Anonymous attacks a lot of things that they find wrong with the world: corporations, governments and other groups that they feel threaten the freedom of the people. On Friday, they attacked what may be their most controversial target yet – religion.

The AnonymousIRC Twitter account announced on Friday three attacks so far on major church Web sites. These aren’t just regular attacks, however, as they have also defaced the Web sites with anti-religion rhetoric and even a video featuring Richard Dawkins set to auto-play so visitors are forced to see it.

Three Web sites that have been attacked so far are Bethel Outreach International Church, the Charlotte International Church, and Crossfire Ministries. All three religious organizations are based in and around Charlotte, North Carolina.

What do you think about Anonymous now targeting churches? Let us know in the comments.

Why did Anonymous hack these particular Web sites? The tweets say, “HACKED Reason: religious idiocy and foh dah lulz.” Sounds like the usual Anonymous reason, but the Web sites defaced message reveal more behind what they’re getting at.

Greetings fellow pirates, hey there religionfags! Guess what? U dun goofed! We rm’d you and your gods and saints neither’t protected you nor casted some awesome thunderbolt onto us.

Let us be clear from the start: any kind of religion is a sickness to this world.
A sickness that creates hate and intollerance,
a sickness that brings people to wage war on their fellow people,
a sickness that has come to this world long time ago, when mankind wasn’t educated,
a sickness that brought false hope and surpression to those who believed
and often even more terror and surpression to those who dared not to believe.
Religions are authoritarian hierarchies, designed to dominate your free
will. Religions are mind control.They’re power structures that aim to convince you to give away your power for the benefit of those who enjoy dominating people. When you subscribe to a religion, you enroll in a mindless minion training program. Religions don’t market themselves as such, but this is essentially how they operate.In case you ever wondered why religious teachings are invariably mysterious, confusing, and incongruent? This is no accident — it’s intentional.

We see religion pretty much the same way as we see many governments. Fearmongering and making lots of money,so a small group of ppl will become insanely rich, while the believing masses can eat dirt.As long as they are afraid that “omgomg god will come and strike great vengeance upon me” all is good.

To quote Encyclopedia Dramatica (bringing you answers to life, the universe and everything since last Thursday) on this issue:

»Religion is a severe mental illness created over 9000 years ago, at the
same time as the Earth. Since then, religion has been one of the biggest sources of drama, faggotry, and unwarranted self-importance in the world today, secondary only to the internet. It is responsible for such insanity as Christfags believing that beating someone half to death with a 2,000 year old book will heal them and Muslims believing that if they blow themselves up they will get 72 virgins. Even atheists are not immune to the psychotomimetic effects of religion; the mere mention of religion is enough to send any atheist into hours of butthurt shitfits.«

So people of the world, don’t let religion control your life. Don’t fight against each other for contrary beliefs.This world and our life can be a wonderful adventure, where you have the unique chance to help mankind and your fellow citizens. Where we can all work together to make this earth a better place for ourselves,our children and all those generations who will come after us. ^(;,;)^

The Web site defacement also includes a video of a Richard Dawkins lecture called, “Richard Dawkins: An Atheist’s Call to Arms.” The video is a 31 minute speech in which Dawkins told atheists to make their beliefs public and combat the “incursion of religion into politics and education.”

It’s strange that Anonymous would denounce major religions, but only target Christian churches. There’s not a lot of info on the churches in question due to their Web sites being down, but we did fine a few things.

We looked through the Google cached versions of the Web sites. While they are a mess, the churches in question seem to have one thing in common – empowering people of all nations and races through Christianity. It’s odd then that Anonymous would attack churches that at least put on a good face instead of much more reviled organizations like the Westboro Baptist Church.

What’s even stranger is that Anonymous has attacked Westboro Baptist Church in the past. Computer World reported last year that Anonymous only took down the church’s Web site after they were issued a challenge. They even said “we don’t war” in response to the church issuing the challenge, but launched the attack because they had had enough.

The hashtags may be the most confusing part of the attacks. They include the #OWS hashtag which is used for the Occupy Wall Street movement. At the moment, once again due to the Web sites being down, I can’t confirm if these were megachurches or not. The churches themselves don’t really appear all that big as Google results only return each respective Web site and not much else.

It definitely seems like more of a case of attacking the for the “lulz” then anything else. Anonymous members and general internet users frequently attack religion with the term “christfag” and other derogatory names. This could just be the group trolling and they just happened to choose these churches as targets.

Why do you think Anonymous attacked the churches in question? Let us know in the comments.

Religion is one of those things, like politics, that you never really openly discuss in public as it leads to everybody just feeling uncomfortable. By taking the fight to the Internet, Anonymous may be opening up the debate for a more thorough discussion. Of course, they could also being doing it just “foh dah lulz.”

We asked if these attacks were part of the planned hacks that the group said would happen every Friday. We have yet to hear back, but we’ll update the story when and if we do.

What do you think? Is Anonymous overstepping its bounds by attacking an institution like religion? Do you agree with them? Let us know in the comments.