“ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN,” the first picture reads, but the second is quick to disagree: “ONLY HUMANS GO TO HEAVEN READ THE BIBLE”.

So begins what appears to be a rather quirky theological debate about the souls of dogs (and eventually of rocks!), carried out entirely on church signs.

But, we ask ourselves, is it real? Did the religious communities represented by Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church really go to war with each other over whether or not pets can go to paradise?

As it happens, the answer is no, they didn’t…

It was a funny email, one that made me laugh out loud when it bounced into my email inbox a couple of weeks ago. The text went something like this:

At first glance it seemed like a charming and harmless little disagreement, the type of which you might have encountered on an episode of The Vicar Of Dibley.

The photos themselves seem realistic enough — there’s little doubt that we’re looking at pictures of real church signs. But if the signs themselves look real, it turns out that the words on them aren’t.

The detail that made me suspicious at first was the fact that the pictures of each sign appear to have been taken from exactly the same position in all of the frames.

In an of itself, this detail alone would be hard to pull off without some very careful setting up. Even a slight difference between a picture of one sign and the next picture of that sign would potentially stand out.

Not only that, but the pictures also appear to have been taken at the exact same time of day with, in the case of Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church, the exact same cars in the background, on the left, in every picture!

So, we can be reasonably certain, just on these details alone, that the images have been faked. It’s much more likely that the same images are being used for each message. However, to make absolutely certain, we head to the intertubes!

One quick Google search later and the top result returned is a site called “Church Sign Generator“. [1]

As it happens, this is a novelty web site that allows visitors to create their own messages on a variety of ‘stock image’ church signs — including images of the signs outside Our Lady of Martyrs and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

Normally the Church Sign Generator web site stamps the images it creates with its web address, but whoever was responsible for the “All Dogs Go To Heaven” strip also covered his or her tracks by removing this clue.

Conclusion

Pretty much an open-and-shut case. Someone discovered the Church Sign Generator web site, created an amusing disagreement between two churches on the matter of dogs and rocks and whether or not they can get into heaven, and an Internet Meme was born!

It’s worth mentioning that we could have attacked this particular project from at least one other direction. If we had been able to establish that Our Lady of Martyrs and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church don’t belong to the same community, then the likelihood of a public disagreement of this nature — where claims are being made back and forth — would probably be very slim.

And there you have it! Personally, I don’t know if dogs do go to heaven or not, but I do believe one thing I’ve seen printed on a (fake) church sign:

Footnotes:

1.	You can view a PDF screengrab here, in case the site itself is ever taken offline.
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