Readers should be wary of e-mail 'facts'

So there I was on the computer, minding my own business, when suddenly I received an email. It was one of those group emails that passed from one large group to another and finally to me. I had received this same email some time ago and here it was making the rounds again. In it, the author asserted that there is a verse in the Koran that predicted how God would raise up an eagle (supposed to be America) to bring peace, or something like that. It doesn't really matter, because it doesn't exist.What makes it worse is that this email says the verse is in the Koran at chapter 9, verse 11. Isn't that convenient? Isn't that amazing? Well, I have read some of the Koran and such a verse does not exist. Yet such a "fact" is being sent and presumably believed by numerous gullible people.Come on people! We have to do better than this. We are acting like lemmings mindlessly running off of a cliff. What? You haven't heard of lemmings? Well, look it up and you will see that … wait a minute. Lemmings do not run off of cliffs?Where did that get started? Where does anything get started? Just because something is repeated does not automatically make it true. Oh, there are many more examples of "truth" being sent out on the internet but I don't want to bring them up. Don't worry, somebody will send them to you.There is a Web page called snopes.com that helps debunk urban myths. These spurious emails reveal our tendency to hold onto myths in spite of the evidence. It's getting more and more difficult to avoid being a cynic. Because faith is a prime commodity with Christians, we are usually the first to go over the cliff (oh yeah, that isn't the way it works, is it?). But humanists and rationalists are not immune to this mindless acceptance of cherished, yet unproven or unverifiable notions. It is a weakness of the general human condition.For more, please access my blog and read the first four entries from April of this year. It is time to stop and think about thinking. Here's one thing that seems to be true — having faith in a lie doesn't automatically and magically make it true. Someone supposedly once said "faith is believing what you know isn't true." Delete that one, too.Tom Rupp is a Bible Teacher at Capital Bible College. He can be reached at truppfolsom@yahoo.com or through his blog at thomaswrupp.blogspot.com.