Religious hacking: Christians on atheists
(Read more on this topic at Notes from Off-Center. Thanks Drew!)
Iain Thompson of vnunet.com writes on an unusual Myspace defacing in his article, “Christian Hackers Attack Myspace: What wouldn’t Jesus do?” Counter to the recent press on the Anonymous hacking group attacking Scientology sites, this time it appears that “radical Christian hackers” are behind this attack.
(Apparently, this story is now dated but it’s just making the rounds to Christdot. See the Athiest and Agnostic Group article on Wikipedia.)
I’m far from defending the action. It’s a childish and immature act of vandalism. However, it isn’t much more than that. This is a defaced Myspace group and not burning heretics. Hardly the worst form of religious discrimination. At the same time, it fails standards of Christian charity and anyone’s standards of decency.
Thinking of intolerance, has anyone looked at the Atheists & Agnostics group page? Especially the pictures page? At the time of writing, there are 43 pictures there. About a quarter of them are explicitly bashing Christians: Adam and Eve, Mother Angelica, an image of the Virgin Mary in toast, an Israelite throwing stones, a Baptist Church sign, DaVinci’s Last Supper are all parodied. The rest are self-promotional bits and fan photos.
What other religions are parodied? None. Only a few make generic reference to God or Faith. No one here wants to attack Allah, the Dalai Lama or the goddess Durga. Just a chance to take a cheap punch at Christians with a less than clever graphic of an Icthys fish eaten by a Darwin fish. This behavior is typical of many atheists, from the prominent folks like Dawkins or Hitchens down to one of the ordinary 35,000 members of this Myspace group, they are less interested in declaiming faith as giving kidney punches to Christians.
To me, the story here is that an Atheist group took many cheap shots at Christians. In return, a Christian group is returning cheap shots. About as exciting as man-bites-dog: a usual story but with some reversal.
I will not condone this act of vandalism. Some of my sympathy goes out to the Atheist and Agnostic Group, but only so far as the response to immaturity has been immaturity.
Here’s the report from the group leader’s Myspace page:
Update: 1/30/08, 10:00 p.m. EST.
Thanks sincerely to all who sent emails or forwarded the press release (real big thanks to the Secular Student Alliance and the Humanist Chaplain from Harvard). Myspace hasn’t yet responded, and our group is still deleted.
Short FAQ based on some of the emails I got:
Q1) How do you know the group was deleted for religious reasons?
A1)I have no smoking gun. I cannot produce any internal Myspace memo saying “crush the heathens”.
However, I assert that our group’s history up to its recent deletion (1/1/8) establishes a prima facie case that we were deleted for religious reasons:
Note first that I ran the group for almost 3 years, and was very careful to not violate any TOS.
We were deleted two years ago due to complaints from a group called the “Christian Crusaders.” They would search Myspace for profiles they found offensive, and then mass complain to customer service.
Their strategy was to send so many emails to customer service that someone, somewhere at Myspace would delete the profile or group.
It worked. They were able to get us deleted for a few weeks til myspace restored us (pre-news corp; Tom Anderson, himself posted to our group offering to protect us). The “Christian Crusaders” also got many other groups and profiles deleted, including a large pro choice group.
Three months ago, my account was hacked. The hacker took control of the group and renamed it “Jesus is love”.
It took almost a month of constant emailing to Myspace just to get them to restore the group. I lost my profile (3000 friends; dozens of blogs), and the hacker banned many regular users.
Banning on a Myspace group is oddly permanent / can’t be undone. So, I sent more requests asking Myspace to un-ban my regulars.
I got an email back– finally; after about 3 weeks of requests for help– saying “thank you for the information. We have scheduled the group for deletion.”
Literally 5 minutes later, the group was deleted. I think it’s ironic that Myspace’s response to my persistent and sincere request for help was to delete the group!
I hope that puts our deletion in context. Add to that, the biggest xtian group here was deleted not too long ago (post news corp) and Myspace Tom personally restored it.
Do I think Myspace is an evil atheist hating conspiracy– no. Do I think an agent of Myspace deleted my group because it was an atheist group. Yes.
I realize this is circumstantial evidence; but I think the case outlined above is strong enough to warrant my conclusion, and I am waiting to see if Myspace replies.
Q2) You realize that Myspace is privately owned; you have no right to free speech there; they can delete content at will?
A2) I do; but I think Myspace deleting atheist groups is equivalent to a restaurant refusing to serve minorities. Myspace provides a free service, yet it benefits tremendously ($$$) only because users provide content. As a for-profit, I suspect Myspace has some duty of equal protection to all members of protected classes. If Myspace deleted the largest African American group here, no one would tolerate that. Why should we tolerate it for any minority group?
I’m not trying to be dramatic. My experience is nothing like the typical civil rights violation, but I believe it is nonetheless a violation. I’m not sure where the line is drawn between trivial violations and ones-worth-fighting for. I personally think this one’s worth fighting for.
I feel our group had value; we helped give a misunderstood (and often despised) minority a sense of community. The fact that 35,000 people took the proactive step of joining the group (even if most never posted) suggests that it had value. The emails I got today from regulars and strangers suggests that it had value.
Personally, the three years I invested in maintaining the group (and the blogs on my deleted profile) had value to me. So, I think trying to get the group back is a rational investment of my time.
Further, I’m not asking for a march on the capital. I just want our group back.
February 6, 2008 at 10:36 am
Looks like tit-for-tat, juvenile whining, and further examples of why the entire idea that atheism today will one day resolve the “god thing”, or that religions will simply cancel each other out and do away with God are frankly stupid assertions since the result is more intolerance and more hostility. The new atheist movement will only result in clearer dogmatic entrenchment for many Christians and that they do not see this is absurd.
But perhaps that is the goal right? The more they can create this entrenchment, the more it appears to legitimate their claims. This only leads to more books sold, more speaking engagements, and more toxic “memes” to regulate the system itself. it is, in a real since, something that regulates the consumption of reality and so, reconstitutes it.
February 6, 2008 at 10:55 am
[...] Wells @ [lab]oratory posts an interesting commentary on a current melee-a-brewing between atheists and Christians over [...]
February 9, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Thanks Drew! I think you’re right on: it further establishes entrenchment rather than furthering actual dialogue. So much of the popular writing on this subject was cutting edge around 1860. It’s too bad that both science and theology have advanced and gone post-modern since then.
February 9, 2008 at 9:26 pm
At least some think so! So much of the atheist dialogue seems to smack more of positivists versus religious belief between 1860 and around 1930 when religion ceased to be the primary formative agent in higher education.
My question tends to be: how did you come to your sense of values? If not a petri dish or some other controlled physical experiment, by what means do you legitimate what you value? We would all do well to re-read Popper, Kuhn and Polanyi against some of the stuff that Dawkins is arguing. But I think it’s all to sell books and just be competitive with Christian literature. It’s all rhetorical stuff that really does nothing much at all to advance knowledge.
March 26, 2008 at 7:02 am
If this was a christian group that was deleted there would probably be mass press reports; but because it’s just atheists, there is almost complete silence. There are christian groups out there that try to track down anything they find offensive and try and get it banned, whether it’s on myspace, youtube, etc. There are Jewish groups that do the same; there was a news report recently, for instance, that documented Jewish individuals who were hired by various groups, such as the Anti-Defmation League, whose only purpose is to review sites like youtube and myspace and contact the administrator whenever something these people find anti-semitic. This is not some tit-for-tat battle; this is a concentrated attack on atheists. The article above suggests that the atheist group in question was bashing christians because it had pictures mocking christian icons; yet not one of them was denying christians’ right to worship, no mass emails were sent to myspace demanding christian groups be deleted. That same courtesy does not extend to atheists, apparently.
May 23, 2008 at 8:25 am
[...] and devolves into rhetoric and the abuse of Godwin’s Law very fast. (See also: my piece on Christians attacking a MySpace group for Atheists and any other entrenched conversation such as Democrats vs. Republicans, Pro-choice vs. pro-life or [...]
June 6, 2008 at 8:44 am
[...] from the religious toward the non-religious, and keeping the conversation rhetorically entrenched (1, 2). A cursory glance at the comments on WSLS (I don’t recommend it) has opposing sides [...]
February 10, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Did you know that there are thousands of social clubs in the United States? And that these tiny little social clubs, are required to pay taxes, if they charge for membership, or even only ask for donations?
Religions should be removed from tax free exemptions, they are nothing more than social clubs. If they wish to be considered non-profits that is fine, but they should have to prove it like any other businesses in the United States. If they make money, they should pay a tax to the USA, period. No special treatment for religions, as opposed to other businesses.
Remember that folks when you think that people without religious creeds are somehow lacking, or you feel sorry for them, etc… Atheists don’t get a free ride from the government.
February 10, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Churches do give evidence of their non-profit status on a regular basis. They are 501(c)3 organizations like many secular non-profits.
As a priest in an Episcopal Church, here is a sketch of the process we follow. We regularly publish financial statements, showing revenues and expenses. At the beginning of every year, we vote on a budget that becomes a public document. We have annual financial reviews from an outside source. On a regular basis, every few years, we have full audits from a CPA.
Procedures similar to this are carried out in all Episcopal Churches and most mainline Protestant denominations. There is ample, public evidence for keeping their non-profit status.
Hope this helps! Please keep the discussion on the topic of the post.
By grace,
Jason