Anyone who's been on MySpace for a while and has over, I dunno, 200 friends, has probably seen a bulletin like this one: it's titled something to the effect of "Sad News" or "You Need To Read This." You know, something to pique your curiosity without tipping off what the post is in regards to. You open it, and it reads like this:

There are so many people on this list. I guess alot of people aren't ashamed to stand up for what they believe in. You opened this because it said "sad news" ......but if it said "Jesus Christ our Lord" would you have opened it? Jesus said, "If you are ashamed of Me, I will be ashamed of you before my Father." It's your choice. If you aren't ashamed to do this, repost this as sad news at ( name of your school) and put your name on the bottom.

Then there follows a list of the last several hundred lemmings who did just that. I almost universally delete whomever posted the bulletin last.

I have never been impressed by chain letters. They're wastes of time, energy and even money. If I send someone an email or message, it's because I have something to say to that person. Bulletins are a bit of a cypher, because it's just info you leave in plain view, but there are plenty that also cross the line, ie, the "Tom is deleting people and only by forwarding this barely literate message will you be spared!" or "There's a killer loose on MySpace!" schmuckeries that flare up every six months or so. Recently I saw one about copperheads and heroin syringes in Chuck E. Cheese ball pits that almost had me going until it alleged that what killed a kid from East Bumblefuck pricked on the heinie wasn't gangrene but a heroin overdose. All it takes is one very obvious piece of bullshit to bring a house of cards down.

The same person who'd posted that one is also the one who posted the one I cited above. The only reason I haven't yet deleted her is that got a nice message from her on my birthday. See, my worldview, even it only is answerable to me, does not preclude the possibility that I might be wrong. From the tone I read in these messages, I don't detect any such humility in those that author them.

Let me explain exactly why these messages rub me the wrong way. I am not a Christian. I have never been a Christian. So I'm not even someone who came from that background but left it; there wasn't anything to leave. My actual religious background, Judaism, was rarely anything more than the sports team I used to root for. (If the question arises why I don't anymore, you obviously don't pay much attention to what's going on in Israel. If you do and still ask that question, go fuck yourself.) There came a point when I understood that the nature of the universe was entirely too complex for any one book to attempt to encapsulate. Shit, the entirely of man's works is insufficient as anything more than a sliver of a reflection thereof. The search for just a speck more knowledge is what ennobles mankind, not settling for pat answers in pretty tales that have been so redacted and rewritten that they're next to meaningless. Down that path lays intellectual entropy and very likely extinction.

Still, I do not begrudge anyone their respective reality tunnels, so long as they understand that that's what they are: theirs. They are in no more possession of the facts than anyone else. In fact, that they've accepted a story that so many else have settled upon seems to imply even less curiosity about the universe around them, and thus have nothing new to contribute on that front. Again, that's their right. Conversely, it saddens me that my own father is a stated atheist; that also betrays both a lack of curiosity and a hubris of certainty his scope does not afford him.

And yet, for the most part, you do not see atheists, agnostics, or even Jews, Muslims or Buddhists posting bulletins on MySpace using emotional blackmail in the form of Pavlovian call-and-response to confirm common imprinting. In other words, I very much doubt a bulletin saying, "BOY I LOVE SATAN HE GAVE US ALL PONIES SIGN THIS AND PASS IT ON OR HE'LL SELL YOUR PONY TO A DOG FOOD COMPANY" would go unremarked upon; you'd probably lose a good number of friends unwilling to participate in your Mickey Mouse Club roll call entrainment.

You may think these people are "sinners" or otherwise hate that for which you're declaring your love, but you're off. What they hate is YOU, the person who posted that bulletin. You're the insecure narcissist who needs an echo chamber so the logical inconsistencies of your mythologies don't seem to matter so much. You're the one who suggested that your reader is the misanthrope for not believing as you do, rather than you for taunting them with the promise of divine castigation for not circulating a chain letter on a social network (because that's how the Creator decides such things; you prove your faith by copying n' pasting a field of text, ooo). And you lure people into that philosophical trap, flimsy as it may be, with a vague title that on first appearance seems like a legitimate concern on a human level, as though only through deception will the "true" be separated from the "false." If that's what your idol requires of you, all the more reason why anyone of merit would want to stay far, far away.

By all means, find one another and chatter happily about how much you love your mutual perspective in the proper milieu. But the expense of the alienation of all others when you evangelize, especially this crudely, ought to weigh upon you if you indeed have a conscience which these perspectives inform. Any convoluted justification you employ to excuse the short-term ramifications in favor of your supposed goal is just mental masturbation to bury your immediate empathy. It's a placebo that feels like fulfillment, but it's lightyears away from any feeling at all.