Much ado about...

well, nothing, really.

After all the hubbub, the wailing, the posts railing against Richard Abanes and his handling of an article by Ken Silva, after all the virtual screaming and hollering about Apprising Ministries being taken offline (which could have been easily avoided if Ken had simply taken the high road and deleted the post, even temporarily), Apprising.org is back online, with a new layout which, in my opinion, is much more attractive than the old one.

Ah, well, the beat goes on, as they say.

Like bits of data on the Internet...

...these are the posts of our blogs.

I hesitated to post on the dispute between Richard Abanes and Ken Silva, but as Pastor Silva's site, Apprising.org, appears to be offline at this hour, I decided now is as good a time as any. I was going to post a brief rundown of what has brought us to this point, but I decided that if you're reading this post, you probably know what's going on by now, and if not, do a little poking around, I'm sure you'll get caught up pretty quickly.

OK, here goes...

I have a lot of issues with Ken Silva and the things he posts at Apprising Ministries. To be brutally honest, it's hard for me to get through even one of his articles/missives, what for his liberal use of name calling (heretical this, neo-liberal that, ecumenical church of deceit, Roshi, Yogi, Guru, etc. etc. etc...). However, I read the original article in question (link is to Google cache copy), and I can certainly see where Richard Abanes would see that he was being libeled by Ken Silva. Why he has chosen to wait this long to bring up the issue, I do not know, and I do not pretend to know the motives of Pastor Silva or Rev. Abanes. Just wanted to make that clear.

My take? Both of them went too far. In spite of the fact that Richard Abanes felt that talking to Ken Silva directly would have been fruitless (and based on exchanges I've seen online between Ken and others, I'd say Richard is probably right about that), he should have at least tried to resolve the issue with Ken directly. He has also, I feel, added some unnecessary fuel to the fire over the last few days.

Now, lest you think I am letting Ken off the hook... Ken Silva has, in my assessment, blown this whole thing completely out of proportion. This is one article among THOUSANDS on his site. Ken had the chance to be the bigger person and simply pull the article from his site, no harm no foul. Instead, he posted the message from iPower (his hosting company) for all to see, and stoked the fires that soon spread across the blogosphere. Not to mention, he violated copyright laws by posting an email from Richard Abanes that had a clear copyright notice at the bottom. Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that Ken had no form of recourse with iPower. He could have called them, explained his side of the story, and discussed possible solutions to this problem. He could have gotten in touch with Abanes directly and resolved this, at which point Abanes could have redacted his complaint to iPower. It's possible Ken could have sought some sort of arbitration with iPower to prevent the deletion of his site.

Long story short, this whole thing has gone too far. While I disagree with almost everything Ken Silva has posted at apprising.org, it didn't need to come to this.

That's my opinion. That and $1.50 will get you a copy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tomorrow morning.