This is revolting! Try not to barf.

[Laura]

Just received this Propaganda Chain letter by email. Gads!

When you're down to nothing, God is up to something."

This is beautiful! Try not to cry.

She jumped up as soon as she saw the surgeon come out of the
operating room. She said: "How is my little boy ? Is he going to be
all right ? When can I see him ?"

The surgeon said, "I'm sorry. We did all we could, but your boy
didn't make it."

Sally said, "Why do little children get cancer ? Doesn't God care
any more ? Where were you, God, when my son needed you ?"

The surgeon asked, "Would you like some time alone with your son ?
One of the nurses will be out in a few minutes, before he's
transported to the university."

Sally asked the nurse to stay with her while she said good bye to
son. She ran her fingers lovingly through his thick red curly hair.
"Would you like a lock of his hair ?" the nurse asked.

Sally nodded yes. The nurse cut a lock of the boy's hair, put it in
a plastic bag and handed it to Sally.

The mother said, "It was Jimmy's idea to donate his body to the
University for Study. He said it might help somebody else. "I said
no at first, but Jimmy said, 'Mom, I won't be using it after I die.
Maybe it will help some other little boy spend one more day with his
Mom." She went on, "My Jimmy had a heart of gold. Always thinking of
someone else. Always wanting to help others if he could."

Sally walked out of Children's Mercy Hospital for the last time,
after spending most of the last six months there. She put the bag
with Jimmy's belongings on the seat beside her in the car.

The drive home was difficult. It was even harder to enter the empty
house. She carried Jimmy's belongings, and the plastic bag with the
lock of his hair to her son's room.

She started placing the model cars and other personal things back in
his room exactly where he had always kept them. She laid down across
his bed and, hugging his pillow, cried herself to sleep.

It was around midnight when Sally awoke. Laying beside her on the
bed was a folded letter. The letter said:

"Dear Mom,

I know you're going to miss me; but don't think that I
will ever forget you, or stop loving you, just 'cause I'm not around
to say "I Love You". I will always love you, Mom, even more with
each day. Someday we will see each other again. Until then, if you
want to adopt a little boy so you won't be so lonely, that's okay
with me. He can have my room and old stuff to play with. But, if you
decide to get a girl instead, she probably wouldn't like the same
things us boys do. You'll have to buy her dolls and stuff girls
like, you know. Don't be sad thinking about me. This really is a
neat place. Grandma and Grandpa met me as soon as I got here and
showed me around some, but it will take a long time to see
everything. The angels are so cool. I love to watch them fly. And,
you know what? Jesus doesn't look like any of his pictures. Yet,
when I saw Him, I knew ! it was Him. Jesus himself took me to see
GOD ! And guess what, Mom ? I got to sit on God's knee and talk to
Him, like I was somebody important. That's when I told Him that I
wanted to write you a letter, to tell you good bye and everything.
But I already knew that wasn't allowed. Well, you know what Mom ?
God handed me some paper and His own personal pen to write you this
letter. I think Gabriel is the name of the angel who is going to
drop this letter off to you. God said for me to give you the answer
to one of the questions you asked Him 'Where was He when I needed
him ?' "God said He was in the same place with me, as when His son
Jesus was on the cross. He was right there, as He always is with all
His children. Oh, by the way, Mom, no one else can see what I've
written except you. To everyone else this is just a blank piece of
paper. Isn't that cool ? I have to give God His pen! back now. He
needs it to write some more names in the Book of! Life. &
nbsp;Tonight I get to sit at the table with Jesus for supper. I'm
sure the food will be great.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. I don't hurt anymore. The cancer is
all gone. I'm glad because I couldn't stand that pain anymore and
God couldn't stand to see me hurt so much, either. That's when He
sent The Angel of Mercy to come get me. The Angel said I was a
Special Delivery ! How about that ?

Signed with Love from God, Jesus & Me.

(Let's see Satan stop this one.) Take 60 seconds and repost this,
within the hour, you will have caused a multitude of believers to
pray to God for each other. Then sit back and feel the Holy Spirit
work in your life for doing what you know God loves "When you're
down to nothing, God is up to something."

Email this.

Title: This is beautiful ! Try not to cry.
Send this to 10 people in 2 minutes and you will feel the Holy
Spirit brightening your life in just an hour.

 

[doublea1535]

Revolting and scary. I used to get letters like this from my cousin all of the time. It finally became too much and I asked her to stop. Afterwards she stopped emailing me completely. Oh well, I guess if she had nothing of her own to say then I am better off not hearing it.

But to try to make my point, what I think is scary is how much energy people put into these things. How much it (apparently, although I doubt truly) makes them happy. How offended they can get when you politely ask them to cease trying to include you in their "chains."

 

[Ryan]

So this heart-tugger of an email pushes pretty much every emotional and religious button possible, but the introduction says, "Try not to cry"! Is this intended to consciously create a contradiction in the reader? Inject noise.... sow confusion.

I wonder if there's a bunch of people who get paid to make up these propaganda pieces and send them winging around the 'net?

 

[Laura]

I wonder if there's a bunch of people who get paid to make up these propaganda pieces and send them winging around the 'net?

Probably. Which gives me an idea: why don't we come up with some good ones in reverse? Ones that make people think???

Now, figuring out how to do that would be a challenge.

 

[GRiM]

Hihi.. Can't understand people who even consider this to be anything else but fiction. Lots of NLP and sales language.
On the subject of "chainletters-that-makes-you-think" I would recommend about the same length as this one as it takes a minute to read and I dont think one should expect that any more attention will be given.

I really like the old philosophical questions that relates to the human nature or the diffrence between evidence/facts and opinions or maybe a picture of earth and a close-up of the clouds with a question about were the angels and people with harp are located? Like do the harp-players/Angels/jesus reside in the stratosphere or the throposphere? Or is the objective heaven diffrent from the cristian heaven.

Just top of my head.

 

[OPINMYND81]

Try hard not to cry? I was trying hard not to LAUGH!

C'mon, I mean sitting on god's lap, him giving you construction paper and a pen to write a letter (apparently there's a lot of book keeping in heaven! :/) then the archangel Gabriel fedex'ing it himself? Seriously who comes up with this tripe?!?

I have no doubt that its a group of psychopaths at the top who wrote this laughing themselves silly knowing that thousands of people who will read it will take it as gospel truth. Kind of like when they actually made people believe that a guy was playing golf on the moon. As for the people who buy into this crap can you say "arrested development"?

I firmly believe that the people who buy into this are not ADULTS but really just children in grown up bodies who refuse to grow up...and sadly they appear to be the majority. They completely justify their irrational beliefs, even after the fact that the letter has proven to be absurd, by saying that it's "harmless" and it's supposed to "make people feel good" so "what's wrong with that?" As I always say: good intentions often lead to bad results.

All this will do is emotionally charge their "beliefs" even more and make them more entrenched and harder to get out...thus making our work at reaching these people a lot harder...if indeed they can be reached at all. Those at the top of the food chain sure know they're doing.

Good observations on the NLP, title and set up of the letter: I'm sure Joe Vitale would be proud! And I'm all for a chain letter that will actually be of some use to people and not the annoying crap they usually get. We can probably even market it that way and ask questions like: do you get the sense that man is not really in charge of the world? That there's more to reality than meets the eye? That things feel controlled somehow? etc. etc.

And for the end we can say: "Feel free to share this letter with others. If you don't, it's ok, we promise you that we won't tell you:
-that you will have bad luck for the rest of your life
-that you will not have sex for the next 7 years
-that some boy in Nebraska will die of cancer
-that Bill Gates will not be sending you a cheque of a million dollars
-that Freddy Krueger will kill you in 15 minutes
Indeed, we think you're smarter than that. Have a nice day!"

You get the idea. :)

 

[Johnno]

There's actually a word for things such as these....."glurge".

I'm not sure if there's cubicles of glurge authors under the watchfull eye of a "boss-man" cracking the whip to come up with something more sickly sweet than the last. They usually involve puppies, kittens, jesus, children and illness. This is pretty good as it involves three elements! It gets bonus points for mentioning angels.

I've received a few "patriotic" ones in my time with a few things altered changing it from US patriotism to Australian patriotism.

Perhaps it's what greeting card writers do in their spare time? Or more seriously, a way to map networks....with various phrase sniffing software picking up the e-mail whizzing by?

 

[gaelen]

Title: This is beautiful ! Try not to cry.
Send this to 10 people in 2 minutes and you will feel the Holy
Spirit brightening your life in just an hour.

I know I feel something and I'm pretty sure it's not the Holy Spirit. If it IS the Holy Spirit then we are in deep trouble.

Deliciously horrible.

G.

 

[JGeropoulas]

Yeah, I've thought about something along those lines. My idea was send around an e-mail asking people who are "sick of all those 9/11 conspiracy theories to help speed up the work of our group, Blind Patriots ;) in debunking those theories".

They'd be asked to select several 9/11 items to thoroughly research, and then report their findings to us. I'd also advise them to "to be be alert for any false debunking articles which could make our group look foolish." Hopefully this would lead them to have open minds attuned to details that would ultimately enlighten them.

So far, just a pleasant daydream, but maybe it has merit. Though the C's used a a similar strategy in teaching Laura early in the Wave Series I believe, I'd have to give more thought to concerns about deceiving all those poor blind patriots ;)

I've also considered something like a little fun quiz with truths embedded into the Q & A. Such as:

How long do you think it would take
a big chunk of concrete to fall 10 feet?

a) 1 second
b) 2 seconds
c) 10 seconds
d) 60 seconds

ANSWER: a) 1 second

So, since it takes a chunk of concrete flooring 1 second to fall 10 feet to the
floor below, how long would it take the concrete floor from the 110th story
of a tower to fall floor-by-floor until all 110 floors hit the ground?

a) 110 seconds
b) 220 seconds
c) 10 minutes
d) 1 hour

ANSWER: a) 110 seconds (110 floors x 1 second per floor)


YOU'RE DOING GREAT! NOW YOU GET TO GO TO THE BONUS ROUND !

If you saw the concrete floor from an 110-story tower fall
down 1,100 feet in only 15 seconds, what would you think?

a) It fell in a free-fall (e.g. it took those 250 Trade Tower "jumpers" 15 seconds to crash into the ground)
b) It had been blown up by demolition explosives
c) The "pancaking" down, floor-by-floor theory is part of the Government's conspiracy to hide their involvement.
d) All of the above

ANSWER: d) all of the above are true

YOU GOT ALL THE TRUE ANSWERS! YOU WIN!

 

[Ruth]

YOU GOT ALL THE TRUE ANSWERS! YOU WIN!

Oh, I love it. No-one can resist a quiz!!

 

[Laura]

I think it's a great idea too. Both are great ideas. So, how about creating the emails and we'll work on propagating them. I'm sure everybody has a list of people they know who are "official story" supporters that we could start with.

 

[Buddy]

Years ago, when I was looking into Dianetics as a possible way of making money and helping people, I was introduced to the 'emotional tone scale'.
'Propitiation' is one emotion which is very LOW on that scale. In fact, the only thing lower is apathy and then death.
Propitiation was described as the emotion of 'gift-giving in order to appease...'.
The concept I formed to help me understand this was one of 'painful joy'. This contained the ideas of joyfully sacrificing one's own mind, happiness, property or whatever to whatever anonymous entity needed it in order to avoid death. In this emotional condition, it is ok to betray and hand over the integrating function of own's consciousness and to feel good about it.
I don't think it is even possible to betray oneself to such a deep level without feeling pain of some kind. And with the right indoctrination, that pain can be misinterpreted as the 'joy of giving', or even 'the joy of giving until it hurts'.
I'm wondering if the sender of that chain letter is feeling that burn.
My own acceptance of religious indoctration over the years has caused me to experience something similar to this first-hand and it has taken some time to identify it for what it is. Now when I look back over parts of my life, I occasionally feel a similar revulsion to my own behavior in this regard.
I, myself, have sat and conjured up similar good-sounding and good-feeling trash as a way to induce my own painful joy and to elicit similar feelings in others while believing my efforts would bring me 'rewards in heaven'. [I had to pause to laugh at myself after writing that line]
Today, when something like this appears in my inbox, it is easier for me to see it for what it is and ignore it, but on occasion, I have shot back a quick email that I thought would expose their illusion and question their assumption that I would even be receptive to something like this. Of course, I don't know what effect anything I've sent has had.
I am happy to say my wife shares a similar mindset on this issue. More often than me, she receives this kind of stuff and her first impulse is to send back an essay 'illuminating' the sender. I've had several laughs reading some of her responses and I have the idea that a sense of humor is valuable in an effort such as this. I'm sure it would make them fume!

edit - opps! This is the first time I failed to notice the dates on this thread. That's 2 edits in one day...I must be tired! Sorry

 

[Meg]

The concept I formed to help me understand this was one of 'painful joy'. This contained the ideas of joyfully sacrificing one's own mind, happiness, property or whatever to whatever anonymous entity needed it in order to avoid death. In this emotional condition, it is ok to betray and hand over the integrating function of own's consciousness and to feel good about it.
I don't think it is even possible to betray oneself to such a deep level without feeling pain of some kind. And with the right indoctrination, that pain can be misinterpreted as the 'joy of giving', or even 'the joy of giving until it hurts'.
I'm wondering if the sender of that chain letter is feeling that burn.
My own acceptance of religious indoctration over the years has caused me to experience something similar to this first-hand and it has taken some time to identify it for what it is. Now when I look back over parts of my life, I occasionally feel a similar revulsion to my own behavior in this regard.

That sort of indoctrination sounds an awful lot like programming. Thanks for sharing your experience Buddy.

 

[Buddy]

That sort of indoctrination sounds an awful lot like programming.

I hope my use of the word 'indoctrination' wasn't misleading. I'm referring to an emotionally intense, self-programming effort, encouraged by authoritatively delivered, guilt inducing sermons, biblical references and such by people you trust.
I really, really wanted to believe because I really, really wanted to be 'saved'.
I was extremely emotionally sensitive as a young man anyway, and could be easily controlled by guilt and fear. Such is life in the bible belt, I guess.

 

[Meg]

That sort of indoctrination sounds an awful lot like programming.

I hope my use of the word 'indoctrination' wasn't misleading. I'm referring to an emotionally intense, self-programming effort, encouraged by authoritatively delivered, guilt inducing sermons, biblical references and such by people you trust.
I really, really wanted to believe because I really, really wanted to be 'saved'.
I was extremely emotionally sensitive as a young man anyway, and could be easily controlled by guilt and fear. Such is life in the bible belt, I guess.

Not misleading at all. It's a good word to use when it comes to religious programming, osit