Anatomy of an Anti-Christian Hoax

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This may seem like an odd post to use to remerge from six weeks of blog dormancy, although, as you'll see, it has some relevance to why I've been dormant.

So where have I been, or more to the point, where have my blog posts been?

I haven't posted recently for two main reasons:

(1) FrancisChurch fatigue. A lot has happened in the last six weeks, and the pace of what is continuing to happen has increased.

Motus in fine velocior.

It's just hard to continue to track with words one's grief or concern or righteous indignation or whatever. It can be cathartic, but it also can be depressing. That's not an excuse for my own wimpiness, more another way of describing it.

But in blogging it's also important to feel that one is making a unique contribution, however small, and if ten Catholic blogs are writing about the latest Outrage of the Day, and you have nothing in particular to add, then...

And as most of my readers would agree, the Catholic blogosphere has recently been, in a sense, leading the opposition to Bergoglio and his demolition campaign.

I want to thank all the loyal readers and commenters on this blog for bearing with me. I've gone though this before, and it will pass, as it always does.

In my small way, I don't want to let you down, and I feel bad when I do. I apologize.

(2) But the second reason is that I have been working on finishing up revising and adding to a gaming project, which I occasionally post about on my gaming blog Save Versus All Wands. My game, Seven Voyages of Zylarthen is not a "Christian game" by any means, but it was written in part to make fantasy adventure games friendly or at least non-hostile to the serious Christian community in a way that its parent, Dungeons & Dragons, is often perceived not to be.

It's always been difficult for me to fully focus my attention on two online or quasi-online projects at one time. Before starting Mahound's Paradise, I was quite active in the gaming blogosphere, but a few years ago, I took more than a year off to write the game.

And I should say, in the game community I have many online friends, many of whom are Catholics, but the majority of whom are non-Catholic Christians, agnostics, atheists or even "pagans." That's fine with me. We are often allies in the sense that we dislike what the leftist "social justice warriors" are doing to the hobby. And evangelization (whatever atom of it I can ever embody) should always begin with a commitment to the truth (whatever atom of it I can ever embody).

And truth, friendship and loyalty in a sense transcend religious categories, though any believing Catholic can tell you that they are ultimately based on the example our Lord set down (whether people perceive it or not).

I also, as may be expected, have made many enemies in the hobby - leftist gaming people who also appear to obsessively read Mahound's Paradise just so when in a gaming context if I claim that knowledge is good or it's wrong to set cats on fire, they can respond with, "yeah, but you're an anti-Muslim bigot and a hyper-reactionary Catholic who EVEN hates the Pope!"

Funny, they never cared about the pope before...

And who has the time? I never read their silly religious-political posts...

I have a lot more to say about Zylarthen and whether or not D&D is really "anti-Christian" etc., but I'll leave it to another post (for both my gaming blog and Mahound's Paradise).

But to add more background to today's post, there's a meme in the gaming community that serious Christians are ignorant bigots who want to mess up people's fun, in particular by throwing Christian fundie hate at gamers and gaming.

A recent alleged example of this turned out to be a hoax, perpetrated by an obscure game publisher who wanted to gain more clicks for his game site and (almost certainly) gin up anti-Christian hate (or at least milk more clicks off of the anti-Christian thing).

In any case, here's the story, which was crossposted a few days ago at Save Versus All Wands with a slightly more, ah, forthright title:

Jacob Bos

The Darker Side of Dungeons & Dragons

I'm sure by now, most of you have heard the name "Dungeons & Dragons". On the surface, it's a game of the imagination, governed by strict rules, and played with dice, maps, and miniatures. Under the surface however, lies the allure of the occult, the temptation to escape from reality, and the desire for power.

So begins the first blog post from a blog called "Secret Evils of the World." Both the blog itself and the profile of the blog's author "Thomas Elder" were created yesterday morning from an address in Canada, with no obvious provenance in terms of the blog or the blogger.

It appears to be an 80's style Christian fundie anti-D&D rant. Those red pictures on the side are depictions of hell.

You may find the link here. Or not - it may have been taken down by the time you read this. But here's what it looks like, and below is the profile of "Thomas Elder."

The first post went up at 5:51 AM CST. (The time stamp is the Blogger default, which is PST.)

Yesterday, between the hours of 6 AM and 7 AM, a minor RPG industry guy named Jacob Bos linked to the blog's first post. He put it up in a number of places on Facebook where it received hundreds of comments and many shares, virtually all of which were predictably hostile to the blog and post, and many of which degenerated into anti-Christian snipes and attacks.

Jacob Bos is the person behind the Myd'Realm fantasy setting and 5Realms Publishing, both of which have a presence on DriveThruRPG. Bos is based in Canada.

The blog post itself received 150+ comments, all of which, as far as I can tell, were directed there by those Facebook posts and shares.

The first comment was posted by Jacob Bos at 6:19 AM, twenty-eight minutes after the anonymous first-time blog from the anonymous profile that was just created launched itself into the ether.

So Bos appears to have found it quite quickly on Tuesday morning.

Maybe the Canadian internet isn't that big...

Well, Bos wrote it himself of course.

And he also inserted himself into the discussion on at least one of the Facebook places where he linked to the post - the group 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - laughing along with those attacking those bigoted and stupid Christian fundies. Here's one comment among many. Notice that he comically tries to direct attention away from the troll thesis:

Bos also linked to the post in Old School Gamers, where I first saw it, his own page, his Myd'Realm and 5Realms Facebook pages and, of all places, the group 80'S CARTOONS, T.V. SHOWS, MOVIES AND TOYS ..what do you remember? He also linked to the post on his Twitter account, which ironically got no likes or retweets. For all I know, he put it up in other places on Facebook and elsewhere.

Here are a few of the ways he introduced the post:

Some church.

Organized religion.

You are all sinners! Repent!

LOL

He was a busy man between 6 AM and 7 AM, just minutes after the original blog and profile was created.

The "Secret Evils" blog title picture is from the TV series Freaks and Geeks. Curiously, the same picture was posted on the Myd'Realm page a few months ago (with funny "meme" writing placed on it). While it's true that a similar picture has appeared on other sites, each picture has different dimensions and pixel counts, etc., as one might expect. Except for two them - the pictures for Myd'Realm and "Secret Evils" are precisely the same (in terms of dimensions, pixels, etc.).

I originally was taken in by this hoax like most (though perhaps not all) of the commenters. Indeed, as a Christian D&D player I felt it my silly duty to defend the anonymous blogger from the lynch mob, at least partially - "30%" as I put it - as well as pointing out that the whole thing, whatever the merits of the anti-anti-D&D case had partly turned into an anti-Christian thing.

I should note that at least two Christian ministers respectfully argued the merits of D&D back at the "Thomas Elder."

Bos is of course a troll and a liar. He invented the profile, wrote the blog post and then linked to it either to create clicks and shares for his "setting" and company pages or to gin up anti-Christian hate. I suspect it's both.

He allowed it to be shared and re-shared as an alleged example of Christian or Christian fundie hate.

See? Christians are stupid and bigoted. They want to control you and stop your fun. They want to condemn people they disagree with to hell. They can't separate fantasy from reality, etc., etc.

And they hate our favorite game, D&D.

Someone must have been channeling the late Patricia Pulling and Jack Chick...

Except. Not.

It was Jacob Bos all along.

That Chesterton Misquote: a Detective Story

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Old School Renaissance

In a post a few days ago, I made a quasi-defense of allowing our four-year-old son to read the 1981 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fiend Folio. In my Google+ and Facebook intro blurbs for the link, I paraphrased an alleged G.K. Chesterton quote. The paraphrase went like this:

Fairy tales do not tell children that monsters exist. Children already know that monsters exist. Fairy tales tell children that monsters can be killed.

Now my "paraphrase" was actually a direct word for word copy of an actually existing rectangular Chesterton quote thingy--the sort of picture people post and repost on Facebook and other social media (though note the wonky punctuation):

But I thought (though I honestly don't remember why I thought) that that itself was probably a paraphrase of something where Chesterton was actually referring to dragons not monsters. I used "monsters" (while acknowledging that it was probably a paraphrase) because it squared better with my post--I was talking about monsters in general, such as the monsters in the Fiend Folio, not dragons specifically. Here's one of the rectangular quote thingies on the Chesterton dragon version:

And here's another:

And here are three more:

I've posted five of these because they all differ. The major differences are the substitution of "Fairy tales are more than true-" for "Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist," and "beaten" for "killed." But minor differences include "don't" for "do not," "that dragons" for "the dragons," "the children" for "children" and the insertion of "that" in-between "us" and "dragons."

This is, of course, annoying. If Chesterton really said it, you would think someone would simply look at exactly what he said in Collected Essays Volume XXVII or whatever and just quote it. Is it "don't" or "do not"? Well, what did he actually say?

Okay. Now it gets even more annoying. Hold onto your hats and wait for it . . .

The quote has also been ascribed to Neil Gaiman:

And now, instead of "killed" versus "beaten," we have "beaten" versus "defeated."

Enough.

What was the original quote and who actually said it?

In fact it was Neil Gaiman quoting Chesterton in the epigraph to his 2002 Coraline, p. 7:

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten. 

- G.K. Chesterton

But the story is not over. As Gaiman later admitted, he misquoted Chesterton--and this was in the epigraph!

How did he misquote Chesterton? Why did he misquote Chesterton?

Well, Gaiman may have had his memory filtered through an earlier misquotation from a third source. Hold onto your hats again. That source is . . . 

Terry Pratchett.

In When the Children Read Fantasy, published in SF2 Concatenation (1994), which obviously preceded Coraline, Pratchett wrote:

One of the great popular novelists of the early part of this century was G.K. Chesterton. Writing at a time when fairy tales were under attack for pretty much the same reason as books can now be covertly banned in some schools because they have the word ‘witch’ in the title, he said: “The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.” 

Now, do not misunderstand what I'm doing here. I'm not being critical of Gaiman. Indeed, we have Gaiman to thank for admitting his mistake.

Gaiman himself realized that he had misquoted Chesterton and attempted to unravel what had happened:

It’s my fault. When I started writing Coraline, I wrote my version of the quote [from Chesterton's] Tremendous Trifles, meaning to go back later and find the actual quote, as I didn’t own the book, and this was before the Internet. And then ten years went by before I finished the book, and in the meantime I had completely forgotten that the Chesterton quote was mine and not his.

(See this Tumblr post by "MJS.")

So what was the original quote? it's from "The Red Angel," Chapter XVII of Chesterton's Tremendous Trifles (1909):

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it--because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Of course, in classic Chestertonian fashion, Chesterton restates essentially the same idea at least three more times in the chapter. Here's another version in the very next paragraph (warning: one of the terms used is now considered politically incorrect):

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a Cyclops. But fairy tales restored my mental health, for next day I read an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart. Sometimes the sea at night seemed as dreadful as any dragon. But then I was acquainted with many youngest sons and little sailors to whom a dragon or two was as simple as the sea.

So, what does this all mean? Well, obviously, quotes on the internet are often very unreliable, at least if one is a stickler for accuracy. Then again, I do not think anyone can deny that the basic spirit of what Chesterton originally said was preserved through the various permutations, even though technically he was misquoted again and again. And while I obviously like reading actual Chesterton, I think the best version of the quote is that first "monsters" one. It's simple, stark and clear. But I would have preferred that its origins hadn't been misdescribed.

[Crossposted at Save Versus All Wands]