Blogging has reminded me how important spam filters can be. Use a key word of one kind or another in a blog and you will get a stilted response from:
sexygirlseekssexyguy@subprimemortgages.com
“I admire the information in your blog. Please send money.”
(My computer turned even this bit of nonsense into a url without my asking it to. So….no promises what might be on the other end of the link.)
We live in a world filled with spam. And the great gift of the modern world is that spam looks for you, you don’t need to look for it.
• Health and wealth gurus who want to teach you how to pray your way to wealth.
• Ex-hippies who want you to string your own necklace of spiritual wisdom.
• Self-help experts who have discovered that there is almost as much money in talking about spiritual matters as there was a generation ago talking about sex.
• And even a handful of authorities with religious and academic credentials who (as unrecovered fundamentalists) have discovered truths about religion that you should know now — so that you can live in liberated despair that we are all just an accident (but they won’t share that part with you).
But if you think spam crowds your in-box and robs you of valuable time at work, just think what spiritual spam does to cloud your mind and divert your heart’s energy. Every piece of spiritual spam out there threatens to lighten your wallet, waste your time, and divert your energy.
Use a filter. Not all of it is worth reading and some of it is a soul killer.