My Review of a Religious Website

In class when we were discussing rhetoric, an example was brought up regarding religious pamphlets, and the sort. I immediately decided that I would look around online for a rhetorical religious website I could use, and write a thought paper on it. I wanted to do this for a couple reasons. I absolutely can not stand when people try to force their faith on someone else who isn't a part of that faith, or act like they're better than people who don't practice their religion. I wanted to put my bias aside and try to figure out what kind of people do this, and what they are actually thinking. The website I found that I wanted to use for my thought paper is called God's Truth About the Occult. It is located at http://www.farsinet.com/truth/. I have absolutely no knowledge of the Occult this website speaks of, and I figured this was a good thing since I could keep an open mind about what the site was trying to say. After learning about Hugh Rank's Model of Persuasion, I realized how important things like repetition, composition, confusion, among others are, when analyzing a piece of rhetoric. All of the aspects of Rank's Model are very relevant to the content on this website.

When analyzing a website, whether it is rhetorical or not, I feel the most important thing to look at is the composition of the site regardless of what the content is. The way the page is laid out, what colors are used, and how the information is organized, is all very important. This concept is part of the intensification group of Rank's Model.