Stole the following from Reddit…
“I mean, I don’t see why I shouldn’t worship Satan. They didn’t give me the wrong body like that cloud jerk.”
The bogus Satanic Panic is returning. Here's a look at the original purveyors of myth — Chick Tracts
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I wish more people would remember this. It wasn’t all about uptight, gullible parents restricting their childrens’ entertainment choices. Innocent people who hadn’t done a thing wrong had their lives ruined over this, labeled child predators and given prison sentences based on the flimsiest of “evidence”.
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I dunno. That mind bondage spell sure would have been helpful.
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The Satanic Panic is one of the counterarguments I give whenever someone uses the “what’s the harm” argument for pseudoscience. People will say, “Who cares if acupuncture or astrology doesn’t do anything? It’s not hurting anyone.” Well, irrationality does in fact have a very high cost to society, and the Satanic Panic is a great example. It seems like silly misconceptions about heavy metal music along with a few seemingly harmless “repressed memory” charlatans. In the blink of an eye though, it turned into a literal modern witch-hunt where multiple people were figuratively burned at the stake over absolutely nothing.
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And of course, a whole bunch of people who had real problems which they needed help for didn’t get the help they actually needed because they got shunted off onto a track where all anybody wanted to hear from them was that they had been abused as part of satanic rituals.
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It seeped into the McMartin trials on accusations of ritualistic child abuse which turned out to have been completely cooked up by a news reporter’s girlfriend. Can’t forget the “backwards masking” thing either. I remember an evangelist put on a church choir song backwards and instead of hearing about satan, they were hearing about angels and it was such a miracle. Ouija boards were a pretty big deal too. A televangelist reported on a ouija board being burned and how they heard the cries of demons being burned alive.
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A neighbor of mine would hand out Chick Tracks for Halloween (“The Little Princess”). Happily for my kids, they’ve moved away now.
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Hmm…I wouldn’t want to disappoint on the candy, but as far as costumes go, there’s nothing scarier than someone handing out Chick Tracks. 
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The early 90’s Satanic Panic in Gilmer, Texas is the one I always like to cite.
Briefly, a girl goes missing, the evangelical city council thinks Satanism has something to do with it, a poor local family gets blamed, and the Sheriff gets thrown under the bus when he points out there’s no evidence. (They actually believed that “no physical evidence” was a type of evidence, it was proof of how powerful the witchcraft was.)
(Embedded link is free, NYT link is paywalled.)
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I’m pretty sure my friends and I played D&D or some other roleplaying game an average of at least two hours a day every day for five or six years–that is, we didn’t play every day but when we did we’d often have marathon sessions that would go for hours.
I also attended Glathricon over multiple years and several other roleplaying events in Evansville, Indiana, and met Gary Gygax and other RPG creators.
Having said all that I’ve honestly never met anyone who took Dungeons & Dragons as seriously as the purveyors of the Satanic panic.
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I got into D&D and gaming in 1980, and the novel was a hot enough newspaper/local TV topic to get the movie made. There were three or four other novels out at the same time that touched on the same theme.
My mom tossed out all of my D&D stuff at one time, but that was because my grades were slipping due to ADHD and role playing games were what I was focussing on, so she (wrongly) thought tossing them would help be concentrate on homework more. Instead, I geeked out on BASIC programming instead and still played RPG’s, just kept my stuff at my friends’ homes.
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I always thought Satanic Panic was rather interesting, given I was a Preacher’s Kid. Our mom never threw out any of our stuff, but she threatened to once because we were fighting too much. Looking back, my brothers and I fought over practically everything, and Satanism never entered the picture.
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Ah yes
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That’s the real slippery slope. Sure, it starts harmlessly enough when someone offers you a type-in magazine and you think this is fun. But before you know it, you’re on Pascal and soon your friends can’t understand you because you’re Lisping, then even COBOL and Fortran aren’t enough anymore and you’re robbing banks to feed your assembly habit.
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I heard about this programmer high on JavaScript who jumped off a roof last year because he thought he could fly.
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JavaScript is full of loose types, I swear! It’s one of the main causes of fatal errors.
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I used to work for the company that makes this game. I was never raised with any sort of religion and basically thought Satanic Panic was a joke. My mind changed after working there for awhile. I’ve worked in toxic companies before but this was something entirely different. It’s difficult to put into words (and it’s probably very easy to make fun of) but I’ll say this: the cards are no longer allowed in my house and I would never again associate with anyone who plays. Rituals have meaning whether we believe in them or not.
Huh? I haven’t played D&D in ages, but it didn’t involve “cards” when we did it. And there were no rituals either.
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What was your role at TSR and what do the letters stand for?
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What cards?
Are you confusing Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons?
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