FSTDT

1. Overall, FSTDT is similar to RationalWiki in that it's a left-leaning, mostly atheist and agnostic echo chamber where members more often act like petulant jerks who, by their own admission, love mocking and "calling out" people for saying things they don't like to hear instead of defeating others' arguments rationally. The key difference is that, unlike RW, FSTDT does not masquerade as an encyclopedia.
2. In 2014, a former 40-year atheist and blogger named Stan described the site as a place "…where Atheists and skeptics can have a safe harbor in which to ridicule that which they take out of context. Actually there is a link to context, but no one seems to have used it in my case. It's the sort of snake pit where the target du jour is countered with comments like "asshole", and the standard logic errors which they insist are the logical answers to the "idiot" they are trashing
3. The fact that many users choose to remain anonymous proves that they know what they're doing, while not illegal per se, is unethical enough that they don't want to get caught doing it, especially by the religious friends that many members claim to have in real life.
4. Their whole business model is flawed because, if there were no more writings they don’t like for them to quote on the Internet, the enterprise would lose its purpose and collapse.
5. Their arguments against whatever quotes they find are generally one-sided and full of logical fallacies, often as extremely ideologically biased towards the left as are those on RationalWiki or SJWiki, especially since quotes are taken out of context.
6. They tend to give tags to quotes that do not reflect the quote authors' original intentions, including giving the tag "#fundie" to quotes that have only minimal to no religious connotations. This makes it clear that they want their interpretations of anything they quote to be the only true and correct interpretations.
7. Although they aim to provide links to context for every one of their quotes, users don't seem to reference or pay attention to that context.
8. Many of their arguments amount to nothing more than argumentum ad hominems, or personal attacks, with childish insults and name-calling as well as lazy, unimaginative sex jokes solely to get a rise out of people.
This is often the case with their comments on many quotes under their tag "#dunning-krueger," which refers to people that they believe are "not nearly as smart as they think they are." It's another way of saying, "You're dumb because we said so!" and renders them guilty of the same sense of elitism that they condemn various quoting targets for showing.
The same principle applies to their tag "#pratt," an acronym for "Point Refuted A Thousand Times," which indicates a sense of laziness and unwillingness to have a civil debate and basically says, "We’re right, you're wrong, so shut up already."
9. The people running and/or contributing to it do a terrible job at sourcing for their quotes: many links to context are dead (happens a lot with links aged 10 years or older); image only; and unarchived social media posts that can be easily forged, deleted, or modified.
10. They hate U.S. President Donald Trump so much that they normally avoid saying "Trump" like the Bubonic Plague and do not offer any impartial criticism or say anything forgiving about him, believing that anyone who shows any sympathy or forgiveness towards him is a racist, neo-Nazi, or "wingnut" by association.
They like to whitewash originally well-intentioned but nowadays corrupt and violent groups such as Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the feminist movement.
11. They deny that feminism in history has come in waves and that, in the recent past with third-wave feminism/feminazism, the feminist movement is now a shell of its former self. They even accuse anti-feminist women of being "hypocrites".
12. Anyone who does not support toxic modern feminism is automatically a "#sexist" in their eyes.
13. Anyone who does not support BLM's violent behavior is automatically a "#racist" in their eyes.
They mislabel people guilty of ethnic hatred or xenophobia as "racist" even though individual human races/skin colors are not one and the same as ethnicities or national identities.
14. Like many social justice warriors, they promote minority groups in ways that even minority groups themselves might find offensive. For example, they support LGBTQ2+ characters being inserted casually into entertainment regardless of quality or consequences, force everyone to accept them and condemn anyone who doesn’t accept them or care about their activism, and suggest that anyone who isn’t pro-LGBTQ2+ is automatically a homophobe. All of this essentially gives the LGBTQ2+ community in the real world a bad name.
15. They give credence to the idea that there are more than two genders.
16. As their Website's title implies, they have no qualms in using Christophobic (anti-Christian) language. For example, when discussing matters of Nazism and religion, they often go on screeds about how Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were (allegedly) Christian. In reality, Hitler was staunchly opposed to mainstream Christianity, according to his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and saw it as a branch of Judaism, which he of course hated even more. He thus invented the false religion of "positive Christianity" to deceive German Christians of the day into thinking that they were doing "God's work" by serving the führer.
17. Though one of their tags is "#moonbat" for quotes composed by "left-wing nutjobs," this tag is hardly ever used compared to "#wingnut" for quotes written by "right-wing nutjobs." This makes it even clearer that they are biased towards the left.
18. They like to present readers with crudely-made conclusions instead of letting the evidence speak for itself. This is more of an act of insecurity as they fear that people will not see things the way they do and expect every argument they make to be taken seriously.
19. Many of its members act toxically and intolerantly towards anyone who so much as disagrees with them.
Although they claim to have Christian users, hardly anyone ever comments on quotes to offer a Christian perspective nowadays.
20. They are extremely pro-social justice: they are primarily interested in attempting to correct people and being right, aggressively attacking all who disagree. They claim that this is for their own self-amusement when they write like they would establish dictatorial control over what people say on the Internet if they could, believing that what they do to their targets is somehow "needed". They admit that the only reason they support free speech is so they can have something to attack!
21. It underwent a major revamp in 2019, but its basic, blocky, blandly-colored aesthetics without any modern graphics or features make it look like it's from the late 1990s-early 2000s era.
22. That said, it suffers from a poor Website design overall because it lacks many features and technical conveniences that would be normally present on a message board. For example:
- There is no menu to select how many quotes/comments can be viewed per page, including in search results.
- Search engine filters/results sorters are not always as accurate as they could be.
- The search engine only works with finding quotes, not comments; nor does it list the number of results per search query.
- Sometimes, the last page of a search results list, for whatever reason, turns up completely blank.
- There is no option to report comments (probably intentional, given how the site encourages people to be mean-spirited).
- User pages are nothing more than lists of quotes users have found and comments they've made (probably to preserve their anonymity).
23. Its painfully unprofessional and outright immature logo features a "sexy flying Jesus penis," a crudely-photoshopped devil version of pop singer/songwriter Taylor Swift practicing martial arts, devils in flying saucers, a reptilian alien-type creature with devil horns, a NyQuil bottle with devil horns surrounded by fire, and what appears to be a Biblical leviathan in a bathtub (in reference to one of their more popular and infamous quotes from 2009) eating fast food from McDonald's.
24. If anyone dares to object to the 2020 Coronavirus quarantine or criticizes how governments handle it or how the media misrepresents data and statistics surrounding it, FSTDT will surely go on a witch hunt after them.
25. They do not take responsibility for their actions: they blame others for getting themselves quoted by FSTDT, even if they realize that they have the power and the choice not to quote people they don't like and not to let silly things people write online offend them so much. Moreover, no self-respecting FSTDT user will ever admit to SJW-type behavior.
Likewise, in their FAQ section under "But You're Defaming Me!" they try to rationalize their efforts to defame people by arguing that their targets are sabotaging themselves, not considering the possibility that the quotes they find might have different intended meanings than what they read.
26. When people on other Websites criticize or counter-mock them, they do not usually take the criticism or counter-mockery well.

[Submitter’s note: yes, they finally did it. Fundies are now attacking The Handmaiden’s Tale for muh persecution. Be a Christian in Saudi Arabia, funded by Christian Nation America, and then complain]

The Handmaid's Tale' is ugly and anti-Christian. We have a better story to tell

The Handmaid's Tale is a superbly filmed and acted version of Margaret Attwood's 1985 novel and has won five Emmys – including Elizabeth Moss in the lead role deservedly winning best actor. The liberal metro-elites love it because it portrays their nightmare – a United States run by religious fundamentalists, in which women are oppressed and treated as a subservient class.

The Handmaid's Tale portrays an America called Gilead, in which gay men are hanged, abortion is banned and birth control pills are not allowed. Most women have become infertile and so those young women who are fertile are taken as 'handmaids' to be impregnated by the 'commanders'. Although it's a dystopia, at least the Greens should be happy as the USA finally gets on board and reduces carbon emissions by 70 per cent. And there also appears to be racial equality – at least in the TV series. In the book African Americans are removed to national homelands but in the TV series they have an equal role with the whites – I suspect somewhat cynically that this is because an all-white cast would not have gone down well.

The 'baddies' are portrayed in very religious terms. The female leaders who control the handmaids have 'Irish nun' accents, solemnly intoning that 'fertility is a gift from God' – as the girls are prepared to be raped. The handmaids dress in a nun/puritan style. In one strong scene the handmaids are encouraged to take part in a stoning by the chief 'nun' who tells them that 'God's love gives us blessings and gives us challenges' – the challenge in this case being to stone to death one of their sisters. It gives a whole new meaning to the tough love scenario.

The numerous Bible quotes, biblical language and names are set up to portray a scenario where right-wing religious fundamentalists have taken over the USA...watch out, the evangelicals are coming to get you!

The hypocrisy is brilliantly portrayed. The music from Onward Christian Soldiers is played as the master reads from the Bible and then has sex with the 'handmaid', while his wife is present observing the grotesquely unerotic scene.

The Handmaid's Tale is as much a liberal fantasy as The West Wing was. Moss, incidentally, portrayed President Bartlett's daughter Zoey in that series. The West Wing portrayed a President and presidential team that came as near to heaven on earth as most can imagine. The Handmaid's Tale, on the other hand, is its hellish polar opposite.

So let's return to reality. There are countries where religious fundamentalists are stoning people to death. But none of them are ones where Christians have taken control. Of course you could not have a major network portraying a dystopian future where America has become an Islamic republic. That would be Islamophobic! But Christian fundamentalists are fair game – Christophobic isn't really a term that has caught on yet.

And there are religious cults that do a great deal of harm – including some that profess to be Christian. In an irony that seems to have escaped the maker's notice, Elizabeth Moss, the star of the show, is a committed member of the Church of Scientology – one of the most cultish and harmful religious groups in the Western world. But again of course, Hollywood would not make a series about the evils of Scientology – there are too many well-known celebrities involved and anyway they would be sued.

Neither is this a film series about Trump's America, any more than the book was a commentary on Reagan's America. Ironically, Trump's misogyny, sexism, bad language, sexual immorality, dodgy business practice and opulent lifestyle has more in common with Harvey Weinstein than it does with Billy Graham. The abuse of women that this fantasy series portrays is seen today as much in the increasing number of Hollywood producers and powerbrokers who, after the Weinstein exposé, have themselves been accused, as it is in the religious authority figures who have been found out. The hypocrisy of conservative fundamentalists preaching religious morality while engaging in sexual immorality is matched only by the hypocrisy of liberal fundamentalists preaching woman's rights while engaging in sexual abuse.
The Handmaid's Tale is an ugly series – its sexual explicitness and violence mean that it is out of bounds for anyone with any degree of sensitivity. Unlike The West Wing, which I am now watching for the fourth time, I won't be going near this one again – not just for the ugliness of its sexual violence but also because of the bigotry and anti-Christian hate speech. It is the kind of programme made about Christians that antisemites would make about Jews. It demonises 'the other'. Despite the constant citation of Scripture, the portrayal of Christianity in the drama is the antithesis of what real Christianity is. Real Christianity is not religious hypocrites enforcing their perverted teachings through the barrel of a gun.

Some people say, 'It's only a drama – who cares?' I care. There are those who know nothing about Christianity who when they see this programme will think that this is what it is about. The producers even managed to have a comment at the end: 'If you have been affected by the issues in this programme, call...' as though being part of a religious country run by Christian fundamentalists is a common or likely occurrence.

The Handmaid's Tale is part of a general cultural shift in which Bible-believing Christians are the bogeymen of contemporary society. While in the West we are nowhere near the level of persecution that Christians in many countries face, I'm still not a big fan of encouraging people to hate us on the basis of a distorted and perverse view of the Christian faith.

The way for us to challenge and handle this kind of post-truth alternative-fact fantasy is not to complain, whine and curl up in our Christian snowflake ball. Let's get out there in the real world and be its salt and light – sharing the truth, beauty, love and freedom of Christ. It's not the fear-mongering of The Handmaid's Tale that our world needs, but the Good News of Jesus Christ.