Being real here, I disagree that the 'moral panic' was full of baloney, they were in fact mostly correct in their analysis, but the fact that people didn't understand says more about the state of society and its lack of faith than anything else.
I grew up non-religious and was essentially raised by public education, television, video games, and the internet. For the first quarter of my life I was a nihilist (atheist, then agnost, regardless: nihilist). I've dumped an ungodly amount of time into games like Runescape and World of Warcraft and never felt it was a problem. It was and is a problem. At a fundamental level these activities are escapism into fantasy which disconnects one from properly interacting and learning about the world.
I am no longer a nihilist. "The truth that there is no truth" is a baloney contradictory lie. At a spiritual level this sort of stuff, this escapism, is the arrogant statement that "God's creation is not good enough, man's creations are better." Additionally, the vast majority of this stuff is not edifying, inspiring one towards virtue, quite the opposite. It is thus quite possible indeed to see the fingers of Satan therein. Most are blind to this unfortunately.
As far as Satan representing a general moral or spiritual decline, I can see your point. But there is no doubt that such a concern degenerated into mass hysteria in the 80s.There was a nationwide push to root out Satanic Ritual Abuse from daycares across the country, none of which was occurring (kind of like the push to end racism everywhere now). There was child abuse, sure (there is racism now too), as there always is to some degree, but none of it had anything to do with Satanic rituals. The McMartin daycare trials were absolutely nuts, plain and simple. Social workers were indeed ensconced in a moral panic and making patently insane claims about reality that destroyed a number of people's lives. It didn't go nearly as wide as the current hysteria over racism and such, but it went pretty wide, it was all over MSM, and it used a lot of the same mechanisms that we're seeing now.
One could make the same point about the current leftwing hysteria that you're making about the Satanic panic. There are definitely some valid claims underlying some of the left's views on race, but fear and lack of reason have blown them wildly out of proportion, leading to the formation of what is essentially a massive fiction resting on a kernel of truth.
Yes, there has been a general spiritual decline in our society and the Christian right was certainly correct in pointing it out then. But that's not where it stayed. I'm sorry, but my He-Man toys were not sending me messages from Satan, and that was the claim, not that He-Man represented some general debauchery. D&D was not possessing me with demons or driving me to want to kill, and that was the claim. Judas Priest was not sending me subliminal Satanic messages in their albums if I played them backwards, and that was the claim. There was never an epidemic of Satanic rituals occurring in daycares, and that was the claim.
I see your point, I really do. We are in a kind of spiritual warfare here, but when the specific claims go as nutty as they did then with Satanism as they have now with racism, whatever necessary truth underlies them gets lost in the hysteria.
Being real here, I disagree that the 'moral panic' was full of baloney, they were in fact mostly correct in their analysis, but the fact that people didn't understand says more about the state of society and its lack of faith than anything else.
I grew up non-religious and was essentially raised by public education, television, video games, and the internet. For the first quarter of my life I was a nihilist (atheist, then agnost, regardless: nihilist). I've dumped an ungodly amount of time into games like Runescape and World of Warcraft and never felt it was a problem. It was and is a problem. At a fundamental level these activities are escapism into fantasy which disconnects one from properly interacting and learning about the world.
I am no longer a nihilist. "The truth that there is no truth" is a baloney contradictory lie. At a spiritual level this sort of stuff, this escapism, is the arrogant statement that "God's creation is not good enough, man's creations are better." Additionally, the vast majority of this stuff is not edifying, inspiring one towards virtue, quite the opposite. It is thus quite possible indeed to see the fingers of Satan therein. Most are blind to this unfortunately.
As far as Satan representing a general moral or spiritual decline, I can see your point. But there is no doubt that such a concern degenerated into mass hysteria in the 80s.There was a nationwide push to root out Satanic Ritual Abuse from daycares across the country, none of which was occurring (kind of like the push to end racism everywhere now). There was child abuse, sure (there is racism now too), as there always is to some degree, but none of it had anything to do with Satanic rituals. The McMartin daycare trials were absolutely nuts, plain and simple. Social workers were indeed ensconced in a moral panic and making patently insane claims about reality that destroyed a number of people's lives. It didn't go nearly as wide as the current hysteria over racism and such, but it went pretty wide, it was all over MSM, and it used a lot of the same mechanisms that we're seeing now.
One could make the same point about the current leftwing hysteria that you're making about the Satanic panic. There are definitely some valid claims underlying some of the left's views on race, but fear and lack of reason have blown them wildly out of proportion, leading to the formation of what is essentially a massive fiction resting on a kernel of truth.
Yes, there has been a general spiritual decline in our society and the Christian right was certainly correct in pointing it out then. But that's not where it stayed. I'm sorry, but my He-Man toys were not sending me messages from Satan, and that was the claim, not that He-Man represented some general debauchery. D&D was not possessing me with demons or driving me to want to kill, and that was the claim. Judas Priest was not sending me subliminal Satanic messages in their albums if I played them backwards, and that was the claim. There was never an epidemic of Satanic rituals occurring in daycares, and that was the claim.
I see your point, I really do. We are in a kind of spiritual warfare here, but when the specific claims go as nutty as they did then with Satanism as they have now with racism, whatever necessary truth underlies them gets lost in the hysteria.