Poe's Law

Before I get into this, let me place a disclaimer...

This post contains links to other sites on the Internet which are not safe for viewing at work. They are also not pornographic in the strictest sense, but I wouldn't click anything here with young'uns around.

Now that I got that out of the way, let's get away from the Bible for a bit and talk about Poe's Law (and that particular link should be safe for pretty much anybody). Poe's Law says that

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.

Worded inversely,

Real fundamentalism is often indistinguishable from parodies of fundamentalism.

The idea is that some forms of fundamentalism are so extreme and so absurd that they appear to be only parodies, and the real parodies become indistinguishable from the real thing. As an example, I propose this image:

The image is funny. A grumpy atheist represented as a goat (a symbol of a demonic nature in Christianity) is described as "always sad" (I'm an atheist, and I'm rarely sad), and kids who spot an atheist should immediately report it to a holy person with great urgency while avoiding communication with the atheist. "Very advanced witnessing techniques are needed for these grouches." It could easily be a way to keep rationality out of children's heads until the fundies have them fully brainwashed. Or it could be a big joke put on by someone who likes to make fun of fundies.

Another example, the very unsafe-for-kids Sex In Christ, promotes anal sex, oral sex, and fisting as alternatives to other, pregnancy-prone sex acts, and claims that the Bible approves of them using quotes from scripture. Is this real or a joke? It's impossible to tell.

Anti-Spore is a website that was set up to protest EA's game Spore, which is a game built around natural selection and the evolution of creatures. The author of Anti-Spore later came out and admitted he had been fraudulently posing as a far-right Christian creationist as a joke, but even after that public admission, people still fell for it. Or maybe they didn't, and only continued sending him hate mail for the same reason he started the site in the first place. Poe's Law in action.