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 simple. 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.note 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. There are also two spinoff sites: Conspiracy Theorists Say the Darndest Things (CSTDT) and Racists Say the Darndest Things (RSTDT), which produce quotes that are often just as, if not more, batshit than their fundie counterparts.As this site involves religion and politics, be sure to choose your words wisely here.
This website contains examples of:
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Tropes A-D
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".
Analogy Backfire: One Freeper was arguing why the title of "marriage" should be reserved only for straight Christians—and managed to compare God with Santa Claus in the process.
Appeal To Nature: Xizor believes that racial equality is wrong because "equality exists nowhere in nature" and that in nature "there must always be a hierarchy".
This. Much of the site contains ridiculous arguments against the theory of evolution.
Creationist teachers told a student that all humans descended from Adam and Eve, and that inbreeding would not have been an issue because "DNA wasn't invented then."
This poster, in addition to thinking evolution is false because there are no "giant mammaried mosquitos" or "feathered fish", is apparently unaware that there are live-bearing snakes.
This person thinks that if you get two of the "best and most diverse" members of every species, you're not going to have issues with inbreeding.
This quote takes irreducible complexity to absurd new levels.
Todd Akin's ignorance is once again recorded in this quote. Apparently, abortions can be given to women who are not pregnant (and this is also a terrible, terrible thing).
Kent Hovind has stated that "I don't think you could demonstrate bugs are alive!"
This poster says that Hitler "wanted Germany (and possibly the rest of Europe) to be Islamic".
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.
Assimilation Academy: Certain private religious schools serve as nothing more than indoctrination centers for children, teaching them to value rigid dogma as opposed to critical thinking skills.
Here is an actual science quiz from the Blue Ridge Christian Academy in South Carolina.
This is a page from an actual Creationist textbook.
Bestiality Is Depraved: It's not uncommon for fundies to accuse homosexuals or atheists of bestiality; this has led to many comments about their apparent obsession with the topic. Made all the more disturbing by Neal Horsley, who admitted in a radio interview to having had sex with a mule.
Cerebus Syndrome: In a way. The early days of the site were mostly good for a laugh, if you find yourself amused by extremes of human stupidity. Quotes came mostly from religious web fora, and were, for the most part, the type of humorous idiocy exhibited by the users of Rapture Ready and CARM. The splitting off of CSTDT and RSTDT into their own sections led to many quotes being submitted not because of their stupidity, but because they represented a throwback to less-enlightened times. The situation went From Bad to Worse after the election of Barack Obama and the rise of the Tea Party, which released a fury of conservatives all eager to say the most horrible and disgusting things about the President, and quotes promoting racism or Objectivism became more common than the original science-denying quotes. Nowadays, FSTDT can make one lose all faith in humanity.
Comically Missing the Point: Linda found a gay pornographic magazine under her 16-year-old son's bed. Her conclusion was that her son's secret girlfriend must have left it there.
Cultural Cringe: Though only a handful have taken it beyond the pale, one cannot really deny that most of the American commenters resent their country because of the perceived fundamentalist stranglehold on the country's politics and culture, particularly when compared to Western Europe, which several commenters will hold up as exemplars of what a society should be like.
Cure Your Gays: Of course many a fundie would advocate this, but this one takes it to silly levels. Apparently banning gay conversion camps for kids means you're banning heterosexuality.
Some of the commenters, particularly Anon-e-moose, seem to think that democracy doesn't do enough to stop fundamentalism, and so appear to be in favor of religion being treated the way it was by Stalin and Mao. Thankfully, these people seem to be a minority and they're occasionally called out by other commenters.
According to this quote, God punished Japan with the 2011 tsunami because Japan is the center of the video game industry.
Harry Lyon suggests that any illegal immigrant who sets foot in the state of Alabama be shot on sight.
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 specific detail as to what they believe will happen to their "enemies".
Dirty Communists: A good litmus test for deciding whether a conservative is fundie enough to be posted on FSTDT is whether or not they accuse liberals of being communists.
Disability Super Power: One Islamophobic poster's idea for a Muslim superhero was a Taliban fighter (inexplicably fighting in Iraq) whose limbs were blown off. After being exposed to yellowcake uranium, he acquires the ability to respawn after each Suicide Attack.
Divine Parentage: Wotans Krieger seems to think that this is what makes Germanic peoples (or Aryans,as he calls them) better than the rest of humanity. Namely, they're not "mere human animal(s)", but descendants of the Gods themselves. It gets worse when you recognize the kind of Gnosticism he's referring to—the one where the number of souls caught in the physical universe never actually increases. In other words, if you're not a divine-lineage Aryan, you're a Demiurgic abomination that should never have existed in the first place.
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.
Driven to Madness: Subverted. Brendan Rizzo is a commenter that has been characterized into saying how bad the US fundies suck. In fact, he did it so much he (at times) generalized fundies into the whole US population. Other commenters sometimes put in their own anecdotes from fundies on their countries to show him the US was not alone in the fundy infestation. He seems to have retired temporarily from the site (although he throws a comment here and there sometimes) to prevent himself from becoming insane from so much stupidity he saw in a regular basis.
Dumbass Has a Point: Sometimes (albeit very occasionally) the fundies quoted also say something reasonable in their rants, 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 naďve 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.
Evil Counterpart: It has been said FSTDT and Rapture Ready are each other's counterparts, depending on one's religious beliefs, but Occidental Dissent is an even better foil to FSTDT, being an online community made up of the most reactionary people on the Internet.
Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Fundies often say horrible things, but they come across as even more despicable when they try to be funny. Case in point, this gem from David Duke. Yes, thatDavidDuke.
Evil Only Has to Win Once: The commenter J James points out in a Texas-based quote that fundie politicians only have to be elected one time, by the slimmest of margins, for them to gerrymander themselves into a nearly-permanent majority. He defends Texas as being a victim of this, and says it is not an acceptable political target because many reasonable people live there, but are narrowly outnumbered and electorally silenced.
Evil Reactionary: If a given person quoted is not The Fundamentalist, then they are this trope. (Of course, it is perfectly possible for a poster to be both at once.)
"David"note If that is his real name... wants to round up all atheists and "send them to the chambers". And he explicitly compares it to the Holocaust, without even trying to hide the Nazi-like attitude.
Laurie suggests that liberals are "dangerous animals" who should be rounded up and sold into slavery in a foreign country to pay off the US national debt.
Financial Abuse: LadyBuck cut off her daughter's college funds because she dared vote for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney.
Rapture Ready. It is the single most cited source of the quotes mocked on the site. The second most cited source is Christian Forums with 374 pages worth as of this edit. Rapture Ready? 442. And that's before you factor in the ones marked as "RR", which brings it up to as many as 618.
Free Conservatives (now known as Where Liberty Dwells) and Free Republic, tie for second craziest. They have 126 pages worth of quotes (of which 52 come from Where Liberty Dwells and 74 from Free Republic) 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, and has 24 pages worth of quotes as of this edit. Occidental Dissent is even worse, though because it was the last of the commonly quoted fundie sites to be discovered it has a mere six pages. However, new quotes come from there at a much higher rate than anywhere else, so it will soon catch up.
Conservapedia is now getting up there, with 28 pages. (Yes, more than Stormfront.) Moonbattery, a similar site, now has 34.
CARM Forums have 70 pages.
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 28, enough for the site to create its own discussion forum just for religion. And that's not even getting into Yahoo! Answers, with 113 pages. (Though most of those are from trolls.)
Above Top Secret is shaping up to be one of the most fruitful forums for conspiracy quotes too, with 21 pages.
From a Certain Point of View: Horrifying example: the white supremacist Mythistory Channel wrote that "Adolf Hitler had no hate for any peoples. He was extremely respectful of all cultures and wanted the best for all nations and that they also prospered." (See Blatant Lies.) The only reason he was able to say that was because white supremacists consider only Northern Europeans to be people.
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, and received the "Backronym of the Year" award from the site.
Even more impressive, one fundie came up with "F.A.L.S.E. S.C.I.E.N.C.E. I.S. A.S. F.A.K.E. A.S. P.R.O. W.R.E.S.T.L.I.N.G.S. W.W.E. S.M.A.C.K.D.O.W.N." = "Faith-filled Atheists Loving Simple-to-complex Evolutionary Stories Constantly Ignore Energy's Needed (Creating Energy Isn't Scientific). A Simple-to-complex Fictional Account Keeping "Evolution" as somehow Powering Random Operations Without Reaping Entropy (Second Thermodynamics Law*) Is Not Good Science! Without Working Energy, 'Scientific' model Always Contradicts Known (Continued)"
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.
God Before Dogma: Many posters on the site are religious moderates and are just as disgusted by religious fundamentalists as anyone else.
God Is Evil: If he's anything like the fundies' interpretation of him. Vincent Cheung is one of the only fundies to actually admit it, not that he cares.
God Is Inept: Chris, an administrator at Rapture Forums, asserted that God used the Second World War and the Holocaust to bring the Jews back to Israel, as if there were no better way of doing so.
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 more specific examples, see some of the comments in response to the commenters whatever and SpukiKitty in this thread and the responses 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".
Hiding Behind Religion: There is a good chance that at least some of the people quoted are disingenuous, using religion as an excuse for their terrible behavior—as opposed to actually being fundamentalists.
Hitler Ate Sugar: Far too often. Running a search of the name "Hitler" yields 55 pages of results as of this edit, some of them comparing him to Barack Obama.
Rush Limbaugh makes tenuous connections between Nazi Germany and environmentalism, animal rights activism, healthcare, anti-smoking initiatives, and practically anything else that a nineteenth-century robber baron would oppose.
This is one of the most obvious examples (though it doesn't concern Hitler himself).
Briggid wants to "eradicate religion", implying that many religious people would have to die in the process. love moderately ? favors "Maoist suppression of religion" and "a communist state that mandates atheism by force". William T Goodall simply wants religion banned with people who "promote it" being "sent to prison for life without parole."
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 this and this.
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.
Innocent Bigot: One Christian high schooler began proselytizing to a Wiccan classmate, calling her religion "evil" and saying that if she were to "accept Jesus as Savior" she could be "saved". After school officials made her apologize, she stuffed anti-Wiccan Chick Tracts in her locker along with a note saying she "was going to hell" and was then surprised that this behavior led to her being expelled.
"It" Is Dehumanizing: Fundies eschew proper pronouns when discussing transgender persons, often derisively referring to them as "it" or "he-she".
Here's another one. The poster says that trying to change the laws in order to allow gays to marry is like trying to change gravity. It actually won the Insane Troll Logic award.
In this post, the fundie claims to have found photographic proof that Beyoncé is a lizard-person while at the same time admitting to Photoshopping the image.
This... thing, which says "Having no proof of God's existence is proof of God's existence".
God's Warrior, angry at having been previously quoted on the site, called a lawyer to discuss a possible lawsuit against FSTDT. When he realized that this was a fruitless endeavor, he decided to threaten the site with God's wrath.
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.
Look Ma I Am On The News: Usually inverted in that the fundies say things over news reels or get quoted on news websites only to appear on the site afterwards. However, there was the case of Xiao-Feng-Fury (see Rogues Gallery), who made national news over her Macy's incident.
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.
Though considering the sheer craziness that comes from Texas, some commenters probably wouldn't mind such an outcome...
Miles Gloriosus: This white supremacist's online handle is "Tamer of Savages", yet he admitted to running away in terror after merely being approached by a black man.
The Moral Substitute: Moonbattery has been claimed to be a conservative counterpart to Fundies Say the Darndest Things. In reality, however, posts on Moonbattery are highly likely to get quoted (and thus mocked) on FSTDT instead.
No Bisexuals: Gonzo67 believes that there "is no such thing as a 'Bi-Sexual'. PERIOD." Williams thinks that bisexuals are "just sluts". BigJay01 says that "there is no such thing as half a fag." Furthermore, when fundies make unintentionally homoerotic statements, the commenters will frequently accuse them of being closeted homosexuals, ignoring the possibility of bisexuality, though this might be just to rile them up.
Non-Indicative Name: Many quotes have come from a man calling himself jewish philosopher, who in reality is neither Jewishnote he claims to be a convert but never went through any formal initiation into Judaism nor a philosopher.
No Sympathy: Here is a horrible post to someone who is depressed and self-injuring. Instead of offering encouragement or sympathy, the fundie calls her problems a sin and lays a guilt trip.
One of Us: Some quotes are from people on here — there's one from This Very Wiki and two by posters on These Very Forums. Several commenters are tropers as well.
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 Correct History: A group of Tennessee Tea Partiers decided to whitewash any part of American history that cast the Founding Fathers in a negative light, including slavery.
Politically Incorrect Villain: Quite a few. Bryan Fischer has many instances of this, but perhaps his most notable is when he appropriated Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech to promote discrimination against homosexual people. DoctorDoom (no relation to thatDoctor Doom) is this so much that a wall of shame has been built here:
Psycho Lesbian: Maggie of Radfem Hub calls herself a "radical lesbian separatist" and speaks glowingly of a world in which men are "doomed to extinction".
Tropes Q-U
Quote Mine: Quite a sizeable chunk of the site. Sometimes this gets called out.
Rape and Switch: Many fundies believe that homosexuality is the result of being sexually assaulted by someone of the same sex. A common saying in the anti-gay crowd is that "homosexuals don't reproduce, they recruit."
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 being owned by the state is Marxism. There's also several quotes in the archives talking about how Joseph McCarthy is an American hero.
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?
To be completely fair, we know gravity works, we're just having one hell of a time figuring out how it fits into existing theories, and how it seems to contradict what we know about forces.
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 U.S. "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.
Savagesusie is another good example; the vast majority of her posts relate to Marxism and how the various things that she dislikes are caused by a Marxist conspiracy. (Ironically, she herselfhates democracy.)
This quote posits a scenario that begins with people making hateful comments on the Internet and somehow ends with Christians being fed to lions.
Also many many quotes that claim that legalizing gay marriage will naturally lead to people being allowed to marry pets, children, plants, and inanimate objects. Because apparently informed consent is not a concept that exists in these people's worlds.
The Social Darwinist: Recently there has been an increase in quotes from hardcore Objectivists who apparently view poor people as another species entirely and believe in completely eradicating social welfare programs. Others take a more militant approach and suggest we actively penalize the poor. (Ted Nugent, for example, believes welfare recipients should be stripped of their right to vote.)
Strawman Has a Point: Whenever fundies try to refute opposing arguments, they wind up invoking this trope. This is probably the most headache-inducing example.
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.
This poster, for example, believes that "God designed girls" in such a way that their "bodies wouldn't reject a foreign body", and that having multiple sex partners in one's lifetime "compromises a woman's immunity to viruses and disease greatly."
Fundies all too often praise perpetrators of terrorist attacks on mosques and abortion clinics.
Sadly, the commenters are not immune to this either. D Laurier is vocal about siding with the Palestinians in the Arab Israeli Conflict, to the point where he even claims that Hamas is benevolent. Note that D Laurier is not an anti-Semite.
, 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 simple. 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.note 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. There are also two spinoff sites: Conspiracy Theorists Say the Darndest Things (CSTDT) and Racists Say the Darndest Things (RSTDT), which produce quotes that are often just as, if not more, batshit than their fundie counterparts.As this site involves religion and politics, be sure to choose your words wisely here.
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