Blessed is he who deletes wrong/mean email without forwarding

There is a golden rule for this, our season of emailed manipulations, when so many senders want to use your good name [again] by having you forward their hyperventilating claims to your friends. Because the same spam-spewing political machines think we’re wackos who will tamely meet their political needs.

The rule: When in doubt, delete it.

Or as Norman Shapiro and Robert H. Anderson wrote in the authoritative 1985 RAND corp. study Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail, “Exercise your responsibility to be selective in the broadcast of information.”

How to make a sound decision about what to forward (broadcast) and what to ditch?

Test the email’s veracity at:

• Hoax Slayer
• Snopes
• TruthOrFiction

If it is political, check facts in the email at:

• PolitiFact
• FactCheck.org

Political or not, look the topic up at WikiPedia or here.

The Associated Baptist Press asked several Christian ethics experts and in addition to some we suggested above, their suggestions included:

• The least reliable: Administer the “smell test” and if it doesn’t smell right, ditch it. So said said Bill Tillman, holder of the T.B. Maston Chair of Christian Ethics at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary.
• Wise: Consider the “seven deadlies,” said Robert Kruschwitz, director of the Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University. Thus you will avoid spreading an email which encourages “any of any of the seven deadly sins — lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride.”
• Much better: Consider motives of the sender, and consider your own motives.
• Basic: Measure gossip against the Golden Rule. David Gushee, distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta, recommended applying the Golden Rule in terms of “pass on accusations about others as you would want others to pass on accusations about you.”

If the facts are right and the ethics are right, it’s probably OK for forward. Assuming you actually want to promote the cause at issue.

U.S. Catholic/Episcopal reunification rush?

Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says the American Church “stands ready to collaborate” with the Vatican in implementing a historic new provision to receive Anglicans into the Catholic Church.

Collaborate?

In theory there could be a lot to do.

There are over two million Episcopalians in the U.S.

But even among the most conservative, as we noted earlier, reactions to this British-led initiative have thus far been, well, cool.

Meanwhile, some of the Catholic bishops, like their sex-scandal distracted Irish peers, have sexual predation bankruptcies and like legal and other clerical predation entanglements to attend to, as U.S. Episcopalians look on, from a distance. As they have been for the quarter of a century since the scandal erupted into public view [H/T Get Religion].

Ordination as an Episcopal bishop of openly gay, non-celibate Gene Robinson, acceptance of women as priests, acceptance of same-sex unions and other issues seem unlikely to be enough to push a great many into the Roman Catholic fold.

No reunification rush in prospect.

Roman Catholic Church to receive Anglicans [Update]

Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI has created an “apostolic constitution” – the highest form of pontifical decree – to make it easier for Anglicans, individually or in groups, to join the Roman Catholic Church.

The British Guardian wrote:

It will be the first time since the Reformation in the 16th century that entire communities of Protestants have reunited with Rome. The first group to take advantage of the new rules is expected to be the Traditional Anglican Community (TAC), which separated from the rest of the Anglican community in 1991 and has more than 500,000 members worldwide.

[Benedict's chief theological adviser, the US cardinal William Levada,] said that, under the new arrangements, Anglican communities that joined the Catholic church would be able to keep their own liturgy while remaining outside the existing dioceses. Their pastoral care would be entrusted instead to their own senior prelates, who would not necessarily become Catholic bishops. This is a way around the problem that in the Catholic church, as in the Orthodox churches, married men are not allowed to become bishops.

The result is a new home for traditional Anglicans who are dissatisfied with growing acceptance of homosexuals and of women priests and bishops. Ruth Gledhill and Richard Owen of the London Times correctly term it a move by the Roman Catholic Church “to poach” thousands of traditional Anglicans:

Traditionalists, including up to six Church of England bishops, had visited and pleaded with Rome to provide some sort of structure inside the Catholic Church for their wing of the Church of England because of liberal moves towards women bishops and gay ordinations.

Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols of the Roman Catholic Church of England and Wales at a press conference at Ecclestone Square, explaining how the new Apostolic Constitution will lead to Personal Ordinariates for defecting and ex-Anglicans.

The effect on Anglican/Catholic relations is not positive.

Foundations for distrust include last week’s statement by the Vatican’s top ecumenical official, Cardinal Walter Kasper. When asked about the Vatican’s negotiations with would-be converts, he told reporters: ”We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.”

Neither the Anglican Church of England nor the Episcopal Church in the U.S. is being welcomed into a new relationship. Andrew Brown argues with good reason that they are in effect being ceremonially discarded in a Vatican action which amounts to “thank you for the members and clergy. Bye:”

One of the things that this development means is that the Roman Catholic church is no longer even pretending to take seriously the existence of the Anglican Communion as a coherent body.

Instead there are various sections of “the Anglican tradition” (not “church” or “communion”), some of which are still properly Christian and so able to become Roman Catholic.

Even the conservative breakaway Anglican Church of North America responded with courteous coolness. The response from the decidedly conservative Rev. Robert Wm. Duncan, Archbishop and Primate, said in part:

We rejoice that the Holy See has opened this doorway, which represents another step in the growing cooperation and relationship between our Churches. This significant decision represents a recognition of the integrity of the Anglican tradition within the broader Christian church. While we believe that this provision will not be utilized by the great majority of the Anglican Church in North America’s bishops, priests, dioceses and congregations, we will surely bless those who are drawn to participate in this momentous offer.

With predictable bluntness, Keith Porteus-Wood of Great Britain’s National Secular Society said of matters there: “This is a mortal blow to Anglicanism which will inevitably lead to disestablishment as the Church shrinks yet further and become increasingly irrelevant. Rowan Williams has failed dismally in his ambitions to avoid schism. His refusal to take a principled moral stand against bigotry has left his Church in tatters.”

Those searching for ecumenism in this historic development will indeed find either tatters, or delusions.

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• A brief history of reunion talks.
• The Archbishop of Canterbury is quite displeased, Damien Thompson tells us, at having the announcement sprung on him.
• The Archbishop of Westminster and The Archbishop of Canterbury have issued a joint letter
• Fr. Z explains in detail and comments on the considerable implications for the SSPX negotiations and perhaps eventual reunion.
• History is being made, concludes Austen Ivereigh for the Jesuit weekly America: “The experience of the new emigres will be closely watched by other Anglicans — and will strongly affect the prospects of long-term Anglican-Catholic unification.”

Tuesday morning link farm [Updated]

• [Breaking: Anglicans welcome into Roman Catholic Church] Damian Thompson says in his London Telegraph blog that there’s a big announcement today on Catholic-Anglican relations; Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster at joint press conference. But about what?
  Fr Z says It makes sense if “… this is to announce that there will be a reunion of Traditional Anglicans with the Catholic Church.”
• USA Today says Atheism 3.0 urges respect for religion.
• The Boston Globe writes about the same-sex marriage fight boiling toward a Nov. 3 vote in Maine.
• The East Valley [AZ] Tribune ‘s Martha R. Carr writes that the deadly Sedona sweat lodge was without religious foundation.
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports there’s no GOP ‘ladies first:’ Huck and Romney both best Palin in poll.
• Swiss court orders convicted non-clerical felon Roman Polanski kept in jail during extradition fight.
• The Arizona Republic explains how the role of clergy in the immigrant reform debate is growing.
• A new report on the Irish Catholic child sexual abuse cover-up is expected to rattle timbers next week. It “will show that the Church failed to rein in predatory priests who were known to be abusing children.”
• The Irish Independent reports that Catholic Bishops will hand over primary schools to the Irish government. The Independent commented:
  

  The forthcoming report on abuse in the Dublin diocese will also make it difficult for the Church to demand public monies at a time when there is anger over the amount paid by the religious congregations for compensation to abuse victims.

Epidemic fear of flu vaccines endangers all

Amy Wallace at Wired Magazine writes:

This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.

Sanity has yet to prevail and bootless anti-vaccine arguments are still being given undeserved credence. As a result, the necessary change is likely to have a high price. Surgeon/scientist Orac at ScienceBlogs writes:

My prediction is that a lot of children will have to die before the anti-vaccine movement looses its influence. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands, even. We have a short memory as a society. A mere 60 years ago, people lived in fear of polio. Every summer, in various parts of the country, swimming pools would be shut down based on its appearance. Children were condemned to iron lungs. Thanks to the polio vaccine, that all came to an end. Even more recently, a mere 20 years ago, Haemophilus influenza B was wreaking havoc among children [and vaccines put an end to that].

. . .
As I’ve said, we have a very short memory. Deadly microbes taught us a deadly lesson over hundreds of years, until we learned how to keep them at bay with vaccines. I fear we will receive a refresher course on how deadly they can be, courtesy of Jenny McCarthyand her allies.

Read the Wired articles here.