The only thing I pass around on email besides business stuff are funny/cool clips or photos. Any political and religious matter are never passed on. All the stuff I get is rightwing anyway. Much of it is overtly anti-Muslim and sometimes it's really disturbing--like the one that listed a bunch of reasons why good Muslims can't be good Americans. This stuff has been apread about a lot of groups--Catholics, Japanese-Americans, etc.--and it has never resulted in anything good. It becomes another black mark and there's going to be a few of those given us in the coming decades as historians learn more and more of what we did in this invasion/occupation and why.

And you wonder how many people will receive that email and believe it. That's why I am thankful for the hoaxes--they remind people not to believe everything that gets to them in an email.

But a good rule of thumb is that if an email is informing you of some crazy atrocity somewhere that you never heard of, it's a fraud. Then there's the proselytizing one where it shows some heart-wrenching partiotic moment followed by the caption "Only two people have ever offered to die for you. Jesus Christ died for your soul. A soldier died for your freedom" or some such namby-pamby crap as that. Nothing drives me further from Christianity than something that pathetic, ingratiating and opportunistic.