A Time to Destroy: I Cast Thee Out

post from Destructoid on 21 December 2008 12:00:00 PM. © Destructoid

[Editor's note: BulletMagnet tells a wonderful tale about Capcom's Demon's Crest and how it messed with his religious beliefs for his A Time to Destroy Monthly Musing. -- CTZ]

This might be a bit too personal of a story to be appropriate for a blog like this, but I’ll try to avoid going too deeply into the stuff no one else would be interested in. Regardless, just be advised of what’s on offer here - if you don’t mind a bit of exposition, read on.

To briefly set the stage, I’ll mention that I was raised in a pretty religious household (I won’t bother saying which religion specifically) – granted, we weren’t the type of totally nutty faith that tells everyone who disagrees with them to their face that they’re all worthless sinners who deserve to be treated like garbage by true believers, but more to the point I was the recipient of a pretty strict upbringing in terms of morals, and the code of conduct that I was required to abide by. It was a fair amount of guidelines to keep in the back of your head, but I managed to keep myself mostly on the straight and narrow without much trouble. Some years down the road, though, some of the nitty-gritty stuff of my religious upbringing started making less sense to me as I looked more deeply into it, and suffice it to say that eventually I left its confines, and to date have not taken up similar spiritual residence elsewhere.

Now before you assume anything, I want to make it clear that I do not consider my upbringing a “deprived” or “wasted” one – while I don’t adhere to my former faith’s dogmas anymore, by my own choice I’ve determined to keep many of its basic lifestyle teachings in mind even now, as I can look back on quite a number of them and realize that they kept me out of a lot of potential trouble. To a large extent I could truthfully say that, aside from the absence of rituals in my schedule, as a person I haven’t changed a heck of a lot. In short, despite my differences with it, I really can’t say that my years of living in a religious environment really “cost” me anything.

Well, except one particular SNES cartridge.