Why civilization—including a website—requires rules and boundaries

On Holy Saturday, 2003, a brief blog entry about Jesus being dead and in the tomb on that day, was followed by an anti-Christian statement by a commenter to which I strongly objected. This gave rise to a discussion about what is the line between speech that should be allowed and speech that should not be allowed.

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Lydia McGrew writes:

I was interested to read the old thread in which a commentator went out of his way on Easter Even to say that Jesus is still dead, and you chided him for bad manners. It made me laugh a little ironically. About five years ago I wrote for a blog called Right Reason, now defunct. It was billed as a blog for conservative philosophers and philosophy. I put up a Merry Christmas post and then—I believe in the same 12-month period—another Christian philosopher put up a Happy Easter post with a link to a speech or sermon by the Pope.

We had an angry reader come into the Easter thread and ask, aggressively, whether Right Reason was a Christian site (apparently this was an accusation) as he had now noticed two posts commemorating Christian holidays. Also, he wanted to know why we didn’t wish our Jewish readers a Happy Passover, he being (he revealed) such a reader. I was very angry about this, even though this had not been my post. I told him in no uncertain terms that I thought all this business of passing around good wishes for every other religion’s holiday seasons was a lot of nonsense and pandering and that, more or less, he should grow up. Let’s just say the blog owner did not seem pleased with my being so sharp with this reader.

I’m very pleased now only to blog at my personal blog and at an overtly Christian blog, What’s Wrong With the World, where nobody asks, offensively, “Is this a Christian site?” and where if someone did we certainly would not be expected to be exceedingly polite to him. Anyway, it occurred to me reading your old post and comment thread that we’ve come a very, very long way from the days you remember when Christianity actually had some sort of status in American society.

Chuck Ross writes:

In regards to your post which links to an Easter post from 2003, I, as an atheist, still defer to Christianity. Although I am unable to have faith that Jesus is our Savior, I still capitalize the words “Savior” and “God” and realize that a society which fails to do those things in a figurative sense is forever lost.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 23, 2011 11:39 AM | Send