Hah!
You are quite the optimist.
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Could well be both.
Quicksilver or STFU.
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Based on that logic meteorologists are tools of Satan too. âHowâd you know it was gonna rain tomorrow!?â
What a load of crap. Human sacrifices were never made to our dark lord unless you failed your saving throw.
They did, it was called the Bible. You can play the saint class, sinner class, doubting Thomas, etc. Different races like Catholic, ProtestantâŚ
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thatâs gonna be the name of my death metal / techno fusion band
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I donât believe that to be true. Con-men know that they are deceiving people. Con-men do not believe their lie. These people may have convinced themselves of their lie. It may be self-delusion, but that doesnât make them believe any less in their statements.
Human beings are not rational. While it may seem insane that someone can convince themselves of something they know to not be true. This is self-deception. This is a well-documented phenomenon that occurs with human beings. People can and do convince themselves that they have done things which we know to be untrue.
Fundamentalist Christians âhear the voice of Godâ, they âwitness miraclesâ that never occurred. They can twist events to match their beliefs. This may have started as a lie or as a self-deception, but these âex-Satanistsâ have gone on to SWEAR BEFORE A COURT OF LAW that they can point you to the hidden bodies that they buried. These people are not just lying, they truly believe their lies. This places them in a category with a great deal of moral ambiguity.
Itâs yours, sir!
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But thatâs the thing about so many of the âex-Satanistsâ who were selling their expertise during the Satanic Panic - they clearly didnât believe their lies, when you dug down deep enough. And you didnât have to dig very deep - I have to assume that most of the people giving them money and attention took them at face value because they wanted to believe the stories for their own purposes of self delusion. And there were plenty of people who were self-deluded, too, but they werenât the ones getting the real attention.
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Youtube video of random family playing Dragon Raid.If playing a Christian-themed RPG were important, Iâd probably do a custom GURPS Narnia instead.
Exactly. What was scary about the Satanic Panic was not that there were people like this guy connecting D&D to human sacrifice but that a lot of these absurd claims went mainstream beyond their initial fringe Christian audience.
You could read books like 1980âs âMichelle Remembersâ which purported to be a true account of a womanâs participation in a Satanic cult when she was 5 years old (which she then supposedly repressed but was able to recover a book length treatment of ritual rapes and human sacrifices thanks to recovered memory therapy).
Book was obvious nonsense, but was passed off as if it were straightforward nonfiction by the popular press and mainstream television shows such as Oprah Winfreyâs talk show. The prosecutors in the McMartin preschool case used âMichelle Remembersâ as a model for the claims in that case and the author worked as a consultant on that and other Satanic abuse cases.
And people like Damien Echols get to spend the next 20 years in prison because they wear a lot of black.
I have to admit, AD&D led me to the local game shop, which led me to Car Wars, which led me to Illuminati, which led me to becoming a Discordian and a SubGenius. Hail Eris, and praise âBobâ!
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Except for one of the biggest, Lauren Stratford. She almost certainly believed her lies. She testified in court cases in ways that would almost certainly put her at risk of perjury. She later became a fake holocaust survivior. She was delusional. She was a pathological liar.
How about Mike Warnke. He didnât just lie about his âSatanismâ, he lied about military experience and education. Both of these things were easy to verify and debunk. Either he was an enormous idiot, or he was delusional as well.
My point is that con-men are typically careful about their constructed lies. They are careful not to create unnecessary traps for themselves. They think about their lie, in other words. The charlatans involved with the âSatanic Panicâ were not con-men. They were delusional individuals who created fake worlds that they most likely believed to some degree. At the very least, they had some psychological problem with lying. This puts them more int he L. Ron Hubbard camp. People who deceive themselves.
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There were people who were delusional, or pathological liars (who didnât believe what they were saying), but there were also plenty of con-men. (Something on the scale of the Satanic Panic absolutely requires all three, I think.) Warnke may have been a con-man who told stupid lies (which just makes one a bad con-man), but he wasnât that stupid - he knew his lies would simply be accepted by the audience he was targeting, because they wanted to believe him. He managed to scam millions of dollars over almost 20 years until he gained enough mainstream attention that anyone bothered to fact-check him. There were plenty of guys like him who were more careful in their lies (or at least tailored their lies for their audience and stuck with that audience) and who profited off of being âoccult expertsâ without ever saying anything outrageous or specific enough that anyone could pin it down to disprove it. Those guys came off as pretty cynical from their histories and things they said in their unguarded moments - they clearly didnât buy what they were selling.
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Youâre right! Actually we were playing Existential Crisis and DragonsâŚ
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Excellent⌠unfortunately my Boss walked in about 20 seconds from the end⌠-2pts!
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