Why trolls hate christians

This aggression has led to suicides, soiled reputations and — in some cases — profits , according to Yasmin Green writing for The Daily Beast. Unfortunately, Christians are neither immune from trolls nor free from becoming trolls themselves. I became a victim of trolls — some of them people of faith — when I wrote my first article for an environmentalist blog several months ago.

I was reporting on various weather anomalies over the Christmas break, and its publicity created a stir on social media. No apologies were offered. Trolls are so real that they can shape the tone and content of an online debate with detrimental effects.

For that reason, they cannot be ignored. In fact, Christians should protest any trolling speech whenever it is used in person or online and stand on the side of civility and moderation. This is not political correctness. This is living into the basic values to which Christians are called. Nor is it censoring disagreements; trolling is more than disagreeing with something — it is attacking the person instead of the very thing for which the person stands.

If you know what the Navy Seal copypasta is, you're in. If not, you're out. White nationalists and other far-right extremists have been able to co-opt this process.

The alt-right in particular uses online trolling to radicalize internet denizens and spread its message in a well-defined process : load the hate into a "joke," let the meme distract the people who don't get it, and watch the real message spread as the surface content is discussed and spread around. This is why Nazis use a cartoon frog to comment on President Trump's Twitter postings, and why the Christchurch shooter loaded his manifesto with memes—and plenty of links to Islamophobic and racist material.

The hope is that ordinary people will get drawn in by the inside references and so be exposed to the bigotry and hate. We could take this situation as the occasion for another the-internet-is-terrible-we-should-all-leave-social-media tirade. It wouldn't be wrong. Pastors and other leaders should remind their people that just like in real life, hateful jokes online aren't really jokes, and they're certainly not harmless.

Christians and other faithful people would do well to give wide berth to sites that allow or even encourage hateful shitposting. At the same time, we should recognize that this sort of activity is anomic, in all the many meanings of that rich concept.

It's normless, or at least transgressive of established norms. It's deranged. And it's created by people who have withdrawn their emotional investment in society. It's no accident that people who gravitate toward memes are often isolated, frustrated, finding it difficult to find meaning in anything outside their insular culture. And then you have to explain it because it's a documentary. And how do you explain that. There's actually a scene that we cut that's the Troll Hunter and the Veterinarian that talks about that.

They have an argument about whether or not trolls can really smell Christians, she doesn't believe that, [because] she's a vet.

She believes in facts. But he's actually seen it. It's a very nice scene, but we cut it. But you justify some of the troll science in the movie, like how you kill a troll. How did you come up with the science behind troll slaughter? I just sat down and talked and sorted it out. Trolls, according to mythology, when they're hit by sunlight they blow up, like a balloon or they turn to stone.

But you can't turn anything to stone, so I had to figure out something else. It had to be a bodily reaction, what's in the sunlight, what action does that create in the body? The ultraviolet rays gives us Vitamin D and that is also related to calcium production in the body. When I was reading up on it, those connections pieced together.

In addition I'm married to a veterinarian so she was helping me make sense of all of this. Are there trolls anywhere else in the world, or are they all just in Norway?

Can there be Canadian trolls? In the fairy tales it's mostly set in Norway. Even in Sweden they have a very different mythology.

A lot of people say zombie films are metaphor for consumerism. What are trolls a metaphor for? The only topic I baked into this film is related to how we treat our wildlife. How we treat our treasures, in a way. That is there in the film, for me, buried under the action. They are advanced animals, they have a human side to them. They are defenseless, all they care about is getting food, getting shelter, the things that animals and we care about as basic needs. They're not there to kill.

They're defending themselves mostly and when they smell Christian blood they get very aggressive, it's like holding a red cape in front of an ox. It's that kind of thing. That is also related to the stories.