Common Sense and Other Outmoded Fads

... aka Keeping It Real.

Someone sent me a set of links yesterday which led to sites that, frankly, scared me - a lot. Several decried the genre of MUD as demonic in nature, satanist and cultlike, promulgating behavior which shall most certainly lead to eternal damnation and the end of life on this planet as we know it.

There was raised a great and vocal moral outcry on one, cautioning our youth to avoid everything from D&D and any roleplaying environment. This site also specifically mentioned the Beatles as a misleading influence and named several other cartoons as being dangerous to the minds of our trembling children. Any roleplaying environment? I suppose Shakespeare is right out...

One site declaimed ice hockey as well as fostering un-Christian behavior. Tennis was mentioned. So were transparent washing machine lids.

One site spoke to the validity of Dungeons and Dragon spells, saying they were authenticated as real life demon-summoning conjurations. Said authentication was supposedly performed before this website's author became Born Again. I must confess I did not read the entire page.

Through all of these ran a common thread of caution. These games warp our youth from the path of righteousness and place their feet upon the path of peril and lost souls. These games are addictive and fraught with dangers - by our very systems we breed serial killers and cause suicides.

Now, before a team of lawyers starts advancing on my house, chanting Free Speech epithets and scaring the cats... I am not in any way, shape or form saying that these websites full of moral outrage have no right to be up on the Net. I have a firm belief in a person's right to believe what they choose to believe, and to do so without being judged as to its 'rightness' - so long as said belief does not impinge on anyone else's right to believe what they choose to believe. Faith is a highly personal matter. I have mine. You have yours. May you be allowed to believe what you believe without feeling obligated to push your beliefs on me. I reserve the same right.

So I raise a toast to the morally outraged who feel duty-bound to write such sites and foist them upon all passersby as tracts of warning and impending Doom. You do the world a service, most certainly, and with the best of intentions, I am sure. Those of you who claim to be born again seem to screech the loudest. But please... Born Again does not mean Born Stupid.

Last I looked, they were not taxing Common Sense, so that's not a real good reason to avoid it.

Common Sense is as robust as its user allows it to be or as fragile as its user allows it to be. It should be applied liberally and without hesitation. It should be applied to known conditions on a regular basis, providing practice for dealing with the unknown condition when it arises.

Common Sense dictates that, if you are susceptible to influence by things such as roleplaying and find yourself unable to remain grounded in reality while you act the part of an elven king in text, you should not do this.

Common Sense would lead to the logical conclusion that, if you find it difficult to wake up in the morning because you played games on your computer until midnight, you should probably stop earlier and get some sleep.

Common Sense would say that. It's the same Common Sense that says that if you have a job and don't go do that job for a week, you will probably not have that job for long. You probably won't get paid for it.

Sorry if this is rather fragmented today, but I tend to get very troll-under-the-bridge when confronted with things like those pages which, while probably written with great sincerety and the utmost concern for our well-being as a species, are so significantly lacking in that precious commodity of Common Sense.