For it is by grace you have been saved...

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

This Blog Rated "R"

I've said before that sometimes I'm a bit behind on things. So you shouldn't be surprised that I just discovered something that was posted several years ago! You know how it goes, you follow a link to one article, then it points to another, and so on.

Anyway, I followed enough links to end up at a post from Trevin Wax's Kingdom People over at the Gospel Coalition blog. And it had to do with the "rating" his blog received by some online rating thingy. His was rated NC-17 because of references to death, missionaries, dangerous, etc.

For kicks, I plugged in my own little blog's URL to see what they might say about the rantings found here. While I'm not apparently as dangerous as Mr. Wax, I still have been labeled as semi-dangerous. Here is the result:
This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
  • missionary (4x)
  • shoot (3x)
  • kill (2x)
Well, there you have it. Parents, keep your kids away from this site. Who knows what I might do or say. I know this is just in fun. The site that does these ratings is just one of the silly "quiz" sites that tries to draw you in and follow an endless series of clicks that gives you all sorts of ads, etc.

Still, it does raise some interesting questions about what the world thinks about Christianity. I remember reading somewhere that a popular Christian movie received a PG-13 rating for "thematic elements," meaning of course the theme of Christianity. Wouldn't want young children hearing about that, now would we?

There are all sorts of commentaries that could come from this. We could talk about the faulty ratings system in general (which I mentioned here regarding games). We could talk about the world's aversion to all things Christian. We could talk about the idiotic double standards we see all around us (i.e. promoting "alternative lifestyles" while banning Christian thought). In fact, I recently read about a case here in Missouri where the ACLU brought a suit against a school district for using filtering software that kept school kids from pornographic sites. They used the argument that the school was discriminating against pro-gay sites. The world we live in. Go figure.

As I said, lots of things come to mind. But for the most part, this was just for fun. So, have fun. After all, this is a rated R site!

(P.S. You'll be glad to know that our church site received a G rating. It's safe! Or does that mean we aren't using enough Christian language over there. Hmm... I'll have to rethink this)

4 comments:

Gregg Metcalf said...

Dude, I wonder how you got an R rating, when I have addressed some pretty heavy topics? I was rated at PG. I guess I used the word "kill" (1x) and the word "hurt" (2x)

That was a fast evaluation I wonder how there were able to look at 4 years of blogs?

Well, for grins and giggles for awhile I am going to add the rating to my blog.

Scott said...

Gregg, I don't think it goes through the whole history. I think it just looks at what would show up on any given day. So the rating would probably change after each post, depending on how many posts you show per page. It's all a joke, and the real problem for me wasn't shoot and kill, but the word "missionary"! Go figure.

Anonymous said...

That's not what "thematic elements" generally means for ratings. You're likely jumping the gun to assume discrimination there (although you don't say which movie so I can't exactly check). When the MPAA says "thematic elements", they mean "elements of a film that do not fit into the traditional categories such as violence, sex, drug use and language, but may involve some degree of malcontent". Did somebody die in the movie? Was there family strife? Did someone experience bigotry or racism or some sort of other oppression? Did kids or teenagers experience strong peer pressure in the film? Any of those or similar issues would count as thematic elements.

Scott said...

Dear Anon.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing some thoughts. You may have misunderstood. This comes from a little site that supposedly "rates" your blog based on the occurrence of certain words or phrases. Has nothing really to do with movies or any particular movie. It was just all in fun. But, again, thanks for stopping by.