BULLSHIT!
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Snopes.com - Truth or Fiction Search - Urban Legends - Pants on Fire Legends - Fact Check - Hoax Slayer - Legislation Tracker
One of the defining characteristics of Protestant Christianity is freedom of faith. Like all rights, this one has a corresponding duty, to believe only what is true, but this right is frequently abused. Because Protestants are morally at liberty to believe anything they find acceptable, their conclusions are often based on a fundamental conviction of the assumed equivalence of truth and assent, that if enough sincere people find something sufficiently reasonable, it must be true. For many, even their understanding of the Bible is based on what they already believe; if they read something elsewhere in the same Bible that actually says otherwise, they simply disregard it as irrelevant.
For example, followers of one Harold Camping recently gained national attention (and the scorn of unbelievers) by widely publicizing his prediction, based on his misinterpretation of Scripture, that a series of catastrophes of Biblical proportions would begin all over the world at 6:00 PM local time on May 21st, 2011. Needless to say, it didn't happen. (Mr. Camping was called to give an account of this disservice less than 31 months later.) Perhaps the kindest that can be said of them is that they exercised extremely bad judgment, substituting blind faith for understanding (not to mention Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32). That makes sense only if you happen to be a small child - or a fool!
This kind of judgment often becomes a basis for vigorous missionary activity, in person and by mail, TV, and the Internet, and even at military funerals. Anyone who has an e-mail account can expect to be bombarded by stories from these people. Some of them will even visit your home and give you literature. Their intent is to convince you that something they believe is reasonable enough to be worthy of your acceptance as well. As someone raised in a different tradition, I find this attitude incredible!
I find it ironic that, at a time in history when the human race has finally reached the ability to disseminate truth to the point that anyone with a computer can gain access to anything that is known or can be computed, there are evil people bent on the destruction of human civilization by using that same technology to disseminate falsehood and lies. And be not deceived, these people are evil! Whether or not they say they are not evil, or believe that they are not evil makes them not a bit less evil. Hitler, Torquemada, and Atilla the Hun didn't think they were evil, either. Matthew 7:16-20 and John 8:44. If you don't believe my Bible, look it up in your own!
You hear it all the time on TV. "Millions of men depend on Enzite (that doesn't do anything) for male enhancement (whatever that is)," "Mom believes tot still alive (with absolutely no evidence one way or the other)," "63 Percent of Americans think housing prices will stabilize (based on what?)," "Should Catholic priests remain celibate? (like votes count!)" The idea here is that if enough people believe it, it must be so, and they don't even consider evidence either way. Even supposedly strictly factual news articles on the Internet allow readers to "rate" them to determine popularity. It's not facts that are important, it's faith.
In the past few years, this philosophy has lead to circulation on the Internet of the most preposterous legends, in the hope that enough people will find them sufficiently believable to assure that they are true. To accomplish this, they frequently contain an admonition to "forward this to everyone you know!" Since most people forward e-mail addresses along with the texts, spammers find these preposterous myths a good way of harvesting e-mail addresses and installing viruses as well. The spammer includes his own address on some preposterous e-mail, sends it to addresses he already has, and waits for it to be forwarded back to him along with all those new addressees of people to whom "forward or delete" are the only two options.
In spite of legends to the contrary, there is ample evidence that all we know, all our science and technology and culture, is the accumulation of between one and two million years of excruciatingly painstaking trial and error. The fruits of investigation, inquiry, discovery and invention of our ancestors was passed on, bit by bit, to their progeny. Like that of each individual human, born ignorant, our knowledge is the summation of the few things we learn in each generation, added to the overwhelming compendium of human understanding available to us by our unique gift of language, speech and the written word.
Since the reign of Queen Victoria, western intelligence had decreased by about one point every ten years. Within my generation, this ascent from ignorance and savagery has been reversed by our new-found facility to communicate, and believe, falsehood and lies. We are headed back to the stone age and even earlier. Maybe we'll end up as we started, a handful of ignorant starving savages, freezing in the dark of our miserable caves.
The sorry state of our society today is due in part to one of its most intractable problems: that the majority of our voting citizens are comfortable with believing and acting upon ideas that are widely circulated, apparently reasonable, compatible with their established beliefs, and totally WRONG!