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The Truth of the Matter

It's a regular day at work. You're cruising through your normal sources for the latest in news, Facebook, Twitter and various blogs. One does have to wonder how much more we might accomplish if it weren't for sites like these. But I digress.
You're scrolling through for news when you come across a picture linked to a story. Possibly about a missing dog belonging to a veteran or a spider that eats dogs. But the story that really gets you is the one warning of impending changes in the law that will force us all to have chips implanted in our hands.

Share. Like. Retweet.

Off the story goes. A comment here, indignation there and the fears are spread. It only really gets my attention when someone warns of impending doom to my Facebook account, because of recent changes made that will cause all of us to unwillingly share our favorite colors and our first dog's name. All we have to do to stop the madness is change all of our settings and share it with everyone.

The real issue is the under usage of snopes.com or sites like it. A simple search would have revealed the claim to be false, along with several others.

Today is not the day McFly went to in the future in Back to the Future 2.
Those photos of Tom Hanks posing with a drunk person. They're not what you think.

KFC didn't stop using 'chicken' in their name because they are growing mutant chicken meat.

Besides, there are other reasons you should second guess eating at KFC, or any fast-food restaurant.

But the real issue is even worse than what we believe on Facebook. It's what we believe in any area of life. Someone quotes someone they heard quoted by someone else and we accept what they say as actual truth. Not everything is two clicks away on snopes.com, but we do have sources of truth that we can access.

The question is whether or not we will take the time to stop scrolling and take the time to investigate the truth for ourselves. This has implications for Christians in more important matters than whether or not the secret formula for Coke is kept by two people, who each only know half the formula.

I'll stop here for today, as you clearly have some things you need to snope out. Have fun!

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