Trinity MCC

Pastoral Ponderings:

July 12th

I quite enjoy listening to NPR and the other day I heard a story about people who write Fake News.  I was reminded, when talking about this, that Fake News is lies - and there is no other way to describe it.  On the program they told us that the person had created a news article that shared a Russian woman had been raped by Muslims. This fed into the hateful rhetoric about the Islamic community.  Why would anyone think firstly that putting lies out there to demonize a group of people is ok? Second why would anyone think making up lies about rape (which if one goes through this it is an incredibly traumatic event that changes lives forever). What was more scary was even when people found out it was fake news they still continued the hateful rhetoric.

I wondered how we can stop this - and the only thing I came up with was that we can be careful when we hear news - checking everything before sharing it.  On Sunday I spoke about gossip and how if we are not careful gossip can break a church.  Not that I am suggesting this would happen at Trinity MCC but it is key that we continue to have checks and balances within ourselves to make sure we don't fall into the trap of feeding the forwarding of fake news/gossip.

We can never change the world but we can change how we interact in it and with each other.

Many blessings

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