Thou Shall Not Blog

In these tumultous times of global economic meltdown and heightened International tensions, the Evangelical Alliance has found a way to justify its existence for another month.

The worldwide organisation has ploughed its best efforts into producing a new list of Ten Commandments – this time aimed at bloggers. It makes for interesting reading and I feel more than a little sinful realising I have probably already broken most of them. That my number of actual Commandment transgressions is hovering around the seven mark comes as little condolence.

The newly digitised moral compass orders firstly:

1. ‘You shall not put your blog before your integrity.’

It is difficult to see how the two are anything other than symbiotic. Your blog – you would hope -is a manifestation of your integrity. Your blog is a globally accessible platform upon which you may voice indignation, assent, or apathy on inumerable issues. That you have taken the time and effort to compose an argument or adopt a position, requires integrity. Blogs couldn’t exist without it.

Other personal favourites include:

6. ‘You shall not murder someone else’s honour, reputation or feelings.’

Murder? I can see the semantic link for which they grasp with buttered fingers, but ‘murder’ is surely a little alarmist. Feelings are hurt on a daily basis in the blogosphere; rarely are they mortally wounded. By extension, this rules out terse disagreement with others’ personally held beliefs – valid as they may be. If we were all to arrest our disagreement, the Internet would be the electronic equivalent of an Amsterdam coffee shop. And Charlie Brooker would be out of a job.

7. ‘You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind.’

What, exactly, is adultery of the mind? And what is wrong with it? We all get tempted, we all have thoughts that our peers and loved ones would frown disparagingly upon, but as long as they remain ‘in your mind’, where’s the harm? The Alliance has missed the trick that ‘in your mind’ isn’t the same as ‘visiting rude websites’. Looking at blue pages is not in your mind – it’s in your history pages.

My absolute favourite has to be:

10. ‘You shall not covet your neighbour’s blog ranking. Be content with your own content.’

The fact that your Internet neighbour could be based in Addis Addaba notwithstanding, this really smacks of desperation. The meeting in which these farcical guidelines were randomly forged from a mixture of poor theology and rash word association must have ground to a halt after nine commandments had been penned. They needed ten. It was getting late and the chairman had forgotten to Sky+ Songs of Praise.

“How about: ‘Be content with your own content’?”

“Great, yeah, that’ll do. We even like the lazy repetition in your epigram. Let’s hand this in.”

If you are jealous of someone’s blog hits, firstly: stop looking at it. Secondly, keep accessing your own from various computers. A million times. Don’t get jealous, get even.

Somehow I fear such a mantra is unlikely to feature in the Evangelical Alliance’s forthcoming ‘Broadband Beattitudes’.