Quote from: Spinachcat;649922Fortunately, the atheism is on the rise, agnosticism is on the rise and Christian fundamentalism is slowly, but surely, dying away with the old people. In the next 20 years, most of the Religious Right and the Moral Majority will be dead and buried. Even now, they are slipping quickly toward irrelevance in nursing homes.

Haven't watched Jesus Camp, have you?

Quote from: CRKrueger;649928Haven't watched Jesus Camp, have you?

You find a movie to be a credible account of reality?

Quote from: CRKrueger;649928Haven't watched Jesus Camp, have you?

I did!

Virtually every boy in Germany 1940 was part of Hitler Youth, but how many still professed to nazism in 1960? Beliefs change once you leave mom's house.

I am heartened by the 2012 election where the Born Agains got behind a Mormon. Imagine that sentence in 1980 or 1992 or even 2000? And more importantly, the rest of the country said NO to "morality" disguised as intolerance for women, gays and minorities.

Gay marriage and marijuana are mainstream. Homophobia and racism are not.

Their version of Jesus has lost the war.

Quote from: Spinachcat;649935I did!

Virtually every boy in Germany 1940 was part of Hitler Youth, but how many still professed to nazism in 1960? Beliefs change once you leave mom's house.

I am heartened by the 2012 election where the Born Agains got behind a Mormon. Imagine that sentence in 1980 or 1992 or even 2000? And more importantly, the rest of the country said NO to "morality" disguised as intolerance for women, gays and minorities.

Gay marriage and marijuana are mainstream. Homophobia and racism are not.

Their version of Jesus has lost the war.

I seriously doubt that the Christian Moral Majority types are going away.  The assumption that these people will merely become irrelevant as time goes on due to demographics is a very dangerous one.  Perhaps this won't be very important in other parts of the country, but fundamentalist Christianity is very much a driving force regionally --particularly in the Plains and Southern states.  The simplicity of their argument --God said so because it's in the Bible-- is what keeps them going.

Just because they got behind a Mormon candidate doesn't mean that they approved of him.  It was more a matter of their desire to defeat Obama that drove them into Romney's camp.

Could we please not let this devolve into a "hurrah for atheism!" thread? I can get enough of that in Tang.

Quote from: Dan Davenport;649938Could we please not let this devolve into a "hurrah for atheism!" thread? I can get enough of that in Tang.

Let's hope the cloud of smug from Clooney's speech does not roll over RPGsite, or we're done.

Quote from: Spinachcat;649935I did!

Virtually every boy in Germany 1940 was part of Hitler Youth, but how many still professed to nazism in 1960? Beliefs change once you leave mom's house.

That was an epically crappy analogy you just made there, mate.  Cause, you know, there might have been an intervening cause there between 1940 and 1960 that might have persuaded folks to not profess nazism.  Yah think?

Sometime around Halloween in 1988 the epic scumdouche, yellow journalist, and general bad human being Geralo Rivera did a prime-time TV special called Exposing Satan's Underground. There were only three TV networks for most rural people back then (Actually, we only got two). It was a big ratings hit.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSf4CAEVLU

Pretty hard to take seriously, right? No sane adult could actually swallow this shit, right?

The next day, I went to high school in my very small, mean, and angry little town in a conservative rural area of an otherwise blue state. I would have been 16 or 17. There was a weird silence that morning. A tension to everything. Something had changed, overnight. Imagine being a Muslim in an airport on September 12, 2001 (Yeah, I know all U.S. Airports were closed then, but you get the idea).

The bomb that had dropped was Geraldo's special. It had hit the adult population (or at least a significant minority of them) like a ton a bricks, and a large number of them, apparently, had become convinced by it that there was a Satanic cult right here in Nowheresville, and that it had to be ferreted out and smashed. For the next week there was a period of hysteria where kids were constantly being pulled out of class to the principal's office to be grilled by administration and police about The Cult. "Where does it meet? Do you know anybody in it? etc, etc. Weirdly, even though I was known as a D&D player and horror/gore/metal freak, I was never caught up in the witch-hunt: They only went after "Bad" kids, the ones who smoked, came from broken homes, had been in fights, girls smeared as "Sluts", etc. Adults talked about The Cult as if it was a very real thing that they just needed just a little more evidence to prove. A friend of mine was arrested for underage drinking when a party he was at was raided... because neighbors reported hearing "Chanting". I remember one mean redneck kid (The last person in the world you would ever expect to be a Satanist, although as an adult he was active in the local KKK) talking about how his dad had warned him that if he ever found out that he was involved in The Cult he would beat him into the hospital.

And then after about a week it was over. Thankfully the madness burned itself out before we got a West Memphis Three-like situation or something similar.

So yeah, the 80's "Satanic Panic" was a very real thing. As far as it's actual effect on my role-playing experience, it was a mixed bag: I knew some very religious people that had no problem with D&D, some very religious people who took the weird compromise position that "Some people turn evil/kill themselves from D&D but our group/rules system/club isn't like that", some barely-religious people who were anti-RPGs simply because a popular youth pastor had spoken against them, and even some secular people who were against it because they saw a TV "Expose" where an "Expert" said it made kids kill themselves and they just accepted as gospel whatever they saw on TV (It wasn't just Right-Wing fundies railing against role-playing, I remember the liberal talk show host Phil Donahue having a particularly unfair hatchet-job episode on D&D, which he bashed mainly on the grounds that it was creepy for adults to still be playing games. Apparently if you are over 18, your life should be a joyless slog of unending labor or else you are mentally sick.). My mom had some very conservative Mormon friends who objected on religious grounds but mainly seemed freaked out on political grounds by the fact that the game had no winner (A game without a winner struck them as vaguely hippy-socialist-pinko).

Quote from: Dan Davenport;649938Could we please not let this devolve into a "hurrah for atheism!" thread? I can get enough of that in Tang.

Seconded.

Quote from: Dan Davenport;649938Could we please not let this devolve into a "hurrah for atheism!" thread? I can get enough of that in Tang.

I prefer a "hurrah for Judaism!" thing, we don't have Satanic panics.

Buddhists don't have any sort of panics, even when we should probably be panicking.

Quote from: taustin;649708In all seriousness, the geekier ones generally do have higher incomes.

Have you seen different household income stats from rpg.net than the ones I see? Far better educated and lower paid than the average American. Granted, that's big purple so they're not "real" geeks, but...

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;649968Sometime around Halloween in 1988 the epic scumdouche, yellow journalist, and general bad human being Geralo Rivera did a prime-time TV special called Exposing Satan's Underground. There were only three TV networks for most rural people back then (Actually, we only got two). It was a big ratings hit.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSf4CAEVLU

Pretty hard to take seriously, right? No sane adult could actually swallow this shit, right?

I remember that show; it came out when I was in college.  I still want to kick Ozzy's ass for being on that damn thing.

Thankfully, I was already away from my parents when that came out, otherwise I'd imagine I'd have woken up the next morning to find a priest in our house ready to perform an exorcism.  

On the college campus I was at, the show was met with either a collective shrug or outright ridicule.  But there were plenty of people outside of college who descended upon it to rail against the "evil in our midst".  The fact that "The Last Temptation of Christ" came out at roughly the same time didn't exactly help, because it stirred up the religiously conservative masses to an extreme degree.

Quote from: econobus;650018Have you seen different household income stats from rpg.net than the ones I see? Far better educated and lower paid than the average American. Granted, that's big purple so they're not "real" geeks, but...

Yeah, I was gonna say.  There are some geeks that make good money, but the large majority I hang out with and meet at various stores and cons don't when compared to other groups I hang out with (I'm also a sports nut).  Especially gamer geeks.  Maybe it's because geeks tend to do liberal arts type of education?  And we all know the job market out there for people with English and Art degrees...

The Panic was real and just provided another quiver in the bow of nutty fundamentalists. With the DnD panic, now they could browbeat and shame not only conventionally rebellious kids for drinking, early sexual activity or the like, but geeky bookish kids as well.