A friend of mine got a long lecture about the evils of D&D from a substitute teacher. My friend produced a six-page single-spaced essay on the benefits, citing multiple scholarly sources that found RPGs stimulated intellectual curiosity, creative thinking, and improved reading comprehension. Increased interest in Shakespeare and other classics was another benefit.
And this was done in two days without the benefit of the internet.
Unfortunately the sub was gone by then, but I doubt he would have benefited from the lesson anyway.
I have fond memories of Jack Chick tracts, because once we pranked a super-Catholic teacher by pretending to have found a classmate’s purse under our chair, knowing he would look at it (as he always did). We filled it with fake cocaine and joints and Jack Chick tracts about Catholics being of the devil. And he also did a whole tract about San Francisco being of the devil. Love it.
Hear hear. I grew up immersed in the world in which this propaganda flourished. To this day, the only recurring nightmare I have ever had was of desperately running around Northeast Kansas trying to save my family before the bombs dropped and/or Jesus came back to plunge us all into 7 years of hell on earth before burning us for eternity.
I recently visited Virginia with my girlfriend and ate at the kind of diner that is packed on a Sunday afternoon. There was a rack of Chick Tracts and I picked up a couple to show her how “wacky” my childhood was. I got through half of one of them and was so triggered I didn’t even want to share. Such a bleak and hate-filled worldview and nothing like what Jesus spoke of. I am so thankful that a miraculous confluence of rational literature, music and art allowed me to extricate myself and not pass down this cycle of abuse to my children.
I can’t hate Jack Chick because he gave me the gift of laughter. Unending riotous laughter. Mocking, braying laughter. I admit that I wish more American Christians had taken the time to distance themselves from him, rather than spewing his crank literature from a fire hose that doused the world. I know that there are good American Christians, but why don’t they ever publicly denounce Chick’s religion of hate? You just know that they’ve read this stuff.
If there’s a spiritual punishment awaiting Jack Chick, I hope it’s reincarnation.
Brazil is very Catholic, and Chick Tracts are quite anti-catholic, at least back in the day they were. I don’t know if they have been overtly anti-catholic recently. So that might be a reason.
I grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist church, so Jack Chick tracts were laying around everywhere. I’d read them and think to myself “this is fucked up”.
After high school I didn’t step foot in a church for 17 years. Now I attend a mainstream church that allows gay pastors and does things with Catholics (gasp!) and find the people much nicer and much less uptight. Some of them even drink whiskey!
