FSTDT

""That's the beauty of Heaven... we can leave our brains behind.""

- A RaptureReady forumgoer, unintentionally explaining most of the site

Fundies Say the Darndest Things, often abbreviated to FSTDT, is (to use its own description) "an archive of the most hilarious, bizarre, ignorant, bigoted, and terrifying quotes from fundies all over the internet". Or, in other words, it's a community dedicated to mocking religious and political stupidity.

The history of FSTDT is a surprisingly simple one. The initial administrator, WinAce, found religious stupidity humorous, so he decided to set up an archive for the craziest of the crazies. He called it Christians Say the Darndest Things, but quickly changed it when he realized that Christian fundamentalists aren't the only people capable of saying outrageous things. Unfortunately, three years after the initial creation of the site, WinAce passed away from cystic fibrosis.

However, this wasn't the end of FSTDT as a new administrator, Yahweh (who saw fundies in much the same way as WinAce), picked up where the first left off, both in the memory of WinAce and as a project to improve her coding skills. However, Yahweh found the task of rebuilding and recompiling the website to be far more difficult than she initially expected and ended up abandoning the project after a valiant effort.

The third administrator, Distind (who watches fundies in an attempt to figure out what makes them tick), much more confident in his programming abilities, picked up where Yahweh left off and the site flourished under his command, until he passed the staff to Shy around 2016.

Shy, the fourth administrator, managed the site with great efficiency, but because of burnout and manic depression, in 2019 he recruited Pryo as webmaster, who helped the site by moving to a better hosting service. As of 2020, they both still manage the site, along with a team of moderators. keeping material that goes back to the earliests incarnations of the site

At first glance, the site seems to mock conservative Christians exclusively, but it only seems that way because they tend to be the loudest and, as they put in their FAQ, fundies of other religions doesn't usually post in English (but when they do, they end in the site eventually]. Stupidity of any religious or political persuasion is fair game and the site's history has had a respectable number of quotes from antitheists, liberals and other non-conservative and non-Christian fundies.

As this site involves religion and politics, be sure to choose your words wisely here.


 * Abusive Parents: Some of the quotes actually attempt to justify child abuse. One particularly horrifying example is this. It advocates spanking children until they cry "tears of a broken will".
 * Against My Religion
 * All Blue Entry: This and its following post restate the OP entirely in TV Tropes links.
 * All Gays Are Pedophiles: This quote makes the assumption that her own brother is going to molest her son purely because he is gay.
 * All Gays Are Promiscuous
 * All Jews Are Cheapskates/Greedy Jew: Some fundamentalists quoted on the site rehash the old conspiracy theory of Jews running the banks.
 * Arab Oil Sheikh: Amusingly averted so far.
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
 * Entitled by name in this quote.
 * "That includes the most heinous criminals, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Tupac Shakur."
 * IslandLifer hates "monkeys, wetbacks, ragheads, and micronesians" [sic].
 * Artistic License Astronomy: Not only is the sun 32 miles in diameter, it's also a planet.
 * Artistic License: Biology: This. Much of the site contains ridiculous arguments against the theory of evolution.
 * Artistic License Chemistry:
 * Apparently, you can't combine oxygen and hydrogen to make water, and even the smartest man on Earth can't.
 * Also, apparently elements rarely react with each other, no one knows how chemical bonds form, and a solid and a gas couldn't possibly react.
 * Artistic License Geography
 * Artistic License History
 * Artistic License: Law: Fundies often claim that the Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation. This quote claims that the Founding Fathers made it illegal for atheists to testify in court or to hold public office.
 * Artistic License Physics:
 * The emission theory states that the light emits from our own eyes, not from the object we look at.
 * The Second Law of Thermodynamics proves that evolution is impossible -- it could only happen if there were a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy.
 * "Simply put, E=mc2 is liberal claptrap." (Yeah, take a wild guess who said that.)
 * Artistic License Religion:
 * Among other things, the Bible apparently forbids interracial marriage.
 * These two are considerably worse.
 * And as for getting other religions totally wrong, this. All you need to know about it is that it calls Buddhism "Japanese voodoo".
 * Artistic License Statistics:
 * This.
 * Not to mention this.
 * Association Fallacy: this is a notable example.
 * Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: The creators of Power Rangers are trying to teach children the truth about reptilians!
 * Berserk Button:
 * For FSTDT commenters, fundie quotes about rape, specifically those which attempt to excuse the rapist or to shift blame to the victim. Naturally, these particular quotes receive by far the most vitriolic comments and usually attain especially high Fundie Indexes. As a result, the Top 100 page contains a markedly disproportionate number of posts about rape.
 * Posts promoting abusive parenting practices and similar abuse of children tend to get similar enraged reactions. Particularly this one.
 * Posts promoting bullying seem to be another recent one.
 * Black and White Insanity: According to Gerald Polley (who actually is a schizophrenic), There Are Two Kinds of People in the World: homophobic bigots (who he thinks are good) and Depraved Homosexuals who engage in Parental Incest.
 * Blatant Lies:
 * "I'm not racist, but... black people are an insult to our race."
 * "The MTV video for FEARLESS, presents Taylor Swift as if being offered [to the occult."]
 * "The viking kingdoms were orderly, peaceful lands of serene wisdom and love."
 * "In one speech, Obama viciously attacks Sarah Palin and then admits to the world the he was born in Kenya, all while knowing that he will soon be declaring Martial Law due to the soon to be Obama Birth Certificate Natural Born Citizen Uprising and Mass Protests and will cancel the 2012 elections."
 * Boomerang Bigot: Commenter Brendan Rizzo is an American (still living there) who really, really hates America. He used to make posts defending his country from anti-American attacks but got fed up with it all.
 * Born in the Wrong Century: Deconstructed by the fundies who express nostalgia for earlier times. They approve of the bad aspects of those times as much the "good" ones.
 * Burn the Witch: Yep.
 * But You Screw One Goat!: "When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule."
 * Cluster F-Bomb: Sometimes.
 * Commie Nazis: Many fundies believe that Obama (or liberal politicians in general) are gay Marxist atheist Muslim pinko commie Nazis. Yes, atheist Muslim.
 * Daydream Believer:
 * "Leviathon [sic] is a spirit I have battled as well..."
 * What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: The confrontation in question took place at McDonald's.
 * Atheira believes Harry Potter and Avatar really happened in alternate realities. (The "authors", who are really channelers, just changed the names for some reason.)
 * Disproportionate Retribution:
 * According to this quote, God punished Japan with the 2011 tsunami because Japan is the center of the video game industry.
 * Harry Lyon and Tim Lennox suggest that any illegal immigrant who sets foot in the state of Alabama be shot on sight.
 * Many of those quoted believe that people will suffer eternal torment for arbitrary things such as homosexuality or even merely having a different belief. It's particularly disturbing since some of the quotes go into extremely graphic detail as to what they believe will happen to their "enemies".
 * Does Not Like Men: "A penis is a fucking weapon!"
 * Does Not Like Women:
 * fschmidt, as well as everyone else on love-shy.com.
 * Vox Day is another one, claiming, among other things, that there's no such thing as marital rape.
 * As is KHETLASER, who is too misogynist even for the aforementioned love-shy.com. It is also possible that he is a pedophile.
 * Double Standard:
 * This. Also, this.
 * The commenters have a version of this as well. Whenever an American fundie is quoted, a small subset (mostly Headache) of the non-American commenters will blame the USA as a whole for the existence of its fundies, but this never happens when the fundie quoted is from elsewhere, and if an American tries to claim such, the other commenters show him no mercy.
 * Some commenters will not only "blame the USA as a whole for the existence of its fundies", but they are so bent on doing this that if a quote is stupid enough they will just assume it's American and then proceed to bash Americans for their stupidity. This quote is from Canada.
 * Dude, She's Like, in a Coma: This quote seems to suggest this trope.
 * Dumbass Has a Point: Sometimes (albeit very occasionally) the fundies quoted also say something reasonable in their rant, which is usually acknowledged by at least one commenter.
 * Eagle Land: The American fundies are shining examples of Flavor 2 (not to say that other countries don't have their own fundies). Unfortunately, because the USA is so much more populated than the rest of the English-speaking world, a naïve commenter could easily assume that all Americans are like that even though that is not the case. In fact, Headache, if he isn't a Troll, seems to believe this, as the vast majority of his comments are about how the United States is "the land of the fat and the stupid" and how the American people deserve their country to be ruined because a minority of them vote for fundie candidates.
 * Eats Babies: Apparently, because atheists have no morals, logically they find eating babies to be a perfectly acceptable activity.
 * Enemy Civil War: When one religious nut criticizes another religious nut, expect a commenter to declare "FUNDIE FIGHT!"
 * Enemy Mine: His4Life, one of the fundies often mocked on the site, will join the other commenters in chewing out racists.
 * Evil Counterpart: FSTDT and Rapture Ready sometimes act like this to each other.
 * Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: Many quoted fundies feel this way towards gays, atheists, and basically anyone not like them.
 * Female Misogynist: A surprisingly high number of misogynistic quotes are made by women who grew up indoctrinated by fundies.
 * Forum Full Of Crazy:
 * Rapture Ready. It is the single most cited source of the quotes mocked on the site. The second most cited source is YouTube with 118 pages worth as of this edit. Rapture Ready? 431. And that's before you factor in the ones marked as "RR", which brings it up to 604.
 * Free Conservatives and its successor, Free Republic, come as second craziest. They have 102 pages worth of quotes combined as of this edit, which in itself is impressive, and live up to their reputation by producing some of the vilest quotes on the entire site. It's possible that they are a front for a racist skinhead group.
 * Also present is Stormfront, which doesn't even hide behind a front, though it has only 18 pages worth of quotes as of this edit.
 * Conservapedia is now getting up there, with 25 pages. (Yes, more than Stormfront.)
 * Christian Forums, or CARM, has 69 pages.
 * Not even websites which nominally have nothing to do with religion and politics are immune. The POD Warrior Forum, a POD fan forum, has 79 pages, and International Movie Database has 27. And that's not even getting into Yahoo! Answers, with 66 pages. (Though most of those are from trolls.)
 * Fun with Acronyms:
 * One commenter came up with "Chronic-Oppressive Reality-Disconnect Syndrome", or CORDS, because fundies want to bind everyone to atavistic "cords" of behavior.
 * And there was also this gem from a fundie doubtful of the existence of dark matter: "Fabricated Ad hoc Inventions Repeatedly Invoked in Efforts to Defend Untenable Scientific Theories", or FAIRIE DUST. Admittedly, it's quite impressive.
 * Even more impressive, one fundie came up with "F.A.L.S.E. S.C.I.E.N.C.E. I.S. A.S. F.A.K.E. A.S. P.R.O. W.R.E.S.T.L.I.N.G.S. W.W.E. S.M.A.C.K.D.O.W.N.! = "Faith-filled Atheists Loving Simple-to-complex Evolutionary Stories Constantly Ignore Energy's Needed (Creating Energy Isn't Scientific). A Simple-to-complex Fictional Account Keeping "Evolution" as somehow Powering Random Operations Without Reaping Entropy (Second Thermodynamics Law*) Is Not Good Science! Without Working Energy, 'Scientific' model Always Contradicts Known (Continued)"
 * Fundies Cannot Do Math: This.
 * GIFT: No other way to explain these quotes.
 * A God Am I:
 * Several quotes come from fundies who claim to be the second coming of Jesus, but Mark Dreher takes it further than any of the others. At least he confessed to being a troll.
 * Similarly, Mariette Do-Nguyen claims she is the Holy Spirit.
 * God Is Evil: If he's anything like the God this guy believes in, or even the God of the fundies in general.
 * Halfbreed: One of the fundies' many Acceptable Targets.
 * He Who Fights Monsters:
 * The users of the site sometimes display bigotry, double standards, research failures and the like despite (or because) the site is devoted to mocking those very qualities.
 * However, a lot of posts are written in sarcasm, and some of the more bigoted replies are often Poes.
 * For example, some of the comments in response to the commenters whatever and SpukiKitty in this thread.
 * Trolls and fundies posting to try and call out quote posters notwithstanding, there are 28 pages of quotes from the search word "FSTDT".
 * Hitler Ate Sugar: Far too often. Running a search of the name "Hitler" yields 49 pages of results as of this edit, some of them comparing him to Barack Obama.
 * This is one of the most obvious examples (though it doesn't concern Hitler himself).
 * Hollywood Evolution: Oh, so very much. A huge proportion of people ranting about the "EVILutionists" have no idea how the Theory of Natural Selection works... especially whoever came up with these.
 * Hollywood Psych
 * I'm a Humanitarian: According to one fundie, cannibalism is atheist doctrine.
 * Implied Death Threat: The fundie Mark Dreher makes one to the commenter D Laurier here. For context, an earlier quote submitted to the site established that Dreher believes himself to be God, so when he claims that God would kill a person, he is thinking about doing so himself.
 * Insane Troll Logic: There are many examples of this:
 * One that sticks out: Obama is going to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Therefore, the entire adult population of the USA is going to be drafted into the military.
 * Here's another one. The poster says that trying to change the laws to allow gays to marry is like trying to change gravity. It actually won the Insane Troll Logic award.
 * In this post, the poster claims to have found photographic proof of Beyoncé being a lizard-person while at the same time admitting he photoshopped the image.
 * In the Blood: In response to a fundie ranting about how gays should not be allowed to donate blood: "[After the transfusion, do you suddenly get an intense desire to watch musicals and decorate houses?]"
 * I Reject Your Reality
 * It Is Pronounced "Tro-PAY": Inverted. Wiley thinks that "raison d'être" is pronounced "raisin date", and actually spells it that way. See for yourself.
 * It's All About Me: Many fundies seem to believe this, even though one would think that they would not because their religion teaches otherwise.
 * Jade-Colored Glasses: Prolonged exposure to the stupidity and maliciousness of fundies can cause this. It has already happened to a few of the commenters.
 * Jerk Justifications: This guy attempts to justify bullying against those who break social norms (particularly gender roles). This did not go over well with the commenters.
 * Let Them Die: A common response to a fundie who has said something completely despicable is "Die in a fire."
 * Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
 * Logical Fallacies: Every fallacy in the book is demonstrated by the fundies, but this one is the cream of the crop. It somehow manages both to use circular logic and to refute itself.
 * Maligned Mixed Marriage:
 * At least one person on the site provides an excellent example the maligning when he says there is no love whatsoever in any of them. This lovely fellow takes things a step further by implying that white women who marry black men deserve to be killed by Jack the Ripper.
 * And here's a post from the writer of that blog gloating that a woman in an interracial relationship was killed by her lover.
 * Manchurian Agent: Marion Knox believes that people are deliberately given split personalities with alters such as three-year-old sex slaves used to send sensitive information back and forth between politicians and world leaders.
 * Medal of Dishonor: Some quotes earn sarcastic "awards" of this nature.
 * Mind Screw: This. What.
 * Mushroom Samba: Besides Blatant Lies, there is no other explanation.
 * New Age: A relatively common target of the fundies, but there are a few quotes from actual people in the New Age movement.
 * Next Sunday A.D.: "If Obama declared himself dictator tomorrow, what would our military do?"
 * No Except Yes:
 * "'[Glaciers' were not ice but frozen water]."
 * "Vinnie accused me of circular reasoning in concluding that the Bible is a work of non-fiction. My reasoning is not at all circular, I felt that I was pretty clear. First, I presume the verity of the Biblical writers. Second, the writers claim that they were inspired by God and they are recording the truth. Conclusion, the Bible is a work of non-fiction."
 * In response to a reasonable person saying that humans are apes in the same way that ducks are birds: "That's not a very good comparison because...well ducks ARE birds..."
 * See Blatant Lies above.
 * No Sympathy: Here is a horrible post to someone who is depressed and self-injuring. Instead of offering encouragement or sympathy, he calls their problems a sin and lays a guilt trip.
 * Non Sequitur: Plenty, but this stands out.
 * Our Demons Are Different: You should eat them... and use them like Pokémon!
 * Poe's Law: The site is infamous for this. Pretty much everyone from contributors to administrators has trouble distinguishing, though if a posted quote is later discovered to be a Poe, it can be removed from the site.
 * Point And Laugh Site
 * Politically-Incorrect Villain: Quite a few. Bryan Fischer has many instances of this, but perhaps his most notable is when he appropriated Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech to promote discrimination against homosexual people. DoctorDoom (no relation to that Doctor Doom) is this so much, a wall of shame has been built here:

Doctor Doom (59 links)

 * Hatred in general: Here.
 * Hatred towards Mexicans: Here, here, and here.
 * Hatred towards Arabs: Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
 * Hatred towards non-whites in general: Here and here.
 * Hatred towards atheists: Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
 * Hatred towards liberals: Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
 * Hatred towards Obama specifically: Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
 * Hatred towards homosexuals: Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
 * Rants about FSTDT: Here, here, here, here, here, and here.

"Creedence Leonore Gielgud: "At least he's not claiming teh gays and Muslims are commies, and are in cahoots." His4Life: "Creedence, I'll make that claim, and I can show you the uspporting [sic evidence from firsthand documents as well...]""
 * Quote Mine: Quite a sizeable chunk of the site.
 * To be fair, there are a few examples where quote mining has been called out by the commenters by going to the mined site and reading the whole quote, or even the context of the original thread it was posted in.
 * Readings Blew Up the Scale: A common response to an ironic statement made by one of the fundies whose statements have been quoted is that it has "destroyed [the commenter's] irony meter."
 * "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Some of the commenters are great at pulling this off. Others... not so much.
 * Anon-e-moose has gained such a reputation for doing this (especially to fundies who hate Anime or Manga) that other commenters started getting worried when, three pages in, he hadn't responded to this.
 * Red Scare: Some of the fundamentalists on the site seem to think everything is a communist conspiracy. This quote contains the assertion that railways owned by the state is Marxism. There's also several quotes in the archives talking about how Joe McCarthy is an American Hero.
 * Rogues Gallery: There are a few who have a lot of quotes on the site.
 * Some of the most notable fundies on the site are AV1611VET, dad, JohnR7, Supersport, Carico, LoneWolf1984, DoctorDoom, Bro. Randy, savagesusie, Andrew Schlafly and fschmidt.
 * A commenter came up with another list, including fundies who are just plain evil, rather than stupid. The only names in common with the above list are DoctorDoom and fschmidt. The others are Proph, Feynman and Coulter's Love Child, alanorei, Hunter Wallace, Ronald E. Williams, Rick Santorum, Gonzo, Bryan Fischer, Scott Lively, David Barton, Warren Jeffs, Phyllis Schlafly, and Vincent Cheung.
 * Rouge Angles of Satin:
 * There are several examples, but this particular quote becomes unintentionally hilarious as a result.
 * Also, this one actually makes one of the trope naming errors.
 * "I was taught about Darwin's Therory of evaluation."
 * Rule 34: Of the universe itself!
 * Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:
 * Apparently being gay means you will live a shorter life. Gee, we wonder why that is.
 * DoctorDoom asked why criticism of Barack Obama is perceived as racist, and immediately followed by calling him a "Magic Lawn Jockey". You were saying, Doom?
 * Serial Escalation: "What an Idiot!, no one could possibly get more stupid than... Oh Crap, they just did."
 * An excellent example is Cassiterides, who seems hell-bent on denying every scientific theory in existence. He apparently believes that the sun is only 32 miles in diameter, that vision is due to light being emitted from one's eyes (never mind the obvious implications of that), that gravity is an unproven hypothesis, that disease is due to animals overstepping their boundaries (never mind that this conflicts with even fundamentalist Christian theology), and that all the people who oppose creationism are secretly creationists. Face, meet palm.
 * Supersport is also notable in this regard. In his quest to deny modern science he has claimed that wild animals don't get sick, that smallpox vaccinations might actually cause smallpox, that the fossil record disproves evolution because we don't find fossils of animals with eyes on their feet, that he can explain why fossils of larger animals are always found in the "higher stratas" [sic] of the geologic column because he once shook a can of mixed nuts and the larger nuts ended up on top, that bacteria developing immunity to antibiotics is an example of Lamarckian Evolution, that if you get a tan your offspring will have darker skin than you, that E=mc2 is wrong because it contradicts Newton's Law of gravity, that we can't assume light travels to us instead of our eyes traveling to it, that the actions of molecules are a mental process, that scientists don't know what DNA is or what it does, that it's "logical" that dinosaurs lived at the same time as large mammals and that paleontologists dig up unfossilized dinosaur bones that contain "rotting flesh", that humans might be able to regenerate limbs, that bacteria have organs and bones, that cancer is not a disease but a self-defense mechanism, that genetics and the theory of evolution cannot explain recessive traits, and that scientists never talk about the evolution of plants because plants don't have sex. Not content with butchering science, he has apparently decided to butcher the English language as well, claiming that the words "life" and "faith" are verbs. Amongst all the people quoted on FSTDT, Supersport's claims are so unbelievable that on the FAQ, Distind singles him out as someone he still cannot understand, despite years of trying. As of this edit he has been quoted 148 times!
 * The two are so unbelievably stupid that some have suggested that Cassiterides is Supersport's kid, hoping that there is no way that two people so stupid could exist independently of one another.
 * A new contender to the title of "dumbest person on the Internet" is Self-Mutation. He has made such stupid statements as that a crucifix will not shake during an earthquake (because earthquakes are caused by the devil), that God is the only reason that the rules of basic arithmetic stay internally consistent, that atheists will not accept the truth of religion no matter how much "evidence" they are given, that scientists refer to science textbooks as Holy Writ, instead of, you know, actually doing the scientific method, that critical thinking is a religion (and that it is a bad thing), that radiometric dating doesn't work on objects of known age, that God would actively prevent atheists from learning of his existence, and that China did not exist before the Flood even after being given the evidence that shows otherwise. All things considered, he has been compared to Supersport by more than one commenter.
 * Single-Issue Wonk:
 * Several, but one who comes to mind is baileysmom from Rapture Ready, whose posts are always rants against gay people. She even derails completely unrelated threads to take a swipe at them.
 * This became so common that at least one commenter has decided to post using that name, celebrating the (fabricated) child abuse of the eponymous Bailey.
 * A more recent example is Headache, who is a commenter on FSTDT. Inevitably, when an American fundie is quoted, he will rant about how the United States of America sucks and how the American people are stupid and have no hope of ever matching the rest of the world in intelligence. He is quite fond of calling the US "batshit insane". True to this trope, he never talks about anything else with the vitriol that he reserves for Americans, and non-American fundies who are just as stupid or evil as any of the American ones tend to get little or no reaction from him.
 * Stay in the Kitchen: One of them even wrote a poem about how women should stay in the kitchen.
 * Stop Being Stereotypical: Some of the site's fanbase are Christians who are tired of the fundies' shit.
 * Stupid Sexy Flanders: Heterosexual variant: quite a few of the commenters are ashamed of themselves for considering Christine O'Donnell, and occasionally Sarah Palin, to be sexually attractive, when those women have made some of the most ignorant comments on the entire site.
 * Tempting Fate:


 * Trope Overdosed: It's surprising how many tropes there are in what is little more than a collection of unconnected quotations.
 * Two Words: Obvious Trope: "I can sum it all up in three words: Evolution is a lie."
 * What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?: Most of the quotes are pure Type 1.
 * Word Salad Humor: Unintentional example, but you try to figure it out.
 * Yellow Peril: Usually on the subject of anime, but this sometimes happens regarding Asians in general, especially if it involves an Asian woman in an interracial relationship.
 * You Make Me Sic