Religious Urban Legends
If you’re a big fan of Snopes.com, you should definitely check out the urban legends pages at ReligiousTolerance.org. This one is one of my favorites :
The hell hole: The story seems to have been broadcast on three episodes of a Trinity Broadcasting Network program in the early 1990s. Trinity also published an article on their Internet mailing list. It was allegedly translated from the original Finnish newspaper Ammennusastia. The story involves a team of geologists in Siberia who were drilling a well 14.4 kilometers (9 miles) into the earth to study the makeup of the earth’s crust. They lowered microphones into the hole and were stunned to hear the screams of people suffering in horrible agony. They could only assume that they had reached Hell and were listening to the suffering of countless billions of people being tortured without any hope of relief or mercy. Project leader Dr. Azzacov allegedly said: "The deep center of the earth is hollow!… Temperatures of 1,100 degrees C (2,000 degrees F) were reported…we could hear thousands, perhaps millions, in the background, of suffering souls screaming." The information we are gathering is so surprising, that we are sincerely afraid of what we might find down there." Half of the scientists allegedly refused to continue drilling. A newspaper article in Finland added more details: A luminous gas shot up from the drill hole. A brilliant being with bat wings then coalesced, with the words in Russian: "I have conquered" visible against the sky. The Ship of Fools website personnel traced the story back through a series of letters to editors and various Christian newsletters. The originator of the "bat out of hell" addition admitted that it was a fabrication, intended as a joke to prove how some religious folk will accept a totally outrageous story without checking it out. The Biblical Archeology Review printed a story about the Well to Hell story, intending it to be humorous. They figured that the story was so outrageous that nobody would treat it seriously. But many of their readers did. Of course, there was no deep well to Hell, and no sounds of the damned. However, you can hear an online recording that is claimed to contain the screams of the inhabitants of Hell.
I’m sure all the “journalists” at TBN were quick to issue corrections on that one.
There are quite a few other religious urban legends from Darwin’s deathbed confession, to Satanic human sacrifices, to Noah’s ark. Another good one is the “Proctor & Gamble are Satanists” myth, which becomes especially funny when you compare the P&G logos here and here to the one on this hysterical flyer. Oddly enough, I didn’t see anything on the site about the “she said ‘Yes’” girl at Columbine or the endless stream of rumors that “Liberals want to ban the Bible”. Then again, trying to keep track of all this shit must be a full time job.
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My favorite is the one about how God came to the Middle East around 2,000 years ago in human form and offered himself up to be tortured and killed so that he could forgive people for acting the way he created them to act. It seems people who believe this think that he can hear them when they talk out loud to the empty air, and they also think that simply for believing this story, their personalities will exist forever in translucent mist form in an invisible place where they will know endless joy.
Crazy, man…
Comment by Hypatia's Revenge — January 25, 2005 @ 3:14 pm
“She Said Yes” being the title of a book about said girl, yes? We used to sell that at Novel Idea.
Comment by Joe — January 25, 2005 @ 7:18 pm
…the Hysterical Flyer reminds me of the kind of thing the original Cacophony Society (San Francisco) was up to about ten years ago.
One flyer posted around the City offered a reward for the capture of a (fictitious) twelve-foot python, allegedly loose in Golden Gate Park. (That actually garnered ten-second, end-of-broadcast mention from whatever ABC haircut was anchoring the nightly news.)
The best bit was a planned protest of a film being shown at the Castro Theatre — the The Wizard Of Oz. The (fictitious) protest group sent letters to the editor of the Chronicle and Examiner stating the film was an explotitation of Little People (or, dwarves), and threatened to shut the film down with loud and angry protests at its opening. Flyers and posters went up around town stating a date and time for the protest at the theatre.
The theatre’s management, the City, and the SFPD took it all seriously, and when absolutely not one living soul turned up at the stated time for the protest… well, we laughed a whole lot… and the movie was, as usual fun. Especially the Lollipop Guild guys.
I stand in favor of mindfucking the christoids whenever possible. It’s lots of fun to taunt Robots. Unlike Happy Fun Ball, when they don’t know whom to retaliate against, they tend to implode.
Comment by Tom S — January 25, 2005 @ 11:56 pm
That story about Cassie Bernall being misattributed as the “Yes” girl at Columbine never even made it to snopes.com. Even they chickened out; they only posted a tiny, offhanded blurb about it here in a legend about something else Columbine-related, years after the Salon broke the story. To be fair, snopes has a link to Salon’s article, though I don’t remember seeing that link when I first read that snopes page, but I could be mistaken. Anyway, it doesn’t surprise me that rt.org didn’t put anything up there about it either. Guess no one wants to touch it with a 20-foot pole.
Comment by jennhi — January 26, 2005 @ 3:00 pm
So, good old Ammennusastia (the word means, literally, a bucket for scooping or a container to scoop out of, but the idea is of a source to draw from)legend is still going strong! The “respected newspaper” was in fact a kind of propaganda tract published by a religious fringe group called Jengi- ja katul?hetys (roughly, Street Gang Missionaries, or literally Gang and Street Mission), probably somehow affiliated with the organisational empire of Leo Meller, who used to be the nearest Finnish equivalent to an American televangelist. (I don’t know if he is still around. He must be an old man by now.) The oldest appearance of the legend has been traced back to 1989, but I seem to remember it from my high school years, i.e., the first half of the eighties. However, by all accounts it appeared first in the publications of Jengi- ja Katul?hetys.
Anyway, the way how Ammennusastia is described as a “respected newspaper” is amusing to the extreme. For us, Ammennusastia and Street Gang Mission are exemplary of what is in Finland commonly called the Fifth Revival, or Fifthism, i.e. religious revivalism not related to our indigenous revival movements (which happen to be four in number, and rather tame and maistream by now), but inspired by American religious obscurantism and perceived largely as foreign and extremist. Typical of Ammennusastia and other publications of Street Gang Mission was their usage of English-laden street slang, which was hyped, unnatural and stilted enough to alienate the target group entirely – even those “street gangs”, which may be in evidence today, but were almost non-existent back then, do not speak such an atrocious lingo. A gem I still remember is “gam?un beibi, Jeesus diggaa sua jo t?n??n” (“c’mon baby, Jesus digs you even now”). Especially that rendering of “c’mon” into Finnish – “gam?un” – is rather endearing. (I guess “kamaan” would be more to the point.)
Comment by Panu from Finland — January 27, 2005 @ 1:37 am
I hope I may be excused to add that now that I reminisce, I remember Street Gang Mission was indeed affiliated with our established church – it was not part of Meller’s Nonconformist scene. My sister, who used to be active in the mainstream church, was in those days quite upset by the fact that such an obviously Nonconformist outfit should have sneaked in.
Comment by Panu — January 27, 2005 @ 2:03 am
Yow. I totally support Timid and Mainstream when it comes to religions, possibly as a backlash against the advent of christoid robotisim in the United States.
A friend of mine with some Finnish roots went there decades ago, liked it, stayed, married a nice Finnish girl, etc. He’s always spoken well of Finland; and even Monty Python has a song on one of their albums about it. I was wavering on approval for Finland for a while there, but the MP tune and your description of Fifthisim pushed me over the edge. All For Finland!
Comment by Tom S — January 27, 2005 @ 6:32 pm