Yesterday, a concerned woman named Tonia posted this on my Facebook page: “Dr. Brown would you please investigate and address the U-tube videos where the father of Ted Cruz is advocating non-Christian and atheistic internment camps with plans for them to be established in California and Vermont. I do not understand how a true Christian could advocate something like that.” I replied, “???? Complete, utter, nonsense and rubbish. Who in the world is circulating ridiculous stuff like this???”

Another reader provided the answer to my question. It was a News/Satire website called Newslo, which created this story back in November, 2013, combining some accurate, faith-based quotes from Ted’s father, Raphael, together with the make-believe, ridiculous charges.

As the disclaimer on the Newslo website stated, “Newslo is the first hybrid News/Satire platform on the web. Readers come to us for a unique brand of entertainment and information that is enhanced by features like our fact-button, which allows readers to find what is fact and what is satire.”

You might say, “But that’s the problem. Most people don’t read these disclaimers and think the stories are true. Plus, by the time we hear about the story, it’s no longer on the satire website. How are we to know what’s real and what’s not?”

The answer is very simple: the Internet!

In other words, the same place that deceives and misleads and misinforms multitudes is the same place where, in a matter of seconds, facts can be checked and claims verified — and I mean in a matter of seconds. I typed in the Google search terms ted cruz father internment camps atheists. The list of articles that came up superficially confirmed the rumor. But if you then click on the first article and actually read it, you find yourself at the helpful site Snopes.com, where they quickly debunk the rumor. A quick Google search and a couple minutes and the slanderous urban legend about Ted Cruz’s pastor father is slain.

There are misleading claims that are harder to ferret out, of course, but the madding crowd of bogus urban legends passed about endlessly by email and social media — these can be quickly checked with just a few seconds of due diligence.

There’s really no excuse for such ignorance today.

Within minutes of a presidential debate, websites post their fact-checking findings, and while it’s possible to discover some bias in the reporting, for the most part, it’s not that hard to see who was telling the truth, who was lying (or, at the least, forgetful) and who was fudging.

Candidate A said this tonight but said the opposite last week.

Candidate B rightly defended his record.

Candidate C was accurate in general but muddled some of the details.

Check, check, done.

When Donald Trump gave what many are calling his infomercial press conference after the March 8^th primaries — apparently to rebut Mitt Romney’s charge that some of Trump’s business ventures were phonies,  failures or both — I said to my wife Nancy, “They’ll be doing a fact check on this tomorrow.”

Sure enough, the next day, quite a few articles were exposing the deceptions and misrepresentations in Trump’s talk. The Stream reported on it here. As a Fox News story noted (it was one of many online), “The strange thing is, on each point [Trump made], the facts don’t match the display.”

And how long did it take me to verify that there was substance to my suspicions? Less than 10 seconds to type in the key words and less than a minute to scan the first article.

No one has to be conned today. As The X-Files used to proclaim, “The truth is out there.”

That’s why people go to websites like Carfax before buying a used car from the proverbial dishonest used car salesman.

In the same way, we can get online and get the facts before voting or making other serious decisions. And while there’s often a multitude of different opinions to sort through on controversial issues, when it comes to information and verifiable data, it’s not that hard to separate fact from fiction.

That is, it’s not that hard if we use our brains, and therein lies a big part of the problem. We’ve forgotten how to think.

Is there anyone who actually believes that the father of a major presidential candidate wants to have internment camps for atheists, yet the media hasn’t addressed this and the Internet hasn’t exploded with it? Can we really be that gullible?

When an ill-advised tweet sent out by a campaign volunteer can cause a national stir for that candidate, you can be sure that a candidate’s dad calling for the internment of atheists would have created an instant uproar the moment it was discovered.

Unfortunately, these are the days when sensationalistic, farfetched, utterly implausible rumors can spread like wildfire in a matter of minutes, the days when people retweet and like or share rather than question, the days when hollow sound bites rule the day, the days when even news headlines are often interpretations of the news rather than the news itself. (That’s fodder for another article in itself.)

All this could stop in a moment if people simply took the time to think critically (a forgotten art?), question honestly (a noble practice, for sure) and investigate fairly (again, something easily done today).

This could stop a multitude of rumors in a moment of time and prevent a lot of pain, embarrassment, and confusion.

Twenty-centuries ago, James wrote, “And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell” (James 3:6).

That unbridled, out of control tongue has now been loosed like never before by the internet, setting the world on fire. Let’s use that very same internet to put out those unholy fires.