Santosh Helekar writes: >From my standpoint, perpetuation of falsehoods under any guise causes grave harm to society, and a gratuitous defense of it adds insult to injury.
Peter responds: Santosh, mea culpa. Pardon my ignorance of the magnitude of Cynthia's offense. I had no idea that it had or could cause "grievous harm" to anybody and have serious societal consequences. Personally, I am sorry for causing you such injury. If only I had realised that you felt injured, I'd have done my best not to add insult to it. Santosh (continued): You fail to see the simple fact that stating that I did no harm in pointing out the errors, is at odds with your claim that I wasted much emotion in doing so. Peter responds: Mea culpa again--I never once thought that wasting emotions was harmful. Santosh (continued): I don't think you can read my emotions, if for nothing else then for the well-recognized difficulty of doing so across the gaping electronic void of cyberspace. Peter responds: Mea maxima culpa. You're such a logical and (seemingly) rational fellow, that when you used an exclamation mark in your original posting about this alleged "scam" it seemed like you were quite upset. You're right, emotions never are communicated too well in cyberspace. Santosh (continued): The irony of it is that if you had not tried to be gratuitously and pointlessly defensive about this urban legend, from a habitual and exclusive purveyor of such myths, the matter would have ended, as far as I am concerned, with my rather bland and clearly unemotional first response on this thread. Peter responds: Gratuitous, yes; defensive, no. All I did was to point out that the anecdote was meant to inspire and (in my opinion) did nobody any harm. You're a researcher (from what I understand), and you tell me that society has been caused "grievous harm", so I will wait for you to supply proof of such grievous harm and injury to society. Santosh (continued): So I ask you, why did you invest your time (not emotion, because I cannot tell) into this? Was it worth it? Or was it a waste of your time? Peter responds: Santosh, I might have wasted time, but it was well worth the emotion. It gave me a lot of grins and giggles. Santosh (continued): Are you open-minded enough to recognize that you are wrong about defending urban legends, even inspiring religious ones? Peter responds: You are implying that I am wrong. There is no right or wrong when you're merely explaining the motive behind sending out a chain letter. Here's something that you don't know about me: I routinely respond to chain letters when they contain information that may damage individuals or corporations, or create a false sense of vindication for a person's religious belief or ideology. I have done this for chainletters concerning Bill Gates (whom I dislike), Ted Kennedy (ditto) & Donald Rumsfeld (like), Procter & Gamble (agnostic), Einstein (agnostic), patriotic paintings on rocks (like), Neiman Marcus cookies, "I love Jesus" virus...and several others. Many months ago Cynthia sent out a chain letter to this group which contained falsehoods, so I promptly wrote her privately and explained that it was false. She was very thankful that I'd pointed it out to her, and I also told her about snopes.com and advised her to check it out. If I read one of her postings that could possibly be harmful, I will definitely notify her. In your quest for truth you simply seem to lose perspective of what really matters. Or perhaps your perspective is that every little thing matters. A couple of cases in point (I'm relying on memory here): Cynthia had a posting about what to do in the event of a tsunami, it contained a lot of useful advice. You proceeded to tear it apart. At the end of it all I don't think you really helped anyone, and I don't think Cynthia harmed any one. Ditto for your response to Mario's forward concerning AIDS needles. "Look before you sit"...no harm done. Hope that helps clarify. Peter
