Well, all this is interesting to me, anyway, and that's what matters here. The Internet is a terrible thing for someone like me, who finds almost everything interesting.
I may not be as old as Pat Robertson, but I'm too old to have played Dungeons & Dragons, at least as a tabletop game. I'm definitely sorry about that, since it really was a great game.
I have played computer games based on it, of course (many of them only loosely based on D&D). I even played a few PBEM games, years ago. And the thing is, gamers understand quite well that magic is just fantasy. It's only Christians - and other religious believers - who think magic is real.
It's a game. Games aren't demonic, because... well, for one thing, demons aren't real, either! Everyone who plays a game knows that he's playing a game. It's really hard to mistake it for real life. Unless, of course, you're a religious nut who doesn't know the first thing about it.
Oh, and Harry Potter is just fiction, too, Pat. In case you were wondering.
2 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Hey thank you, I'm pretty sure I'm younger than you and I played D&D old style. And a lot of other games as well. Man if they didn't like D & D I wonder what they would have said about Cthulu...
My mum, who was ostensibly religious wasn't all that happy about it at first but we enjoyed it so we kept playing it. It was a great way to develop imagination and lateral thinking as well. Using spells and skills to work your way around problems. And never once did we think it was 'real' :-)
Yup. But I think these religious nuts fear imaginative fantasy because they worry we might recognize the similarity with their own beliefs.
I was a big fan of ancient Greek mythology when I was a kid, and I think it was easy for me to then recognize Christian mythology for what it was (and is). Those ancient Greed gods, which we all recognize as just fiction now, were the religion of their day.
After all, even believers think the same thing when it comes to every other religion. Those are just stories someone made up. It's only their own which they consider to be the exception.
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2 comments:
Hey thank you, I'm pretty sure I'm younger than you and I played D&D old style. And a lot of other games as well. Man if they didn't like D & D I wonder what they would have said about Cthulu...
My mum, who was ostensibly religious wasn't all that happy about it at first but we enjoyed it so we kept playing it. It was a great way to develop imagination and lateral thinking as well. Using spells and skills to work your way around problems. And never once did we think it was 'real' :-)
M1nks
Yup. But I think these religious nuts fear imaginative fantasy because they worry we might recognize the similarity with their own beliefs.
I was a big fan of ancient Greek mythology when I was a kid, and I think it was easy for me to then recognize Christian mythology for what it was (and is). Those ancient Greed gods, which we all recognize as just fiction now, were the religion of their day.
After all, even believers think the same thing when it comes to every other religion. Those are just stories someone made up. It's only their own which they consider to be the exception.
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