I have been hesitant to write about this because I don't want to sound preachy or arrogant. However, an interesting post by a friend of mine about a web site called You've Been Left Behind reminded me of this subject again. He humorously points out this as the interesting web site that it is. (He does not advocate it by the way.) Looking at the web site and researching who registered it, it saddened me, however. It appears to be a scam but one many Christians have probably already fallen for.
We live in a world where communication happens fast, not all of it true. Several years ago, when internet access was just beginning to get commonplace, I got an e-mail about how antiperspirant cause breast cancer. I'm ashamed to say that at the time, at least for a while, I found the e-mail plausible and believed it. Fortunately, I didn't forward the e-mail on but, on finding out the truth about it on truthorfiction.com, I learned a valuable lesson about the hazards of spreading lies, even unintentionally, and the unfortunate gullibility we as Christians are sometimes known for.
It made me think back to the rumor about Proctor and Gamble and it's ties to Satanism, another lie that predated the public internet (and that I believed for a while), but was particularly harmful to a company that was not guilty of the alleged claim. I believe the spread of this false rumor was also harmful to the name of Christ. It made it look as if the church was not committed to truth.
Even today, I still get e-mails from well-meaning Christians who haven't checked out the e-mails they received before forwarding them on. I have gotten e-mails about Dr. Pepper removing "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, about atheist petitioning the FCC to ban religious broadcasting, and even one e-mail from a Christian organization that spoke of a same-sex marriage law in a way that was only mostly true (but contained some unfortunate exaggerations about the wording of the law).
Now I check most forwarded e-mails against Snopes.com. Please, I implore every Christian to do the same. Check it out before you forward it.
What do you think? Am I being to hard? I hope not. My intention was to talk about what I learned from my own mistakes.
2 comments:
I do the same thing with forwarded emails. I can't tell you how many times I've been told that Muslims are positioning Barack Obama to take America down from the inside. I know his whole (exaggerated) background. While I disagree with him on most of his ideas, I'm not thinking he's a jihadist. Maybe I'm wrong.
Being at one time guilty of passing on these scams, I agree with you completely, and you were one of the main ones that helped me see this when I would mistakenly pass on such an email. As Christians we need to stand for truth, all of it, and we need to be diligent to guard the truth. As far as the email hoaxes go, it's really not that hard to verify or expose them thanks to great web sites like Snopes.com, so we are without excuse to not check something out for ourselves before passing it on.
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