@nagarond: Instead of engaging in bigotry, why not deal honestly with the facts?
Science is founded on empiricism. Has anyone ever seen Life arise from non-life by only random natural processes? Has anyone ever seen a simpler form of life evolve newer and more complex genetic program, structure, and function? Despite your fellow travelers' best efforts, no one has.
What we do see is Life arising from only the same kind of Life (or its programs). Whom does that better support, Moses or Darwin?
"the industry's portrayal of Islam is enforcing negative cultural stereotypes"
Don't blame game designers for a negative protrayal of Islam. Blame Islam. Qur'an 8:38-39:
"Say to the Unbelievers, if (now) they desist (from Unbelief), their past would be forgiven them; but if they persist, the punishment of those before them is already (a matter of warning for them). And fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief and polytheism: i.e. worshipping others besides Allah) and the religion (worship) will all be for Allah Alone (in the whole of the world) [...]."
"Why the 'circle of life' has a monarchy with absolute power over its subjects [...] why the Pride Lands needs a king at all (how about a queen this time around?) [...] The Lion King is a simplistic, outdated fable when it comes down to it."
Nature doesn't care about your absurd identity politics.
@Slinqy @Amillennialist The Assassins were Shia (not Buddhists), and the Templars were Christians (not animists) defending Christians against jihadists.
@CaptWaffle @Amillennialist I'm all for fun and games, and I can appreciate commanding German forces in Panzer General or the Soviet army in Company of Heroes -- for people my age, those mortal enemies are dead and buried. No one's trying to blitzkrieg or sneak attack us. (But I can see where someone who survived the Holocaust would be outraged.)
However, at this very moment, untold millions support (in various ways) the "divine" mandate to "kill the pagans wherever you find them"(Qur'an 9:5), and innocent people around the world are being maimed and murdered in fulfillment of that "revelation."
No, you didn't make a game "in some way about the Muslim faith," you created a piece of pro-jihad propaganda, glamorizing Muslim assassins murdering Christians.
(By analogy, when are you going to make a game where we get to play Nazis slaughtering Jews? That'd be a game "somehow about German culture," right?)
Of course, atrocities were committed by Crusaders against other Christians and Jews (and some possibly-innocent Muslims), but the first Crusade was called by Pope Urban II in defense of Christians in the east under attack for centuries by ... Islam.
(How do you think that the Holy Land -- Christian and Jewish -- came under Islamic control? Love and good deeds?)
And the Knights Templar -- The "Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon" -- defended innocent pilgrims who were butchered regularly by Muslims.
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