I have some friends who like to send out “inspirational” chain emails. I have to wonder what these emails are supposed to accomplish. I got one today that, as usual, reads like it was written by a preteen still struggling to master the basic rules of grammar and no idea what logic and reasoning might be. I did a google search on the text of the email and discovered, as I expected, that the friend who sent it was just passing something along and didn’t write it herself, thankfully. But, what is she thinking? Could she actually believe that this kind of drek might persuade me of anything?
You can find the text of this particular chain email all over the net, like here and here and here. It’s a list of stories of various people who somehow “mocked God” and came to a bad end. Since everyone dies eventually, and many die in unpleasant or unique ways, it’s a good bet that if you want to find examples of someone taking some position P and then soon dying in an odd or gruesome way, you’ll be able to dig up an impressive list of anecdotes that prove absolutely nothing. If the fact that John Lennon was shot to death more than ten years after exclaiming that the Beatles were more famous that Jesus is somehow evidence that the Christian God exists, does every incident of a devout Christian being shot to death provide evidence that the Christian God doesn’t exist? Neither argument makes any sense. Just because one event (someone’s death) follows another event (that person mocks God) doesn’t necessarily mean the first event caused the second, because the events could be completely unrelated and the sequence just coincidental.
Maybe if every person who disbelieved in or mocked the Christian God soon died a horrible death while conversely every person who devoutly believed in the Christian God lived long lives and died peacefully in their sleep or surrounded by family and fiends, that might be evidence of something. But such is not the case, and lists like this email are just rubbish.
By the way, googling this chain email led me to a cool blog devoted to crazy Christian chain emails! I’ve added it to the blogroll.
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This must be a relatively new chain email, I couldn’t even find it on snopes.com or I’d include the link and post the link with the debunk to other sites the chain showed up on as well.
And it is a load of used food!
For one thing, a best friend of mine was as devoted a Christian as anyone could get, but she died of cancer. I’m a Christian, and I was really mad at God for giving her such a raw deal. And though I’m over that anger now, I’m still here to tell about it! So here’s proof right there that chain email is crap.
But I think I must be the only – or one of very few Christians who hate chain email, especially any that use religion as a hook to get people fooled into forwarding wildly. And that results in one of two things – an anti-Christian backlash, something else I hate – or Christians continuing to praise the chain email as inspirational *rolling eyes* or else staying silent and not looking into ways to debunk and back up their reasoning not to pass on this kruft. I honestly don’t know of any other Christian on the net who gets as ticked off at chain email and forwarders as I do. They all seem to eat it up. Argh!
yeah