RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA ON THE INTERNET

The World Wide Web contains many sites which contain misinformation, hatred, ridicule and sarcasm directed at various faith groups. We have arbitrarily divided into them two categories:

Secular, Freethinker and Atheist Sites
Religious Sites

Sites by Agnostics, Atheists, Freethinkers and Secularists

We have surfed some of these sites. Their membership and points of view tend to overlap.

The main Agnostic, Atheist, secular and freethinking WWW sites are certainly opposed to Christianity, but mainly use techniques of critical analysis, satire, humor and some ridicule.

Most of their pages are directed to:

critical analysis of the Bible, questioning its accuracy, consistency, validity, inspiration and usefulness.
criticism of Creation Science and support for the theory of Evolution
critical reviews of anti-choice efforts by some religious groups, e.g. anti-abortion, compulsory school prayers, and opposition to physician assisted suicide
analysis of issues related to the separation of church and state
discussion of discrimination against (and persecution of) atheists

We find some of their satire directed at individuals to be uncomfortably negative. But they cannot be classified as intolerance of the faith of others.

Some examples of intolerance, satire and ridicule were:

The Freethought Web has writings by Joseph McCabe including his inflammatory Big Blue Books. Some of the titles are: The Vatican's Last Crime, How The Pope Of Peace Traded In Blood, How The Cross Courted The Swastika For Eight Years, The Totalitarian Church Of Rome. The last book is subtitled Its Fuehrer, Its Gauleiter, Its Gestapo, And Its Money-box and contains such phrases as:
- ...the Roman [Catholic] Church is in sympathy with Fascism and has itself a semi-Fascist complexion
- ...the Pope is a traitor to humanity.
- about 30 [popes] were murderers, fornicators, sodomites, or variety-artists in crime.
The McChurch Home Page (2) claims (with tongue in cheek) that a non-biased, objective system computer" has analyzed the Bible and studied the character and personality of God. The computer "concluded" that God was dysfunctional, insecure, unwholesome and should be isolated from children to avoid damaging them.
One site ridicules the famous book by Josh McDowell (3) Evidence That Demands A Verdict (sub-titled Historical Evidences for the Christian Faith). This book is devoted to the defense of the Christian faith. Josh attempts to supply evidence "which will satisfy anyone who is willing to honestly weigh the evidence."
The site (4) ridicules the book by proposing alternate names, such as
- A Verdict That Demands Evidence
- Evidence That Sucks
- Evidence That Josh McDowell Is Really An Atheist Who Is Trying To Make All Christians Look Like Morons
- Evidence That Demands A Verdict, But Can't Even Justify A Search Warrant
The Snake Oil site (5) has four main pages
- Gospel Grapevine which spreads rumours and satire about a variety of Christian ministries, such as Bob Larson, Brother Jed Smock and his wife "Sister Cindy" (university oriented evangelists), David Koresh, Tammy Faye Baker, the Christian Anti-Defamation League (publishers of "Virgin Pride - Uniting The Virgin Community, in honor of Jesus Christ"), etc.
- Salvation Sideshow concerning Evangelists who have serious disfigurements, genetic malformations or who suffer from cerebral palsy.
- Benny Hinn Blew Me concerning a healing service
- Robert Tilton Goods concerning "trading cards" and a humorous and apparently rather earthy video of an Evangelist.

Religious Sites

The Atheist and similar WWW pages tend to use humour and satire in their opposition to Christianity. But we have to go to the Fundamentalist and other Evangelical Christian sites to see extreme examples of hatred and misinformation, in which various benign non-Christian groups are falsely accused of gross immorality, ritual murder, cannibalism, mutilation etc. These relatively few religious WWW sites direct their hatred and propaganda against small religious groups, homosexuals, persons promoting choice in abortion and physician assisted suicide, etc.

We do not wish to condemn Christianity alone; we do not wish to condemn Evangelical Christians alone. However, we have not been able to find any examples of hatred and misinformation in liberal or mainline Christian sites or in sites maintained by non-Christians.

Some of the more disgusting sites that we have found are:

Exegesis (6) is a monthly magazine distributed by Email and Fax from Washington. They include excerpts of letters of support from Neut Gingrich, Steve Forbes (publisher of Forbes Magazine) and the Family Research Council. It is primarily an extreme right wing magazine, but is strongly based on a very conservative interpretation of Christianity. Listed under the topic "One of The Most Important Articles We've Published" is an interesting essay from their 1995-DEC issue: "Judaism's Best-Kept Secret is Almost Revealed:. It has an unusually high amount of anti-Semitic content.
Media House International (7) is an Evangelical Christian group that publishes a quarterly magazine Champions. They have a section of their home page devoted to providing misinformation about Wicca, and trying to show that Wiccans engage in human sacrifice. (They don't).
The Other Side of the News (8) is a newspaper column which promotes extreme right wing political and Christian views. They bill themselves as "too conservative for the media". Their WWW site contains some disinformation about gays and lesbians.
The Ritual Abuse and Healing Home Page (9) believes that Satanic/Sadistic Ritual Abuse is widespread. They attribute the abuse to "satanism, christianity, various pagan and pantheistic belief systems, white supremacy movements, nazism, Santeria, voodoo, etc."
We will add additional sites as we find them. If you have any "favorite" hate WWW sites we would like to hear of them. Any contributions gratefully received.

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Internet and Book References Cited

The Freethought Web is at:
http://freethought.tamu.edu/freethought/
The McChurch Home page is at:
http://mcchurch.org
Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Here's Life, San Barnadino CA (1992; 35th printing)
A satire on Josh McDowell's book is at:
http://freethought.tamu.edu/freethought/robby_berry/toptenjm.html
The Snake Oil home page is at:
http://fender.onramp.net/~analyst/snake/Snakeoil.html
The Exegesis magazine's anti-Semitic essay is at: http://www.vais.net/~exegesis/9512-Judaism%27ssecret.html
The "Media House International has anti-Wiccan essays at: http://www.forerunner.com/champion/X0038.html
The Other Side of the News has some anti-homosexual essays at: http://www.cris.com/~dhathaw/otherside/homonorm.sht
The Ritual Abuse and Healing Home Page has ritual abuse misinformation at: http://www.xroads.com/rahome/

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