Web hoaxer Stephen Roseman posted a picture of a dog with a piece of ham on its face on Facebook, and counting on the power of suggestion, managed to horrify a lot of dog lovers while garnishing internet “prayers.” Here’s what he wrote along with the photo above…
This poor dog was badly burned and disfigured trying to save his family from a house fire
One like = one prayer One share = ten prayers
Lots of people liked and shared; I was previously unaware of the growing practice of equating “likes” on Facebook with prayers. Others, not so susceptible, and not so tender-hearted, perhaps, realized that the dog was a ham, and mocked everyone who fell for the scam. The hoax also set up religious Facebook users to be mocked by the likes of the Huffington Post and Ann Althouse, because equating Facebook likes and sharing with praying is so much more ridiculous than, say, Buddhist prayer wheels (one spin = thousands of prayers ), or, for that matter, folding your hands, closing your eyes, and moving your lips.
Once his hoax was discovered, Roseman posted the following admission on his Facebook page:
People, people this isn’t even my dog, I found this picture on fascistbook, stole it, and decided to use it in a prank to fool these religitards
So I did, and low and behold idiots left and right fall for it, and those that didn’t, seem to think they have a superior intelligence or something, for pointing out the obvious
Keep in mind, I never told a single soul to like this, that is their choice, I don’t give a f*ck either way.
What an asshole.
- This jerk feels superior to people who believe in God, and thinks it’s fair and civil to insult them as “religitards”? Roseman shouldn’t feel superior to a sea slug.
- It’s ironic to use an illiterate “low and behold” right before calling others ‘idiots.”
- Why this creep thinks not telling people to “like” his fake post (he’s equivocating: what he wrote is obviously an encouragement to “like” it) in any way mitigates the despicable aspects of posting a fake photo and story while using the idea of a horribly injured animal as the basis for a joke, aimed at making people of faith feel foolish.
His confession is the manifesto of a fick. No need to try to shame him further, for he is shameless. Just consider the kind of individual who would write something like that.
Ethics Alarms 
I hope the dog got to eat the ham and perhaps tear a piece out of the jerk’s britches.
1) Im saddened that people did not instantly see that this was ham. My knee-jerk reaction when I first clicked on this, without reading a word, was “Oh…he trained that dog to sit still with ham on it’s face. That’s….interesting.”
2) Im saddened that genuinely praying for someone is cheapened with equating “likes” to prayers, instead of, you know, just praying for the recipient in the privacy of your own home, instead of needing other people to “see” you being prayerful. (not sure if I phrased that correctly)
3) What a ****ing bag of ****. I am someone who values humility in people above just about any other character trait, and people who unashamedly see themselves as better than others who have done no harm to anyone else (rather, are trying to do good, as they see it) make it really, really easy to root for bad things to happen to them. What an ass.
Bingo.
He used his name. I assume. So he’s going to carry this idiocy around for life. That ought to be about long enough.
He seems like the kind of guy who would have supported the campaign to relabel atheists as “brights.” Yeah, that was a real thing.
The dog impresses me.
It’s acts like this that remind me why I loathe atheists. “Religitards?” If I posted some fake story about another police shooting and said “I just did it to fool these niggers” how would that be any different? If nothing else, the guy used his real name, so maybe someone will pay him a visit and straighten him out with a baseball bat.
There you go again..
Please don’t lump all us atheists with this asshat. Many of us are peaceful followers of a non-theistic philosophy. I think there’s a difference between atheists who allow themselves to be humbled by the grandeur of the universe(s) and atheists who trade worshiping gods for worshiping themselves.
I personally think that if there is a god or gods, that entity is so beyond human comprehension that we would be like ants to it, and our petty religious squabbles are motes of swirling dust.
Peaceful followertroublemakers philosophy don’t go around baiting those who believe differently just so they can insult them. There was no reason to do any of this other than to cause trouble. I have no use for troublemakers or bullies of any stripe. However, atheist troublemakers and bullies I find particularly offensive because they tend to be smug, arrogant, and interested predominantly in both getting their own way and showing themselves to be superior. They also tend to turn what should otherwise be enjoyable times, like Christmas, like other public observances, into headaches at the mildest, nightmares at the worst.
Yours is a very respectable point of view. I can’t help thinking that the loud, mocking ones are actually very unsettled in theirs.
Thanks. That may be the case. However, it’s not for those of us on the other side to psychoanalyze or sympathize. It’s for us to fight back. As I said, I have no problem with anyone choosing to believe or not to believe. I have a big problem with bullying, and I have a big problem with the weaponization of the Bill of Rights. The Establishment Clause was meant as a shield to protect minorities, not a sword for aggrieved minorities looking to impose government by lawsuit and take power over the way others express themselves. You can cloak it in the First Amendment all you like, but look at some of these cases.
The Woonsocket cross matter, which never got off the ground, and the Bladensburg cross matter both involved clear war memorials, with grave marker type crosses with “in memoriam” inscriptions. In the Woonsocket case the memorial was also fairly small and in a fire station parking lot where no one would have occasion to go unless he had business there. The Ground Zero cross involved displaying a relic of 9/11 just as it was found. The main problem with the Mt. Soledad cross was that it was on publicly owned land. To read some of the letters and complaints you would think these displays were the equivalent of a Nazi swastika or worse. In the case of the Ground Zero cross the plaintiffs actually claimed that the sight of the cross, which is, by the way, now in a museum you have to get a ticket to enter, that the sight of it made them physically ill. The Mt. Soledad case bounced up and down the Federal system for a decade, when it probably could have been resolved by a transfer of the land (which is ultimately what happened last year), but the plaintiffs fought very hard to block that transfer, because nothing more than removal of the cross from public view would satisfy them.
All of these matters ultimately failed. The Woonsocket matter in fact turned out to be a bluff, since the aggrieved person was apparently not brave enough to sign his/her name to a complaint. No named complainant, no harm, no harm, no case, and the religion-haters from the out-of-town FFRF were forced to slink away with their tails between their legs. Mt. Soledad in particular should stand as a memorial to mindless bullying and trying to force your own way. If the plaintiffs had really been that concerned with strict compliance with the Establishment Clause, then transfer of the land should have been a resolution all could live with. They were not Constitutional scholars interested in compliance. They were haters who couldn’t stand the fact there was a cross on top of a hill overlooking a harbor and wanted to force it off. They failed.
I don’t even want to guess how much time and money was spent dealing with this nonsense, in fact that type of language is frequently in the letters organizations like this send when demanding a removal – if you don’t take that cross down, we’ll file a lawsuit and ask for fees and costs. Boy, those fees add up really fast at $400 an hour for attorneys, maybe more if we have to deal with an appeal. It would really be too bad if your town couldn’t buy that new fire truck or had to cut back on street cleaning or couldn’t reopen that playground because you had to fight us over a silly old memorial from a war that gets one paragraph in the social studies books and no one cares about except those old farts from the VFW who put on funny hats to play Taps badly and lay a cheap wreath once a year. There’s fewer and fewer of them every year, too, in five years, seven max, no one’s going to come there at all. Why don’t you do the right thing by the 95% of your town who doesn’t care and consign that relic to the history books too? We’re not telling you what to do, if you want to be fighting fires with old equipment that might fail, and live with piles of refuse stinking up the street in the summer, and tell the kids there’s no place to play, that’s your business. What’s that? No, no, we’re not going to help you out with the costs of removal. Why should we help you right a wrong you never should have committed in the first place?
Just some arrogant atheist activist playing on the sympathies of good people in order to make himself feel superior.
I’d say “activist” gives him too much status.
Sadly Facebook is, as you have undoubtedly noticed, heavily trolled by people who insist on posting pictures asking you to ‘like’. I have sympathy for people, especially kids, who are sick or injured but I still seldom respond by ‘liking’ them. It’s somehow been made cheap and pointless, almost like the boy who cried wolf. On and on it goes and you get desensitised, and it has reached the stage of being meaningless.
Regarding the case above; Jack, and others, have pointed out that the world is full of people who don’t think to deeply – like me for example – and who can be caught out regardless of whether they are religious / atheist ( which is arguably a religious belief) Republican / Democrat; climate change believer / sceptic, etc/etc.
I’m sure we’ve all been caught out at some stage, I know I have.
The point is that such hoaxes say far more about the person who is doing the hoaxing than anyone who falls for it.
Roseman has demonstrated his character by his actions. He is the one who will have to live with that.
They do it because there’s money in it, or because they think that the number of likes they recieve means something. Some people are in it because they think that having thousands of friends proves that they’re cooler than everybody else…they beat the bushes, go through old year books and blanket-friend invite their friends’ friends in efforts to pump up their friend counts. The rest are in it for the momey. If you get millions of shares and likes and followers you can sell the page, with established traffic, to a business for a tidy sum. What is awful about these ‘1 like = 10 prayers’, ‘Type Amen’ etc pages is that in almost all cases the photos are stolen. I’ve seen the same photographs of a Down’s Syndrome little girl, a badly burned baby, and a baby with a tumor going around now for years. I cannot recall the name of the little girl at the moment, but her parents have been trying to stop the use of her photo for a couple of years now. These posts, and the ones exhorting people to,pray for ‘the 31 soldiers killed in Afghanistan today’ and other ’causes’ all play on people’s sympathies. Ridiculing those who show sympathy or empathy for someone else, or the religious, to prove how sophisticated and intelligent you are is rampant. I think it reveals a lot more than the ‘intelligent’ realize.
It doesn’t matter even if jerk up there had actually labeled himself “atheist” because it would have nothing to do with it. Being an anti-humanist, anti-religious jerk is part of his Fick-ism, not a function of a non-belief in God or gods.
That’s not how Facebook likes really work anyway. For a lot of people it’s just a knee jerk reaction to anything that they are in general agreement with. It’s likely that thousands of non-religious people just read the caption, glanced at the picture, and thought, “Well, I love dogs, so…(‘click’)”
Or maybe people thought this…
“Why is there a ham on that dog’s face? Maybe it’s some weird home remedy for horrible canine burns. Whatever. I love dogs, so… (click)”
I especially enjoy it when someone announces the death of a parent, and people click “like.”
I hate the damn things. You will notice that there is no like option on the blog, though Word Press is always urging me to add it.
Oh, that drives me crazy. I wouldn’t know what to say if someone ‘liked’ a post of mine about a death in the family. They must just go down the page and ‘like’ everything without really reading it.
I sat staring at that photo for five minutes trying to figure out why putting ham on a dog’s face was unethical before reading…
I have been awake too long.
It’s such a bad photo, I thought at first it was a selfie.
I’m going to try to coach this gently, because it doesn’t do to rile up this demographic in particular, and I’m not excusing what this person did. BUT. Christians to an extent bring this upon themselves.
I’ve noticed this for years, Christianity has this built in self-promotion thing that includes an audience for music no one will ever listen to and nicknacks no one will ever use, and it seems to have spilled over onto the internet in the form of gathering attention to hoaxes. I wonder, I really do, if the hoax would have garnered as much attention without the word ‘prayer’ on the post. Does anyone remember “This Is a New Day”‘s Morris Ceurello? My grandmother and her friends bought dozens of Things from him, including a countdown clock to the apocalypse she never quite got the hang of working. Or does anyone else know of an aspiring band who couldn’t cut it in soft rock but changed every instance of “baby” in their music to “Jesus” and sold 100,000 copies? The reason religious people get hit with these scams is because they as a demographic reward them with money.