Troll On- God, Natural Disasters, and the Powers of the Internets

A version of this article appeared on Splice Today in March.

She recorded and posted the video quickly and impulsively—from concept to upload, the process took less than 20 minutes. Her eyes are gleaming and her face beams happiness and smug satisfaction. “God is such an amazing God,” she tells us, peering through the screen and into our eyes, so close to the lens that her face distorts. “On Wednesday, at the start of Lent, believers all over the world came together, and we have been praying specifically for God to open the eyes of atheists all over the world.” And, she tells us with excitement and pride, “Just a few days later, God shook the country of Japan. He literally grabbed the country by the shoulders and said, ‘Look! I’m here!’” TamTamPamela is overjoyed by the quick and emphatic response of her deity to her prayers, and encourages her audience to redouble their efforts. “Just imagine what will happen at the end of the 40 days!” she says with a beatific smile.

The video went live the morning of March 14, and began spreading almost immediately, thanks initially to a link on Ignorant and Online, a Tumblr account dedicated to “exposing the worst […] online comments, Facebook posts and internet posts. What was once anonymous is now revealed.” Started only two days before, Ignorant and Online had so far almost exclusively displayed screen caps of status updates of Facebook users linking the Japanese disaster to Pearl Harbor, or other off-color remarks related to the crisis. Perhaps it was her invocation of God, or the nature of video itself, but for whatever reason, this clip carried more weight. Within hours it was everywhere, and atheists and Christians alike seemed none too happy with the contents of the video.

That night I watched her YouTube channel with amusement, and then alarm, as thousands of comments flowed in, ranging from cries of “troll,” to threats of death, rape and pizza delivery. The alarm came when addresses, full names and phone numbers began appearing as well, first for a woman in Florida and then for another name in California. A sample of the comments:

b17ches like you makes me literally wanna start a crusade. mark my words that you’ll die a horrible horrible death.. — buyungwidhi

how about I fuck-start your face you stupid cunt.— heavysweater

Lady, if I held your head under the water for 17 minutes, I would quickly show that he either: A – Hates you B – Doesn’t exist— Notjustbonez

can anybody tell me who this girl is? name or location can help cause i can just look her up. Ill give her a religious wake up call myself and shoot this bitch.. private messg me any info on her. first person to do it ill give 1K. thanks— vietnameseJKT

you need to get raped — abaebae1

Yout such a dumbshit. fuck you get a fuckming life. i pray u fucking die u dumb bitch. i beleive that oh my god i cant begin how to think how much pain people will cause for u. your so fucking dumb. do understand anything? go die u fucking cunt. id llove to see u die. go to hell. do you not understand people are dieing. LETS ALL PRAY THAT YOU DIE! be encourage that god will crush you. Ill be overjoyed when you die — djmattzz1

Japan will come get u for this. — nova123

And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. TamTamPamela posted one last brief video, “Coming Clean,” in which she stated that she’s been “making troll videos for a while,” but that at this point she’s “kind of tired of pizza,” and so she’s calling it quits. Her account, along with all of her videos, disappeared shortly after.

Although deleting the account put out most of the fires, death threats and links to both somewhat correct and completely incorrect personal information continued to promulgate for days after the video. Surveying the wreckage, at the virulence of the reaction to her video, I tracked down the real person behind the character of TamTamPamela to find out, in her own words, what it’s like to be hated by a million people. What are the consequences of having your address and phone number, the names of your family members, even photos of your house linked to on dozens of web sites containing death threats on your life?

“Nothing,” she said over the phone, five days after having posted the most disliked video in YouTube history.

Really? Nothing?

“Nothing in real life,” she said, except that, “Tuesday morning a pizza was delivered to my house.”

Has anyone recognized her?

“If they did, they didn’t come up to me and say anything.”

A college student named Tam is the real-life person behind TamTamPamela, her self-described “character” that she played for more than a year on YouTube and on various religious message boards, both real and satirical. She was surprised by the reaction to her video, given that up until that point her videos had hovered around 10,000 views only. She ultimately outed herself, she says, because of the inaccurate private information being spread about the woman in Florida. “It wasn’t until late Monday night that my boyfriend told me that people were posting another woman’s information all over the Internet, saying the other woman was me,” she said. “And that was when I got worried. I started thinking that people were going to take this way too far.” Once she had outed herself, she said, there would be no point to maintaining the videos—the satire would be ineffective—and so she closed the channel.

I watched the year’s worth of videos before their deletion, and seeing them chronologically, one can see the rapid development of the craft of satire. The early videos are rambling, meandering, rarely getting to their central topics right from the start but instead approaching the arguments as part of a larger fabric of personal history. As they progress Tam warms to her character, and the videos have a lot more direction, arriving at the theme early and spending the bulk of the time developing the concept. One video discusses the season of Lent, and how it is the will of the Holy Spirit for TamTamPamela and her dog, Rambo, to fast together for the entirety of the 40-day period. In another video TamTamPamela has been visited by an angel who told her that she “must pass on this message to the sinful people of Massachusetts. If you don’t vote for Scott Brown today, God will be very angry. The wrath he poured out on Haiti, the wrath he has poured out over the world in small doses—let those be an example to you. Don’t give God a reason to be angry. Vote for Scott Brown.” In a more vulnerable moment, TamTamPamela reaches out to her YouTube audience and asks them for advice about how to resolve her impasse—the Bible instructs her to obey her husband in all things, but her fiancé doesn’t want her posting any more videos. She knows the Holy Spirit has instructed her to continue her evangelization. What’s a good Christian girl to do?

But something was different about the Japan video. Part of the reaction was undoubtedly due to its proximity to the crisis itself, but some of the extremity could come from the craft and the delivery of the satire. Almost all of the previous videos have slight tells to clue their audience into the intent. “I always had the same people watching and the same people commenting,” Tam said. “There were two groups—the one group that would watch it and argue amongst themselves whether I was being serious, and there was the other group who knew my intention was to bring attention to the subject of the video.” The difficulty of determining the authenticity of statements of a religious fundamentalist nature is a well-observed phenomenon—called Poe’s Law, named after and coined by Nathan Poe: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”

In fact, if there is a “tell” in TamTamPamela’s penultimate video, it’s that most fundamentalists aren’t as direct in general conversation about these kind of feelings, and certainly not on video. That doesn’t mean that those thoughts still aren’t there or expressed. The earthquake connection readily brings to mind Pat Robertson. In 2010, shortly after the devastating earthquake in Port Au Prince, Haiti, Robertson had this to say on his show, 700 Club:

… something happened a long time ago in Haiti—people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon III or whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you free us from the Prince.’ True story! And the Devil said, ‘Okay, It’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out, the Haitians. But ever since that they’ve been cursed by one thing after another. They’ve been desperately poor…. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God, and out of this tragedy I’m optimistic that something good may come.

It’s a spectacular bit of reasoning, tying the woes of a stricken nation to the perceived Godliness of its people. And, for a Bible literalist, it’s a perfectly reasonable position as well. If one believes that God has agency in the world, that He in fact has opinions about the conduct of the human beings he has created and rewards them and punishes them in turn, it’s natural to assume that such a devastating event is in fact the will of that deity. This assumption is made explicit throughout the Bible, as God selectively destroys individuals, cities, kingdoms, and at least once, the entire world. In fact, the Bible instructs those faithful to God to carry out the work of eliminating unbelievers for him:

If you shall hear say in one of your cities, which the LORD your God has given you to dwell there, saying, Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which you have not known; Then shall you inquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is worked among you; You shall surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword. And you shall gather all the spoil of it into the middle of the street thereof, and shall burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the LORD your God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.

— Deuteronomy 13:12-16, American King James version

Did Tam approach her videos from an atheistic perspective? Like much good satire, it’s hard to pin the perspective down completely, but Tam sees herself as religious. Yet, “I really don’t like calling myself a Christian, because these people who are the face of Christianity have painted Christianity in such a terrible light.” From her perspective, the satire is directed at “the Christians who really don’t care what’s going on around them, and the kind of people who are representing them. Most Christians would never blame these natural disasters on God. But these same Christians let these crazy wackos lead them and let them be the face of Christianity. I kept posting the videos because I wanted to bring to light that if we actually followed these leaders, this is what we would be saying.”

Her faith did not seem to change the digital wrath directed at her, wrath similar in tone to the wrath God has instructed his people to visit upon the unbelievers. Reading the words directed at her, it’s hard not to see the reaction as the wrath of the righteous. And yet, in this world of screens and distance, of pulsing light and little physical proximity, what does the righteous indignation of a million people mean? Thousands of threats of death and rape. Your name and address and phone number. A single pizza, turned away at the door.

Tam is guilty of poor taste—she is guilty of indiscretion, and of tremendously bad timing. But mostly, she’s guilty of not winking at the camera often enough, and not couching her character’s speech in the language of diplomacy.

Professional provocateurs, meanwhile, have the line down perfectly, and know how to use indignation and outrage to gain audience and advantage. The same day that TamTamPamela’s love letter to God spread across the Internet, Glenn Beck shared his thoughts about the crisis with his radio audience of millions.

I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes … Well, I’m not not saying that either. [Laughing.] What God does is God’s business. I have no idea. But I’ll tell you this—whether you call it Gaia or you call it Jesus, there’s a? message being sent. And that is, ‘Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it. [More laughing.]

Negative reaction to Beck’s calculated raving was mostly of the “what type of God would kill thousands of innocent people to punish them?” variety of indignation. Well, if you are a Christian or Jew who believes in the literal truth of even a fraction of your religion’s holy scriptures, then the answer is simple—your God kills people innocent of all but not loving him. He instructs his followers to do the same. Much worse than that, he’s set up a system of eternal torment to punish the slain unbelievers and sinners of all other stripes. That kind of petulance makes Beck, or even TamTamPamela, look like the very model of grace and understanding.

Not actually existing has advantages: TamTamPamela will suffer no eternal torment. But though she’s passed, her creator lives on. “I’m still definitely going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m not going to stop,” Tam said. “It’s in my nature to troll people, to get a reaction out of people, to say, ‘Look, you see what’s going on, why don’t you do something about it?’ ”

Isn’t she worried about reprisal? What about applying for jobs in the future—isn’t she worried that searches using her full name might turn up all of this material? She reminds me that her state of residence has a law forbidding hiring discrimination based on religious affiliation. So she might be in the position of defending her character’s viewpoints in order to get a job? She laughs. Seriously, I tell her, the stuff I’ve written has been seen by such a small fraction of the people that have seen your videos, and yet I have constant anxiety about someone out there calling me out for the asshole I am, hating me for what I’ve written. Do you just get used to the hate? Are you and I just built differently?

“Everyone always says that it’s part of my natural personality to have that ‘I really don’t care about anything’ [attitude],” she said, her normally fast cadence of speech slowing down slightly. “But I know what people are like in real life versus the way they are on the Internet.” She paused, and then spoke again, a smile in her voice. “And I think I’m the perfect example of that.”

18 thoughts on “Troll On- God, Natural Disasters, and the Powers of the Internets

  1. Sheesh; you all are trying to get Bert to disown me.

    “your God kills people innocent of all but not loving him. He instructs his followers to do the same.”

    That’s a fairly contentious reading, I think. Among other things, at least for Christians, the New Testament seems to pretty explicitly suggest that vengeance and smiting is no longer the way to go.

    Even in the Old Testament, Job is really explicit about saying that attributing natural disasters to the immorality of the victim is unconscionable hubris and blasphemes against God. Beck is one of Job’s comforters; that doesn’t put him on the side of God.

    So I agree with Tam and not you, I think; Christianity doesn’t actually support Beck or Robertson.

  2. You’re aware that the story of your namesake is essentially God making a natural disaster to kill sinners? And that there are numerous instances in the Bible where God encourages the killing of whole groups of people (genocide, essentially) for not being part of his chosen people. Or that there are many sections (Leviticus especially) which basically say “kill folks who commit these sins/infractions”. The New Testament is gentler, of course…but Job, at least, is Old Testament, and hardly offsets many of these to any great degree. God does kill off Job’s family just to test his faith, really.

    Again, the Bible is really very contradictory on all of these types of things…since it’s really not one coherent message or story. It comes down to which parts you want to read and pay attention to…and how you interpret them.

    I’m not breaking any new ground by suggesting this.

  3. Sure. If God speaks to you and says, this is why I’m doing this, I guess you can believe him. Most people don’t have that happen though. I don’t think Glenn Beck did.

    But your point is well taken. I guess I’d argue it goes both ways? Sean says fairly definitively that God demands the killing of sinners; as I said, that’s a contentious reading, not something that’s as obvious as he claims it is.

  4. But, what kind of Christianity? The perfect ideal, or the messy, varied real-world kind? (The fate of Sodom and Gomorrah certainly are a precedent for the “God sends disasters upon immoral people” idea.)

    While fundamentalists condemn as “cafeteria Christians” those who follow the enlightened parts of the Bible and reject the hate-filled, intolerant ones, they do the exact same thing themselves; only in reverse.

    What proportion of Christians actually do totally reject violence, turn the other cheek, pay more attention to their own flaws rather than “the mote that is in [their] brother’s eye,” give up all their money and possessions to the poor?

    Even among “liberal” Christians, such behavior is rare; and fundamentalists act in the exact opposite fashion.

    From Tim Kreider, a cartoon commentary: http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly070307a.htm (Check out his statement afterward…)

  5. @Noah–

    I’d like to think that this is one of the advantages of growing up with little to no cultural knowlege of a culture or religion, and instead being exposed to the primary text of that religion as an adult. I don’t have a cultural framework of explanation and justification acting between me and the text–all I have is a jumbled and conflicting document that proports to be the word of God, that has him visiting his wrath upon all stripes of people, and instructing his followers to do the same. I realize that there are many different ways that people attempt to reconcile these views, but the idea that Old Testemant God isn’t vengeful and jealous, by his own admission no less, is just wishful thinking on someone’s part. Personally, although it’s hard to really reconcile all the different Gospel and Epistle views of Jesus together coherently, I’m interested in the idea of Jesus as intervener, intermediary between God and man rather than mystical counterpart to God. Working from Mark primarily, anyway, it certainly makes more sense.

    Anyway, I’m getting far outside my field of expertise here. I just think it’s worth reiterating that I haven’t cherry-picked passages here–there’s plenty of material to choose from, including my personal favorite, 2 Kings 2:23-24, in which God sends she-bears to eat 42 children for mocking Elisha’s baldness.

  6. Well, mocking baldness is bad, obviously. I don’t see how you can blame him for that.

    Job really, really says you’re not supposed to attribute natural disasters to people’s sinfulness, though. God can punish people for mocking baldness (or for being bald, presumably), but, at least in Job, it’s pretty clearly presumptuous for humans to assume that punishment is in fact what’s going on.

  7. Not to start a Reformation flame war, but pegging natural disasters to sin seems to be a Protestant, and more specifically an American Protestant, obsession. The institutional Churches (Catholic, Orthodox, probably throw in Lutheran and Anglican) are not known for blaming natural disasters on the “gays” or whatever.

  8. “most fundamentalists aren’t as direct in general conversation about these kind of feelings, and certainly not on video”

    That’s interesting, because I always had the impression, as a non-American atheist, that that kind of thing was…well, maybe not mainstream, but not totally marginal in American evangelism. Like Falwell and Robertson blaming the 2001 terrorist attacks on the ACLU, of all things. It’s good to hear that that impression was somewhat mistaken.

    Also: (some) evangelicals observe Lent? I always thought that was a satanic ritual of the whore of Babylon (i.e. Catholicism)?

    Also: Noah, it may be contentious in the light of two millennia of commentary, but if you just look at the bible as a primary source, it’s undeniable that its god often visits suffering on gentiles and non-gentiles alike as punishment for their sinfulness, at least in the Old Testament (I don’t know the NT well enough to say the same thing). “Job” complicates that by showing that god will also inflict suffering if he’s made a bet with the devil, which, um, yay theodicy?

  9. Jones-

    I used to, somehow, be on the mailing list for the evangelical group called… hm, Family something-or-other, the one that led the major Disney boycott in the late 90’s. And there is definitely an element of speaking in code in public, especially on these really sensitive issues. It’s why Pat Robertson makes the news for these kinds of things still–not because it’s shocking that he or his followers have these beliefs, but that it’s surprising when they’re aired so publicly and casually. Most of the time it’s all implication and suggestion, which is usually more than enough.

    Incidentally, I also lived through the three hurricanes in a row that were God’s wrath upon the people of Orlando for allowing gay pride flags to be flown downtown. So if anyone ever wants to compare wrath stories, let me know! There was no pillar of salt involved in mine, but at least once crushed car and several thousand downed oak trees.

  10. For pity’s sake, Job complicates it by saying explicitly over and over and over that attributing suffering to people’s sins is wrong! That’s the whole point of the story! Job’s comforters, who all tell him he must have sinned to deserve his suffering, are the bad guys!

    God in Job is absolutely hard to love, and I don’t even like everything about the book, but on this position it’s unambiguous and really profoundly right. Because of that, it really forshadows the new testament in a lot of ways; Job is about separating suffering and retribution, and in some ways about seeing suffering as virtue rather than as sin. Which — you know, the emblematic moment of suffering in the new testament is the cross, and the whole point there is that suffering is undeserved and redemptive. To say that Christianity’s main, obvious response to suffering is to blame the victim just seems clearly ridiculous to me. Christ embraced the lepers, you know? That’s pretty important.

    The Old Testament is a good deal less clear; the God there is much more vengeful, obviously — but, like I said, there are moments such as Job which complicate things.

  11. To say that Christianity’s main, obvious response to suffering is to blame the victim just seems clearly ridiculous to me. Depends on whether you’re talking Christianity the text or Christianity as practiced by a particular group.

    My dad’s church is big into it, including believing that cancers are caused by negative thoughts, which–yeah. I think it helps if you know that a lot of the current big box religious prosperity theology hinges on being rich because you’re good (in god’s eyes) and therefore the poor are poor (or sick, or whatever) because they aren’t good in god’s eyes.

  12. Noah: yeah, you’ve got a point. The message of “Job” is both metaphysical and epistemological. Metaphysically, it shows that the conditional “if x is suffering, then x sinned” is false, since there’s at least one counterexample in the form of Job. Job is punished, but didn’t sin, so the conditional is false. Everyone can agree that “Job” shows that.

    But “Job” has a broader epistemological point than that, which you’re right about. Like, in response to the case of Job, you might think “well, even if there are *some* sufferings which are not the product of sin, it’s still true in *general* that suffering is the product of sin”. I.e. you might it’s *inductively* valid to infer sin from suffering.

    But then “Job” denies even that, with its explicit diagetic rejection of theodicy. Job tells his buddies they’re full of shit, and then god himself comes down and confirms it.

    So, yeah, in short we’re both right. Suffering is not infrequently the product of sin, according to the Old Testament, but according to “Job” (a) it isn’t always so and (b) we shouldn’t suppose that it is in any particular instance. So if you take “Job” seriously, you shouldn’t do what Robertson et al. do.

    That said, don’t the prophets frequently make the inference from suffering to sin? That is, aren’t they constantly telling the Hebrew nation that their suffering is because they haven’t followed the divine law? So if you followed the prophets’ example, you could still have some biblical support for what Robertson et al. do.

    Of course, it’s mighty presumptuous to place oneself on the level of the prophets, but that’s hardly unusual for some of these people…

  13. VM, I think Christians in the U.S. are *more* likely to support torture than non-Christians — which, if there’s anything Christians should oppose, it would have to be torture.

    Certainly, Christians do and say a lot of horrible things, often attributing those things to their Christianity. I think there’s often pretty strong pushback to be made from within the Christian tradition though — for instance, the prosperity gospel stuff strikes me as a particularly heinous (and particularly American) heresy.

    Jones…I am not super well versed in the Bible (I know Job by far the best)…but yes, prophets denounce. As Eric said, the Bible’s kind of a contradictory book.

  14. ——————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    For pity’s sake, Job complicates it by saying explicitly over and over and over that attributing suffering to people’s sins is wrong! That’s the whole point of the story! Job’s comforters, who all tell him he must have sinned to deserve his suffering, are the bad guys!
    ———————-

    …Which hardly stops the “cafeteria Christians” on the fundamentalist side from ignoring all that; the way they do when Jesus said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

    At least one Christian comics creator got it, though. Couldn’t locate the strip online, but when Snoopy’s doghouse burned down (which apparently took place in the September 19, 1966 strip), this exchange took place (quoted from memory):

    Lucy (loudly haranguing): “You know why your house burned down, don’t you? Because you SINNED, that’s why!”

    Snoopy gives her a tongue-out “Bleagh!”; Lucy cartwheels in midair.

    Snoopy: “Her kind deserves to be ‘Bleaghed’!”

    Alas, it’s human nature to deal with the unsettling reality that really bad things could happen to any of us, anytime with the “magical thinking” that those people to whom that happened somehow deserved it, and if we behave ourselves (don’t sin, don’t eat meat, don’t have negative thoughts), then it won’t happen to us…

    ————————-
    Sean Michael Robinson says:

    …there’s plenty of material to choose from, including my personal favorite, 2 Kings 2:23-24, in which God sends she-bears to eat 42 children for mocking Elisha’s baldness.
    ————————-

    I recall John Bolton nicely illustrated that one, from a script by Alan Moore. Might’ve been in the comics anthology, “Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament”…

    http://www.johndavies.org/2004/05/outrageous-tales-from-old-testament.html

    http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1420376.Outrageous_Tales_from_the_Old_Testament

    …or in some other anthology with the same theme, which I also own but can’t remember!

    BTW, some heart-warming church signs at http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2007/11/outrageous-tales-from-old-testament.html

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