.

At first I was going to blog about how lame Christians are with this shit. But I quickly came around to the idea and realized that this is all pretty cool. Imagine you are in high school and your parents are borderline religious nut jobs. You can't shop with the sluts and whores at Hot Topic and you can't listen to the Devil's music on your I-pod. You can't be exposed to the violence of Grand Theft Auto on X-box. Being a teenage is hard enough, but having to walk the halls of high school so detached and remote from the in crowd. That's tough.

Well now we have Berean to the rescue. Your cool christian threads kind of fit in, and if anyone looks too close, you are making a statement about your faith. Sure you can't rock out to Metallica on Guitar Hero, but you play christian rock on Praise Hero. You know its not the same. The cool kids will still put you down, but you know what they are talking about. At least you can relate. When you go off to college to live amongst the heathens, the transition will be that much smoother.

All in all, my venture into the Jesus store was pretty cool. I still don't know about these puppets though:



They kinda scare me.