RE: "Fantasy Role-Playing Is Hurting America"

 

"Oh God, another one" is what I thought upon reading the headline of Christianity Today. I mean, I frequent enough gaming groups to know they're practically lousy with progressives. I listen closely enough to know that their hatred of Christians isn't totally unwarranted and is usually because some family member said something to the extent of "Dungeons and Dragons is satanic!" and then the poor nerd had to endure a living hell simply because they found something worthwhile in a poorly understood hobby.  Conservative Christians are bad at figuring out RPGs. That's not a controversial statement. Period. And, while this article isn't nearly as irritating as it looks upon first glance, it's still symptomatic of basic issues that Protestants have with... well... being human. Still not a good article, by and large.

I do recommend reading the article before going on, by the way. Here it is again.

Now, in the 2020s, I am wondering if my evangelical elders weren’t partly right about the way fantasy role-playing can paganize a culture—just not in the way they expected.

Right here, at the beginning, we have a problem. That word: "paganize". I'll bet you that most Americans (Wiccans included!) wouldn't know real paganism if it bit them in the ass. But we'll get back to that. Just know, right here, that right at the beginning of the article Dr. Moore commits a fatal error: he thinks that paganism has anything to do with what's going on in "fantasy roleplaying", as he calls it.

It doesn't.

If anything it's the lack of paganism that's the problem, not its presence.

But we'll get there!

So we'll address the good of the article, which is more evidence of manufactured consent being a constant in this... "republic". Dr. Moore breaks down Bannon's disgusting tactic on manipulating people through Breitbart. To quote Dr. Moore:

Senior asked whether Bannon considers what he has done in propagating political media and in energizing populist nationalist movements to be “the gamification of politics.” He replied that this is exactly what he’s doing: “I want Dave in Accounting to be Ajax in his life.”

That is gross. I'm perfectly aware the left has their own form of this, but that doesn't mean I can't call out Bannon's evil tactics here. Bannon realized the basic premise of pretty much most MMOs: keep the dopamine stream coming and you can sorta comfort yourself with the fact that none of the things that happened reflect who you are in the real world at all. Bannon's response to this phenomenon was perverse: make that wish to have the two "halves" of a disaffected person become one in a way that benefits him. So he admits to pumping this tragic dopamine spiral into Breitbart.

I mean, I can't get that out of most progressive "news" institutions, so at least he's honest?

Yay?

Here we stop for just a moment to remind everyone reading this post that manufactured consent is the problem of a republic (I won't call it democracy, democracy is just flat out evil): he who gives information to the voter has the real power. Period. That's who you have to worry about.  And, as distasteful and gross as Bannn's tactics are, it's the same basic Marxist narrative as the left pushes, and just as deliberately. If you are sitting on the left and going "Oh you stupid conservatives!" you really have not learned anything from the last ten years, at all. Both sides are trying to weaponize the common folk for their own profit, that's all socialism and any variation of Marxism has ever been. 

And will ever be.

To resist the left as persecutors is in itself Marxist.

But Dr. Moore does not point this out. I do not know if he knows it, but as we're about to get to, his basic presuppositions are so wrong, on such an egregious level, that I think he's drinking the Kool-Aid as much as anyone else.  He lumps in things that do not belong together with a flippancy that I actually find shocking. 

And it takes work for me to be shocked at the idiocies of conservatives.

It turns out actual fantasy role-playing—whether it be Dungeons and Dragons in a treehouse years ago or multiplayer video games on a screen now—is, for most people, harmless fun.

Hold up. Just hold up. That's like comparing playing baseball in real life with playing a baseball video game. TTRPGs require active engagement of the imagination in common with others, while holding to a ruleset to guide said common imagining. The benefits of this activity have been tracked, with some pretty awesomely verifiable results, over the last few decades, and roleplaying is itself a therapeutic activity, in and of itself a good thing to do. TTRPGs are not morally neutral. I'm not saying everyone has to play them, but they're actively good for you to do, should you choose to do them.

MMOs, while there's some obviously good examples of them being healthy, also have a strongly addictive element to them, shown by actual cases of people pretty much literally pissing their lives away on an addictive loop that is more like a slot machine than a real game. Obviously they're not all like that. And not everyone who uses a slot machine will be there until they shit themselves. But anyone who thinks MMOs and slot machines (and the social media that's based on it) aren't designed to be addictive are kidding themselves.

I do not fault Dr. Moore for not knowing about the therapeutic benefits of TTRPGs. I do fault him for not engaging in just the tiniest bit of common sense.

You might find that nitpicking. It's not. This level of basic ignorance is a common trend of  this article. For instance, right after that:

 Paganism, after all, demands the sort of significance that is heroic, in which one’s virtues of strength and power are celebrated in story and song.

Has the man read any actual mythology at all??? Like, at all??? Even a few seconds of reading anything before Christianity reveals a total lack of caring about humans. Humans do not succeed in these myths because they're cool, they succeed because the gods like them, and that's a very important distinction to draw. Assuming humans show up in the mythology at all, like in most Norse stories. Speaking of the Norse, there's a good reason why the common folk went Christian, as the scraps of the old religion they followed involved all sorts of awful crap like human sacrifice. Bits of Mediterranean practice we have are no better; temple prostitutes would get knocked up by men intentionally possessed by spirits so the child would start out possessed. And it just goes on. And on. And on. To be pagan meant to realize that humans were worth fuck all in the grand scheme of things, and therefore were perfectly expendable.

Where are on earth is any of that in CNN or Breitbart??

The problem of paganism, of course, isn't that the pagans were wrong for realizing that human life was cheaper than toilet paper, or that the world is inherently predatory and cruel. That's as obvious as walking into a war-torn country, of which there are many today. Western society is the exception to the truth... and that only goes insofar as you don't look at a garbage can behind Planned Parenthood.

At least the pagans had the balls to call the things they killed human.

I can't even get that out most progressives. Cowards.

No, the problem of paganism is very different: they leaned into the cycle of cruelty. They found there was no way out, so they didn't bother to try. There's a nobility in accepting things as they are, and it's this nobility I think the modern "pagans" try to recreate... but if you're going to do that you better be willing to build an altar to put those baby parts on. And you better be willing to own up to to what it is that you're doing.

Progressives can't because their ideology is inherently dishonest in a way that no pagan could ever afford to be.

And conservatives are just progressives driving the speed limit.

So.

This brings us to the end of the article, where Dr. Moore attempts to solve the problem with Christianity as he understands it. Of course his presuppositions are so wrong that anything he tries now is going to be hollow and insulting. He's trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. And besides setting off the baggage of many a conservatively-raised human (that includes me!) he present an image where all the words aren't technically wrong but it all adds up to one horrifying lie.

Christianity, as a historical fact, has never disagreed with paganism on the shockingly cruel nature of life. Nor had it ever tried to paint a different picture until Protestantism, because actual, historical, Christianity values life experience over something like a book. It is not an abstraction. What Christianity is, instead, is an acceptance that the world is going to break you. Over. And over. And over. And over. There is no "winning". You can't beat the house, and even if you do you'll be sitting in a puddle of your own piss and awfully creamy underwear and really, at that point, did you really beat the slot machine? Did you really?

Down.

Down.

Down.

That. Is. Life. Period. Not liking it doesn't make it not so! Sorry! 

But what Christianity, real Christianity, preaches loudly and without reservation, is that God became man so He could be there to catch you at the bottom. It goes from a bone-crunching fall to landing into the arms of your father after he threw you into the air. It turns all the anxiety of falling through the air and realizing you're going to get really hurt into something thrilling, because He's waiting for you, arms outstretched and ready, smile on His face. 

Some of us just happen to get tossed into the air particularly high, and the drop can deliver a particularly heavy kick of fear.

We all also happen to experience the drop, however scary, in decades, not moments.

Ain't that a bitch?

It's the same inputs of death, decay, and illness, but with the knowledge that it adds up to something incredible. 

As an aside,  I don't say that as someone who has completely unlearned the old ways of cynicism, mistrust, and rampant trauma that is classical liberalism. The Enlightenment era peddled the idea that somehow humans, just on their own, are capable of figuring out the world, and that there are methods to get around the brutal facts of the world. I can see that it's wrong, but I'm only just beginning to realize there may be a better, more positive, way of thinking than assuming that humans have something that they never did: power.

I suppose Dr. Moore's sum up of what he thinks is Christianity at least touches on the actual pitch of the 2000 year old religion. But it's more a blind squirrel finding an acorn. Or a stopped clock being right twice a day. I don't know Dr. Moore, and I really shouldn't pretend  to, but this article I find scandalous in the actual sense: it confuses and hurts one's ability to think about the truth. He misidentifies the dying throes of a sick and twisted ideology for something else, and therefore he misleads, however unintentionally.

But I find that in a lot of Protestant stuff, so there's that. It's almost like classical liberalism is just the philosophical outgrowth of Protestantism, or something.

But that's for another time.