For the record

John Loftus and many others have been blogging about Jim West shutting down his blog. Here is the comment I made on John's post,

For the record I emailed Jim and asked him to remove one particular post from the internet. I did not expect an apology or response/retraction of any kind, but simply to have the damaging post removed so it couldn't be accessed by the family of the person in the story.

The next thing I knew he had blocked access to his blog.

I will miss those of his posts which really were funny, but many were not. I personally don't have a problem with making fun of either Christians, atheists or cat lovers. A certain amount of robust jousting over ideology doesn't bother me.

I do have a problem with hounding fat people, homosexuals, etc. I also have a problem with those who say something about someone by name that is not true.

The young man in the post that I asked Jim to pull, had committed suicide after the newspaper had published something about him that was not true. This is the problem - irresponsible publication of false information is not a joke. It can have consequences.

It would be great to have the humour back without the cruelty.

Here is my original post on the topic in October. I have had differences with the bibliosphere for some time. I have wished for standards or expectations that would discourage bloggers from negative posting about racial groups, gender, homosexuals, or fat people.

It should also be expected that if someone posts something about someone that cannot be proven to be true, then there should be a retraction and apology, or at least the false information should be removed from the internet. In addition, ad hominem or personal attacks should not be acceptable.

On the other hand, I have no problem with strong words being exchanged with regard to a belief or ideology.

The simple fact is I find crticism of a racial group, calling homosexuals "sinners" and defending the view that women should be subordinated in the home, to be totally unacceptable. These are hateful things to do, and should not be tolerated. In addition, I think there should have been some expectation that biblioblogger events would not be the place to express the view that homosexuality is a sin, or that women should be subordinate. (They probably aren't but I would like to know that.)

Call me PC - I don't care. You can point out to me that some of these things are in the Bible, and I will only respond that slavery is also in the Bible.

I have closed comments on this blog post due to an anonymous commenter. Please email me if you wish to discuss it. I don't think that my request caused Jim to close his blog, but likely someone else commented as well. I really don't know what exactly influenced Jim.

I have since been reassured by many other blog posts that Jim will be back. Whew. Other posters are giving more credit to other reasons and I am good with that. My original request was to have one single post removed from access by google and I hope that eventually it will die out of google cache.