Most of my friends and acquaintances have stopped forwarding me chain emails. This is likely due to the fact that, bothersome skeptic that I am, I usually research the email and write back to the sender to explain how their original email is incorrect, a hoax, or a scam. I do get forwarded some chain emails that are legitimate, but they are few and far between. I haven’t been keeping stats on this, but I would have to say that more than 90% of these types of email turn out to be bullshit, and I think I’m being fairly conservative with that estimate.

I last wrote about this subject back in 2006, when I discussed this post-9/11 Nostradamus chain email that I took a few friends to task over. Suffice to say that my views haven’t changed much since then.

The bit that sent me off today was an email about little girl from Poland who was severely injured in a fire. The girl, who’s name is Alexandra Kuczma, is only identified as Alexandra in the email. The email goes on to explain that she narrowly escaped death in a fire (true), that she requires a great deal of surgery and rehab (true), that her parents have no money to pay for this having lost everything in a fire (true), and that for every person who forwards this email her parents get $0.03 (complete, utter, and total bullshit).

How anyone in this day and age can think this is true escapes me. Does anyone stop and consider how metering out money based on email forwarding would be done? Does anyone stop to, I don’t know, maybe check snopes.com to see if there is any information on this email there? Oh wait, there is. It’s right here - I found it after literally 10 seconds.

Another thing that pisses me off is that the version I have of this email contains graphics and disclaimers for two hospitals - the Cleveland Clinic and Driscoll Children’s hospital. So either some ghoul tacked those on in the hopes of making this look more believable, or (probably more likely) they were forwarded through these hospitals by yet more gullible people. This is most likely because there are literally hundreds of email addresses on the forwarded version I received (as an aside, what a nice harvest for your average spammer out there.)

However, the absolutely most irritating part of this email was this little snippet someone inserted right before the story, which I quote in it’s entirety:

If you don’t do this…you don’t have a heart!- Go to the bottom!!!

Luke 6:38 Give, and gifts shall be bestowed on you. Full measure, pressed, shaken down, and running over, shall they pour into your laps; for with the same measure that you use they shall measure to you in return.”

Yeah. Um, about that. Save me your admonitions. It’s got nothing to do with my heart - I’m not going to do it because I have a brain.

It’s a sad situation, and it would be nice to be able to do something to help this little girl. Unfortunately, forwarding emails isn’t going to help anything. Cash donations would probably be nice for the family, but from the snopes article it looks like there is no easy way to do this. The more cynical side of me also notes that this would require more work than hitting the “Forward” button.

So it goes.

Why does this not surprise me? I happen to catch an article on CNN today about the Pope canceling a speech at La Sapienza University in Rome. Hmmm, read down a bit….protest by students and academics….letter demanding that the trip be called off…read a little more…..oh, I see. The Pope finds the Galileo trial to be, in his words, “reasonable and just”?

Come again? The Pope agrees that it was reasonable and just that the Church convicted Galileo of heresy for having the audacity to argue that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. From the article:

In the letter, academics — pointing to a speech the pope gave at the same university as a cardinal in 1990 — claimed he condones the 1633 trial and conviction of the scientist Galileo for heresy.

Wow. He’s probably a bit pissed that Pope John Paul II announced on October 31, 1992 that the church erred in condemning Galileo. Of course, Pope John Paul II was eager to promote the view that there are no inconsistencies between science and faith, which he later expounded on in his encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason).

Of course, the view of these two Popes may not be that far removed. The quote below is from the site referenced above. The emphasis is mine.

On 31 October 1992, 350 years after Galileo’s death, Pope John Paul II gave an address on behalf of the Catholic Church in which he admitted that errors had been made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the Galileo case closed, but he did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo on a charge of heresy because of his belief that the Earth rotates round the sun.

I’m sure some would and will argue with me on this, but to me the message is fairly clear. Humans are meant to explore, and there should be no areas that are off limit to the inquisitiveness of the human mind. In Galileo’s day there was rigid dogmatic certainty that the Sun revolved around the Earth. We’ve known for some time that view is wrong, to the point where it’s become something of a joke. However, it wasn’t a joke back then and it makes me wonder which of today’s dogmatically imposed views will be viewed with amusement a few centuries from now.

You know, too many people seem to be dying of late. I mentioned this to my mother the other day (I’ll admit it; I talk to my mother, on the average, at least once a week. Normally quite a bit more during football season. What? Your mother doesn’t watch football? Too bad for you….that is, unless you don’t like football. Then it’s probably a plus - but I digress.) and her response basically boiled down to “you’re getting older, get used to it”.

The worst happened quite recently - one of Alex’s friends from school just lost his mother. She was just 50 years old. She had cancer for a number of years, and it finally took her life. That particular visit to the funeral home was, without a doubt, one of the saddest. A husband without a wife, and two kids without a mother.

I had already been feeling a bit melancholy over the holidays, as I was sailing through uncharted territory. This was the first time in 35 years that I didn’t have Grandparents and I was missing them terribly.

I sat up thinking about all this after the funeral home, and at some point things just clicked into place. Yes, it’s sad, very sad. However, looking at it another way - well, in a way it is inspiring. Neil Peart has a great line “there is never love without pain”. When someone is removed from your life it hurts. That’s a good thing. Getting emotional about something that matters is important. The other important thing is moving on, focusing on what you have rather than what you’ve lost. George Hrab (Yes, as Beth would say, I am a pathetic Hrab-ian fanboy. I’ll admit it. I also shower my friends with Hrab books and CD’s at holiday time in order to gain more converts.), in a yet-to-be-published-other-than-on-the-podcast (as far as I know) song addresses that side of the equation quite well:

every hand that’s ever writ - will up and quit,
’cause everything alive will die some day.

But in the meantime:
I get to see you smile, and that makes it all worthwhile.

A few weeks back I read a quote from Richard Dawkin’s Unweaving the Rainbow. I think it sums life up quite nicely for me.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Or, as my Grandfather used to say, “Any day above ground is a good day”.

Too true.