Oh, I was speaking of a general superstitious fear of witchcraft. I was probably trying to think of the Malleus Maleficarum. Much of the mindset of the anti-RPG (anti-everything-else) fundies is caused by the same kind of ill-founded hysteria. I think the buffer override comparison is pretty apt: "Danger! Danger! Does not compute!"
(Lately I've been reading a lot about the court of James I, which was corrupt and dissolute from the top down, but in the middle of it all you had this monarch who absolutely believed in witches and rather wanted to do something about them. One wants to tell him to clean his own House of Office, particularly after reading about the Overbury affair.)
... having grown up absolutely forbidden from gaming by a fundamentalist parent, i can say that it is fear that the gaming will BECOME a religion. it's also a little of the Hammer of Witches - they fear that if you "play" a magic user in an RPG, you learn to become a magic user in real life, and then you might become a witch, and then you're "lost."
(but what is christian prayer if not another form of talismanic spell-casting? particularly ritualized prayer.)
and jim -
the fen ever lendeth itself to a furore.
John F - I'm not sure that I would be so quick to lump in Luther and Calvin as a unit. It's held in many quarters that Luther did not write with the intent of splintering the Catholic Church, he wrote with the intent of reforming abuses from within. It happened (putting the case mildly) to not work out that way for him. The ideas of both men may be used as bases for Protestant thought and sects, but the difference between Lutheran thought and Calvinist thought is frequently great.
My mother is converting to Catholicism right now. It's odd for me, it's sometimes difficult to be around. She has always had a capacity for fanatical religious belief, but there seems to be something numinous about it for her which I am entirely missing. I'm not particularly an atheist, but I am exceedingly skeptical, and if I had pure theistic sensibilities they'd probably be something on a deist model. At any rate, she is currently being challenged by friends and family, all the time, about this child abuse coverup and also about the Crusades (a little late, I think). I understand the challenges, but frankly I feel that any patriarchal authoritarian religious structure can easily lend itself to child abuse of all kinds. You'll find as many fundamentalist Christians who treat their children with extreme harshness based on the concept of "spare the rod, spoil the child" as you will find Catholic priests abusing their positions - possibly more. But the fundamentalist sects do not have a central power structure and thus are not seen as being anywhere near as wealthy and influential as the Vatican, so they are not such easy media targets.
... all of this reminds me of that nice Vatican announcement a few years ago wherein they said it's sort of OK to be Jewish. *rolleyes* It's just something they ought not to be issuing pronouncements about. It's not their business. & certainly, if they are going to be so obsessively anti-birth-control and anti-abortion that all sexual acts must have at least a potential outcome of childbirth, I agree that they should be a heck of a lot more worried about whether children get homes at all, so long as the homes are not abusive. The issue is that, yeah, societal attitudes right now may indeed lead to "violence" against adoptees with same-sex parents, but it's not from within, it's caused by outside prejudicial attitudes against same-sex unions. IE, being picked on at school is likely to be more of an issue than anything that goes on in the home. & pronouncements like this one serve only to exacerbate that problem.
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