About
Marine Todd is a copypasta story about a United States marine who violently assaults a college professor for challenging the existence of God.
Origin
According to the tech news blog Technology Tell, an email copypasta telling a story of a college professor who challenges God to knock him off a podium causing a a marine to hit him in the head began circulating as early as 2004. On March 20th, 2014, an image macro variation of the copypasta was posted by Facebook user Earl Dibbles Jr, which gained more than 283,100 shares and 241,000 likes in the first three weeks.
A Marine was taking college classes between his deployments to Afghanistan.
One of his courses had a professor that was an atheist and a member of the ACLU. One day the professor shocked everyone by walking into class, looking up and stating "God, if you are real, I want you to come down and knock me off this platform, I will give you 15 minutes.
Several minutes tick by in silence, when the 15 min. time almost expired the Marine gets up from his seat, approaches the professor and punched him in the face knocking him off the platform and out cold. The Marine simply went back to his seat.
The professor came to, visibly shaken and asked the Marine, “What the heck did you do that for?!”
The Marine said, “God was busy protecting America’s military who are out protecting your right to say stupid shit like that, so he sent me to fill in.”
Spread
On March 21st, Redditor NibblyWibbly submitted the image macro to the /r/cringepics[2] subreddit, where it garnered upwards of 7,900 up votes and 600 comments in two weeks. On March 29th, Salon politics editor Elias Isquith tweeted a parody version of the copypasta, in which Marine Todd judo kicks a professor for saying “America deserved 9/11.”
Follow-up to an earlier report on Marine Todd. Please share if you know a warrior pic.twitter.com/B2vDxDAznJ
— Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) March 29, 2014
On the same day, several other Twitter users began posting humorous variations of the story.
One shared a tale with me and I will share it with you. To further chronicle The Education of Marine Todd: pic.twitter.com/EaSQKmBc6a
— Sam Knight (@samknight1) March 29, 2014
last Marine Todd from me (probably)
crushingbort</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/jdcrowley">jdcrowleydankmtl</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/rigamarock">rigamarocknickmullen</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/swarthyvillain">swarthyvillainpic.twitter.com/3AsyrZuuec— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47) March 30, 2014