"Urgent request....
I just got this message, please pray.
Beloved friends in Christ One of our Christian friends, Ali Enokido requested us to pray:
"Urgent prayer request! Please pray for churches in
India. Buddhist extremists in India burned down 20
churches last night. Tonight they plan to destroy 200
churches in the province of Olisabang. They plan to
kill 200 missionaries within 24 hours.
Right now all Christians are hiding in villages. Please pray for them and send this mail to Christians you know. Please ask God to have mercy on our brothers and sisters in India. When you received this message, please send this urgent prayer request forward. Please pray for them and commit this matter in our Almighty
and Victorious Lord!"
Love in Christ
Vivian Tadros"
As the source of this was somebody who regularly sends me conspiracy/disaster emails I checked it our on google. I found several thousand articles match the search terms with varying dates. So if it was true, it's obviously too late to pray, and I'm sure I would have heard something about Buddhist extremists burning churches in India.
One of the articles said this:
"This is a hoax. There are no “provinces” in India, there are states. There is no state of Olisabang. There are no Buddhist extremist groups in India that I’m aware of (though there are some in Sri Lanka, and there have been reports of anti-Christian violence there in recent years) .
There have been violent attacks in the Indian state of Orissa; these have been perpetrated by Hindu extremists, however. This anti-Christian violence is a genuine cause of concern–but no one is helped by passing on hoax e-mails without checking the facts."
It really does nobody any good when you pass on these things. It just wastes time and it's like the boy who cried wolf. One day that email you get will be a genuine request for prayer for a genuine disaster but nobody's going to listen.
When you get an email like this you need to ask "does this sound like another email I got some time ago?" Then copy and paste a sentence or two into google and see what turns up there. Better still go to snopes.com and search their site.
We hear preachers condemn gossip and spreading unfounded rumours, guarding our tongues etc. What aobut guarding the rubbish we send out in the form of email?
Absolutely! I think God expects us to be good stewards in all ways, not just with money.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that common sense goes out the window when some people turn their computers on!
ReplyDelete