So we got some references to Bannon talking about gamers, writer comparing the Communist Party members that had to go underground because of Mccarthy and the feds hunting for them to D&D nerds that met in their parents basement as LARPing revolutionaries playing make believe in their heads as Stalin ate all the grain in the USSR, and some kind of dumb shit about how hero worship is bad and pagan and why hero worshipping Jesus is good amd wholesome
"my name is Grog I am a orc and I would like to destroy the IMF" rolls die :d20-fuck-ya:
Critical Failure. Grog has taken a loan which he will never be able to repay. Grog's assets are being seized.
Very good. A dagger is indeed concealable, so the IMF will not be able to seize it, and you can later stab the IMF director with it (in D&D).
For an article about Fantasy Role-Playing, he sure doesn't say much about Fantasy Role-Playing. He talks about MMOs, he talks about Communists, he talks about comments sections of the news, he even talks about the attitude existing within the church. Reading the article, it seems like the title is clickbait and he's just talking about escapism in general. He gets somewhere in the neighborhood of a point but then veers off into Jesus.
When we start to really understand and embody [the cross] in our churches, maybe fewer Daves will find their identities in either accounts payable or Ajax online.
So... Basically his solution is to still have a culture where everyone is desperate to escape from their lives, but they turn to his preferred form of escapism. Ok, but then he says:
Our culture of fantasy role-playing is leading us to some perilous places. Sadly, we often replicate it even within the church.
So it's bad that people within the church have this same attitude of wanting to escape and be larger than life. But that's exactly what he wants the church to be for these people.
Ok look, here's your options. First, you can try to improve people's lives in hopes that they stop feeling the need to escape. Second, you can accept that people are going to look for various escapes, and accept that some methods let people escape in a relatively harmless way, like tabletop RP. Third, you can attempt to direct all of that energy of escapism towards your own institution, and if that attempt were successful, then the church would be completely overtaken by it (and if I can put on my fedora for a second, I'd say that we passed that point long ago).
It's really a case of "be careful what you wish for," because he doesn't seem to realize that he's asking for more of those terminally online alt-right types who just get into organized religion because they see it as a weapon to use in the culture war. His analysis is crippled by treating "More Jesus" as the solution to every problem.
How the cult of imagined heroism is bringing down our nation’s institutions.
Yeah man, the founding fathers are--
...oh you're talking about some OTHER imaginary heroes.
I hope it catches on with all the tradcath and orthodox people. I would love to go back to the simplicity of the "D&D is for Satanists!" arguments I used to have when I was a kid for a little while.
Oh god. I'm nostalgic for culture war bullshit!
I think that this article is pretty weak. It tries to conflate two pretty different things (multiplayer online gaming and fantasy tabletop gaming) with two other very different things (Jan. 6 protestors and membership in the US communist party). The article is sufficiently infused with capitalist realism that the author can't help but characterize involvement in real political struggle (for good or for ill) as anything but LARPing. Other than an off-handed Bannon quote, the author fails to present any other evidence or cases that link populism to role-playing. The only solution offered is the trite and tired "y'all need Jesus."
It's a bad article, and the content doesn't even really match or support the headline. I think that the only notable aspect is the good ol' anticommunism shoved into the middle of the piece.
Honestly just surprised there's stuff this :LIB: in a Christian periodical.
The Christian publications can get it right sometimes. This piece, titled "Three Cheers for Socialism" is rather famous for it's dissection of America and it's aversion to collectivist policy, e.g.
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
I love this article, they even give the game away part-way through.
Yet the way of Jesus is quite different. A Christian vision of heaven is not Valhalla with wine (or grape juice) instead of mead. Valhalla—and almost every other pagan vision of an afterlife—looks backward. It’s the echo and celebration of the warrior’s success in the life that was.
We're promising pie in the sky but these other guys are promising 69s in the sky, how un-christ-like.
Christian Heaven is way more nonsensical than Valhalla or whatever. For Christian Heaven, you don't get in by doing good or even noble deeds. You can be a huge asshole your whole life and still get in so long as you subscribed to a specific set of beliefs and "put your faith in Christ's death on the cross to save you from your sins". And once you're there you praise god for all eternity while nearly everyone else you cared about or knew (as well as like 99% of everyone who lived) is experiencing unimaginable torment for eternity in hell. THAT is some bullshit right there.
I thought Sola Fide was just a Lutheran thing? Don't most christian denominations say that you actually have to be virtuous + believe in god to go to heaven?
Nope, this would be considered "faith by works" to evangelicals and other conservative protestants in the US, which they would consider to be heretical.
This. I have a family member who’s basically a fundie.
They’re always banging on about any church that claims you can buy your way in through some kind of work or through money. Thinks that’s always the devil leading people astray bc it contradicts that letting jesus into your heart is enough to save you.
But that's not a majority of christians, there are more Catholics than there are protestants.
which they would consider to be heretical.
Ironic if nothing else.
Hot take, american protestants are the trotskyites of christianity.
I thought that was a Protestant thing in general. With calvanists believing in predestination, and quoting wiki the Catholic view could perhaps be interpreted as a progression or flow: first grace, then initial trust/repentance/conversion, then faith/hope/charity, combined with an emphasis that none of these elements should be isolated thus missing the package.
Yeah, looking into it, Calvinists believe it too. I should have probably specified Luther himself, not specifically Lutherans.
The general idea is that believing in Christ is enough to get you into heaven, but if you do actually believe in him, you would be inclined to do the good deeds he preached anyway.
weird how churches keep hemorrhaging followers in america, despite the increasing control of religious evangelicals over civic life in the last 50 years.
vv excited to see the tissue paper saying "secular country" be ripped in half as some anglo looking incarnation of Efraín Ríos Montt bursts through and begins organizing people into death squads to liquidate the demons among us.
This is true. My last character was a warlock powered by the terrible secret of space: communism.
