by Michael Anton

Created on: June 30, 2009

The game, Dungeons and Dragons, is about as Satanic as having snacks with your friends while having an involved conversation - which is pretty much what the game is. Many people have become frightened of the game since its introduction in 1974, believing that it has something specifically to do with Satanism, that is, the worship of the anthropomorphized and completely negative inclination to do evil as opposed to an anthropomorphized completely positive inclination to do what a ruling societal party deems is positive on a deity level.

In order for Dungeons and Dragons to be specifically Satanic, one has to believe in the faith systems that promote such volatile treatment of people and celebrate in misinformation peppered with a lust for anti-intellectualism in the first place. Nothing has power until you give it power. Dungeons and Dragons makes use of ancient stories, myths and legends from all around the world and a systematic methodology for determining success or failure concerning activities by employing simplified statistics and game theory.

Satanism, as a religion, has little to do with the types of ancient story telling technique based fantasy worlds that are played out in D&D. Where in D&D, a player makes decisions based on a rich story line and carries out actions based on skills attributed to fictional characters based on experience from the game and outcomes are decided based on dice rolling, an actual Satanist practices meditation and self growth and the devotion to a deity that encourages people to act for themselves instead of each other. Some brands of Satanism bring in the use of a kind of magic, which is more based on subtly manipulating nature than shooting missiles out of their hands or shooting fire from a staff, so we have already established that the only thing that D&D and Satanism have in common is some roots in ancient legends. Since Satanism in the United States has only seemed to exist in fiery sermons and in 1960's San Francisco when talented night club organist at a bar called the Lost Weekend, Anton Szandor LeVey (born Howard Stanton Levy) decided to spook people out by writing The Satanic Bible and converting his mom's house into a temple where mock Catholic "rites" took place.

If D&D is Satanic because there is a storyline and encouraging people to actually do math while developing creative reactions to events, then every culture with a heritage of storytelling, oral tradition, make-believe, camaraderie

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