Does the email you forward to others communicate something about you? If so, what does it say?
I receive a TON of email each day! A great deal of it is spam, but some of it is a "forward" from a friend or relative. I received one such email the over the weekend. Here is what the text said about this picture:
"The attached picture was one taken by the Voyager ~500 billion miles away from earth. It took a succession of 60 shots to get a panoramic view. Each picture had 146,000 pixels and each pixel took 5.5 hours to be downloaded. Months later, this was the picture they received (sort of disappointing). The bands of light are reflections of the sun off the space craft.Caught in a beam of sunlight on the right is a small pale dot. This is Earth. An astronomer described it as a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
The point was to show how great and glorious God is. However something stuck out for me. It said that each pixel took 5.5 hours to be downloaded. I don't know much about technology, but I do know that the pictures I send folks on my computer have tons of pixels and it takes only seconds to download them.
My dh, who is quite a bit more scientifically sophisticated than I, took issue with a few other things:
"Obviously, a pixel doesn’t take 5.5 hrs to load. Not only that but if that were the case, it would take 48,180,000 hours (5,500 years) for those photos to load. Another thing, any object as small as the sun viewed from 500 billion miles away would not be visible in a photo of this scale – let alone the earth, or any reflection from the sun."
It goes without saying that it is a good idea to investigate things a bit before we pass them along to friends and family or, even more importantly, business associates. If we pass along some bit of false information, we end up with egg on our faces. When Christians pass along misinformation like this, it just solidifies the intellectual's belief that Christians are a bunch of feeble minded and gullible simpletons.
A quick way to check out these types of things is to run it by Snopes.com. In this case, there was no entry. The next thing to do is to check Google for any reputable sites or blogs that counter the claims of the email.
Bill Gates is not going to send you money, Neiman Marcus didn't charge anyone $500 for their cookie recipe and neither did Mrs. Fields. Nobody was abducted and woke up in a hotel bathtub of ice with a note of instruction after being harvested for organs. And no matter how many people you forward an email to you won't have "good luck" or make a million dollars.
Forwarding emails like this can make your friends and family think you have lost your marbles, colleagues wonder about your business saavy and intillectuals more convinced that Christians will follow any silliness blindly.
I was raised by two Atheists of Jewish heritage, married a non practicing Catholic and became a non denominational Christian due, in part, to some Amway meetings and a Jehovah's Witness who came to my door. My purple crayon writes with humor and almost always a little out of the lines.
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This blog is my creative and fun way of sharing my thoughts on communication skills relating mostly to homeschooling and sharing and defending the faith. It also reveals a bit about how the Lord took this shy Agnostic girl and allowed her to find her voice and her purpose, a zany voice to the Christian community with insight as to what unbelievers need to hear about Christ Jesus.
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I'll share news items, quotes, family friendly humor, tips, trivia, and my newest feature: Question of the Week. I invite you to come share your thoughts!
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For more creative fun with JoJo you can visit www.ArtofEloquence.com
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"A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." -Proverbs 25:11
Jan. 6, 2009 - False information