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It's all Kadabras fault, really. Ooooo, scary far east mythicism gonna corrupt our kids and make them turn their eyes from god and be eating cats in the woods.
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Jul 24, 2023 11:12
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I'm 49. Satanic panic wasn't much different than the Rap and videogame freak outs of the early 90s, the furry and anime ones we had here in the early/mid 00s, and the ones the chuds are having about trans folks now. Mix in bullying/wanting to feel superior to someone, (And something thats's new or strange generally isn't a thing likely to be able to fight back obviously so perfect target!), OMG THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN, conformist bullshit, and adding in a little Jesus nonsense to boot? It keeps happening roughly every 10 years or so people find something new to rage about under the excuse of THE CHILDREN PROTECTED and of course JESUS VALUES. This nonsense goes all the way back to anti Jewish Blood Libel, and Witchcraft trials. Sometimes its mostly silly but other times it causes a whole lotta death and hurt. The silly just makes things that probably would have went away anyhow become enduringly popular and beloved well beyond what it might have done otherwise. (Night Trap was poo poo and barely a videogame. It only sold and is remembered because of the outrage. Free marketing. Making something upsetting to parents is basically begging every kid to teenager to covet the hell out of it.) But the other part is.. yeah. Its destroyed so many lives and families just so some rear end in a top hat can do the equivalent of throwing the dweeby kid with few friends into a locker and get away with it. Its always been this way and its usually pretty hypocritical as actually harmful stuff is normally ok as its either been made culturally acceptable or people will scream False Flag and other poo poo. (While there are some very wtf people into MLP and a lot of anime that shouldn't loving exist, the amount of actual sex abuser monsters in any organized religion or sports is 10000s of times worse and real. People know to avoid the ahego shirt people. Father Touchy just actually.. I can't even think of a good joke or analogy for some of those fucks.) Hell even stuff that can be ok like sports can do a lot of physical damage even in normally non contact ones. (Ever have part of your jaw with teeth attached go 1/4" or so back due to a baseball? I have. I don't recommend it!) The only thing in danger playing dnd is the box of Cheez Its! Tldr: its all bullshit by assholes consciously or unconsciously looking to be dicks to anyone that can't really fight back. BECAUSE JESUS just makes it extra easy mode. So anything outside of socially and culturally accepted norms gets targeted.
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Jul 24, 2023 11:40
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My mom fully let me fly my own freak flag as a kid and teen so we never really dealt with “[thing] is satanic and evil”. Even if she didn’t get whatever my sister and I were into, she embraced that’s just who we are. Now, as for my extended family…not so much. When my cousins had their Pokémon items taken away from them, they were told that they were going to be burned (I *think*), however my aunt just sent it to my sister and I instead. I had all the cool secular toys and books and games and I absolutely shared with my cousins knowing that I was the bad influence. I felt bad that they didn’t have cable tv or non religious kid friendly outlets, so I mean, someone’s gotta be the cool cousin. Two of my moms siblings never did Halloween with their kids. In fact, when my grandmother passed in Oct 99, I had asked my visiting cousins “oh, what are you going to be for Halloween?”. Needless to say when I got the answer back “it’s Satan’s birthday”, I was confused. I didn’t know who Satan was. I was 8, raised in the aggressively liberal Episcopal church, so I thought Satan was like a family friend and I guess his birthday was a big deal??? Lol, lmao. My cousin explained that he wasn’t a nice guy (so no birthday party), and that if you must celebrate Halloween (which to me was absolutely non-negotiable), we need to be a costume that god would like. Again, I was 8, and assumed God was chill with whatever I was going to be for Halloween because idk, why wouldn’t God be ok with that?? Thankfully, or perhaps it was ironic divine intervention, I was planning on being an Angel, because I thought the halo headgear was cool. Brilliant rationale, child teen witch. At that time, the concept of a devil seemed like similar to a dragon or wizard or faeries and poo poo, it’s just make believe and it’s not real. Like, God is so powerful so like why would he have an enemy, we can all just be chill and love one another?? Why is this guy Satan so bad? Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding? I cannot remember learning in Sunday school, or in mass, about Satan or a devil or anything beyond “sinning is something that like, maybe don’t do? But if you do you’re not irredeemable”. It was that moment at 8, it clicked in that the God my mom raised me to believe in was different than the God some of my relatives had, and that their God had some poo poo going on. Another fond memory that happened that same time: my cousin was big into Carman. Again, 1999, 8 years old, access to pretty much any media I could get into. I thought it was Cartman and thought “ok so Halloween bad, South Park…ok?”. Once I saw my cousins Carman cassette, I immediately realized my mistake. Never realized how formative that whole experience was in hindsight. This was all before I was 11 and decided “that’s it, goth time” and never looked back. That’s when I REALLY learned about the satanic panic (or at least the post-9/11 iteration), and how seemingly normal people can believe some of the dumbest poo poo imaginable.
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Jul 24, 2023 11:45
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Jesus is alright. It's the people who have barely read it and start screaming all red faced and throwing temper tantrums because some dont think EXACTLY LIKE I DO that are going to HELL.
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Jul 24, 2023 11:49
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BiggerBoat posted:^^^Who recorded an album called "Satanic Majesty's Request" and had a hit called "Sympathy for the Devil". It's Asian
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Jul 24, 2023 12:02
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I went to Catholic schools K-12 and knew a fair amount of kids whose parents banned them from Pokemon and Harry Potter, but thankfully my parents never gave the idea any oxygen. They're quite devout, so it's a little weird they didn't at least express concern about what I was into, but they've fortunately never been the type of religious people to get swept away in "activism" panics like that.
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Jul 24, 2023 13:00
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My mom took my vinyl copy of Celtic Frost’s To Mega Therion and I never got it back  I was a victim of the satanic panic and this is my story
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Jul 24, 2023 13:44
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My parents did not care but I got in trouble for wearing an Army of Darkness t-shirt to school one time, a girl in my class thought it was Satanic because it had skeletons on it. I had to turn it inside-out and take a note home telling my parents that I shouldn't wear it to school again. My wife's family is way more religious and had bans on Harry Potter, basically anything from Japan, and pretty much any non-country music depending on what their church said was evil. They never seemed to last very long since it just made kids way more interested in that stuff.
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Jul 24, 2023 13:46
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my mom never bought into it but when i was 14 i got a copy of gta: vice city for my birthday and she gave me a lecture that i wasn't supposed to steal cars and kill prostitutes now.
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Jul 24, 2023 14:08
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TK8325 posted:my mom never bought into it but when i was 14 i got a copy of gta: vice city for my birthday and she gave me a lecture that i wasn't supposed to steal cars and kill prostitutes now. Holy poo poo one of the few times my mom showed concern for what her kid was consuming, it was when I wanted to rent the following game:  100 percent serious. To be fair, Blockbuster didn’t have the box art on the rental, so when she saw the title she thought something entirely different.
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Jul 24, 2023 14:22
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Ken Griffy Jr. Knock you straight outta park
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Jul 24, 2023 14:28
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Treecko posted:Ken Griffy Jr. Knock you straight outta park To be fair all that my mom knows of baseball is: - the Mets AND the Yankees are both NY teams - cracker jacks are great but the toys kinda suck nowadays
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Jul 24, 2023 14:30
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I traded 7 yugioh cards to my cousin for his copy of RE4. His aunts didn't give a gently caress what they bought him. But he was too scared to play it, so I had to help him. Probably didn't help that his parents were in jail.
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Jul 24, 2023 14:33
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Video games aren't the devil. White trash, drunken domestic fights on the other hand...
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Jul 24, 2023 14:50
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Why are Americans, Christians, and especially American Christians so braindead?
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Jul 24, 2023 15:25
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Lemon Trees posted:Why are Americans, Christians, and especially American Christians so braindead? Because American Christianity is an aesthetic and a manufactured ethnic group. American Christians have like zero observances that they even really stick to besides like, going to Church on Sunday, the spirituality aspect of it is basically non-existent. It's an utter void of a religion.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:29
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Most American Christians have zero desire to indulge in any deeper theological introspection or meaningful spirituality, almost all of it is just a ceaseless begging for the love of a God that seemingly demands good deeds yet rewards utter spiritual laziness simultaneously. It's more a frantic denial of death than anything approaching philosophical or even emotional depth.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:31
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BiggerBoat posted:I'll never get why believe this stupid poo poo and get so scared about a heart shaped piece of plastic and some cardboard. I got a lot of this, growing up. Like real life fwd fwd fwd fwd fwd fwd emails of spooky stories being passed around. A regular 80s Jehovah's Witness story was about some parents who were so stupid that they let their kid watch the Smurfs with that evil wizard Gargamel in it and their kid had a Smurf doll at a JW meeting once and it stood up and started walking up and down the aisle because it had demons in it. Yeah. They believed that. Wish I was joking. It was classic "the ends justify the means" mentality of just making up goofy bullshit to scare people into following their lies. The FIRST Google hit when I just searched for this is a perfect display of trying to scare JW followers into falling in line: quote:"I have heard a lot of stories about smurfs... how the dolls would talk during the meetings, how a JW kid has smurf wallpaper, and the little blue devils jumped off the wallpaper in the middle of the night and bit the kid... how there was a JW woman who babysat for some worldly kids who had a smurf swimming pool, adn how she was afraid the little plastic smurfs painted on it would try to drown the kids...." Laugh all you want but that sort of thing kept me terrified at night when I was a kid.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:44
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dang, Smurfs are cooler than I thought
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Jul 24, 2023 15:46
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I was also told that I had a stuffed animal as a baby that was gifted to me when I was born by a couple who then later quit the Jehovah's Witness religion. My mom said I then started unexpectedly crying at night when that stuffed animal was with me so she threw the evil sinners' gift away and I stopped crying because there were demons inside of it. I honestly wish even half of my stories about this poo poo were made up. I've had people repeatedly congratulate me on being able to escape that cult at such an early age. I agree with them. My family still tries to get me to join again and it's laughable because they have no clue what white hot anger I have toward that organization.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:47
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:Most American Christians have zero desire to indulge in any deeper theological introspection or meaningful spirituality, almost all of it is just a ceaseless begging for the love of a God that seemingly demands good deeds yet rewards utter spiritual laziness simultaneously. It's more a frantic denial of death than anything approaching philosophical or even emotional depth. Do evangelicals even really believe in the denial of death bits? I grew up Catholic and I've always been amazed at how little lip service modern evangelicals put into the eternal life bits. Like, the crowd I grew up around were surprisingly mild and secular for how much church they did, and I don't actually know how many of them thought intellectually that they were headed for a Heaven, but they spoke of death with deep reverence and emotion. Evangelicals will nod along with the preacher but the way they talk about death and the hereafter seems trite in comparison, it always sounds like they're just checking off boxes. I dunno, maybe I'm just projecting.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:54
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:Because American Christianity is an aesthetic and a manufactured ethnic group. American Christians have like zero observances that they even really stick to besides like, going to Church on Sunday, the spirituality aspect of it is basically non-existent. It's an utter void of a religion. So true. I loving hate Americans Christians. They're one of the few groups in the world where the world would be better off without them.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:55
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chefscientist posted:Born 83 raised in evangelical churches So Cal so felt it petty hard. Mixed right in with stranger danger. My mom is still worried about D&D and still thinks Satan is trying to destroy the country? In the late-90s and early-00s, some Wiccan groups started trying to shut down these "reformed Satanist"/"former witch"/etc hustlers by attending and recording their events. Then when they told some ridiculous STDH story about killing a baby or doing a blood sacrifice, they would call the police and report that the speaker had just publicly confessed to committing a murder. That seemed to get some of them to roll back their bullshit for a while.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:57
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Lemon Trees posted:Why are Americans, Christians, and especially American Christians so braindead? Because Calvinism.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:58
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while my mother is devoutly southern baptist she was smart enough to realize the difference between entertainment and actual demon worship so pokemon/harry potter/whatever was never a problem. even so, i still had weird christian guilt about warlocks in wow when i started playing that, or stuff like that. took me a bit to get over the internalized religious guilt. now fpses and rap, however, that got banned immediately.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:05
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No, I was in the "Crazy people are putting razor blades in Halloween candy" generation.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:07
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So how many of y'all actually tried to summon demons and poo poo as kids? My crew did halfhearted attempts by drawing pentacles in the local cemetery and running around the church counterclockwise 9 times during a full moon or something similar. And dammit, no demons appeared. The angry pentecostal pastor did come out and scream at us a few times though. I guess he was a demon of sorts so maybe that counted! lol, I just remembered one of our friends made a cross out of chicken bones and brought it to the church one night. I guess he thought that would open a portal or something lmao isaboo fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Jul 24, 2023 |
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Jul 24, 2023 16:09
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Extra Large Marge posted:No, I was in the "Crazy people are putting razor blades in Halloween candy" generation. That's as close as my parents ever got to the Satanic Panic, having had the fortune of growing up in an areligious household. My mom definitely checked our Halloween candy for a few years, although I remember there was an old couple across the street that gave out homemade stuff for Halloween and she refused to check it because she felt silly accusing the 80+ yo neighbors of putting blades or pins in popcorn balls. Somehow that didn't extend to the rest of the neighborhood though.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:14
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the holy poopacy posted:Do evangelicals even really believe in the denial of death bits? I grew up Catholic and I've always been amazed at how little lip service modern evangelicals put into the eternal life bits. Like, the crowd I grew up around were surprisingly mild and secular for how much church they did, and I don't actually know how many of them thought intellectually that they were headed for a Heaven, but they spoke of death with deep reverence and emotion. Evangelicals will nod along with the preacher but the way they talk about death and the hereafter seems trite in comparison, it always sounds like they're just checking off boxes. I dunno, maybe I'm just projecting. As someone who went to way too much Sunday school in a very typical American Christian church, they weaponize fear of death a lot while they're trying to convert people, but they especially instill it in kids when they're at church camps with no parents around, if they don't bring it up, it's because they're caught between moments of fear and doubt where they want to avoid it by not talking about it, and the occasional bit of faux euphoria when they think they've convinced themselves that they actually believe. A lot of conservative Christians are vacuous in either two ways, they either go to church out of compunction and basically never think of it outside of that (or in extremely superficial ways, eg, "thoughts and prayers") or out of some artificially manufactured Evangelical zeal where they think they can will belief out of pure animus. In American Christianity, death is about punishment and reward, there's no concept of going to God to shed worldliness and the prison of the body, but rather they pretty much believe they'll go to heaven the same as they are now and will spend an eternity like... hanging out I guess. Again, there's no theological introspection there at all, they don't even think about what life after death could possibly even mean, like what is a personality without hormones or the proclivities of brain matter? People they don't like go to hell because that's the worst thing they can imagine happening to someone and hatred has a much higher perch in their hearts than any sort of respect for humankind. That's why they don't talk about it in reverence, because they're not even loving thinking about what it could mean. They're avoiding it by trying to believe in God. They still don't actually want to think about it, God is a defense mechanism, not a calling. Most of them don't really believe, it's just extremely basic conformity and also trying to assuage personal insecurities about their status in life by engaging in the typical pyramid of "success" that conservatives believe will automatically make you happy, Family, Work, God, and Freedom (these of course are expressed in insanely perverse ways in America). The fact that this guaranteed rulebook American Dream bullshit doesn't work out for the majority of them just means they haven't driven up their martyrdom complex enough, perhaps working 70 hours instead of 60 a week and bragging about it on Facebook will finally make them fulfilled. There's a "study" where they concluded that American conservatives who are additionally Christian are "happier" but I'm pretty sure it's just them disingenuously equating the "success" of having achieved the American Dream in some perfunctory way with actual happiness. They think happiness is property and a checklist of conformist bullet points to meet after all. After having spent so much time with these people I cannot stress enough how much of their lives are spent in denying the scary feelings they feel inside themselves. Fear that they aren't good enough, fear that they aren't manly enough, that people don't see them as powerful enough, that they aren't meeting the checklist fast enough, that their lives will be meaningless if death is empty, etc. It's no mistake they tend to be massive bigots because fear rules their lives in a completely different way than it does like, your average poor, nominally leftist person. One person is miserable because of actual, worldly, material insecurity, like not having enough money to live, receive healthcare, or having a job that isn't soul sucking, the other one is miserable because the insane complexes in their brain lead them to have impossible standards that are impossible because they are unnatural and bizarre, while they ignore all those material woes and even welcome them to stoke their martyrdom complex. They'd rather aggrandize all their fears and kneejerk emotions as some kind of willful emotion brought on by the majesty of biological determinism and the word of God. All American Christians think God acts and believes just as they do. Which is pretty emblematic of how they think, you'd have to be brutally arrogant and additionally incredibly loving stupid to think that if God existed he would be so incredibly limited in mental scope. Even a demiurge wouldn't be such a basic bitch.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:14
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gently caress American Christians for spreading their brainworms around the world too.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:17
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Extra Large Marge posted:No, I was in the "Crazy people are putting razor blades in Halloween candy" generation. Oh no no no. I was never allowed to celebrate Christmas or Halloween or Thanksgiving or Easter or... name it. Anything. I once lost it bawling my eyes out because a kid at school brought cookies to class and I later found out they were birthday cookies and my religion taught me that I had just committed a serious sin. If anyone wants a history lesson in abuse and trauma, I'm your PTSD guy.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:17
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Christians be hatin' cuz they see me rollin' them d20 dice. I played a lot of D&D in the 80's and no one said poo poo to me about it. Even played it during Boy Scout camp outs.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:27
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Extra Large Marge posted:No, I was in the "Crazy people are putting razor blades in Halloween candy" generation. Honestly. My mom checked all of mine. I subconsciously do it now too. I might also just be trying to sneak a bit. No razor blades here!
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Jul 24, 2023 16:37
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isaboo posted:So how many of y'all actually tried to summon demons and poo poo as kids? My crew did halfhearted attempts by drawing pentacles in the local cemetery and running around the church counterclockwise 9 times during a full moon or something similar. And dammit, no demons appeared. The angry pentecostal pastor did come out and scream at us a few times though. I guess he was a demon of sorts so maybe that counted! I mean Catastrophe posted:Oh no no no. I was never allowed to celebrate Christmas or Halloween or Thanksgiving or Easter or... name it. Anything. I once lost it bawling my eyes out because a kid at school brought cookies to class and I later found out they were birthday cookies and my religion taught me that I had just committed a serious sin. That always broke my heart when we had birthdays in school and the JW kids had to leave or just sit there while others had fun. Like I didn’t get *why* so and so never ate birthday cupcakes in class until a sleepover in the fourth grade where we giggled about boys, milky pens…and JWs. I learned what a cult was that night! One of the girls snuck in her brothers Incubus CD (not Brandon Boyd), our first “scaaaaryyy musiccc” experience. E: my god Milky Pens were such a loving controversial to-do when I was a kid. Probably explains my tattoo situation as an adult, however
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Jul 24, 2023 16:38
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I grew up in a very religious household and my mother went all in on the satanic panic stuff from the second I was able to make my own decisions about media consumption. My video game magazines were pre-screened and anything with "ugly" images was cut out or the pages were stapled together. I once got invited to a friend's house and his older brother was big into metal with huge Iron Maiden flags hanging in his room. Naturally I thought this was the coolest poo poo ever and was subsequently banned from visiting again. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, GI Joe, Pokemon and anything else anime-adjacent / from Asia was verboten. Horror and horror adjacent movies were absolutely a no-no. I somehow got a pass on Harry Potter because "at least he's reading" but other fantasy and sci-fi was scrutinized based on the cover art. As I got older and more independent the censorship abated but good lord growing up was the No Fun Zone. The Satanic Panic never really went away either and every so often there's a local news story here that gets the God botherers all riled up.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:44
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:As someone who went to way too much Sunday school in a very typical American Christian church, they weaponize fear of death a lot while they're trying to convert people, but they especially instill it in kids when they're at church camps with no parents around, if they don't bring it up, it's because they're caught between moments of fear and doubt where they want to avoid it by not talking about it, and the occasional bit of faux euphoria when they think they've convinced themselves that they actually believe. A lot of conservative Christians are vacuous in either two ways, they either go to church out of compunction and basically never think of it outside of that (or in extremely superficial ways, eg, "thoughts and prayers") or out of some artificially manufactured Evangelical zeal where they think they can will belief out of pure animus. In American Christianity, death is about punishment and reward, there's no concept of going to God to shed worldliness and the prison of the body, but rather they pretty much believe they'll go to heaven the same as they are now and will spend an eternity like... hanging out I guess. Again, there's no theological introspection there at all, they don't even think about what life after death could possibly even mean, like what is a personality without hormones or the proclivities of brain matter? People they don't like go to hell because that's the worst thing they can imagine happening to someone and hatred has a much higher perch in their hearts than any sort of respect for humankind. That's why they don't talk about it in reverence, because they're not even loving thinking about what it could mean. They're avoiding it by trying to believe in God. They still don't actually want to think about it, God is a defense mechanism, not a calling. Oh yeah, they definitely seem to have plenty of conviction about the hell part. Maybe that's where the disconnect is, the church people I grew up around wouldn't dream of wishing hell on anyone (at least not in polite conversation.) If someone was obviously straying from the faith people would just sound vaguely sad and regretful talking about it, if it was acknowledged at all.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:44
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Treecko posted:Honestly. My mom checked all of mine. Oh my yes, I check my kids too, as is tradition. Now that I think about it, as a kid I did get a Chick Track on Halloween that informed me that all Catholics are actually sun god worshiping pagans. That's kind of Satanic Panic I suppose.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:49
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Serious_Cyclone posted:That's as close as my parents ever got to the Satanic Panic, having had the fortune of growing up in an areligious household. My mom definitely checked our Halloween candy for a few years, although I remember there was an old couple across the street that gave out homemade stuff for Halloween and she refused to check it because she felt silly accusing the 80+ yo neighbors of putting blades or pins in popcorn balls. Somehow that didn't extend to the rest of the neighborhood though. Poisoned Halloween candy was pretty universal, not necessarily tied to anything to do with Satanism. Super mainstream stuff. Really incredible how widely that was believed.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:51
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I remember local news saying to take your Halloween candy to the hospital to have it x-rayed for razor blades and such
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Jul 24, 2023 16:53
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When I was a kid in the 90s at one point my mom went to a seminar about it. She later had a talk w/ me at like age 5 about how d&d was a satanic game that made people do crimes against god and that i should never associate with people who played it, basically a DARE talk but for d&d. Now I'm gay and trans and I play d&d and I've never been happier. Hail satan
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Jul 24, 2023 17:03
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