I haven't been to Religious Forums since last September, mostly because I got a little bored because I agreed with so many people here. When a forum becomes essentially a "mutual back-slapping club", I tend to lose interest and go looking for something else.
This time around, I decided to do something a little different. I searched around the internet for a fundamentalist Christian discussion group that tightly controlled their membership. After a bit, I found one and applied for membership posing as a college age female who was also a born-again Christian. After I was accepted, I started off posting in a pretty innocuous manner, portraying myself as a bubbly, positive Christian. There were lot's of "Praise God" and "Amen" type things in my posts. Once the group got used to me and accepted me as one of their own, I started questioning some of the things they were posting. Not, "questioning" as in disagreeing, but as in simply asking things like "Is that really true" or "Can you show me where it actually says that".
And boy, did the poo hit the fan! I've never seen such a quick and unified turnaround in a group of people.
Let's be clear here...the sorts of things they posted were some of the most vile, mean-spirited, disgusting views I'd ever seen. Everything...and I mean everything...was a conspiracy. There were threads about rounding up all Muslims in the US and deporting them, jailing them, or even killing them; there were threads arguing that gays would go out at night and kidnap babies and eat them; there were threads about how the civil rights act was fascist; and there were so many threads about Obama and how he was a terrorist, Muslim, atheist, Nazi, communist, gay, CIA/Al Queda operative...it's hard to describe. There was even a lengthy discussion of geocentrism (with people actually advocating it).
What I discovered is that as loony and strange as fundamentalist Christians seem on open boards like this one, when they discuss things amongst themselves where they feel safe and like no one is listening, that's when the true crazy hate comes out. Also, they do not tolerate even the slightest bit of doubt or questioning from within. All one has to do is ask something like, "Really? Can you show me where that language is in the proposed bill" and you are immediately set upon by the group. I even had multiple threats of physical violence posted to me.
I also came away with a confirmation of some opinions I'd had of fundamentalists before the experiment, mostly that they are extremely paranoid, intentionally ignorant, and genuinely unhappy and angry in a very deep and serious way. And the fact that they've become more politically influential in recent years is something we as a country need to take very seriously. These are some very, very disturbed, messed up people.
EDIT: As I mentioned above, I was posting as a young female. It wasn't too long before I was struck by how differently I was treated. Being a male and always having posted as myself, I wasn't really prepared for what I experienced. In general, the men were very condescending and didn't take me seriously and the women really wanted to....what I call "bicker". The men regularly referred to me with terms like, "little girl", "sweetie", and even a few sexually offensive terms, and the women were even worse! Being the father of two young girls, I was really bothered by this treatment. At the very least, I came away from this experience determined to make sure my daughters don't ever allow anyone to treat them like that simply because of their sex.
