1758 Mr Satan.

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I remember the moral panic about D&D although I was very young. There was a revial later on when the cartoon came on tv but it didn’t amount to much. Where I’m from D&D was still looked at warily though. Anyone outside of nerds were suspicious about it at best. The same thing happened over and over with every new thing that came out. Macic cards, pokemon, Yugioh, virtual pets, you name it. People who are afraid of magical beings see them in every new thing. We had one really evangelical church in town that was fire, brimstone, and exclusivity. Only shitty people were getting in to heaven as far as they were concerned. Honestly, if heaven is filed with assholes, the afterlife is looking pretty depressing.
My sister was friends with a girl from that church for about a week once before the girl went nuts and started teling us that we were going to hell. She then launched an harassment campaign that lasted for a couple of weeks or so. My sister was not, and is not, the kind of person who will tolerate that shit for very long so she put an end to it pretty damn quick.
I remember a few kids disrupting class because they had a problem with something a teacher said and then telling us about how it was against Jesus and blah blah blah. I didn’t know at the time that these kids were going to grow up to fuck with the separation of church and state though.

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I’ve never really understood it. I mean, the thing about that freak-out was nobody cared before it happened. And I do mean nobody. My father (who at least at the time was a pretty conservative Christian) played it growing up and decades later, taught and played it with me and my brothers. I think my parents would chafe with some people’s view point in the world, but they never really went in for fire and brimstone, especially not about any game. They were more concerned we would get too into it from a psychological standpoint.

My parents just think it’s a waste of time. But I know a few evangelicals that would probably think of it as devil worship.

To be honest, I myself am a professing and practicing Christian, but I see the concept of the church ‘demonizing’ things as just trying to hold onto the money of the elders. In truth, a lot of churches are dying out because the elders refuse to let the young step up and learn things or introduce new ideas.

One church I belonged to, I was actually asked to serve on the church’s council, and while flattered, I took a look at the congregation. I was the only person of my generation in it. My parents were the next-youngest, and they were in their fifties. The rest of the church were old fogeys in their seventies or even eighties.

I turned the position down, and the pastor (an old man himself) said he honestly couldn’t blame me for doing so. That church was not a healthy one since one or two old people could easily cause over two dozen young ones to be turned away. I ended up going to the ecumenical services run by the military chaplains instead since while they were small still, at least the mean age of the congregation wasn’t 74, and everyone was a lot more open to things.

A “professing and practicing Christian” and you attend ecumenical services? o_O

Didn’t the Christ say something about being the only way to God?

Just sayin’

The next question is exactly what that means, right? You can’t just say there’s a narrow path and not define it.

Christ was an odd duck. One minute he’s saying not one comma or period is subtracted from The Law (of God) and the next he’s saying “Love fulfills the Law”.

I’m not trying to bug you or anyone, but-
No matter what you think of someone else’s god, or gods, or goddesses-
I don’t think those two quotes are in context, neither do I think that those are the only things that he said.

I try to accept everyone’s choice of deities, or their not having them, as long as they aren’t using their deities to cause harm to me or others.
To me- freedom of religion, + the freedom not to have one, is a very important thing.

That’s all I have for now.

My religious parents convinced my non religious friends parents to let us play RPGs (we did other RPGs that weren’t D&D). The friends parents were all “Isn’t this evil and satanic” and my parents were all “That’s just non sense. Not to mention, would you rather them sit at home playing this game of make believe or out there doing drugs.”

It worked!

And then friends still got drunk, did drugs and still RPed >_>

I was 17 when I started playing Warhammer 40k. My conservative christian father looked at what I was spending my money on, looked at the prices, and then made a comment on how he was glad I would never be able to afford drugs.

As a person who has played D&D since he was 10, I can safely say that whatever the church has said about D&D is 100% true… whatever it is.

So the Unicorn Uprising of 1200 BC actually occurred? Man, I really need to crack open the bible again. (Just a joke. Don’t kill me)

If you’ve never read it, The Dungeon Master (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073GP6NMQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) is worth your time. It presents a story that most people THINK they know, but few actually do, about what really happened to cause that so-called moral panic.

Amazing how all of the OTHER symptoms indicative of a potential problem get subsumed below the Devil Worship of a variant of make-believe cowboys and indians. It’s definitely not an easy way to scare people and start a power grab amidst parents terrified for the “immortal souls” of their children…or terrified that they might have to explain what their children are doing to other busy-body judgemental parents who never changed from the high-school bullies they used to be.

You: terrified that they might have to explain what their children are doing to other busy-body judgemental parents who never changed from the high-school bullies they used to be.

Me: Yessss!! Control, Power, FUD, and Power! (Oh, and control) and Power!
(Did I mention the power of Controling others?)

I KNEW James Dallas Egbert my freshman year in college at Michigan State. I can say from personal experience that 99.9% of what you read is pure bullshit.

William Dear, who wrote The Dungeon Master, was the private investigator hired by Dallas’ parents to find him when he disappeared. Mr. Dear was also a shameless self promoter, according to numerous contemporary accounts. Suspect that anything you read in that book, other than publicly documented facts, to be the product of his imagination. His brilliant idea that the steam tunnels under campus somehow played into this is also bullshit.

I have been in those tunnels with a self described “tunnel rat” While the tunnel rats and D&D crowd had significant overlap, they were distinctly different activities. If Dallas went into the tunnels to attempt suicide by OD, it was more likely he did it as a place where he would not be found until he was dead.

I have never read The Dungeon Master, but I cannot believe it is a work of much value.

(Anyone who knew him, knew him as Dallas. There is a photograph of Dallas, widely circulated at the time of his disappearance, including by the wire services, of him hugging a teddy bear. I took that picture. It was in my girlfriend at the times dorm room, at a party at the end of finals, spring term, on June 6, 1979. I remember the date well because it was my birthday, and we were celebrating that as well as the end of finals. Alas, as widely distributed as the photo was then, I cannot find it in current image searches. )

I don’t know what possessed me…[ I chose that, poor choice of words, by accident], but-

I tried to find a pic of James Dallas Egbert, with a teddy bear, on the web. I had no luck.

In my opinion: I found a good article on Dungeons + Dragons toys + action figures, if anyone would like to look at it.

It is on this page: https://mysideofthelaundryroom.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/dndtoyspart1/comment-page-1/

Please check it out.

Interesting. However, the picture I took that I was writing about is not on that page.

The teddy bear had nothing to do with D&D. As I said, we were in my girlfriend’s room. She had the teddy bear. A licensed Winnie-the-Pooh version, IIRC.

You bet.
I wasn’t thinking that the aforementioned photo is on the linked page, but that- I thought that it was interesting- that the author of “my side of the laundry room”, had written an article, about: James Dallas Egbert, D + D games, + the odd fixation that the media had, with the James Dallas Egbert case. No big thing.
Cheers.

I don’t want to be Elfstar anymore. I want to be Debbie!

You are referencing the Chick Tract, arent you? That was something else. The girl gets recruited in a coven that wants to teach her real magic which she uses to manipulate her parents to buy her more D&D stuff. Later on a friend of her commits suicide just because her character died in the game, which any real D&D player would just, you know, make a new character. Because they knew it was just a game with a bunch of dorks having fun! But no, just burn everything and go to church.

Considering the sheer amount of random crap that people are condemned to eternal damnation for, at least D&D is a fun and entertaining way to corrupt one’s mortal soul.

Our group once, only once, tried to combine metal and D&D, and the resulting failure was hilarious. Zert (half-orc barbarian) tried to begin his action with the opening of Drowning Pool – Bodies. He failed his attack roll, so Raster (my half-elf sorcerer) tried to use dash and then Fire bolt as a bonus action, also failing the roll.

Basically, you end a half-orc barbarian jamming along using his axe like a guitar, a half-elf sorcerer sliding in providing the pyrotechnics, the rest of the group is either laughing hysterically or joining in both because of the fails and the results, and we all were levelled up because our DM thought it was the best thing ever.

I remember trying to pay my way through seminary by applying for a job at a gaming store. My ex-father-in-law was a little freaked out. Started telling me stories about kids he knew that now I realize was just Chick Tracks. Sadly, said store was not hiring as I had heard. I would have loved that job, and maybe he would have forbidden us to marry and saved me from that relationship.

From my experience the problem is not Christianity. I had many secular acquaintances who were unable to comprehend roleplaying (largely Texan, I might add). Most people just don’t understand the idea of imagining themselves as someone else to the point they think something is wrong with those who do. Christianity just adds evangelism on top of that, which ultimately fails evangelism, as I Corinthians 9:22 would tell us. “Hell hot and judgment soon,” as my Pastor likes to call it, is a valid preaching subject, but I am sorry for anyone who has had someone try to personally evangelize them with threats of hellfire.

Hopefully the rise of our generation is going to bring about a change from scaring kids to inviting adults to reason, and that there are enough people left in the world who haven’t already been so pushed aside by what the perceive as normal Christianity that an invitation to reason will be accepted.

“Hopefully the rise of our generation is going to bring about a change from scaring kids to inviting adults to reason, and that there are enough people left in the world who haven’t already been so pushed aside by what the perceive as normal Christianity that an invitation to reason will be accepted.”

I’m 71 now, That’s what I hoped back in the 60’s — that the rise of *my* generation would bring about such a change.

The bizarre example is attempted moral panic over Harry Potter. As a friend of mine pointed out, it is total nuts-and-bolts fantasy, i.e. you say these words, wave your wand this way, brew this potion, and stuff happens, with no appeal to demons, angels or other higher beings required, so the connection with devil worship is basically zero. He also had this interesting theory that there might be higher beings, but they keep themselves secret from wizards in the same way that wizards do from muggles.

Imagine, 2% of the population disappears overnight,… (subsumed into Heaven?)
Well, if the fundamentalists were all subsumed, then logical thinkers and cooler heads would have more of a majority in politics, …. Nah?

Having read the bible I suspect that the people you are referring to will not be the ones rapture’d into Heaven. Although, also through having read the bible, I know that there is no god and hence no rapture…..

No offense meant, but: reading a Christian, or other, bible- convinces people that there is no god?
That is unusual.
Most of the Christian bibles I’ve encountered try to prove that the is a god.
Please, if you would- tell me which translation, or version, of the Christian bible, proves to its readers that there is no god. That is a book that I’d like to read.

It’s not so much that the Bible explicitly spells out anywhere that the God it describes within doesn’t exist as it’s a case that an objective reading of the Bible, without preconception that it is a divine revelation or received wisdom or the ‘Ultimate Truth’, rather quickly highlights to the reader that the singular being of ‘God’ that all the various writers of the books of the Bible describe is not at all the same character.

Just like with God-botherers today their God cares about the things they care about, thinks the way they think, will do things the way they would do them – basically they think God is a more powerful and better (by their definition) reflection of themselves.

So you’ve got Pro-Lifers and Pro-Choicers each ardently sure that their God feels exactly as they do about the issue. Pacifists and Pro-Preemptive Action peoples who feel their God (ostensibly the same God of the same religion) wouldn’t approve of the other’s ideas.

The authors of the Bible are the same. God is vengeful for generation upon generation for sin, according to one. Another author who feels his fore-bearers were sinners (i.e. idolators) argues that the sin of the father is not the sin of the son. For some authors their God wants bloodshed, in holy war, for others their God demands they place the fate of their military battles in his hands to deliver them with miraculous intervention.

That’s not even delving into evidence that the earliest authors of the Pentateuch and the like were apparently ‘henotheists’, that is they believed other Gods existed but that only their God, the God of the Tetragramaton, was worthy of worship. It wasn’t until some time later that it became apparent that the authors held firmly that their were no Gods but their One God and that all others were non-existent.

Of course then it gets schizophrenic by the time the New Testament roles around. Sudden God is three beings each separate but indivisible and, from numerous parts of the Gospels, it is apparent that one part can possess or lack knowledge or abilities that the other/s have and yet they somehow are the same person… the Godhead is theology at it’s finest, where even the most basic of the laws of logic, the Law of Non-Contradiction, gets pitched out the window in favour of a nebulous placeholder that allows for a ‘super-position’ state of God that can be all things simultaneously and none of them at the same time.

I’m late to the conversation but . . . .

There are cool people in KS. They even attend church and read this comic. ;)

The upside is that we churn out tons of artists and atheletes.

Hell, there’s a few Hollywood types with homes in Kansas. And, no, they’re not “just outside of” Lawrence/Topeka. That crap is just to drum up tourism. Being that they’re here for privacy, I won’t divulge the town’s name, just that it’s an hour-and-a-half from Wichita.

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