#1 INSIPID-IRRATIONAL
You know those inspirational stories that reinforce our belief and trust in God? Aren't they heartwarming? Well, they are ... up until the point where you get to the bottom and there's some sort of challenge or curse about passing this on to receive a blessing or how much of a coward you are for Christ if you don't pass it on (for they know how eager I am to pass on other emails ... but it's this email about God I'll hesitate and not forward; haha if they only knew the truth). It turns the email message from inspirational into sinspirational. From godly to satanic. There have been a handful of times (out of the tens of thousands I've rec'd) where I have forwarded the message on ... but only after deleting all that chain letter garbage about passing it on at the end.
If the message is good, it'll stand on its own. It doesn't need heaps of guilt or the threat of a supernatural curse if we don't pass it on...
#2 ANGRY (un)TRUE STORIES
You know those stories that point out an injustice or some other reason to get mad? Lately it's been the immigration issue. Seems a lot of people are letting seeds of hatred towards their Latin American brothers and sisters get sown in their hearts. If they only knew how much God loved this culture and how much He is blessing it. I got one yesterday about someone that wanted to cancel their bank credit card account, because they were tired of seeing the bank give credit to non-citizens or something. During the process of the transaction, they were asked for their social security number. This person refused, because the illegals don't have social security numbers and yet they get service here without it. The customer service person told him that when callers connect and press "2" for Spanish, they won't get asked for a Social Security number. Well, investigate this on snopes if you want, but don't you know that this story is false? In fact, 100% of the stories you read on the internet are false -- especially if it's in the body of one of those "pass this on" type emails! While the accuracy of the statistic I just threw out there might be slightly off by a fraction of one percentage point, if we followed this advice (which I've been doing for about five years now), we'd be much better off than believing this garbage. Have you ever sent out an enraging email to a list of people -- only to be replied back with a link from snopes that shows that police in Georgia never do such and such (or some other report concerning the alleged crime/activity).