Troll /v.,n./ - [Originally from the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban]
To make a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite.
In my many years on the Internet/Usenet/WWW, I've seen the Christians pull lots of little pranks -- usually low-end, no-brainer sorts of pranks, but pranks nonetheless. Of course, almost as long as Atheist groups have been on the internet*, Christians would do their best to join in and harass the intellectuals with their usual stuff ('Get Jesus or else', 'God Hates XYZ, and you are all filthy and sick', 'You have to have Jesus' 'The bible is the word of God' etc. etc. ad nauseaum), flaming merrily away, their fires burning brightly with good, Christian Love, content in the knowledge that they are 'right' and that God is on their side, thereby justifying their disruptive activities in a forum which was meant for people several orders of magnitude brighter than them. These sorts of antics are really to be expected; whenever you have any gathering of intellectuals or people who fall outside of the societal norm in any way, you can be sure that the Christians will be along shortly to sniff around it and try and tear it down, instinctively fearing (and therefore automatically hating) anything and anyone they know might pose a threat to their stranglehold on the cultural brainstem.
Then, one day, one of the Christians with an IQ only 20 points below that of the average mass of discarded fetal tissue got crafty (or, at least, as crafty as a Christian can be said to be: while usually pretty devoid of intelligence, they can possess a rude sort of animal cunning) and decided to try Deceptive Trolling, for a change.
The Christians almost always have and certainly always will continue their regular flame-and-run acts in everything from the Atheist groups and, of course, any religion common in America which they despise (such as, for example, anything even remotely Pagan in origin, as well as any other branch of occultism). But I think the first Christian DeceptaTroll tricks I saw were in the homosexuality sex-related newsgroups, where someone would advertise their page, and upon going there, the poor unsuspecting gay would find, instead of a support group (or whatever else was promised), some Church or Christian-sponsored page either berating them for being gay, or telling them how it could help 'cure' them of their homosexuality.
Next, I began seeing posts in some of the other sex newsgroups (such as alt.sex.stories), advertising pages where erotica was to be found, the URL sending your unsuspecting porn-hunter to a Christian page telling them the evils of pornography, how they were going to hell, how they were a sex-addict and should seek help, etc. etc.
Upon perusing some of these, I became irked, since such deception seemed impolite. Not unchristian, of course (since Christianity is, by its very nature, very self-deceptive and delusionary), but very impolite, and obnoxious. So I decided that I would think of a way in which this could be turned against them, in a good, prank-like manner, which delivered a message more devastating than theirs could ever be. While most people think you should (as that old expression goes) 'Fight fire with fire', personally, I've always liked a different tack: I fight fire....With cold water.
So, late in 1997, I conceived of a perfect prank; one which would delightfully dish it out to the Fundies, maximizing the annoyance of Those Who Needed Annoying, while minimizing the effort needed on my part to sustain it. In fact, writing this summary of it all is almost the most work I've put into it; reading their letters and and writing my responses (when I chose to) was actually fun ;)
The Posts
I made one (1) post each to sixteen different newsgroups, among them alt.christnet, alt.christnet.ethics, alt.religion.christian.baptist, alt.religion.christian.last-days, alt.christnet.evangelical, etc. While the posts varied, all of them were similar to, though not exactly like, this one, which I posted to alt.christnet.evangelical:
Subject: Questions about Religion
Email: curious1@thoughtshop.com
Date: 1997/09/07
Forums: alt.christnet.evangelical
I have a lot of questions about Christianity, and would be interested in corresponding further with anyone who can provide me with some answers. I would really like to speak with anyone who would like to correspond with me about this. All emails will be replied to. No spam from those not interested in Jesus, please, and I am not interested in any religion except Christianity.
Thank you for your time,
Jay
Does that sound innocent enough? Good. I thought it did, too. The best part, however, is this:
The one absolutely identical thing about each of those sixteen posts is that they all had the same email address: curious1@thoughtshop.com -- an email address which is now extant no longer, but was, at the time, hooked up to an AutoResponder which, upon receiving email from someone, would do two things: Forward their letter to me at my email address, and automatically email them this. To get the full gist of this joke, I highly recommend following that link and seeing what they received before reading any further.
Get the picture? Good.
So picture this: here we have (for example) Bob, the child-molesting Baptist, holed up in his mom's basement, using his 286 or whatever to scan Usenet for Kiddy Porn, Religious Icons, news of the Coming End Times, etc. Then, when he takes a moment out of downloading KP to check his favorite religious newsgroups such as alt.christnet.evangelical, he sees the post from curious1@thoughtshop.com. 'Oh,' he thinks, after he's finished reading it in a half-hour or so (record time for him, probably), 'Wow. I've got a live one here. It's some youngster who wants to know the Word of the Lord -- and yessirreebob he came to the right place -- I'm gonna tell him ALL about the wonders of Jeeesus.'
His brain writhing like a can of eels, his fingers banging on the keyboard faster than a tractor with a broken transmission running at full-tilt, and he sends a response, somewhere along the lines of 'Hi, I'm Bob the Christian, and I can tell you all about the word of God, since the Bible is the only book I've read for the past 36 years of my life. What do you want to know?'
Then, the AutoResponder sends him the Industrial Strength Jesus Questionnaire. Yep. Just as I can imagine some poor, unsure-about-himself homosexual feeling like he just got kicked in the chest when he followed a post promising a Gay Support Group Homepage and instead winding up at the disguised equivalent of God Hates Fags, I can also imagine that some half-illiterate Christer getting those questions in response to his sickly sweet promise of Christian Knowledge would be like getting a good swift kick in the Christ.
Was I deceptive? Maybe; but no more so than some of the Christian trolls I've seen: there were no outright lies in my posting, unlike some of theirs.
Was I cruel? Yes. So what? It's a tough fucking world we live in, and the Christians and their varied antics only serve to make it tougher, so I threw a little bit of dirt back at them -- admittedly, with a little more deviousness and panache than they could, but all the same, I didn't develop the tactic: I unashamedly stole it from them. Cruel? Absolutely. Unnecessarily Cruel? You decide.
Either way, the responses were, for the most part, funny as fuck. They ranged anywhere from the illiterate 'You'll burn in hell' type to the really intellectual ones where they'd email me twenty or thirty pages worth of answers back, using more words to say nothing than I ever thought possible, all of them, in the end, boiling down to either A) God Did It, or B) My sect doesn't believe in that, so we're exempt from that part of the Bible (all the time ignoring the original questions about why their sect ignored that particular part of the Bible.
I'd like to give at least a couple of examples of the sorts of responses I received -- so check this out:
Subject: Re:
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 1997 18:27:51 -0700
From: "Steven S. White" <sswhite@pacbell.net>
To: <jay@thoughtshop.com>
Your FORM letter and the questions you ask clearly indicate that you have NO intention of considering Christianity as a faith. Your questions indicate that you not only lack faith of any kind,
but you don't even know what it is.
I'll leave you with only a few thoughts since I won't dignify some of the ignorant and moronic questions with a response. They have long been answered anyway.
First, The Spanish Inquisition lasted 350 years, thats 3.5 centuries! Out of about 100,000 people that were brought before the Tribunal (70% secular/30% clergy), less than 2000 were tortured or executed. Atheists have murdered 25 million Christians and Jews since the beginning of the 20th century! Thats equivalent to 20,000 Spanish Inquisitions. IN LESS THAN A CENTURY!
A list of famous Catholics reads like a litany of some of the most briliant spiritual minds that western civilization has ever known. Augustine, Origen, Frances, Vincent De Paul, Aquinas, Dante, Pascal and literally millions like them that have lived throughout the centuries. A list of famous atheists would read like a litany of some of the most vicious genocidal maniacs that have ever lived. Nero, Docletian, Napoleon, Marquis De Sade, Stalin, Hitler.
I would assume that you prefer the latter.
Hmmm...Any red flags or buzzers going off here? Besides sounding like a cop-out, do you think this guy has his history straight? Me neither (too much schooling and such must have just ruined my brain...)
Well, believe it or not, I did reply to him, and his next reply was even funnier than the first; I'll post that, too, when I have the time to format it.
Another one I got was also pretty funny; in fact, I can't decide what I enjoyed the most about this response: the vapid attempts to proselytize me (I'm amazed he was able to get as many words out as he did before mentioning John 3:16), or the fact that he obviously TOTALLY IGNORED the questions, not even attempting to answer them. His response is here, and another couple of funny ones are here.
I will be posting more of them shortly, but it takes time to wade through 200+ letters (even reading as fast as I do) to cull the gems from the manure; and, as much horseshit as there is in that particular pile, there are some gemstones of the finest water; especially the ones where they actually tried answering all the questions, and failed miserably. So stay tuned, and come back to this page when you have the chance: more and more will be posted, some of which are even more hysterical than these - I promise ;)
Comments? Questions? Hate me and think I'm a dickbag? Laughing so hard you pissed yourself? Please email me, or leave your comments here.
*I say 'almost' because there was actually a good span of time between the computer professionals, tech geeks, atheists and other intellectuals getting onto the internet and Christians figuring out how to use things called 'computers'. There might actually be a provable correlation between Christianity discovering computers, and Usenet going downhill; not that the advent of the WWW, AOL, and $20 (or less) a month ISPs didn't have a lot to do with Usenet's decline as the main global source of communication between people.