Fundies Say the Darndest Things

Fundies Say the Darndest Things (FSTDT for short) is a blogging website and message board forum whose self-stated purpose is to serve as "an archive of the most hilarious, bizarre, ignorant, bigoted, and terrifying quotes from fundies all over the internet". Originally launched in 2003 as Christians Say The Darndest Things (CSTDT for short), it has since been renamed to include negative sentiment against fundamentalists or extremists from all religions. Users register at FSTDT without email addresses, allowing them to remain completely anonymous if they choose. Once registered, they submit quotes copied from many different Websites which they deem to be overly religious and/or not scientific enough, too far to the political right, too far to the political left, racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, elitist, pedophilic, psychopathic, or generally insane. These quotes are almost always labeled with searchable hashtags, and users are encouraged to comment on them with a mocking, ridiculing, even libelous tone.

Why It Sucks Now

 * 1) A number of people who formerly used or at least visited FSTDT have noted that the site used to be more about satirizing unusually high levels of religious extremism but has since devolved into a front for sociopolitical leftism and zealous antitheism.
 * 2) In 2014, the site caught the attention of a former 40-year atheist named Stan, the author of the blog Atheism Analyzed, wherein he criticizes atheism without using theistic arguments. Having been ironically labelled as a "#fundie", he described the site as a place "…where Atheists and skeptics can have a safe harbor in which to ridicule that which they take out of context. Actually there is a link to context, but no one seems to have used it in my case. It's the sort of snake pit where the target du jour is countered with comments like 'asshole', and the standard logic errors which they insist are the logical answers to the 'idiot' they are trashing".
 * 3) The fact that many users choose to remain anonymous proves that they know what they're doing, while not illegal per se, is unethical enough that they don't want to get caught doing it, especially by their targets or the religious friends that many members claim to have in real life.
 * 4) Their whole business model is flawed because, if there were no more writings they don’t like for them to quote on the Internet, the enterprise would lose its purpose and collapse.
 * 5) Despite claiming to be against bigotry, there are overwhelming amounts of instances that point to hypocrisy; the most obvious examples being that the users on the website deliberately go after anyone they disagree with.
 * 6) Their arguments against whatever quotes they find are generally one-sided and full of logical fallacies, often as extremely ideologically biased towards the left as are those on RationalWiki or SJWiki, especially since quotes are taken out of context.
 * 7) They tend to give tags to quotes that do not reflect the quote authors' original intentions, including giving the tag "#fundie" to quotes that have only minimal to no religious connotations.  This makes it clear that they want their interpretations of anything they quote to be the only true and correct interpretations.
 * 8) As Stan says, although they aim to provide links to context for every one of their quotes, users don't always seem to reference or pay attention to that context.
 * 9) While their site's title suggests that they target extremists, people get quoted by FSTDT for merely espousing ordinary conservative views not intended to harm anyone.
 * 10) They appear to have a weak grasp of hyperbole and tend to submit quotes intended as jokes or lighthearted satire. Ironically, RationalWiki, which FSTDT claims to be a proud partner of, has called them out on this by noting the site inevitably suffers from Poe's Law: they cannot always read a quote author's intended tone of voice unless there is a clear indicator of that tone. Consequently, some deep-cover parodists have baited FSTDT into quoting them, indicating how gullible the site can be.
 * 11) Many of their arguments amount to nothing more than argumentum ad hominems, or personal attacks, with childish insults and name-calling as well as lazy, unimaginative sex jokes solely to get a rise out of people.
 * 12) *This is often the case with their comments on many quotes under their tag "#dunning-krueger", which refers to people that they believe are "not nearly as smart as they think they are". It's another way of saying, "You're dumb because we said so!" and renders them guilty of the same sense of elitism that they condemn various quoting targets for showing.
 * 13) *The same principle applies to their tag "#pratt", an acronym for "Point Refuted a Thousand Times", which indicates a sense of laziness and unwillingness to have a civil debate and basically says, "We’re right, you're wrong, so shut up already!".
 * 14) The people running and/or contributing to it do a terrible job at sourcing for their quotes: many links to context are dead ; image only; and unarchived social media posts that can be easily forged, deleted, or modified. Some images in older posts are dead links as well.
 * 15) They hate Donald Trump so much that they normally avoid saying "Trump" like the Bubonic Plague and do not offer any impartial criticism or say anything forgiving about him, believing that anyone who shows any sympathy or forgiveness towards him is a racist, neo-Nazi, or "wingnut" by association. In other words, as sites like Conservapedia deny Trump's flaws, FSTDT denies his redeeming qualities.
 * 16) They like to whitewash originally well-intentioned but nowadays corrupt and violent groups such as Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the feminist movement. Examples of this include:
 * 17) They deny that feminism in history has come in waves and that, in the recent past with third-wave feminism, the feminist movement is now a shell of its former self. They even accuse anti-feminist women of being "hypocrites".
 * 18) Anyone who does not support toxic modern feminism is automatically a "#sexist" in their eyes.
 * 19) Anyone who does not support BLM, no matter how violent their behavior, is automatically a "#racist" in their eyes.
 * 20) One tag says that racism includes ethnic hatred, which it technically doesn't: the concept of race relates to physical features, whereas ethnicity refers to one's place of origin or ancestry.
 * 21) They treat even mild, unassuming instances of racism as a "disease" to be "eradicated". As such, they treat people who acknowledge and accept that everyone has at least a little precognitive bias without meaning any harm as part of the "problem". This is not entirely dissimilar to a certain Austrian-born German chancellor who believed a group of people united by a common line of thought were a "disease" to be "eradicated", too.
 * 22) As their Website's title implies, they have no qualms in using Christophobic (anti-Christian) language. For example, when discussing matters of Nazism and religion, they often go on screeds about how Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were (allegedly) Christian. In reality, while Hitler was raised Catholic, and though he claimed he was a "Christian", this was a tactic to exploit crowd psychology, he adopted the politically-motivated, nondenominational false religion of "positive Christianity" to deceive German Christians of the day into thinking that they were doing "God's work" by serving the führer, although this ideology rejected traditional Judeo-Christian doctrines with an antisemitic slant and so likened "real" Christianity to Norse Paganism. This goes to show how the website tries too hard to be in the right that they end up making a circus of themselves.
 * 23) Though one of their tags is "#moonbat" for quotes composed by "left-wing nutjobs", this tag is used not nearly as often as "#wingnut" for quotes written by "right-wing nutjobs". Moreover, when it is used, it is often used for right-wing comments despite its supposed intentions. This makes it even clearer that they are biased towards the left.
 * 24) They like to present readers with crudely-made conclusions instead of letting the evidence speak for itself.[citation needed] This is more of an act of insecurity as they fear that people will not see things the way they do and expect every argument they make to be taken seriously.[citation needed]
 * 25) Many of its members act toxically and intolerantly towards anyone who so much as disagrees with them.
 * 26) Although they claim to have Christian users, hardly anyone ever comments on quotes to offer a Christian perspective nowadays. It has been said by former members that, on FSTDT's forums, drama typically starts whenever someone makes an explicitly religious post on an atheism-centric site.
 * 27) They deny that LGBTQ2 can be violent and bigoted as the far-right. And anyone who says otherwise is labeled a homophobe. [citation needed]
 * 28) They are extremely pro-social justice: they are primarily interested in attempting to correct people and being right, aggressively attacking all who disagree. At best, they quote people to get others' attention, whether it's their targets or generic passersby; at worst, they do what they do to frighten and intimidate people into letting them "win", or emotionally blackmail people into making them feel guilty for saying things FSTDT doesn't like to hear. They claim that this is for their own self-amusement when they write like they would establish dictatorial power and control over what people say on the Internet if they could, believing that what they do to their targets is somehow "needed". They admit that the only reason they support free speech is so they can have someone to attack.
 * 29) They deny[citation needed] that Canada has become a totalitarian state with the laws they have been passing to appease the far-left ideology. [citation needed]
 * 30) It underwent a major revamp in 2019, but its basic, blocky, blandly-colored GUI without any modern graphics or features make it look like it's from the late 1990s-early 2000s era.
 * 31) That said, it suffers from a poor website design overall because it lacks many features and technical conveniences that would be normally present on a blog or message board:
 * 32) There is no menu to select how many quotes/comments can be viewed per page, including in search results.
 * 33) Search engine filters/results sorters are not always as accurate as they could be.
 * 34) The search engine only works with finding quotes, not comments, nor does it list the number of results per search query.
 * 35) Sometimes, the last page of a search results list, for whatever reason, turns up completely blank.
 * 36) There is no option to report comments (probably intentional, given how the site encourages people to be mean-spirited).
 * 37) User pages are nothing more than lists of quotes users have found and comments they've made (probably to preserve their anonymity).
 * 38) Its painfully unprofessional and immature logo, as seen above in the infobox, features a "sexy flying Jesus penis", a crudely-photoshopped devil version of pop singer/songwriter Taylor Swift practicing martial arts, devils in flying saucers, a reptilian alien-type creature with devil horns, a NyQuil bottle with devil horns surrounded by fire, and what appears to be a Biblical leviathan in a bathtub (in reference to one of their more popular and infamous quotes from 2009) eating fast food from McDonald's.
 * 39) If anyone dares to object to the 2020 Coronavirus quarantine or criticizes how governments handle it or how the media misrepresents data and statistics surrounding it, FSTDT will go on a witch hunt after them.[citation needed]
 * 40) At their absolute worst, FSTDT will prioritize spreading left-wing extremism over expressing basic human empathy. For instance, they once accused Mary Ann Mendoza, a grieving mother and an associate of Donald Trump, of racism after she condemned illegal Mexican immigrants for killing her son Sergeant Brandon, a police officer from Arizona. This is made much more problematic by their not outwardly caring in the thread about the fact that Mendoza is herself of Hispanic ethnic origin.
 * 41) In their FAQ section under "But You're Defaming Me!", where they try to rationalize their efforts to defame people by arguing that their targets are sabotaging themselves, not considering the possibility that the quotes they find might have different intended meanings than what they read. This means that they want their targets to feel ashamed for speaking their minds.
 * 42) They support the hypocritical, unscientific "fat acceptance movement", which teaches that there is nothing unhealthy about morbid obesity despite extensive research into the subject conducted by medical professionals worldwide. Anyone who speaks out against this movement is considered an "#ableist" in their eyes.
 * 43) Despite one of their tags being "#conspiracy", regular FSTDT users, like far leftists in general, believe in conspiracy theories of their own. Some believe that anyone who does not support Black Lives Matter hates the black race, or believe that Adolf Hitler was Christian (as discussed above).
 * 44) Similar to RationalWiki, FSTDT mocks people's beliefs in UFOs and has an entire tag dedicated to such ridicule. This clashes with Wikipedia's neutral, informative, and well-sourced article on the subject.
 * 45) As expected, they cannot take criticism. When people on other Websites criticize or counter-mock them, they do not usually take the criticism or counter-mockery well.
 * 46) Regular user Niam2020/Niam2023, also called arcadiusd on DeviantArt, is an American man living "in California somewhere" who exemplifies FSTDT at its worst. In one outrageous example of his atrocious behavior, from August-September of 2020, he played an elaborate prank on DeviantArt user Colonel-Knight-Rider that copied the plot of the obscure 1989 horror film Society, in which he played multiple roles named for characters appearing in the film. He also deceived CKR into giving him his email address so he could sign him up for various pornography Website accounts to impersonate him and mischaracterize him as a homosexual pornography addict (likely to get petty revenge on him for alleged homophobic commentary). CKR did not previously know that Society existed until a friend informed him, causing the scheme to unravel. Afterwards, Niam admitted that the purpose of the prank was to fuel CKR with his ideology by trying to get him to question his conservative beliefs. The next year, Niam somehow found the invite link to a Discord server CKR had made for his friends, snuck into it, and publicly posted pictures of their private conversations, intending to defame them all as "racists".
 * 47) Regular user Anon-e-moose is a British man noted for his gratuitous use of bolds and italics to frighten, threaten, and intimidate his targets into submission, such as his "Take that, you idiot" comments. He also has a history of encouraging people to commit suicide , which, even if his targets are genuinely insane, still counts as attempted murder in the second degree.
 * 48) Regular user Skide, also called Skidie or SheChire among other aliases, is a Polish-born Canadian trans woman who represents how manipulative the typical FSTDT user can be. When FSTDT target Claire Aimée Spencer, a Canadian aspiring animator and devout centrist popularly known across social media as YourClairyGodmother, sought to reason with and placate her attackers, she forged a friendship with Skide. However, she learned two years later that Skide, a narcissist who sees many things in life through a political lens, primarily became her "friend" to force far-leftist ideology on her, including a false dichotomy between liberalism and conservatism, mistakenly believing that Claire supports obsessive anti-SJW ideology. Claire later posted a video in which, besides calling out an ex-girlfriend (whom she eventually found out was a man ) for taking advantage of her, she also called out Skide's actions and described FSTDT as "a harassment blog for making fun of anyone who's not alt-left".

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) FSTDT's targets include people towards whom even sensible Christians, conservatives, Republicans, and centrists are opposed. Examples include but are not limited to far- or alt-rightists, Obsessive anti-SJWs, neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, pedophiles , the Westboro Baptist Church, plus general racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, conspiracy theorists, and believers in magic or paranormal activity.
 * 2) Some of their snarky writings can be humorous to the point where liberals, conservatives, and centrists can all agree on the subject being discussed.
 * 3) They will agree with points their targets make once in a while.
 * 4) They are against rotten far-right and/or fundamentalist websites like jesus-is-savior.com and Conservapedia, whose teachings contradict or reject what mainstream Christianity teaches.
 * 5) When they do make a substantive, non-mean-spirited argument, it is normally more evidence-based than are the arguments on the aforementioned far right-wing websites.
 * 6) They can correct and have corrected mistakes they’ve made in tagging quotes.
 * 7) They are not cripplingly incapable of civil discussion and positively encourage people they quote to speak to them politely on Discord if their quoting targets wish to be de-quoted (they had an administrative email for this, too, that was shut down years ago ). However, special caution should be taken when talking to them so as to be respectful of their right to their point of view, even if it means letting them think they have "won".
 * 8) Although the site exclusively accepts English-language quotes, it has an internationally inclusive user base. Coincidentally, their international users write English very well.

Trivia

 * "Fundie" is a pejorative for religious fundamentalists regardless of faith, especially those who appear to reject one or more established fields of science. FSTDT's user base mainly applies the tag "#fundie" to any expression of religion that does not line up with their views, no matter how openly religious vs. subtly religious vs. not intentionally religious at all that expression is. That said, users like to use the word to refer to anyone they don't like: each quote is rated with a "fundie index" based on how many users click a "WTF?!" button next to it, which further encourages users to react with outrage and spite and fuel their hatred.
 * As seen in this article's infobox image, their emblem features the Latin tagline "Talis est pulchritudo in caelum, ut nos relinquere cerebro ante portas!" Google Translate literally translates this to: "That is the beauty is in the sky, so we have to leave their brains at the gates!" It's likely that the actual meaning is, "There is beauty in the sky, so we have to leave our brains at the door!"
 * The current owner's name, "pyro", is possibly a reference to the anonymous character of the same name from the popular video game Team Fortress 2, alluding to how many users of the site are anonymous.