E-mail proclaims your VIP status

Who needs expensive therapy, a stylish red Jaguar sports sedan, or Charlize Theron whispering in your ear to boost your self-esteem as long as you have an email address that's been in use for awhile?

As CBN producer Chris Carpenter explains, once the world knows how to get in touch with you, you become a Very Important Person:

On most days I feel like the most important person on earth. It is not because I work for CBN or that I am blessed to have a wife and family who loves me. I do not hold any political office. I have not found a cure for cancer nor have I developed a solution for world peace. I believe I am the most important person in the world because of what I find in my email inbox each and every morning.

Without fail, I am greeted daily by invitations from lonely house wives who want me to meet them. Other women write to me requesting that I assist them in solving a rather personal problem. Mortgage companies want me to refinance my house at rates the federal government would consider illegal. Colleges I have never heard of tell me I can receive a college degree in two weeks or less. Why go to a drugstore when companies are pleading with me to buy their drugs for a tenth of the cost. If you need Rolex watches at rock bottom prices, I have a guy who can get them for $10 dollars apiece. And perhaps the most striking reason for my international importance … I have numerous, yes numerous, African banks who want me to store their money for them. In return, each of them will give me a million dollars. All I have to do is give them my bank account numbers.

Without question, if I am to believe what I read each morning in my inbox, I am a true international man of mystery, intrigue, and importance. How can I be so lucky?

Wow! It's incredible to discover that someone besides your Oklahomilist has as much potential power and prestige! However, Chris neglected to mention those less than tactful e-mails that infer that we have too much meat on our thighs, and not enough meat on our ... er, nevermind.

Carpenter's main point is that to keep yourself spiritually clean in an unclean virtual world, it's important to have a strategy to screen out the spam. He spends an increasing amount of time tweaking his spam filters and improving his defensive shield, but it's time he never intended to spend. He's an involuntary draftee into cyber warfare, as are many people.

We recently have adopted a new strategy, sort of a passive "what-the-hell" approach where we don't bother to screen so much (although we keep our anti-virus software up-to-date, regularly scan for troublesome ad- and spy-ware, and make sure our firewall is uncompromised and on the job) as we have learned to do "mass extinctions" of incoming spam. It only takes a few moments to make sure that we aren't killing off a good message accidentally herded into the kill zone.

The drawbacks of the go-it-alone strategy is that curiosity may cause you to fall into the pit:

The most important battle we face from spam is giving in to temptation. Relentlessly pursuing our minds through a collage of inviting words, lurid images, and deals that seem to good to be true, spammers would like nothing more than for us to buy into their service. How easy it is to just click on the link within an email and be instantly transported into a world of pornography, drugs, gambling, and greed.

A friend of ours did just that and it took him years to claw his way out, and then only with God's amazing grace. He now gives lectures on how to defend against temptation and offers help for those who have already succumbed.

While we pray that we not be led into temptation, we also realize that in our society we have to learn to be strong enough not to dive into it of our own concupiscence.