Happy New Year. Be blessed and be a blessing!

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Chain Email: Do You Believe In It?

Technology is inevitable. You will all agree with me.

Emails and sms become a big part of our daily life. I can testify to that ( having just checked all 4 email accounts for about the 16th time with Gmail topping the list with 10 times). One thing that caught my interest just right now is the issue of forwarded emails.

Forwarded emails get especially annoying when it is stupid. For example, I had been cursed to have bad luck for 8 years, asked to forward the email to all the people in my contact list or suffer from something, and so on. I think back then, before I moved to Gmail, I had more forwarded message than I have right now. Also for those forwarded emails that ask you to send it back to the sender, does it even matter? If I send XYZ back to John Doe, John Doe will have to send it back to me again. And then, I'll have to send it back to John again. When will it end?

I got sidetracked a bit there. >.< Well, let's go back to technology issue for now.

With technology, even Christianity advances. Nowadays, we see sms-chain link asking people to pray for item A, item B and so on. Not only that, we constantly receive encouraging forwarded emails containing inspiring stories (sometimes not-so inspiring) and other times, we are asked to forward email A, email B to everyone in our lists to help fund some insane operations.

Question: How much is it is true? How much of the forwarded email thing is true? Does Gmail pay 5cents for every forwarded email? Does AT&T care for a single mother in Malawi who needs money for her son's operation? How would you respond to those emails? How would you respond to those sms-es?

Do you pray for those prayer request sent through emails and sms? How much do you believe that those requests are actually true? More importantly, does it matter if they are false? What about forwarding emails to help Jane Doe with her operation? Do you actually do it? Do you believe in what you did or did you do it for fun?

I'm curious to know the people's respond on this topic. Share with me your thoughts.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I do not believe in, and strongly discourage the passing on of all chain letters. Even a lot of the prayer request chains are out of date at best, outright false at worst, and it matters a great deal if it is false, only partly true, or completely true and up to date. The way hoaxters use our deepest emotions against us for their own personal gain and amusement disgusts and enfuriates me, and I do not like my friends getting duped into passing on chain letters. Their willingness to continue is frustrating, they don't seem to care that they and anyone before them have all been manipulated into forwarding yet more copies of the same junk all over the net.