The little church in the middle of nowhere strikes again!

I stopped going to this church a while back. The new pastor and his family seemed a bit too..."Jesus Camp" for me. For anyone who's seen the movie, I'm sure you catch my drift. For those who don't, I recommend you seeing the film.

While I didn't overhear/see any tongue-talking while there, I still received quite a cult-like vibe whenever I attended. The pastor and his family believed only in custom-made clothing, only in home-schooling, and spent half the time at service singing us songs (just their family) as we watched. There seemed to be a political agenda on his/their minds as well. When I attended regularly, I was yet very concerned about any political issues, so I just sat about sermon, dozed off, and didn't notice these political banterings much. But, ever since I stopped attending, my mother has mentioned a few of these political statements (and false ones at that).

On one occasion, the pastor read an e-mail a friend of his had sent. This e-mail was a forward, reporting results from the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. In the end, the message basically was that Republicans are God's soldiers and Democrats are the Devil's advocates. Of course, the majority of the stats provided in the e-mail were false and regardless of that fact, I don't see any reason to spread a forward e-mail (many of which are false) during a church service. So, upon hearing of this, I found proof signifying the inaccurate statistics and followed it up with a letter stating my own comments and mailed it to the pastor and his family. He kindly called me back and said he didn't realize that it had a political agenda. Uh-huh. But, I just informed him that if an e-mail ends with the following, "Pass this on...", there's a 90% chance that the story shared within it is either partially false or everything presented in the e-mail is inaccurate.

So, I guess just recently, this same pastor shared with his audience what was sent to him via another forward e-mail. What did it express? That Illinois Democratic presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, is a radical Muslim. Again, this is false. I then provided my mother with the proper source material to share with him following a sermon to prove that the information he shared that Sunday was incorrect. She was unable to provide this information last Sunday, but hopes to this upcoming week. I'm curious to hear of his reaction.

Whatever that reaction is, why does he feel it necessary to spread this false information as part of a political agenda? Every week, I hear something regarding the service that makes me even more grateful I left when I did, because it's amazing the brainwashing capability it has on some people. Just last week, she commented on how she believes that we (America) are losing God's blessing, because we've slowly pushed him out of our lives as a nation. Through that, we will slowly lose our superpower status. I then attempted to reverse that logic on her, by stating, "Well, experts claim that if any nation is to be the next superpower, that it will be China. Does that mean they are slowly earning God's blessing?" She didn't understand where I was coming from with that, so I was unable to get through to her on how illogical her statement was to begin with.

This just astounds me. It's amazing how much false information gets spread via e-mails and sermons. There are hundreds of hoax forwards circulating the web and if the reader agrees with what was written, he/she will be likely to spread it around to others, many of which may have similar political/religious beliefs as they and will continue to spread the lies via the Net. This then gets spread at churches and spread elsewhere. Yet, popularity never equals the truth. Notoriety doesn't equal the truth. Regardless of how many forwards and how many spreaders claim that 2 + 2 = 5, the fact remains that 2 + 2 = 4. Regardless of how many people spread the lies in the forwards I just mentioned, doesn't shake the facts that the statistics presented in the first e-mail were inaccurate and that Barack Obama is not a Muslim, let alone a radical one. For how much time people spend reading these lies and spreading them, I only wish they were able to spend a little time checking on the sources to make sure that what they read and may spread are factual.