A rant about bigotry and religion
Poor taste or not, this 'toon is actually pretty clever. It pretty much follows the Jack Chick comic's storyline right down the line, except where Jack only implies certain things about RPGs, here they make it blatantly obvious.
Case in point: the sultry older woman/"pagan" GM in Chick's comic implies through her actions (and the slinky way she's drawn) that she's a servant of the devil, seducing the teenage girl into a life of drugs, bisexual sex and devil worship. In this comic, with deadpan delivery, she flat out says "yes indeedy, I worship demons, have some drugs and come on over next week for an orgy or two." This matter of fact tone exposes how silly Chick's claims really are.
Now I realize that some Christian Gamers are offended by this cartoon. Christianity isn't what's being satirized here. The cowardly, selfish and bigoted scapegoating perpetrated by people like Jack Chick is. Mr. Chick is a hypocrite, who writes comics featuring lovingly detailed vignettes of debauchery, theft and drug use. You can tell just by looking at how much energy and effort has gone into drawing these things, that Jack Chick is getting off on making them, because deep down, he's a pretty sinful person. Like most people who are self-righteous bigots, he foists his own moral failings off on a target group (preferably a socially isolated minority group--gamers, homosexuals, blacks, jews, feminists etc), which he scapegoats. Then he justifies this immoral behavior by clothing himself in the Robes of the Apostles, as if misquoting the bible or going to church regularly automatically makes him "saved" or proves his actions are anything but evil, absolving him of responsibility for being a grade-A jerk.
Most Christians are good people. The problem is that bigots like Chick are moral cowards. They handle stress by scapegoating and hurting others, then don't have the guts to deal with feeling guilty about it afterwards. Heck, they can't even admit that they *are* hurting others. So they lie to themselves about it their whole lives. Sadly, a common way bigots "make believe" they are moral people is to "take the moral high ground" by joining a religion and becoming a fanatic. That way they can persecute others and tell themselves afterward "what I did was moral because I did it for Christ/Buddha/Vishnu/God/etc)." So they can be bigots, scapegoat others, then pat themselves on the back because they go to church and can quote the bible.
99.9% of Christians are good, decent people. Unfortunately, it's that 0.1% of bigoted jerks who hide amongst you that give the rest of you a bad name. The reason Christians are mistrusted by a lot of gamers is that 20 years ago, the bigoted 0.1% managed to trick a lot of the good, decent people to persecute D&D for a short time.
I know from experience. I lost my best friend because his mom, an otherwise good person, believed Pat Robertson when he waved a PHB on TV and said it was a real book of magic spells (I kid you not)! She was a devout (and slightly ignorant) person, who couldn't conceive that Roberston was a charlatan, taking a cheap shot at D&D to trick people into calling in donations. She forbade her son from seeing me, as I was instantly deemed a "bad influence"--I was a cub scout and straight A student who never got into trouble. I don't blame her to this day, just the jerks who manipulated her faith to make a quick buck.
So don't take this White Wolf tract as an attack on Christianity. It's an attack on bigotry, and the small percentage of self-righteous bigots that hide among Christians and hope to fool you into helping justify their acts of cruelty and cowardice. Criticizing these jerks isn't going against Chrisitianity--it might even help devout Christians step back for a second and weed out the jerks--or at least make it harder for them to hide in the back of the congregation and wussily burn books/CDs/gamers/gays/jews/innocents/pagans/feminists/muppets/performance artists/beatle's records/whatever's handy ... at the stake.
Just my (controversial) 2 cents worth.
P.S.: 10 bucks says that "Father Ramos" is a demon whose congregational church is part of the official game setting...
I can see a lot of bad-boy wanna-be's signing up for this one.
