I like to write about religion. I like to read about religion. I even sometimes enjoy conversing with religious folk. But I am not religious. Religion is bullshit and its purveyors often unabashed assholes.
Religious spam is a case in point. As the administrator of a blog, I get a lot of spam. I even get spam from spammers offering to spam for me. Every day, I delete countless robo messages. Some of them consist of complete sentences hawking this or that product. Most are just random broken phrases stuck together and surrounded by links to who-knows-what website. I’ve come to expect this daily deluge. But here’s something I didn’t expect: religious spam.
A few months ago, I started getting weird blog comments from some guy ranting about the Bible and the end times. It was all more or less coherent (by religious standards) but had nothing to do with the blogs I’d posted. So I decided to check him out. I found the guy on Twitter and discovered he is a genuine dyed-in-the-wool Bible-thumper. I almost approved his comments at this point but decided to copy and paste a couple of them into Google first. And what did I find? He’d been posting the same exact crap on hundreds of other websites.
I PM’d the guy on Twitter, and he sheepishly admitted that he was paying a spambot provider to automatically post his rants to random web forums. He apologized. Then, a couple days later, I received more of his spam. I contacted him again. He didn’t respond this time.
I actually almost didn’t write about this. I’m only writing about it because tonight I discovered religious spam in an all new place: Netflix. I was reading reviews of a shitty horror movie when I ran across about ten ‘reviews’ posted by the same person ranting about the Bible and some other apocrypha I’d never heard of (It turned out to be cut and pasted from the Book of Urantia). Why?? What is the point of posting a religious rant to the customer review section of Netflix where it’s just going to annoy people before being buried under hundreds of reviews anyway?
I can’t come up with a reasonable explanation for this behavior, but here is what I have concluded:
If you have an opinion, and you think it’s worth listening to, then create your own blog, write an op-ed piece for the local fish-wrapper, record a YouTube video, start a podcast, something. If your ideas are so nonsensical and so indistinguishable from garbage that you’re comfortable indiscriminately spewing them into cyberia where they will appear between a Nigerian Prince’s pleas for help and a horny housewife’s invitation to her private webcam, what the fuck do you think your ideas are really worth? You’re an asshole, your religion is bullshit, and whatever veneer of respectability it may have once had is being corroded away by dumb shits like you.