When a Christian blogs …
Blogging may be a fairly new phenomena in terms of today’s technology, but not so new that there aren’t any rules to govern those bloggers with ethical standards.
Those ethical standards should be especially important for Christians — or other people of faith. One would think that the teachings of faith would help guide bloggers as they traverse their way through the blogosphere.
Several Oklahoma Southern Baptist bloggers I interviewed this week mentioned the personal attacks that sometimes are posted by other fellow Southern Baptists.
Each of the people I talked to said they wanted people to focus solely on the issues at hand, but a personal attack ripping into someone’s character or casting aspersions on an individual can cause undue harm. One blogger, the Rev. Ronnie W. Rogers of Trinity Baptist Church in Norman, said “spiritual harm” can be caused when bloggers air negative comments about internal affairs at their local church.
The Rev. Wes Kenney, a Southern Baptist pastor in Valliant, Okla., and one of the founders of SBCToday.com said he had noticed that some Southern Baptist bloggers had begun attacking some of the denomination’s leaders such as Paige Patterson and the Richard Land. Those kinds of postings can be discouraging, Kenney said.
The Associated Baptist Press recently had an interesting story on the issue of blogging ethics. That story by Ken Camp makes some interesting points.
Then I found Rebecca Blood’s Weblog Handbook on Blog Ethics.
This handbook includes six ethics rules for bloggers to abide by. Methinks they are pretty good, though they are not necessarily religious in nature.
Here they are:
1. Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.
2. If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
3. Publicly correct any misinformation.
4. Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
5. Disclose any conflict of interest.
6. Note questionable and biased sources.
With all that said, I guess it’s always a good idea to remind bloggers that their words are out there for all to see.
Rogers, in Norman, said he wondered if some bloggers realized that, say 20 years from now, the things they post will still be out there on the blogosphere — where they could potentially come back and cause them or someone else some trouble …
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