Fundies Say the Darndest Things, often abbreviated to FSTDT, is (to use its own description) "an archive of the most hilarious, bizarre, ignorant, bigoted, and terrifying quotes from fundies all over the internet". Or, in other words, it's a community dedicated to mocking religious and political stupidity.The history of FSTDT is a surprisingly simple one. The initial administrator, WinAce, found religious stupidity humorous, so he decided to set up an archive for the craziest of the crazies. He called it Christians Say the Darndest Things, but quickly changed it when he realized that Christian fundamentalists aren't the only people capable of saying outrageous things. Unfortunately, three years after the initial creation of the site, WinAce passed away from cystic fibrosis.However, this wasn't the end of FSTDT as a new administrator, Yahweh (who saw fundies in much the same way as WinAce), picked up where the first left off, both in the memory of WinAce and as a project to improve her coding skills. However, Yahweh found the task of rebuilding and recompiling the website to be far more difficult than she initially expected and ended up abandoning the project after a valiant effort.The third and current administrator, Distind (who watches fundies in an attempt to figure out what makes them tick), much more confident in his programming abilities, picked up where Yahweh left off and the site flourishes under his command to this day.At first glance, the site seems to mock conservative Christians exclusively, but it only seems that way because they tend to be the loudest (in English-speaking countries, anyway). Stupidity of any religious or political persuasion is fair game and the site's history has had a respectable number of quotes from antitheists, liberals and other non-conservative and non-Christian fundies.As this site involves religion and politics, be sure to choose your words wisely here.
This website contains examples of:
Abusive Parents: Some of the quotes actually attempt to justify child abuse. One particularly horrifying example is this. It advocates spanking children until they cry "tears of a broken will".
Artistic License - Law: Fundies often claim that the Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation. This quote claims that the Founding Fathers made it illegal for atheists to testify in court or to hold public office.
Boomerang Bigot: Commenter Brendan Rizzo is an American (still living there) who really, really hates America. He used to make posts defending his country from anti-American attacks but got fed up with it all.
Many of those quoted believe that people will suffer eternal torment for arbitrary things such as homosexuality or even merely having a different belief. It's particularly disturbing since some of the quotes go into extremely graphic detail as to what they believe will happen to their "enemies".
The commenters have a version of this as well. Whenever an American fundie is quoted, a small subset (mostly Headache) of the non-American commenters will blame the USA as a whole for the existence of its fundies, but this never happens when the fundie quoted is from elsewhere, and if an American tries to claim such, the other commenters show him no mercy.
Dumbass Has a Point: Sometimes (albeit very occasionally) the fundies quoted also say something reasonable in their rant, which is usually acknowledged by at least one commenter.
Eagleland: The American fundies are shining examples of Flavor 2 (not to say that other countries don't have their own fundies). Unfortunately, because the USA is so much more populated than the rest of the English-speaking world, a naïve commenter could easily assume that all Americans are like that even though that is not the case. In fact, Headache, if he isn't a Troll, seems to believe this, as the vast majority of his comments are about how the United States is "the land of the fat and the stupid" and how the American people deserve their country to be ruined because a minority of them vote for fundie candidates.
Rapture Ready. It is the single most cited source of the quotes mocked on the site. The second most cited source is YouTube with 118 pages worth as of this edit. Rapture Ready? 431. And that's before you factor in the ones marked as "RR", which brings it up to 604.
Free Conservatives and its successor, Free Republic, come as second craziest. They have 102 pages worth of quotes combined as of this edit, which in itself is impressive, and live up to their reputation by producing some of the vilest quotes on the entire site. It's possible that they are a front for a racist skinhead group.
Also present is Stormfront, which doesn't even hide behind a front, though it has only 18 pages worth of quotes as of this edit.
Not even websites which nominally have nothing to do with religion and politics are immune. The POD Warrior Forum, a P.O.D. fan forum, has 79 pages, and International Movie Database has 27. And that's not even getting into Yahoo! Answers, with 66 pages. (Though most of those are from trolls.)
And there was also this gem from a fundie doubtful of the existence of dark matter: "Fabricated Ad hoc Inventions Repeatedly Invoked in Efforts to Defend Untenable Scientific Theories", or FAIRIE DUST. Admittedly, it's quite impressive.
Several quotes come from fundies who claim to be the second coming of Jesus, but Mark Dreher takes it further than any of the others. At least he confessed to being a troll.
The users of the site sometimes display bigotry, double standards, research failures and the like despite (or because) the site is devoted to mocking those very qualities.
However, a lot of posts are written in sarcasm, and some of the more bigoted replies are often Poes.
For example, some of the comments in response to the commenters whatever and SpukiKitty in this thread.
Trolls and fundies posting to try and call out quote posters notwithstanding, there are 28 pages of quotes from the search word "FSTDT".
Hitler Ate Sugar: Far too often. Running a search of the name "Hitler" yields 49 pages of results as of this edit, some of them comparing him to Barack Obama.
This is one of the most obvious examples (though it doesn't concern Hitler himself).
Hollywood Evolution: Oh, so very much. A huge proportion of people ranting about the "EVILutionists" have no idea how the Theory of Natural Selection works... especially whoever came up with these.
Implied Death Threat: The fundie Mark Dreher makes one to the commenter D Laurier here. For context, an earlier quote submitted to the site established that Dreher believes himself to be God, so when he claims that God would kill a person, he is thinking about doing so himself.
Here's another one. The poster says that trying to change the laws to allow gays to marry is like trying to change gravity. It actually won the Insane Troll Logic award.
In this post, the poster claims to have found photographic proof of Beyoncé being a lizard-person while at the same time admitting he photoshopped the image.
It's All About Me: Many fundies seem to believe this, even though one would think that they would not because their religion teaches otherwise.
Jade-Colored Glasses: Prolonged exposure to the stupidity and maliciousness of fundies can cause this. It has already happened to a few of the commenters.
Logical Fallacies: Every fallacy in the book is demonstrated by the fundies, but this one is the cream of the crop. It somehow manages both to use circular logic and to refute itself.
At least one person on the site provides an excellent example the maligning when he says there is no love whatsoever in any of them. This lovely fellow takes things a step further by implying that white women who marry black men deserve to be killed by Jack the Ripper.
And here's a post from the writer of that blog gloating that a woman in an interracial relationship was killed by her lover.
Manchurian Agent: Marion Knox believes that people are deliberately given split personalities with alters such as three-year-old sex slaves used to send sensitive information back and forth between politicians and world leaders.
Medal of Dishonor: Some quotes earn sarcastic "awards" of this nature.
No Sympathy: Here is a horrible post to someone who is depressed and self-injuring. Instead of offering encouragement or sympathy, he calls their problems a sin and lays a guilt trip.
Poe's Law: The site is infamous for this. Pretty much everyone from contributors to administrators has trouble distinguishing, though if a posted quote is later discovered to be a Poe, it can be removed from the site.
Politically Incorrect Villain: Quite a few. Bryan Fischer has many instances of this, but perhaps his most notable is when he appropriated MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech to promote discrimination against homosexual people. DoctorDoom (no relation to thatDoctor Doom) is this so much, a wall of shame has been built here:
To be fair, there are a few examples where quote mining has been called out by the commenters by going to the mined site and reading the whole quote, or even the context of the original thread it was posted in.
Readings Blew Up The Scale: A common response to an ironic statement made by one of the fundies whose statements have been quoted is that it has "destroyed [the commenter's] irony meter."
Red Scare: Some of the fundamentalists on the site seem to think everything is a communist conspiracy. This quote contains the assertion that railways owned by the state is Marxism. There's also several quotes in the archives talking about how Joe McCarthy is an American Hero.
Rogues Gallery: There are a few who have a lot of quotes on the site.
Some of the most notable fundies on the site are AV1611VET, dad, JohnR7, Supersport, Carico, LoneWolf1984, DoctorDoom, Bro. Randy, savagesusie, Andrew Schlafly and fschmidt.
DoctorDoom asked why criticism of Barack Obama is perceived as racist, and immediately followed by calling him a "Magic Lawn Jockey". You were saying, Doom?
The two are so unbelievably stupid that some have suggested that Cassiterides is Supersport's kid, hoping that there is no way that two people so stupid could exist independently of one another.
Several, but one who comes to mind is baileysmom from Rapture Ready, whose posts are always rants against gay people. She even derails completely unrelated threads to take a swipe at them.
A more recent example is Headache, who is a commenter on FSTDT. Inevitably, when an American fundie is quoted, he will rant about how the United States of America sucks and how the American people are stupid and have no hope of ever matching the rest of the world in intelligence. He is quite fond of calling the US "batshit insane". True to this trope, he never talks about anything else with the vitriol that he reserves for Americans, and non-American fundies who are just as stupid or evil as any of the American ones tend to get little or no reaction from him.
Stop Being Stereotypical: Some of the site's fanbase are Christians who are tired of the fundies' shit.
Stupid Sexy Flanders: Heterosexual variant: quite a few of the commenters are ashamed of themselves for considering Christine O'Donnell, and occasionally Sarah Palin, to be sexually attractive, when those women have made some of the most ignorant comments on the entire site.
, often abbreviated to FSTDT, is (to use its own description) "an archive of the most hilarious, bizarre, ignorant, bigoted, and terrifying quotes from fundies all over the internet". Or, in other words, it's a community dedicated to mocking religious and political stupidity.The history of FSTDT is a surprisingly simple one. The initial administrator, WinAce, found religious stupidity humorous, so he decided to set up an archive for the craziest of the crazies. He called it Christians Say the Darndest Things, but quickly changed it when he realized that Christian fundamentalists aren't the only people capable of saying outrageous things. Unfortunately, three years after the initial creation of the site, WinAce passed away from cystic fibrosis.However, this wasn't the end of FSTDT as a new administrator, Yahweh (who saw fundies in much the same way as WinAce), picked up where the first left off, both in the memory of WinAce and as a project to improve her coding skills. However, Yahweh found the task of rebuilding and recompiling the website to be far more difficult than she initially expected and ended up abandoning the project after a valiant effort.The third and current administrator, Distind (who watches fundies in an attempt to figure out what makes them tick), much more confident in his programming abilities, picked up where Yahweh left off and the site flourishes under his command to this day.At first glance, the site seems to mock conservative Christians exclusively, but it only seems that way because they tend to be the loudest (in English-speaking countries, anyway). Stupidity of any religious or political persuasion is fair game and the site's history has had a respectable number of quotes from antitheists, liberals and other non-conservative and non-Christian fundies.As this site involves religion and politics, be sure to choose your words wisely here.
0 reviews