What is the purpose of this site?

This is a massive Internet archive containing selected excerpts of many hilarious, ignorant, bigoted, bizarre, and terrifying posts written by fundies on online message boards.

What exactly is a fundie?

It’s a bit of a “know it when you see it” thing, but the basic rules are: willfully ignorant, closed-minded, and obsessed. The term is borrowed from religion, since religion is where we started, but you don’t necessarily need to be religious in the usual sense to count. This site regularly features communists, sexists, conspiracy theorists, and peddlers of things like homeopathy.

It is also possible to be religious, or even fundamentalist, without being willfully ignorant, closed-minded, and obsessed.

Why so many Christian quotes? Why don’t you feature more Islamic, Buddhist, or other fundies?

Because they don’t publish their stuff in English. When they occasionally do, we happily quote them. Because Christianity is the largest religion amoung Americans and Europeans, and most native English speakers are Christian, members of other religions are more open minded, if only by necessity (at least, that’s my theory).

People don’t actually believe this stuff, do they?

Having dealt with a good number of these folks, yes, they do. That said they aren’t representative of everyone who shares their beliefs, they're just the worst case senario of those beliefs. Many religious, cultural or even economic ideals if taken too literally have the ability to separate people from reality. If you don’t believe me, I can personally toss you a few references to people who regularly defend statements along the same lines as the quotes we display here.

Furthermore, while some of the people quoted on this site probably don’t believe what they’re saying, that’s because they’re lying, not joking. A publisher that puts a “this isn’t real” disclaimer in the fine print at the bottom of the page along with the copyright notice and warranty disclaimer deserves all the contempt they get. Like fundieism itself, it’s a fine line between a parody of extremism and a deceptive fraud that markets themselves to extremists. As a rule, if someone shoots up a restaurant, it’s not a joke.

Distind? WinAce? Pyro? Shy? Who are you people?

Let’s go in order answering this:

• WinAce is the original creator of FSTDT (originally Christians Says the Darndest things, quickly altered to its current form). However WinAce passed away from Cystic Fibrosis in 2005.
• Yahweh picked up the site after that, creating the first automated archive while teaching himself the technologies involved. Today's FSTDT.com archive can directly trace its lineage to Yahweh’s (the earliest quote is from 2002). Due to the nature of programs written while teaching yourself programing technologies, the site was completely re-written four times, and still had enough issues to cause Yahweh unending grief. Eventually Yahweh decided to throw in the towel of administrating and writing the site due to the sheer pain it was.
• Distind took over the site around 2009. Having a few years of asp.net web development under his belt, he has been able to ressurect a good deal of the functionality of the old site with considerably fewer bugs. It's still a bit of a beast to handle, but a good team of moderators helps with that.
• Shy took the site from Distind around 2016. Shy is still actively participating.
• In response to burnout and manic depression, Shy recruited Pyro to work as web-master in 2019. Pyro rewrote it from ASP.NET to Rocket.rs and moved it off of the previous legacy, poorly-supported hosting plan onto Digibase in Canada. Along with a crack team of moderators, including Shy, the site maintains comment and post continuity going back to Yahweh's site.

But you're defaming me!

Unless the quote is completely without context, or deliberately fake, no we aren’t. Quoting something you said, or were stupid enough to say, is not defamation. If you don’t believe me when I say this ask Stephen Choate, he and I went through this whole thing a while back. Every time it comes up I consider making a ‘wall of idiotic legal challenges’ which still technically would not be defamation as the legal challenges I have received were all quite idiotic.

I was just joking! I don’t actually believe what you quoted me on.

This happens, but to keep the system from being abused the admin handles all of these requests personally.

I love the site, but why don’t you have any specific pages for racism or sexism?

Well, technically we do. On the front page, there’s a link called “All tags.” This lets you see the current list of quotes for each category. Views other than the hotness algorithm, like a top-racist page or a latest-sexist page, don’t exist yet, but they are on the feature backlog.

Why should I register?

Registration is being opened up to help deal with some old problems on the site, nick theft, limited navigation, spam, overloaded moderators, and a distinct lack of recognition for people who have given quite a bit to the site.

Before the plans for accounts are detailed I will get this out of the way: It is not now, nor will it ever be, required for submitting quotes. Registering an account does give you several perks, though.

Each user has a “trust level” associated with them. This value starts at 0, which means that all quotes and all comments will need to be approved by a moderator. A user who gets their content approved, and has an account for more than a day, will automatically go up to 1, which allows commenting and posting to go through without manual approval. Anonymous quotes are always manually approved.

There are plans for trust level 2, which will unlock private messaging. It will always be possible to turn private messaging off, though, for users who want to avoid being bothered. Trust level 2 will be automatically granted, but higher trust levels will always be manual.

Registering an account does not require you to provide an email address. Email will never be a requirement, since it has not proven to be an effective anti-spam measure anway, and I want to avoid placing undue burden on people who want to participate, but it may some day provide optional email-based features (like Reddit does).

I need to contact the admin

To make it easy admin@fstdt.net is the offical admin address.