However, as Kaimi has discovered, role playing games that you make up yourself are where it’s at.

It’s more about the conversations you have — and the spirit you approach them in — than what you ban them from watching/reading (since banning things usually entails various unintended consequences, including sometimes excessive curiousity/fascination with the thing that’s been banned), in any case. Maybe a conversation exploring the attitudes and motivations of Orcs and Balrogs is going a bit far, and I think that saying “ah, this depicts Magic, and Magic is EVIL, and so let’s burn this book” is counterproductive on the best of days. But how about talking about why children and young adults in Germany became willing servants of Hitler, or how public officials so often become tempted to do wrong things while in their offices of responsibility, or how powerful temptations (drugs, pornography, violence, whatever) can be — and how hard it is to turn back once you’ve given in to them?

Yes, Satan exists. But our battles with him are in our minds and in our daily lives and in our interactions with other people and in how we respond to events in our communities and the world. Walking around looking for demons who want to jump up and down on your shoulders telling you to do bad things (or slice you through with a broadsword — depends on your preferred imagery, I suppose: Buffy or LooneyTunes) or Manifestations Of Pure Evil In The Form of Idolatrous Popular Culture and Possessed Persons is as good a way to distract yourself from how your own spiritual weaknesses are harming your family and friends and neighbors as any other method I can think of.

Seriously. Reading the Book of Mormon and church history, it’s pretty clear that most prophets most of the time never encountered herds of swine possessed by demons, and never got spirited away to mountain peaks to be tempted by Satan in person (as it were). Even the “and the whole room turned dark and I felt like I just wanted to die and it was incredibly cold and so forth” experiences were kind of limited to selected spiritual giants, called to great deeds, who had already passed the “are you good to your neighbor, and do you refrain from throwing stones at repentant sinners” test.

Having said all of that, it’s probably wise to explain at some point why you feel that pagan worship is misguided, or why seemingly harmless Oijua (sp?) board games and Tarot readings CAN lead to more problematic sign-seeking. And I’m all for explaining how exactly various pop stars are being grotesque, self-exploitative, and just plain icky when they do the grotesque, self-exploitative, and just plain icky things they do. I definitely think that you can create an atmosphere that distracts from the Spirit with rock music and poker games. Meanwhile, those who host firesides might do well to remember that you can get to Hell through petty injustices and too many bon-bons just as easily as you can through raping and pillaging (and the bon-bons don’t create the same potentially life-changing “oh, ew, I just killed a bunch of people and there’s carnage and blood and I’ve got to buy new boots” moments that pillaging can); or, to put it another way, the demons are cheering anytime you turn away from Heaven, regardless of whether they brought out all their favorite tricks and whether or not you were wearing black, fingering some pagan symbol, and had too many peircings at the critical moment.

Which reminds me how much I liked reading “The Screwtape Letters.”

There. Can we get back to talking about the Prince of Darkness now?

I was a big Dungeons & Dragons geek too back in the day and I actually see how it relates to an early 80s Satanic Panic atmosphere that we all seemed to feel, (plus, I’m glad it inflates the number of posts on this thread) but if I could, I’d like to steer the conversation back to an issue which my original post probably should have raised.

By being Mormon we certainly believe in the reality of Satan, possession, disembodied spirits, and assorted evil forces. If that’s what we believe than I think it follows that there is a danger in exploring the occult. Now, I’m not saying rock music and Dungeons & Dragons lead to that exploration, but as a young parent I wonder how to instill a healthy respect and awareness for the reality of evil without overdoing it and scaring the bejesus out of my offspring early 80s style.