Dan over at Cerulean Sanctum has written an excellent post entitled Sacred Spam that I can relate to….

Dan:

I feel your pain.

I have a contact form on my page and I too get more ’spam requests’ than legitimate responsed. I even get authentic hand-typed posts from people wanting me to review their books on my blog in exchange for the book or peddle Christian products, Christian MLMs or pleas for money for missions organizations promising a trip to India. The worst ones are from the ‘grand rebukers’ who give you the ‘prophetic death threat’ via ‘hit and run’ methods and leave a bizarre looking e-mail address knowing that if you responded, it would bounce back. However, I have their IP address and date/time stamp in case someone goes over the edge.

The other area to be deeply concerned over is allowing your name, phone, address (and now e-mail address) to be listed in the annual church member directory. In fact, before I joined the church I attended and filled out the general information forms for the church rolodex in case the church legitimately needed to contact you, I boldly stated on that form in BOLD CAPITAL letters that the church was NEVER!!! to give, sell, partner, or by any other means my personal information except for local church business issues or letters from denomination headquarters. The elder in charge of membership assured me in a phone call later on that the church’s policy is NOT to sell nor divulge personal information.

The reason why I have to do this is because:

(1): One church I used to attend would, for extra money, contact Christian ministries and offer to ‘give’ them a copy of the church directory for a donation to the church. How I found out about this was that my last name was misspelled in the directory and I started receiving Christian junk mail with the misspelled last name and when the church split, one of the elders who left along with me confessed and asked for forgiveness and repentance for doing this practice.

(2): There are congregation members who will un-staple their copies of the church directory apart, scan them, and offer them (to make some extra money) for sell to Christian organizations (especially religious right political ministry organizations) who ask for money to fight the DEMONcrats or even more appalling, certain political candidates who have the approvals of religious right organizations. Then you would receive a ’special letter’ appealing to the Christian conscience playing on the ‘abortion’ and ‘homosexuality’ cards in envelopes that looked like government checks, yellow western-union telegrams, the electric bill, or foreign airmail letters with the alternating blue/red stripes.

When I used to subscribe to a very popular Charismatic magazine and it’s sister Christian Men’s magazine, I always received alot of Christian junk mail in my mailbox from National Christian organizations and wondered if it came from them because I never initiated any contact with any of those organizations and those same organizations would place large-sized ads in these magazines?

I think it’s very tasteless and shows very little regard for the privacy of a human being.