Question the Internet? Never!

On a regular basis I have e-mails forwarded to me that purport to tell some true story, most often about a political personage with whom that person disagrees. Once in a while it is about some other personage that is supposed to teach a moral story, but those are fewer. Rarely, some form of health advice or warning about a putative health problem is forwarded. And, periodically I receive the odd compassionate tale that teaches some type of feel-good moral, which is promptly ruined by an ending that claims that you are not a true friend, or a true Christian, or a truly compassionate person unless you forward this e-mail. Frankly, those are only the e-mails that make it through my internet provider’s spam filter. There are hundreds of e-mails a day that I do not see. Once in a while I dive into the cesspool of the server’s spam filter to see if it missed any true e-mail. I usually come out of that dive feeling dirty, given the subjects of all too many of today’s spam e-mails.

But what all the e-mails that I do receive have in common is that they are 99% false. Even when the basic story is true, there is usually a twist at the end that turns the story from truth to a deliberately crafted lie. But, in most cases even the basic story is not true. I used to spend time, a couple of years ago, going to Snopes.com to check out various of the e-mails. [There are other equally good sites.] I think I can only remember one e-mail whose information was fully true. Many of them had a degree of truth in them, enough to make it as a half-truth, which allowed the lie to be even more convincingly swallowed.

Let me give you an example of a true story: Bottle Bombs

But now, let me give you some examples of false stories: Debt Free America Act, Dhimmitude, Corona beer, Nieman-Marcus cookie recipe.

So I find myself in the same position as the deacon above. Dealing with people all the time, I have no doubt that people are fervent in their belief that what is on the Internet, or the latest conspiracy theory, is absolutely true. It is so true that they will not even listen when you point them to reputable debunking sites such as Snopes or point them to reputable news stories that debunk what they have just said. It is all irrelevant because everyone else but their cherished false belief is wrong and/or lying to deliberately stop them from seeing the truth.

Sadly, many of these people are also good Orthodox believers (I will let you all speak about your own group.). And, yet, when I would counsel them from the Scriptures or from the Church Fathers, they will promptly turn around and come up with the most incredible reasons why that advice or that Scripture or that quote from the Fathers could not be accurate. And they belong to my own faith group! Suddenly they become experts in church history or modern psychology or any other reason that allows them to duck out of responding to the ancient faith. Ultimately many of them choose to continue the lifestyle that caused the problem that brought them to talk to me in the first place.

And so, as Scripture itself points out time after time, “. . . and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” Many of us are in the position of believing false Internet stories while rejecting true wisdom from Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. Or worse, we make political or product-buying or safety-related decisions based on false Internet stories while refusing to make lifestyle decisions based on Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. To paraphrase Our Lord Jesus Christ, it should not be so among us.