Note to Christians who need to invent horrible scenarios to “save” the souls of impressionable youths:
You’ll go to Hell for telling lies just as easily as you would for worshiping Satan.
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The mistake is that you think they are “lying”. They are not willfully lying. This person has convinced himself that it is true. I know that sounds insane, but it is true. Someone mentioned the Central Park 5 earlier, which was a case where 5 men confessed to a crime that they did not commit.
The memory is a fragile and tangible thing. These people are convinced that it is true. Alternatively, they have convinced themselves that it is true, and that they are only exaggerating SLIGHTLY by claiming it as their own action rather than the actions of others. Either way, he probably doesn’t believe that he is really lying.
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Never drank blood, but ate the occasional blood sausage back in my carnivorous days. Black Puddings not only rot your armor, they’re allegedly good post-hangover food.
Damnit!! My DM sucks! For years he has never let me into the real power and never got me involved in baby sacrifice and drugs.
All we ever got was a bunch of experience points and cheetos.
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Your DM sucked then.
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According to their own mythos, Catholics do, in fact, drink blood, the fact that it starts out as and tastes like wine notwithstanding.
And Abraham comes pretty close to child sacrifice. Ditto the story of Passover.
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Yes, Christianity certainly isn’t historically responsible for any murders.
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it’s ritual sacrifice… not murder…
whatever happened to religious freedom… yeesh…
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It’s all just a big imaginary baby sacrifice daisy chain, isn’t it?
That may not have been the best metaphor, but it wasn’t the worst I came up with, either. 
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This isn’t someone having a false confession forced out of them by the police, or a child being given a false memory. This is someone who was an older teenager when he supposedly got involved with this “Satanism.” He’d have to be pretty mentally ill to believe his story about being a part of a large Satanic group of professionals who murdered people. Obviously none of that happened; there’s no reality to have been warped or exaggerated or claimed as his own. The Satanic panic spawned a whole group of people who gained both attention and money by claiming to be “reformed Satanists” who perpetuated the fantasies about Satanism. They wrote books, went on Christian speaking tours and, most sickeningly, even advised law enforcement as “experts.” Having read about them at the time, they were, quite transparently, simply con-men.
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“in Dungeons and Dragons what you do is create a fantasized universe of the mind in which expediency to achieve your goal is more important than any moral frame of reference to your actions”
So what he’s saying is that when playing a game, you work within an abstracted universe in which all that matters are the rules and achieving the goals? Yeah, that’s games, all right. The irony is that although that’s true of, say, Monopoly, or football - it’s not so much true of a role-playing game like D&D. A game like D&D, in fact, explicitly includes a moral dimension within the rules. Granted, players might ignore that moral dimension, or deliberately play a character that’s a sociopath, but that’s another issue.
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I would really like someone to find this guy and talk to him about that interview.
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“I think I’ve hurt someone… there’s blood on my knife!”
such a classic.
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Even more interesting: the Jews (via the Old Testament) said the same about the Ammonites (and apostate Israelites, and other groups in the region): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehenna
The bible says some wacky stuff. Also, if you ever wonder where they[fundy xtian slapnuts] get these visions of ritual blood sacrifice, go read Leviticus. Ancient Judaism was 
∞£‰©☭ Metal.
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The irrefutable link between Dungeons and Dragons.
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I tried and tried to help breed sacrifice babies - but had no takers.
Hey - how about some classic anti-D&D Chick Tracts!
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP
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Anyone else getting a Napoleon Dynamite vibe from this guy?
I’ve got Dungeon & Dragon skills, Heavy metal skills, Human sacrifice skills…
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I grew up in an accidentally secular family and as a teenager decided to try out a local church that a couple of my friends went to. The youth group we were part of took a trip to see Mike Warnke speak at the auditorium of a local college in the mid-1980s.
Warnke’s schtick was really like being at a heavy metal concert. He spinned these stories of being a Satanic high priest and all of the batshit crazy things he supposedly did. He wasn’t a good actor, but he was very melodramatic like he’d watch Vincent Price films over and over to play the part of the Satanic high priest.
I had to be 16 or 17 and thought he was just ludicrous and clearly fake, but I’m sitting there in an auditorium with probably 1500 other people who are just eating this stuff up and filling up the donation baskets that get sent up and down the aisles.
Eventually, of course, it came out that Warnke was faker than fake about pretty much everything (even lying about the stuff he didn’t really need to lie about, like what sort of degrees he had). By that time he’d already raked in $10M+ US in donations.
The one lesson I took away from the Satanic Panic of that time was that people are, in general, far more gullible than you can even begin to imagine.
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It’s the confirmation bias. People who go to church and are fearful of everything outside the church want their fears reinforced. So they’re willing to believe what these frauds tell them, as long as it confirms their preconceived beliefs. All humans have confirmation bias, but religions nurture it, and encourage people to both ignore things that debunk their beliefs in the religion, and to look for coincidences they can attribute to their deity so they can keep confirming their beliefs.
The skeptical point of view is much better IMNSHO. Things are only worth believing if they can withstand rigorous questioning and attack through logic. If you can’t support a claim with logic and science, there no good way to tell if it’s true anyway.
The line from the X Files is probably the most concise phrasing I’ve heard describing confirmation biases: “I want to believe.”
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I particularly like the “decent into satanism” question. The grammar is a little off, but clearly the interviewer thinks our young man is brining some of the best into the organization.
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