Cowardly Comments Behind the Mask of Anonymity

I leave the Internet alone for a few hours, and look what happens! I go out for a meeting with my life coach, and some drive-by ya-hoo litters my blog with shallow, contradictory, and fight-picking comments. I’ve deleted them. But since you obviously love attention, oh anonymous sir (I’m almost positive you’re male), I’m going to place them all here in one place, so we can get a full dose of them in one sitting.

You call yourself “Me,” email address: me@me.gov And here’s what you have to say:

“Hey, my cousin has Synesthesia…how dare you make fun of this awful disease!”

–On Synesthesia

“Hey, your post makes heaven sound like the mormon heaven, so will we get as many wives as we want, or will it be like Islam where we get 70 virgins?”

–On Living New Heaven & Earth Realities

“I’m all for house churches…I mean, what other church would allow you to worship and smoke wacky tobacky at the same time?”

–On Our Composting God: Making Meaning of the Mess

“So basically, you’re saying that now you’re a lazy out-of-work crazy….but in the future, we’ll all bow down to you because of your immense intelligence…sweet, sign me up!”

–On My Career Now and in the Future

“Wow, I like totally agree. I mean, in 2025, I want to have bionic legs so I can finally dunk the ball. No wait, I don’t want to have legs so I can sit in my recliner all day, and have “An Inconvenient Truth” streamed into my retinas….what a sweet freakin’ life!”

–On A Typical Day in my Life, 2025

I’m so in agreement with you mike. Calvin and Luther and the whole lot of church fathers, all the way back to the first century even, were a bunch of hypocrites. I mean, we live lives that are much more authentic than they ever did. I mean, can we even call those monsters Christians? I mean, they formed the paradigms with which all of us view Christianity, what an atrocity! I say, down with Calvin, down with Luther, with Augustine, and Peter and Paul, and Jesus…oh wait, strike that last one.

— On What to Do About Unrepentant Murderers in the Church?

Ah, the prolific pen of “Me.” How he lacerates with his poison wit, so deftly handling sarcasm and the ideological put-down. Could it really be me? My self-loathing, sophomoric alter-ego, giving myself a well-deserved punch in the you-know-where? Am I going to awaken at the keyboard one night to the stupefied realization that I’m Tyler Durden?

I’m open to the possibility. For now, though, I have a more modest proposal for “Me”: You can say what you want on my blog…within reason. What you’ve said, though absurd and unhelpful, isn’t out of bounds. But you can’t hide behind anonymity…identify yourself. C’mon, fess up: Who are you, Me? If you don’t tell, and you leave further unsigned comments, your IP address is goin’ bye-bye.

10 Responses to Cowardly Comments Behind the Mask of Anonymity

  1. Christo February 1, 2008 at 6:48 am #

    Yes, we have a couple of atheist/realist spamming us too, seems like they are on a drive.

  2. me February 1, 2008 at 2:45 pm #

    Hey, I resemble those remarks….or is resent…I don’t know, I get so caught up in my existential dilemma: who is me…or would it be am me….or are me?

  3. zoecarnate February 1, 2008 at 3:02 pm #

    Adios, me. It was nice knowing you.

  4. me February 4, 2008 at 3:58 pm #

    Actually, why can’t I hide behind anonymity? I mean, that is clearly a consitutional right I have granted to me in the first ammendment.

  5. zoecarnate February 4, 2008 at 4:13 pm #

    While I normally do not post personal emails without permission, because my accuser still hides behind anonymity (while claiming not to) I thought I’d shed some light on this situation. Here’s what “Tom” sent me the other day, right before I left for Charlotte for the weekend:

    From: Tom Unknown
    Date: Feb 1, 2008 11:16 AM
    Subject: Hey, it’s ME
    To: Mike Morrell

    Hey Mike,
    I thought I would just shoot you a line, and see what was up? I’m the guy (good guess by the way) behind all of the obnoxious comments on your blog. I’m not the atheistic thug/heckler that you may think I am. Rather, I’m merely a fellow believer, who’s slightly concerned about the veracity of some of your claims on your blog. See, I’m not down with the whole emergent thing, and I think it is softening the hard truths of the gospel with some po-mo ideas and philosophies. Also, I think that your vocational pursuits as a futurist are just a little off-base. I’m into the hard science of truth, and think anyone who is trying to predict the future is wasting their god-given gifts and talents on something not intended for us to know. Also, your lack of respect for tradition and history in the church is quite off-putting. Really, we wouldn’t be able to vocalize half of our beliefs if it wasn’t for great thinkers like Calvin, Luther, and other church fathers. I see this desire to break from the past within the ECM, and it worries me. The ECM seems to be a movement primarily of “nots”; we’re not this and we’re not that. They try so desperately to distance themselves from main line evangelicals, but all they are doing is distancing themselves from historical christian thought and belief. Without the historicity of Christianity at our backs, we have nothing to lean on, just our own, fallen understanding. Enjoy!

    Well “Tom,” in response to your question of First Amendment rights, I’m not sure. Internet law is an evolving thing, but I’m pretty sure you don’t have any rights on *someone else’s* blog that the blog owner doesn’t want you to have. So what will it hurt? Identify yourself. Plenty right under their own names on this here internet and say far more obnoxious things.

    Which leads me to your email itself. I don’t have time to address it right now, but as a friend of mine said when I shared this with him, “Now, wouldn’t it have been much more fruitful if he had just posted this as a comment on your blog to begin with?”

    I concur!

  6. Any Tom, Dick or Harry February 4, 2008 at 8:05 pm #

    Actually, you don’t technically “own” anything. You “own” the copyright to the original comment and I “own” the copyright(s) to my comments and e-mails (wink), but because they are PUBLICations on the internet, they reside in the public domain if you do not charge a subscription or usage fee. Now, if I technologically vandalized your private link site a la hacking or other such means, I could be held responsible for my actions, but because your blog is published via a third party (in this case, wordpress), they are the ones who have ALL the rights to your blog, not you.

    As for the e-mail as potential commentary, I agree, it would have been more “beneficial” for you, me, and your community of readers. However, I found my somewhat scathing remarks to be much for cathartic in light of some of your views and posts.

  7. Jason February 6, 2008 at 12:46 am #

    wake up…move on…grow up. I’m pretty sure snarky and mean spirited comments or responses do the Lord or his people any good. “ME” write your own blog. I don’t agree with Mike most of the time but he’s still my brother in the Lord. And if you do know the Lord “me” so are you.
    Let’s keep the peace and keep criticism productive.

  8. Peter K Bell February 6, 2008 at 4:00 am #

    Well, I do happen to agree with Mike most of the time, particularly on the topics this “anonymous” guy dislikes the most: the liberty to re-construct the presentation of the Gospel message in postmodern philosophical structural terms; the excitement and interest in reaching forward to have a bit of a look at the future; the continuity of our “past-present-future” church experience and identity encompassed in the intensely unifying effects of the intersection of the eternal with time; and lots of similar areas where I believe the Holy Spirit can redeem us out of the limitations of our fallen understanding as well as the severely trying effects of my offensively run-on sentences!

    But hey, man, get real: we know who you are. And even if it is pretentious for me to say that here, God knows you and loves you, and we are, after all, members of the same Body, on the same planet. And we have the same challenges to love one another in Jesus. So, what’s the point of hiding in unnecessary identity games? He loves you even if you are an axe murderer (or worse, a theology cruncher), and we do too.

    Peace in Jesus,
    Peter

  9. sam clark February 29, 2008 at 7:45 pm #

    I say its Mark Driscoll.

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