"Creationist Site" Says: "Mac Users, You Are Godless Communists!"

by , 10:00 AM EDT, April 22nd, 2002

Repent, sinners. Your Macintosh is a tool to promote Godless Communism and anti-Creationist "propaganda", according to an article at OBJECTIVE: Christian Ministries. Dr. Richard Paley, apparently "a teacher of Divinity and Theobiology at Fellowship University," starts out with discussions of the PBS series Evolution and Pokemon, and goes on to say:

However, these propagandists aren't just targeting the young. Take for example Apple Computers, makers of the popular Macintosh line of computers. The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, "lickable" buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.

Later additions to this article say:

It has been brought to my attention that the Darwin OS mentioned above now has a cartoon mascot (no doubt to influence children) named Hexley (pictured above) -- a platypus dressed as a devil who performs occult magic, i.e. hexes. They're not doing a very good job keeping their ties to the forces of darkness a secret, are they?

(snip)

More clues have come in showing the dark nature of Apple Computers. According to one of our readers, the new MacOS X contains another Satanic holdover from the "BSD Unix" OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: "chmod 666". What other horrors lurk in this thing?

Check out the full article for yourself.

[Editor's Note: The article and the Web site hosting the article were both inaccessible as of 12:46 PM CST to TMO staff (Observer Whit noted that the site was down as of 12:30 PM CST). Other Observers report being able to pull up the site, but that it is very slow.]

The Mac Observer Spin:

Ruh-oh, Shaggy! Some fundamentalist Christian somewhere would have us believe that Godless commies with a 5% market share are obviously eeeeevil, and Steve Jobs is a cult leader bent on destroying good Christian values in Mac users!! Those idiots! Right? Right?

Er, wrong. While many people over the Web who have linked to this 'article' seem convinced that there's a genuine motive behind this, it looks like a hoax. Despite the convincing use of a real Christian free Web hosting service and genuine Christian popup ads, the giveaways are to be found elsewhere on the site:

• There are some poorly Photoshopped images of rallies,
• No such Baptist church as "Mt. Fellowship" appears to exist,
• The fact that many members have e-mail addresses with nonexistent domain names,
• Also, all the "Dr. Richard Paleys" of the world appear to be in fields other than divinity and 'theobiology'.

Sorry, guys; put away the flamethrowers. It's an amusing parody, though, and well worth a read.

OBJECTIVE: Christian Ministries - 'Evolution Propaganda'