Seems that the friendly folks at Objectionable– sorry, Objective Ministries are trying to shut down the website of the Landover Baptist Ministry.
I thought the appropriate response to this sort of thing is to turn the other cheek. Now, where have I heard that before…?
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Well, I’ve just been to the Objective site and it was working quite well (sorry, Nekouken, but “the premise that they’re a free web-space mooching parody site” really can’t be proved by a site’s being down, anyway; I’ve been to sites which have been down, and I know the site is 100% legit–such as Billboard.com, and this site–so the premise can’t be determined on that basis).
I have to agree with Brak’s comments. If the site is a parody or satire, then it’s failed in the purpose. The site has too many links to sites which are definitely fundamentalist or share similar views as religious fundamentalists. For a satire or parody site to link to those just to further the “joke” seems like an incredible load of work.
Discord, the thong theory you posit proves very little. How different are thongs anyway? The basic design of a thong is the same and putting any image on the thong is pretty restricted by the garment’s size (either it’s a pattern print or just a small image placed where the Objective and Landover thongs’ images are). The “honey-pot” theory you suggest to me seems like an awful lot of work (creating a website just to send people to another website, and spending hours to make one site seem so legitimate as to build up a backhistory and even create links to other sites which hold fundamentalist Christian views). Maybe it’s because I have a life offline that I find the idea of doing such incredibly difficult to fathom (maybe there are people who make this their whole life, but it just seems to me they’re spending a fair amount of money for little return). As for the Bible verses:
Carlson’s (the man credited with creating the Landover shutdown page):
\\Revelation 3:20
Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
Revelation 3:21
To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.\\
Dr Miller’s (the church’s minister):
\\Habakkuk 3:17
Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither [shall] fruit [be] in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and [there shall be] no herd in the stalls:
Habakkuk 3:18
Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.
Habakkuk 3:19
The LORD God [is] my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds’ [feet], and he will make me to walk upon mine high places. To the chief singer on my stringed instruments\\
Mrs Miller’s:
\\Luke 11:21
When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace:\\
I’m not really sure what you hoped to learn from the verses–perhaps you thought the verses were non-existent or clued people in on the “joke”–but the verses are real and they don’t appear to be light-hearted offerings. There are people out there who do have favorite Bible verses (I’ve seen a few people quote Scripture as sig lines). (For the record, I have a childhood Bible somewhere, but I’ve found “The Unbound Bible” at http://unbound.biola.edu/ to be a good source to do some quick Bible research when I’m online (the site offers 10 different English translations as well as a couple of dozen modern foreign languages, and a few ancient versions (including the Latin Vulgate and some Gothic).
Perhaps living in proximity to people who would feel very comfortable reading the Objective sit, and sharing and expressing many of the same feelings, I’m a bit more likely to believe the Objective site (Landover, on the other hand, just seems so silly that the parodic nature should be obvious). I’m in Alabama, where the top news story of the year was the whole Roy Moore/10 Commandments deal and there has been a lot of recent talk by some group wanting to make sure that future candidates for political office (this includes state judges) are “real” Christians. So, I hope everyone will forgive me if I can’t just laugh off the Objective site so easily.
I wasn’t defending or denying what Pat Robertson and others said. However, my point about going to there websites was made so you could see that not even theirs came close to this Objective website.
Yikes, I meant “theirs.”
“sorry, Nekouken, but “the premise that they’re a free web-space mooching parody site” really can’t be proved by a site’s being down, anyway; I’ve been to sites which have been down, and I know the site is 100% legit–such as Billboard.com, and this site–so the premise can’t be determined on that basis”
Didn’t say it proved it, simply that it supported it. I figured it didn’t negate the possibility that whatever they did that got Glenn’s attention also got the attention of a surly service provider.
I honestly have no idea what to think of the Objective folks, and I had to stop trying to figure them out last night because my head wanted to explode.
Jack Chick; now him I get. Check out one of his more recent episodes, “Allah Has No Son!” It’s actually entirely realistic until the Muslim started blubbering like a baby asking the Christian man who showed him the light how he could save his soul mere moments after threatening to kill him.
To BrakYeller,
I can totally share your views on Augusta, there. I’m from there and live in Statesboro now, which isn’t a whole lot better. I was raised by that whole “SBC Fire and Brimstone” crowd. And, while I have respect for people’s personal beliefs, I think I lost a great deal of respect for the SBC when my grandmother told me my best friend was going to hëll because she was from CA and happened to be bisexual. -_- As for Landover, I love it. It’s hilarious. ^^
Joseph wrote: Discord, the thong theory you posit proves very little. How different are thongs anyway? The basic design of a thong is the same and putting any image on the thong is pretty restricted by the garment’s size
Have you looked at the pictures side by side? We’re talking two white (apparently cotton) thongs, fairly unusual in itself, structured exactly the same way, and photographed exactly the same way. Much too close for coincidence. The only other explanation I can come up with is that the same people create products and market for both sites, which is unlikely.
As for the intricacy of “Objective”, I certainly can’t imagine spending that much time on it. But I can see the attraction, to some extent, of going that far to mess with people’s minds. Sounds like something my friends and I might have done in high school. Except for we didn’t have internet back then and we’d have gotten bored with it fairly quickly. But when you add in the fact that there aren’t any real legitimate references to these people anywhere else on the ‘net, other than sites discussing “Objective”, I tend to believe it’s a fraud.
Thank you, though, for looking up those Bible verses — I had wondered if their text offered any insight into the matter, but apparently not.
BTW, I e-mailed Snopes.com today to ask if they had any info on “Objective.” They do carry information on “Landover” that I was able to find.
Hey, how come those Jack Chick comics aren’t listed in Overstreet’s Price Guide anyways?
OK. In a slighly more serious tone, when looking at the OBJECTIVE site, I noticed they had a banner ad at the bottom of the page for a long distance service with the ad line “Calling up random people to tell them about Jesus has never been cheaper!” (http://zapatopi.net/cads/ad_tcld.gif) I find that a little hard to believe that is not parody.
If any of you guys are so smart, why don’t you just check to see who owns the relevent URLs?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm?
Work to get your questions answered?
feh.
CJA
I’m going to throw this out there, and I’m interested to see how many people “get” it:
All this arguing about is the Objective site real/fake/parody/serious…
You would think the Objective site was Footage or something.
Come on…
JLK
Actually, Spider, that was my first thought, too. Unfortunately, no whois search seems willing to cooperate so I haven’t been able to find registry information.
‘Tis a mystery…
Ditto what Alan M. said, Spider. If you’ve got some way to check who owns the relevent URLs, by all means share it. It seems everyone’s attempts to do so have yet to bear any fruit. I’m no internet wizard, and I’ve already used what few tricks I have.
Kozemp, I’ll bite… you’re not talking about that old “Bigfoot caught on tape” clip, are you?
tOjb
Yes, it’s a parody.
Look at the pictures in the profile. Aren’t they a bit too perfect? Look at Kyle Glodman’s homepage. Look at “Skeet”‘s profile (it credits him for “bringing this whole internet thing to [their] attention.”
Look at the Evolutionism Propaganda. Just because they are Christian doesn’t meant they have lost brain cells (don’t contest this, or I get the Spork of Pain).
Finally, the dámņìņg stuff (arf!): there are at least 2 locations (Mt. Fellowship Baptist Church and Fellowship University), that have no addresses on the site. Look. You won’t even find a state. Do a web search. They aren’t there.
All this amounts to is people taking glee in the idiocy of Christians (Behold My Glorious Superiority!), and missing the point of the dámņëd site.
WankWankWankWankWank….
“Just because they are Christian doesn’t meant they have lost brain cells…”
No, but it doesn’t mean they haven’t, either.
“All this amounts to is people taking glee in the idiocy of Christians (Behold My Glorious Superiority!), and missing the point of the dámņëd site.”
It’s a funny thing; the satire of the site, assuming it is satire (I’m still not sure), is dangerously close to real things said by real people in very serious situations. Sure, there’s some really absurd stuff on there, but most of it doesn’t go so far over the line as to scream “parody” at me, and the parts that do only confuse me because they don’t really mesh with the parts that don’t.
I mean, read this — from an AgapePress article, a decidedly Fundamentalist news source:
Associated Press reports that cries of “Amen!” rang through a Massachusetts Statehouse meeting room yesterday as more than 200 people demanded a constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage. Bishop Gilbert Thompson, a Boston pastor and member of the Black Ministerial Alliance — one of the groups in the Coalition for Marriage — said, “This radical sexual revolution will destroy a road map that our children desperately need.”
It’s a true story; an article about the Massachussets legislature legalizing gay marriage. What the hëll does that quote at the end mean, though? If you put that in the Onion, I’d laugh my ášš off, of course, since it’s absolute nonsense, but put it on that OBJECTIVE sight and I’d have no idea.
Meshou: All this amounts to is people taking glee in the idiocy of Christians and missing the point of the dámņëd site. If the site is a parody, then isn’t “taking glee in the idiocy of Christians” the whole point of the site?
Meshou: there are at least 2 locations that have no addresses on the site… Do a web search. They aren’t there. I did search after those locations, and I found the same things, as did those whose sources I cited earlier in the thread. But you know what? It wouldn’t be the first time a legitimate group posted false information on their website to make themselves sound bigger and better than they are.
In the final analysis, yeah, it’s probably a parody site… though it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to to learn that OBJECTIVE is run by a legitimate fundamentalist group that’s lying about their credentials and creating false links to throw off detractors and supporters alike. I stand by the assertion that if it’s a parody site, it’s so subtle as to be ineffective: most parody sites (including Landover) acknowlege that they’re a work of parody or satire; the ones that don’t are usually so obvious that there’s no question about it (for example, a friend of mine once put together a fake ‘Amish Pørņ’ website… obviously a parody). So far as I’ve seen, the OBJECTIVE site (which is suddenly inaccessible) has no such disclaimer.
I guess I just want to know if I’m supposed to laugh at the site because it’s meant to be funny, or laugh at the site out of sympathy for the awkward principles it espouses. Is that too much to ask?
tOjb
Btw, I read in a local paper today that a Democrat in the Colorado state legislature plans to introduce a bill to legalize civil unions for same-sex marriages.
Not surprising, a Republican immediately stepped up to try and kill the bill, citing the welfare of children and family values.
Again, I ask, who’s children are suffering and what family values are lost in the face of so many dámņ divorces by people that *aren’t* of the same sex?
Talking to some politicians about this issue is like trying to get a response from a brick wall
(…and for the record, the “Amish Pørņ” website didn’t have any actual pørņ. You’d click on a link like ‘Girl & Horse,’ and you’d get a picture of some fully-clothed farmgirl riding her horse. That’s the kind of parody which needs no disclamer saying “hey, this is parody!”
tOjb)
I can see why people might believe that that site (objective) was real–and trust me, it is no insult to say that some christians do have beliefs like that. I’m a Seventh Day Adventist– we invented scientific creationism (at least, it originated with certain prominent Adventists. Just to cover my ášš, I want to point out that the SDA church has no official perscriptive doctrines other than the vaguely worded “laws of Moses and the faith of Jesus”), and other bizarre and frightening mixtures of rationalism and biblic inerrancy…
But that site is an obvious fake.
Why? I dunno.
Maybe it’s because all the mugshots are obviously colorized photographs, probably scanned off some alumni wall.
Maybe it’s the anti-triclavianism diatribe (there is no such thing. Clav-, by the way, is latin for “key”, not “nail”).
Maybe it’s the fact that the writing style is the same between Objective and Landover, even down to overuse of the words unsaved and secular.
Maybe it’s the fact that the pictures in the carepress shop are photoshopped fakes, using as base the same pictures on the Landover cafepress shop.
Maybe it’s the conspicuously crossed out (rather than deleted) Evanesance under Bands We Like.
Maybe it’s that the children’s lessons are ludicriously out of scale with children’s ministry (Doctor Girrafenstein’s Irreducible Complexity Mousepad?)
Maybe it’s the fact that the Objective Baptist name makes the Shutdown Landover Baptist title text into Objective: Shutdown Landover Baptist
Maybe it’s the lack of addresses.
So in conclusion, that site is not real, even though it very well could be. And I think that’s the point. As to why someone would do something like this, it suggests me something more than a simple “honeypot” lure. Earlier commentors have stated that this resembles the first, subtle irony at Landover Baptist. Myself I can’t say. I only found the latter site today. But if so, that tells me that the Objective site is a relaunching or revamping of the Landover site, a starting from scratch. This whole apparent smear campaign may just be to extablish a chain of continuity (or hyperlinks) between the two pages.
I expect that in the future, Objective will come out, as it were.
Actually, yes–the same company makes the apparel for both Objective and Landover Baptist. CafePress will print just about anything on a shirt/hat/thong.
Sigh. Oh well, I’m not happy to have to deal with this, but here goes.
Mr. Pennington wrote:
I’m of mixed minds on this.
Really, you are? I thought you already made up one, Mr. Pennington.
On the one hand, I find the folks at Objective Ministries to be anything but objective. I am a Christian but I couldn’t get through much of their garbage without cringing. I rate them somewhere below Jack Chick’s old handouts.
Gee, with the way you’re so selfish and biased, Mr. Pennington, I really can’t be sure you mean what you say. Not to mention that I couldn’t get through much of YOUR garbage without shaking my head at how hypocritical and what a charlatan you are. Tsk tsk tsk.
It should be a simple fact that you don’t win people over to your way of thinking by lashing out and insulting anyone who thinks differently than you do. The people of Objective speak of the hate crimes committed by Landover. I feel that Objective is just as guilty of hate; quite different from what Christ taught.
Look at yourself in the mirror when you say that, Mr. Pennington. Do you think that posting potentially racist remarks on a website that doesn’t belong to you is the way to react, just because you don’t like the opinion of the person you’re conversing with? And, do you think that even criticizing the Zionist Organization of America the way you did is how to conduct an argument? I’m not saying that you’ve got to take their side if you don’t want to, but you better bear in mind that that is one of the news sources that I turn to for information, and you shouldn’t go telling someone you don’t even know personally what sources to turn to for information.
Maybe you’re not genuinely informed or aware, but there is quite a lot of antisemitism going on in the US even today, most of which is ignored by the PC-advocating media, and that’s exactly why you have to bear in mind that most major news sources simply can’t be relied upon for gaining knowledge about the world we live in.
On the other hand…
No, I think the one hand is still relevant…
I would be strongly shocked to find that LandoverBaptist.org is in any way associated with the Baptist Church. Were I a Baptist, I’d quite likely be upset with them for claiming such association.
And I would be strongly shocked to know that you really hate the man you’re supposedly good friends with, which doesn’t seem too far off an answer. Perhaps you’d like to answer to that query so we can see if you’re really serious about your “friendship” with him or not?
I wonder how the gay readers of this site would feel about a website designed to make all gays seem to be conform to the narrow-minded stereotypical way some people like to portray them.
And I wonder how they’d feel if they knew that, contrary to what you say here, that you happen to support and defend the very stereotypes the Landover website specializes in as well. Indeed, what would they think if they knew what you’re really like…
Or how the Jewish readers would enjoy one that shows them to be money-grabbing hypochondriacs
Or how said Jewish readers would enjoy knowing that a]you pretend to be “raised Jewish”, as you put it, b]that you’re actually Judeophobic, and that c]you’re anti-Zionist and an anti-Israelist, all of the above being the same thing, I might add, as even Martin Luther King once pointed out in his time.
Or Irish as penny-pinching drunks…
Or knowing that you support even those wretched stereotypes as well. Have you no dignity, no shame, Mr. Pennington, in being such a hypocrite?
Mr. Pennington, you disgraceful little Republican charlatan. I’ve read some of the hypocritical things you’ve said, and I can’t say that I’m so impressed with what you say, nor am I the least bit flattered by your act.
You know what your problem is? It’s that you act like a know-it-all, you’re smug, and worst of all, you’re shameless. And to top it all off, you even go so far as to pretend that you’re Jewish, when, seeing how little you seem to know about the race you claim to come from, it’s more than apparent that you’re not what you claim to be, nor are you as smart as you think you are. However, you’re not so uncommon. Any troglodyte who reads a copy of The American Conservative could make statements like yours.
Speaking of which, as far as I can tell, you’re not even a Republican. You know what you are? Quite simply, you’re a Reformist. In other words, you support and polish the boots of Buchanan.
etc.
Oh yes, you can say that again. And there’s more then that I could say as well about what you really are, but it would take all day, and for now, I think it best to end this conversation.
all right. proof that the Fellowship/Landover sites are both an elaborate parody/hoax:
http://web.linix.ca/pedia/index.php/OBJECTIVE:_Christian_Ministries
http://www.answers.com/topic/objective-christian-ministries
The first one tells who set them up. He has his own site.