Christianity: The Ultimate Phishing Scam
Fear is a powerful thing. It is a tactic that scammers use when trying to phish for personal information as well as what is being used to suppress rationality in Christian churches.
Criminals looking for unsuspecting victim’s personal information send an official-looking email that looks like it is from PayPal or your bank. In the email it states that your account will be closed unless you quickly respond. Determined to save their account from deletion and rescue their 200 bucks that they have in the account, the victim of the scheme will click their provided link (that looks almost real) and show up at a page that looks exactly like the website that they know must be PayPal’s or bank’s home page. They eagerly type in their account information and as the verification screen pops up saying that the issues have now been resolved, all of their fear and urgency rushes from them and they forget about the entire incident after a good night’s rest. They can now relax every night knowing that hackers did not compromise their account because they went to the website and entered their information and confirmed that they are the owner of the account. Rest easy. Rest easy… until your bill comes in. Christianity is a lot like that. Why? I’ll explain.
Just like the phishing ploy I just described, Christian theology has a similar agenda. The bible illustrates this well by depicting a conscious choice that you have to make: You believe or you go to hell.
Mark 16:16
He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.
Notice the way the sentence is constructed as to not scare off those who may be slightly interested but at the same time ominously threaten that person with damnation. Followers of the faith do this a lot. A whole lot. In fact, that’s the main argument that I’ve had to confront. “What if you’re wrong?” That sounds so incredibly innocent, but there’s an unsaid premise that goes something like this: “What if you’re wrong and you’re going to burn in hell forever because of it?” That’s so nice and caring. Thank you for threatening me with your superstitious bullshit!!
Now, I’ll try to draw a bolder line toward my analogy. With this threat that’s been repeated over and over again it is only logical to avoid conflict and avoid any pain and suffering that you may or may not go through. This is completely similar to the phishing attempt. You are threatened and forced to take action to preserve your PayPal account and in that moment of desperation and concern you are fooled into giving people who have no objective evidence that they are who they say they are. I’m saddened to say that Christianity is very similar. We have authority figures that are established in ‘the’ church. We have the pope, pasters, preacherers, bishops, secret levels of authority (Scientology), et cetera that claim to have more of an audience with God or more power in different ways. When someone of that authority claims that you are going to be subjected to something bad your first, rational reaction is to protect yourself from encountering harm. I say rational not to downplay rationality but to stress that our human rationality is compromised when threatened by a strong force. In this sense of (what is apparent to others as irrationality) you reason yourself to accepting the Christian belief system not because you believe it is the true word and inspiration of a god but because you understand that an authority figure knows that you need to do this to avoid hell.
As for why Christians (among other religions followers) continue to follow this system of belief is far more complicated and involves guilt, shame and (again) fear. I won’t continue to go into that today but it may be a good idea for another post.
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2 Responses to “Christianity: The Ultimate Phishing Scam”
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Bud Fox on
June 3rd, 2008 7:48 pm
Nope - you are way off with that.. Wrong on too many levels to count.. -
Kevin on
June 3rd, 2008 8:04 pm
@Bud Fox: Please present something that you disagree with. I really want to start a discussion here…
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