Just wanted to throw in my support and prayers for Ken Silva.

What has happened this weekend to Ken (Apprising Ministries web page) is what some power-hungry Christian ministries would love to do.

Shut down those who disagree with them to the point of publicly speak out as to why they disagree with them. All you have to do is ‘disagree and you are a target….

And who to shut down????

The ‘little guys’ who blog while contending and defending the Faith. The ‘little guys’ who refuse to be sucked into the vortex of the ‘unbiased Christian media’. The ‘little guys’ who refuse to allow the ‘big guys’ to do all the dictating of what is real Christianity. The ‘little guys’ who refuse to be dictated as how to vote for a candidate who refuse to go blindly to follow someone’s personal ideology made ‘God’s official theology’ in the name of “Christian Worldview”, and who realize that the church was meant to be the church and not another political party. The ‘little guys’ who aren’t afraid to tell the ‘big guys’ that they are in error or heresy.

Disagreement IS NOT slander nor libel. Disagreement is simply ‘not-in-agreement’

What we really have here, IN MY PERSONAL OPINION, is not a case of slander / libel. What we really have here, IN MY PERSONAL OPINION, is….

Christianized ‘Clintonic’ Cyber-bullying

Christianized, IN MY PERSONAL OPINION, because the claim that the letter to Silva’s ISP was mulled ‘after much thought and prayer’.

Clintonic IN MY PERSONAL OPINION, because the ‘disagreement’ was handled very similar to the ways liberals handled disagreement during the Clinton presidency that the church pronounced as ‘liberal and ungodly’ but ten years later Christianize it and call it a ’strategic revelation from God’

Cyber-bullying IN MY PERSONAL OPINION, because per Wikipedia, the “use of information and communication technologies (Internet) to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour (possible threatened legal action) by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others (remove their Internet presence and opportunity for ministry).”

Diane at Crossroads says it best in this post when she states:

Whether or not you agree with Mr. Abanes or Mr. Silva, or nobody, is up to you. But there are some serious implications in this. In fact, some other bloggers are also writing about this implication. The larger implication for bloggers is someone going to our ISP or blog host (like Blogger which I’m on) and threatening to sue the blog host ISP if something isn’t removed, or even worse, if the whole blog isn’t shut down….

I can see a future threat for all of us bloggers . The overarching question then is…will this occur more and more as ministries that are heretical will wish to shut up those questioning them and pointing out their heresy? …. Will others in the future threaten lawsuits to the ISP’s and blog hosts of those ministries and people pointing out people and movements that we believe are heretical and are destroying Christianity?

Even one of her commenters took the issue further when they stated (out of anonymity fearing backlash against those who agreed with Silva)

It is a threat, I am a blogger and the reason why I chose ‘anonymous’ as my response name is because if someone will go after a person who he disagrees with and threaten to use the legal system as a form of ‘cyber-bullying’ and a form of ‘cyber-extortion’, that person will more than likely also go after those who support the ‘cyber-bullied’ and the ‘cyber-extorted’ to bully them knowing he has taken down the ‘main guy’, how much easier will it be to take down the average joe who commented.

I am very familiar with the business model of an web-host. It works much like a ‘mom and pop’ business where they are barely surviving but they do not have the resources, stamina, nor long-term reserve to fight and survive a delayed and extended legal battle. Therefore, their mentality is to avoid conflict at all costs and the least expensive way to avoid conflict is to simply remove the controversial content period. That is why there is no serious legal case precedent regarding issues like the one we have here. The mom and pop ISP’s do not want it and know it will put them into bankruptcy.

In fact, many web-hosts are in reality, just ‘resellers’ of web page space of giant web host companies that they ‘affiliate’ themselves with. The servers are not even owned by the mom and pop web host nor are they at their business office, but at a Network Operations Center (NOC) or a ‘co-lo’ (co-location center) the giant web-host owns or rents (alot of them are in the buildings of major telecommunications companies) in a major metropolitan American city where the large amounts of bandwidth is readily available. If you call the mom and pop web-host for support, they have to get back with you because they have to call their ’source tech support’ or they pay extra for a custom 1-800 number and an support staff to answer the phone in your name.

Ken, you have my prayer support.