This is a parody.

UPDATE: Ah, crap. We totally got fooled. It’s a parody.

And, damn, is it good. The makers of Landover Baptist, a more obvious parody site, created it as an attack on Landover Baptist.

The “Alert” on the site was so in line with the tone and intelligence of the real attacks we get, we just swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.

Still, there really isn’t any excuse. We hang our heads in shame.

Chalk up one casualty for us in the War on Easter. From friendly fire, too.

War is hell.

OUR SHAMEFUL ORIGINAL POST:

If we’d written the following reaction as a parody, it would likely have been criticized as too over-the-top. But here you have it: According to Objective Ministries, pamphleteering is the same thing as biological terrorism.

This would be funny if not for the acts their paranoia may lead their followers to take. It’s obvious that the ministry is opposed to freedom of expression. (Literally–they believe “The Internet was created by the United States of America - a Christian nation” and should only allow pro-Christian speech.) But now they want their followers to abuse a law-enforcement agency to get back at us.

From their alert about us (emphasis added):

The “War on Easter” campaign, designed to terrorize churches across our nation, is part of a larger war on Christians being waged by the leftist forces of Secularism. The group responsible has a website where they issue marching orders, distribute their hate propaganda, and sinisterly post pictures of churches they have attacked.

They call on members of Atheist sleeper-cells in our communities to sneak onto church property and place anti-Christian fliers — most disturbingly, ones targeting children — and copies of a low-budget film entitled Your God Wasn’t There, which claims that Jesus has abandoned America. As proof of their anti-Christian motives, they are calling for “666″ of the DVDs to be hidden around churches in time for family Easter-egg hunt activities.

This growing war on Christians has hit home for us as we learned of it this morning when one of their crude fliers was found taped to the front door of Mt. Fellowship Church. Later, our grounds keeper found one of their DVDs hidden in a bush in the church rose garden, where we will be holding our Easter-egg hunt this Sunday. It had a note attached reading “You found the lucky egg”, proving that it was meant for one of our children.

(The culprit is still at large. However, we are conducting a thorough sweep of the garden to make sure no other items were planted and that the area is safe for children. Rest assured that come Sunday, Lambuel’s Easterday Eggstravaganza will not be interrupted by terrorists.)

If your church is targeted, we urge you to take the matter seriously and report the incident to the Department of Homeland Security. While the fliers and poorly produced DVDs may seem like some juvenile prank pulled by Secularized teens, the people doing these acts of domestic terrorism are part of an axis of anti-Christianity that is aligned with bioterrorists who seek to wipe out 90% of humanity with ebola virus. We cannot stress strongly enough that you should not open any of the DVD cases as it is unknown what sort of agents or improvised devices might be inside.

And we cannot stress strongly enough that the Department of Homeland Security has really important things to do, and it doesn’t help the security of the United States to harass this agency with false reports. The irresponsibility of Objective Ministries here is really quite stunning. They don’t like our message, so they are encouraging their website readers falsely to believe that our pamphlets are literally poisonous–and trying to marshall against us the resources of a vital government agency.

Er, could you have made our point about the dangers of religious belief any better, Objective Ministries?

An irony here is that Objective Ministries does what we do–they take their message where it’s likely to encounter contrary messages. See “How To Be A Mall Missionary” here. The key difference? We don’t make up scary stories about their activities and try to sic law enforcement on them. And we never will.

Another irony: Some people, including the non-religious, will probably blame us for the bizarre reaction here. The subtext being: “Yes, we know Christian claims are absolutely crazy. But did you have to go and point it out to them?”

(It goes without saying, but here’s a message for any Objective Ministries readers who are listening: No pamphlet-distributor with this effort has ever put anything physically harmful in any of our literature. That is entirely a product of Objective Ministries’ imagination. Please contact Objective Ministries leader Dr. Andrew Miller and demand that he produce evidence for his website’s alarming claims about biological agents. If he cannot produce evidence, please let him know what you think of his dishonest and irresponsible behavior, and ask him to stop it.)