Not using snopes.com or google.
Jun 24th by JonYesterday, in my excitement about a possible cage match between Justin Bieber and Harry Potter, I shared some wildly inaccurate information on Twitter.
Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter in the movies, said that he initially thought that Bryan Adams 2.0, Justin Bieber, was a woman. In the bottom of the article I saw he said, “I think she’s kind of amazing, she’s really got a voice. She can really sing.”
I thought that was a funny thing to say about Justin Bieber so I tweeted it. Only that quote wasn’t about Bieber, it was about Lady Gaga. Radcliffe thought Bieber was a girl, but he was actually talking about someone else when he made those other comments. (I would argue that Lady Gaga is a good performer/entertainer, but I don’t think she’s particularly known for the power or awe of her voice.)
It wasn’t a big deal, a few folks on Twitter corrected me, but in doing that stupid tweet I did what lots of Christian often do. I shared something online without checking it on snopes.com or google first.
Snopes is a site dedicated to dispelling rumors that float around the Internet. Like fake kidnappings or scams that involve someone giving you a free iPad for testing their product. If I had a dollar for every time a Christian friend sent me a faith-flavored Internet rumor without taking 3.2 seconds to google the accuracy of it first, I could claim like TI that “I’m recession proof, I don’t run to money, money run to me, in this economy I’m considered an anomaly.”
I thought about trying to convince us all to google and snopes stuff before we send crazy Christian internet rumors out via email, but I don’t think this blog is that powerful. I know my limits. But what we can do today is discuss the best ways to quickly identify a Christian urban legend email:
1. Fwd.
Although technically, those three letters mean the email has been “forwarded” to you from someone else, I want to redefine that. All too often if you see Fwd, what it really means is the email is going to be “Fake, Weird, Dumb.” Beware the arrival of an email that has “Fwd” in the subject line.
2. Crazy subject line.
If you see the word, “Horrible” or the phrases, “If you’re a Christian, you must read this,” or “Fourth horseman spotted outside Cleveland,” go ahead and delete that email immediately.
3. The phrase, “I never send these out.”
Yes you do. Stop saying that. This is the telltale sign of a serial urban legend fan. They always try to tell you that they never send these types of emails out but this one, this one is too serious to ignore. It’s the equivalent of the date you go on where a guy or girl says, “I’m not crazy, seriously, it’s not like I’m crazy.” Yes you are, that is what crazy people always say.
4. Prayer.
I think it’s awesome that we can use email to share prayer requests. I think it’s less awesome that we use it to spread urban legends about prayer. I got one recently about the National Day of Prayer being cancelled. It was so full of inaccuracies that it made my teeth hurt. The text was wrong, the photo in it was misleading, the information was shady. It was essentially the email equivalent of the officiating in the World Cup. Bottom line, if you get an exclamation laden !!!! prayer email be very careful.
5. Tricky words.
I once got an email that warned about an event that happened “beside the White House.” It was written that way to make you feel like the White House held an official event in the garden right outside the oval office. But the truth is, “beside the White House” actually just means “near the White House.” Do you know what is “beside the White House?” A public road. A public sidewalk where a whole host of people hold meetings and protests and events. Regardless of your politics, it’s deceptive and/or whack to trick people with language like this.
6. The claim is gigantic.
The bigger the claim, the greater the chance is that it’s fake. A few months ago someone sent me an email from “James Dobson” that said all Sunday worship services on the radio or television were about to be removed from the air unless we signed a petition. Chances are, if thousands of gospel programs are going to be instantly removed from both radio and television, the first time you hear of this won’t be in an email from your friend “BillKingBeliever777.” Also, there are scams aimed at Christians that ask for your email address in order to keep prayer in our country. They just want your email. Avoid these like one of the plagues. The frogs for instance.
7. They claim scientists in Siberia drilled a hole to hell.
You laugh, but this is a real urban legend featured on Snopes.com. Someone actually had to dispel this. So let me clear it up once and for all. That I am aware of, no holes to hell have in fact been drilled in Siberia.
I’m sorry that I misspoke about Justin Bieber and Harry Potter yesterday. That was not cool and I send my sincere apologies both to anyone who is currently experiencing “Bieber Fever” and to Potter fans like me who are desperate to go to the new Hogwarts theme park. Hopefully you were not too hurt. And hopefully, before we send out emails with crazy Christian urban legends we’ll check snopes.com or google.
Have you ever heard a Christian urban legend?
Has someone ever sent you one?
Comments
Thank you for posting this, Jon. I feel such pain when Christians post provable falsehoods (usually political but not always) all over FB. Some days Snopes is my best friend…
But half the time, when I post links to the truth, people don't want to know about it. Honestly, people believe what they want to believe, and don't want to hear the truth…. And then Christians are surprised when everyone else believes what they want to believe and don't want to hear the truth. What an example to set!
All I can say is "thank you!!!" for this post! I HATE those stupid forwards! Actually, I think I hate the fact that I have Christian brothers and sisters who actually believe them and feel compelled to forward them on to me to perpetuate the stupid. Ugh.
I wish I could deny this is happening. Sadly, Christians are among the worst for chain letter addiction on the net! And it makes me mad enough to want to break things! I even have a site specifically for Christians BREAKING chain letters, guess what, I'm the only one there. But I'll smash just about any chain letter that comes my way, and even discourage the sending around of those that contain true stories. If I would've beaten you to the Snopes/TruthOrFiction/etc. at least this time, if I came across some hokey story about them – or any celebrity I was interested in. Yes, I'm a Christian, and I break chain letters 6 ways from Sunday, and I don't always do it nicely, either. The things I scream in my head when well-meaning but hopelessly clued out and suckered-in friends and Christians pass around this stuff, and include me on their junklists – well…Not exactly civil. So. Want to see a Christian tear apart chain letters instead of passing them along like an idiot, http://fictionlands.pbworks.com/Hoaxton and http://cbcf.boardhost.com Hoaxton gives chain letters a creative writing treatment. Let's just say that Bloody Mary would run like hex from me now. And cbcf is where I put all my rants.
Yeah, something else that really disgusts and makes me freakin angry is the abandonment I getrompeople I set straight when they send stupid chain letters. I've found out people have taken me off their lists, which is fine, but then that means they've also put me in their boycott list as well. Out of spamlist, ut of mind completely! And then they go on sending these damn chain letters to everyone else who are either equally awed by this bilge or else too timid and "nice" to say anything about it! ARGH!!! Yes, extra exclamation marks, and this time, they are warranted. I should put up my rant about people abandoning me for the sake of their own egos and because they'd rather send chain letters blindly than be enlightened and actually take the time to have a real conversation with me!
Ugh, those are the best! It’s funny how the most common culprits are people who never email you personally to say “Hey. How’s it goin’?”
I had a friend who would send me every Jesus forward and every Democrat forward under the sun for months on end! And then she got snippy when I emailed her back and told her I was a Republican.
It was worth telling a little while lie to get out from that deluge of fwds.
I especially hate the ones that imply I don't love Jesus if I don't bombard everybody else I know with the lovely photo of Jesus on Velvet.
My loving mom sends me FWDs all the time. I'm not sure what disturbs me most–that she sends FWDs, or that she's 78 and seems to know more about all those F.W.D things happening than me! Does anyone else feel guilty when you delete emails from your mom???
OOOHHH Jon. Yes there is a hole to hell: it's the Hogwart's Theme Park….
As a pastor, I get this stuff sent to me all the time from folks at the different churches I have served. My mom is also very bad about it, too. I used to be very vigilant about sending links to Scopes in hopes of changing the behavior, but it doesn't seem to do much good. Now I just delete and move on.
I am not sure if anyone will read my comment since there are 200+ comments preceeding mine, and maybe it was mentioned before, but there is another site that is also a good source in verifying/debunking rumors:
http://www.truthorfiction.com
Ohh, maybe this was mentioned previously, but if someone send out one of these emails, and in their email they state that they have verified the rumor using Snopes.com, PLEASE do your own checking! Chances are they (whoever started the email) put that in there to make their email look legit.
my mom sends me that kind of thing all the time! it makes me crazy. i’m sending this post to her right away.
Oh, J, I’m not the only one? Yay HP theme park! I doubt I will ever get to go, but oh, how I want to!
[...] Stuff Christians Like, Jonathan Acuff offers up seven indications that what you are reading may be a rumor with no basis [...]
I take those emails that have to be forwarded to 10 friends or Jesus will deny he knows me very seriously! Since I don't have 10 friends, I send it back to the person that sent it to me 10 times. I think Jesus will pat me on the back for that one!
I hadn't thought of that strategy. I should try that next time.
I agree about verifying info before forwarding or tweeting, but new information has also recently surfaced regarding the non-nonpartisanship of the snopes runners. They're apparently less stringent about checking facts when a fact check would hurt the more liberal population. Google that.
my mom sends me forwards. they’re usually awful, and I feel guilty about deleting them, but not guilty enough to read them. also, if this ever gets back to her that I don’t read her emails, I’ll toss a smoke bomb, dodge the bullets a la Nemo, army crawl my way out of the house, bore a hole in the wall with my horde of sharp-toothed weasels, and escape to Canada. you think I’m kidding.
Yeah… I wish '70s-era Christians would read Snopes' entry about the claim that Jimi Hendrix called Phil Keaggy the greatest guitarist alive. (Though, admittedly, he is currently more animated than Jimi.)
I have heard that one also, and in other various forms employing Eric Clapton and Eddie Van Halen (all three variations taking place on the Johnny Carson show).
I found truthorfiction.com to better than snopes. I have used it many times when I receive a "junk" email.
Snopes is a verb! I knew it! WOO HOO!!! That is very handy. I've been googling for years, but now I can snopes too! Thank you for validating the verbness of "snopes"! (:
My pops showed me snopes.com when I was in high school, and I use that site like students use the encyclopedia. I get so many bogus emails, mostly of fake pictures of "The biggest alligator ever!!" or something along those lines. The ones I get really offended by are ones that take advantage of the military and/or families of those serving in the military. I don't understand how people can blindly forward out emails left and right without verifying the facts!! Sadly, my grandmother is one of these. I called her one afternoon and kindly explained to her that she shouldn't believe everything she receives online, and gave her snopes as a reference. She called me sweet, but I still don't think she gets it.
My cousin, once again, tried to convince that Pepsi Co. was releasing another (it's "already happened twice") can design with the pledge of allegiance minus the words "Under God"
.
After arguing with him for 15 minutes, he finally said, "Well, I'll just go buy a new can and show you."
$5 to whoever can tell me how this story ends. Lol,
Two things: First, I go an email that said it had been checked by snopes so of course I did the Christian things and forwarded it to 10,000 people. I later decided to see what snopes had to say and found out that the story had not been verified by them!!!!!!! Now I check everything.
second: I am always puzzled by those that say if I forward this to at least so many people something wonderful will be happening to me in the next 10 minutes. I'm sorry, but that is just voodoo science and contrary to everything we know to be true as Christian. What's up with that. And BTW, I never forward those and I'm still standing!!
Responsible skepticism? Reason? Even though I'm a militant atheist I intended to share this post. Well done.
i remember the one about drilling a hole to hell in the USSR…in fact I remember that being reported on the newsworthy TBN by none other than the great Paul Crouch
I'm still the only Christian on CBCF, and got a chain fwd the other night from a friend, this one was about "The Room" which is NOT by Brian Moore BTW. I replied back with several links debunking the falsehoods within that forward, and put up a mini-rant on CBCF about it.
Christians do need to STOP with the chain letters, NOW!
"It was essentially the email equivalent of the officiating in the World Cup." This cracked me right up. Nicely done!
I work near the White House and sometimes walk there for lunch. Events occurring next to the White House and/or just outside recently include me eating a sandwich. It was peanut butter. I'm sure this reflects a lot on the White House.
I've noticed that sometimes my friends don't care about their 'informative emails' being untruthful. That even when given proof they shrug it off because they are so against that subject and don't want to hear anything that points the other way. People love to pass on erroneous information. This is why my friends call me Mikipedia,… because I obsessively check EVERYTHING I get.
I think there are plenty of truthful, factual things to dislike about people, places or things without having to resort to insane claims, photoshopped drama or political/racial/faith based bias passed along the internet. It is extremly frustrating to me that people are so easily swayed by what amounts to gossip.
If that frustrates you, try arguing about science with die-hard creationists. It's so bad that I've come to EXPECT that a creationist will engage in massive distortions of science, and to be honest, I can't recall the last time I was wrong. For example, virtually 100% of creationists believe that Big Bang Theory involves "something from nothing".
When you point out that it does NOT actually say this, they simply ignore you and repeat that Big Bang Theory requires "something from nothing". They know it's true because it's "common knowledge". Why should they bother learning physics or going straight to the horse's mouth and asking an astrophysicist?
Sure, there's that whole commandment about not bearing false witness, but that's not one of the important ones, right? What could be wrong with casually misrepresenting what scientists really say? It's no big deal, right? "Everybody knows", so it can't be wrong!
I was told, ever since I heard about fleetwood mac, that Stevie Nicks was a wiccan. Turns out she is not and has stated so in many interviews that I have read. Worst of all, it was told to me by my father, a christian man.
Not a very christian thing to do – spreading a lie about someone without a kernel of truth.
I received a forwarded email from a family member that started out, "According to snopes.com, the following article is true." Being the fervent skeptic, a quick lookup on snopes.com, of course, showed that the article was, in fact, false. What people who forward these messages don't realize is that in their great desire to "inform", they are doing nothing more than spamming and spreading rumors that, in most cases, are simply not true.
A Christian urban legend?? Sure, a lot of them…The Garden of Eden, Noahs Ark, Jonah and the whale, Resurrection, etc.
But yes, I constantly have to fact check all my Moms forwards…No Barack Obama is not a Muslim, no he wasn't born in Kenya, No you won't be blessed if you forward this email, no gay marriage is not a sign of the apocalypse.
While there have been no holes punched through to hell, there is a former well known locally as "The gates of hell" in former soviet Turkmenistan. This well punched through a gas cavern that collapsed, dropping the rig down a hole 350 ft across and I am guessing a few hundred feet deep. The collapse of the well sent lots of toxic fumes and natural gas to the surface.
The soviet solution to this was to set the hole on fire to burn the toxic fumes. They thought it would extinguish itself in a few days. It's been burning since 1971.
http://static.atlasobscura.com/place/the-gates-of... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derweze
You can also see this with google maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?source=s_q&hl=en&...
[...] Not Using Snopes.com or Google from Stuff Christians Like (Jon Acuff) In honor of a conversation on Twitter yesterday that offered the correlation between snot and friendship (you don’t want me to get into it), here is this week’s not-so-random picture. Better out than in, I suppose… Now that I’ve subjected you to the horror of that picture, please do me a favor and have an amazing weekend filled with God’s presence (and plenty of tissue for everyone who needs them). I appreciate your prayer and support! If you have a favorite post you’d like to share or want to comment on one of my favorites, please go for it in the comments. Blessings! [...]
The usual retort, if there is one, is the suggestion that Snopes is biased and the pair that run it hate God, America and all that is right. And if you ask for proof of this claimed bias, they usually don't respond, or they post something they misunderstood.
Unfortunately, I have many a family member who love to forward these crazy emails. My favorite was the one about the hypodermic needles with the AIDS virus in them that were hidden in gas station pump handles – who comes up with this stuff?
I think the most ridiculous ones are the ones that tell you that "if you love Jesus, you'll send this along." Absolutely inappropriate and DEFINITELY not a requirement.
So you're saying you're not giving me a free iPad for testing out this blog post?
This is one of my pet peeves! I especially dislike the “fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd:” subject lines. The way I have stopped these from coming to my inbox is I started copying the link to the snopes article about whatever ridiculous email I was just sent (en mass, of course). I then hit “reply to all” and paste the link in the email reply which will now go to everyone in their address book (because you know they sent it to everyone). If you are feeling especially snippy, you can include a little note that says something like “Maybe you should have looked this up before you sent it.”. I don’t get those anymore. I like to think it’s because I have taught everyone in my address book to use snopes (or maybe they just deleted me, oh well).
I once had the unfortunate experience of sitting in church as the Pastor preached on the last days and mentioned…..The Beast Of Babylon. You know, that 2 story computer somewhere with everyones info. An urban legend from the pulpit.
I- just -wanted -to -die.
This was at the end of the most recent forward I received:
"When someone shares something of value with you and you benefit from it, you have a moral obligation to share it with others."
My response: Umm…thanks for the guilt trip but do let me be the judge of that.
I wonder if Christians realize that those horrible chain letters reflect very poorly on their faith, and make them look completely ridiculous to the very people they're supposedly trying to convert. Why does anyone forward such a thing?
Lady Gaga can't sing!? Take that back!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM51qOpwcIM
Granted, she's not belting it like this in most of her recent works, but she's a hell of a lot more talented than most of the pop stars out there.