Snopes is an anti-christian husband and wife team out of California

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Snopes.com exposed as a Leftist, atheist, anti-Christian activist husband and wife team http://www.rr-bb.com/showthread.php?t=65123NOTE: VERY, VERY INTERESTING!! A LONG READ BUT WELL WORTH THE TIME SPENT. MAKE SURE TO READ THE BLOGS AND EDITORIALBY NATIONAL REVIEW ON THE ANNENBERG FOUNDATION AND IT'S SUB ORGANIZATIONS. It's fitting that you're interested enough to ask for this in reply to my email "tease" on this today, because it was the debunking of a rumored Nostradamus prediction of the 9/11 attack that launched Snopes into Popular Culture as "the [supposed] Web Standard of Truth" in the first place!Again, I hope you aren't offended -- but more importantly, I hope that you find this of sufficient value and interest to read the whole thing -- lengthy as it is.__________Don’t let yourself be Snope-a-doped!How many times have you opened an email with the following as the lead-in?“I found this on the Web, and it was verified by Snopes, so it must be true!”Strict accountability to sources, once bedrock “foundation” requirements well established in every college 101 course, are conspicuously absent from common practice today. Ironically, this is "The Information Age", when information that once had to be extracted only by hard effort, now proliferates at out fingertips!!! One might reasonably ask, “But at what cost to our integrity have we lost interest in the sources of the information we rely upon, and by what forfeiture of our obligations as Christians to be ever vigilant, rejecting all deceitful pretenders?”“But Snopes has been the most popular tool for “ultimate verification” of accuracy/non-accuracy of information being floated around the Internet for years! (here comes the kicker) – and they clearly reference all their sources!” The more sincere, honest, and perhaps most important question to ask might be, “Who selects those sources, and by what standards are their sources selected?” This is a WORLDVIEW question!Who would argue otherwise that popular delusions are all but epidemic these days?? Remember the old college exhortation from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, “Question authority!!”?? It would seem well past time to pick this exhortation up again. But this time around, let’s do it, please, with the sincerity and integrity that the Leftists of that day lacked – and still lack today, now that they have finally gained full control of popular culture via the media, entertainment, education, advertising -- and yes, via our church pulpits!! As we understand so well from our reading and discussion at Christian Worldview Roundtable, all but a precious few churches, colleges, universities, and former bastions of principled higher learning have been universally corrupted (dumbed-down, if you will) by centuries of syncretism and perverted twisting of Biblical Truth, by the deliberate harnessing of the inherently evil preferences of mankind. In our meetings, we’ve been exposing and disseminating “self awareness” of where our culture sits today, teetering on the slippery precipices of moral, spiritual, social, and economic collapse, as decadent popular culture trends continue to swallow up the remnants of our once great American Christian culture – right under our very noses. Why then, in light of the above cultural backsliding, do we turn to Snopes.com – without exerting as much effort as checking background references of our “unbiased” and “objective” (and ever-so-convenient) online “arbiters of truth itself”??The first BIG RED FLAG that jumped out at me on my very first visit to Snopes.com many years ago was the conspicuous absence of identification of the site’s proprietors and authors on the web page header, as is the accepted practice with any legitimate Web site (their names appear only in the linked FAQ’s), followed by the equally conspicuous lack of biographies – anywhere on the site, or linked elsewhere, including the FAQ’s!Doing some research, Snopes.com is no credentialed and peer reviewed board of truth standards – as might appear to the uninitiated, as well as to those who neither take the time, nor (ahem -- you know who you are!) exercise proper discernment to give it the “smell test” before swallowing it hook, line, and sinker! Snopes.com is, in fact, an activist, Leftist, atheist, anti-Christian husband and wife team. They have both actively participated in a “documentary” designed to debunk Christianity as just another hoax, among the many hundreds of hoaxes debunked at Snopes.com. Exactly who are Barbara and David Mikkelson, and why, when attempting to analyze the TRUTH CONTENT of current “facts” as well as opinions and separate them from hoaxes, on the site (as practiced and relied upon thousands of times daily at that site), should anyone be willing to voluntarily GIVE AWAY one’s precious reliance on sources of TRUTH and OBJECTIVE FACT to The Mikkelsons -- in these troubled times of rampant disinformation and falsehood yet! -- without having the faintest idea of either who they are, OR without any clue about what their WORLD VIEW might be?!?!I’ve done some research (see full source information at links provided below): The Mikkelsons are an “internet-savvy” couple who met on the Web, married, and founded the Snopes.com Web site in 1995. Snopes.com was inspired by the Mikkelsons’ shared passion for debunking urban legends and hoaxes. There seems to be precious little information about them available, since neither is evidently any kind of accomplished author or researcher of any kind. Their academic credentials are unknown and unpublished publicly, and the Web is devoid of biographies on either of them. What is at least partially known about them has been published in one rare interview that I know of (see excerpt and link to source below). Other than that, their names (clearly identified with the Snopes.com site) appear in the credits of an atheist, Leftist, anti-Christian movie released in 1995 (see link provided below). Barbara and David Mikkelson have no children. They evidently raise both cats and rats as pets in their San Fernando Valley, CA home. Barbara is apparently devoted to the Snopes.com site full time, David does only part time work on the site, being a full-time programmer. Their income is derived from David’s job and advertising from the Snopes.com Web site. The material presented below (again, see full source information at links provided!), which, if not as ultimately trustworthy as a source that we would necessarily want to rely upon as a reference, is I believe, nonetheless both substantial and significant in the context that I have used it here. It clearly indicates that Christianity itself has yet again been placed under attack as one of the Mikkelsons’ choice targets, the debunking of which originally drew the couple together in the first place! Both Barbara and David participated (as actors) in the 2005 Atheist and Secular Humanist “documentary”, The God Who Wasn’t There, a film that attempts to debase, discredit, and refute Christianity as a hoax.I note with equal alarm that Wikipedia (which Snopes.com regularly cites as a primary source on a great number of their pages!) has also become accepted as another, (yet equally invalid) highly suspect “paragon” of Truth. Please note that Wikipedia, as the name implies, is a true “Wiki” – that is, it’s an open source, interactive Web site (akin to a blog) -- with or without adult supervision, as chance and circumstance may have it! – with UNKNOWN CONTROLS (if any) as to the source and quality of its content at any given moment! I note with even GREATER fear (and yes, loathing) that many people I know have a tendency (conscious or otherwise) to count the relative number of Web hits delivered by a search engine (such as Google or ) on a particular search topic, and to assign “credibility” accordingly!!! This, when the ranking of Web hit returns on a search is determined, depending on the particular search engine, by arbitrary algorithms based on various combinations of factors, including both consensus (now there’s a rock-solid assurance of truth – NOT!) AND by how much a Web client pays for a search ranking on a particular category of searches!!!!!Because it has become such a dangerous popular Kulture practice today to confuse popularity with credibility, we now have the emergence of the controlling popular delusion, by which fools are now led in droves. Look around you. It’s a Presidential election year. As we study The Truth Project, Gents, let us be very very careful to whom we so willingly donate unwarranted and voluntary precious gifts of attributes of Truth in these days of highly engineered, designer deceit. Such assignations of truth belong to Our Lord only! As Christians, we are bound as servants of our One Master to carefully guard ourselves against such carelessness, lest we be deceived. We are bound by our responsibilities as Christians not to be taken in by partial truths, which are always among the most powerful tools of The Deceiver!Yours in Christ,John ZuiderveldSOURCES: (PLEASE ALWAYS CONSIDER THE SOURCE of your information, and don’t omit the CONTEXT from which each source is taken, nor how it is used!): Please view the trailer to the movie The God Who Wasn’t There, in which the Mikkelsons are credited as actors (scroll down the page for their names at the link here):http://www.thegodmovie.com/SUPPORTING REFERENCES:INTERVIEW WITH David Mikkelson:SOURCE: A USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review (see note below)http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1059692646.phpExcerpt:…Snopes.com is the work of the husband-and-wife team of David and Barbara Mikkelson, who have taken their passion for urban myths to the Web since 1995. The site is an encyclopedia of past hoaxes and myths, from classic e-mails purportedly from Bill Gates offering money for forwarding e-mail to friends, to recent reports of terrorists buying up UPS uniforms.The Mikkelsons, who live in the Southern California suburb of Thousand Oaks, support themselves via David's full-time programming job, and use ad money from the site to pay for bandwidth and related costs. They received an inundation of traffic right after 9/11 due to a plethora of terror-related hoaxes and misinformation. They've appeared on CNN and various TV shows, but remain relatively low key and out of the spotlight, despite pop culture interest in their subject matter (there have been two "Urban Legends" movies and a TV show; none affiliated with them).I spoke to David Mikkelson recently by phone, after elbowing my way through his e-mail pile to get his attention. The pair depend on e-mail to find out about new hoaxes from their legions of followers.Mark Glaser: Tell me about the genesis of your site.David Mikkelson: Originally, Barbara and I participated in various online discussion groups before the development of the Web. It wasn't convenient to post individual answers to newsgroups every time someone asked about an urban legend, which suggested a Web site repository of such articles, which prompted the creation of Snopes.com. I just started adding more and more sections to our Web site, then Barbara started pitching in and writing things as well. We quickly became the place where people mailed anything that was questionable. If they needed verification, they'd ask us.MG: Do you have any kids?DM: No kids. Just cats and rats. I have my hands full taking care of three cats. I don't know how anyone manages with children, too.MG: Do you really have pet rats? Or is that a legend?DM: [laughs] Yeah, we have pet rats.MG: What are the myths over the years that have brought you wider attention online and in the media?DM: The biggest one, that gave us the biggest boost to the site -- I hate to say it because it sounds like we're capitalizing on a tragedy -- was after September 11. It was the bogus Nostradamus prophecy that was going around that same day [equating a passage about "two brothers torn apart" with the Twin Towers]. Barbara had the foresight to get that up by the end of the day. The next day this thing was going crazy on the Internet and we had a page up on our site debunking it. Our site became the place to go, especially because a lot of the news sites were so swamped with traffic. It took a while before they caught on and started covering a lot of the hoaxes.MG: That's pretty quick to get it out that fast.DM: Well, it was a pretty easy one to debunk. Because it was a [Canadian] student who had been showing [in a Web essay] how vague prophecies can be applied to anything. Lacking that source, it would have been difficult to figure out, we would have had to go through the entire writings of Nostradamus. He had basically invented a Nostradamus prophecy that could be applied to anything. Someone had stumbled across that and didn't read the context.