I suppose the answer to this one depends on our general attitude to the rest of humanity, whether we believe ourselves to be called to share good things with other people in a spirit of gratuity and generosity, whether it is an exercise in self-aggrandisement or our caring about other people only to the extent they can be exploited. Oscar Wilde once said that a cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

I really would like to keep a candid and “naïve” view of life, what cynics would call “romantic notions” of decency, humanity and empathy. Such notions are extremely difficult on the Internet as most bloggers and commenters will never meet in the flesh or know each other as real persons. I’m not the oldest blogger around, but I lived for long enough to remember what life was like without the Internet. When I was at university, we wrote by hand or with a typewriter, got information from libraries and we wrote letters to each other. Sometimes we travelled and met people and got to know them to some extent.

I remember seeing a cartoon of a funeral with the coffin in church, the priest and just a few mourners. The caption said that the deceased had thousands of “friends” on Facebook! Some people say that Facebook is the future, something to replace blogs and e-mail. E-mail now seems so obsolete that spammers hardly use it. Others use Twitter for very short messages. For me, that is even more fleeting and ephemeral than blog posts. That would really be the first circle of hell! It seems blindingly obvious that what we do on computers doesn’t replace our social lives. I am not short of real contacts through our local choral group, the sailing club and local village life.

The best thing to do with blogs is what books do – they inform people and offer information. It is also legitimate to share opinions and views about issues, as plenty of authors do about every subject from stamp collecting to politics. Blogging is a form of amateur journalism and a space for free speech within the limits of human decency and respect of the rights of other people. Libel laws apply to the Internet as much as other written media, so we take our responsibilities, grateful for the protection of the law against what other people might be tempted to write in order to destroy our reputations.

Some people use a blog for personal thoughts and ramblings, to do some good for that person by helping him to see clearly through writing and provoking comments. Of course, we have to remember that people read what we write and they either like it or they don’t. Most comments are exactly expressions of opinion, and no one disputes subjective views. This chemistry of opinions and what we can learn from it is great for our growth as human beings in search of truth and value. Like journalism, editor’s columns for example, the blog is a place for original thought and a counterweight to conventional wisdom, ignorance and prejudice.

Like in real life, one gets the bullies, racketeers and those who fancy themselves as the “policemen” of the world. Some try to dominate the blog with their comments, destroying all dialogue and turning everything into a shouting match. Our blog setups allow us to filter comments and moderate commenters liable to want to start a fight. We don’t have to justify ourselves in our choice of house guests. Others start their own blogs, which we can either ignore or challenge.

It is a tricky choice. Ignoring the blog in question can seem to be tantamount to allowing evil to triumph because good men did nothing. I speak of evil, because we are dealing with personal attacks, for example a priest of one church being called a fraud and a false priest because he does not belong to the church the blogger in question is seeking to join. We are faced with bitterness and aggression. If we challenge the blog, we begin to negotiate with evil and dialogue with it. Exorcists like the late Fr Malachi Martin warned us that we engage the enemy at our own peril. We have every interest in being stronger and on moral high ground.  Good men doing nothing… Perhaps good men and women need to unite, for in unity lies strength.

I often think about the unfortunate parish that would be welcoming a particular blogger I have in mind who is in the process of converting to Roman Catholicism. Parish churches and traditionalist chapels alike are full of the usual cranks. Most are harmless, labouring under mental illness of some kind and finding some amount of healing through their faith and devotion. Others are vicious and often end up having to be physically hauled out of the sacristy and handed over to the police. I have seen a lot in my time. The Church is made up of a morass of humanity, all in need of God’s mercy and love. At the same time, a person can be so disruptive as to be beyond the pale of normal pastoral ministry. In extreme cases in society at large, the most anti-social are put in prison or a psychiatric hospital, and priests in both those kinds of institutions offer pastoral care to the inmates rendered incapable of causing damage and heartache to other people. Our rights end where those of other people begin.

On one hand, there are plenty of obnoxious blogs on the Web that we can do nothing about. They foster immorality, hatred, violence and many other evils. Beyond certain limits they can be removed through the law or blog providers. Those rules and laws apply to us all.

Perhaps another role of blogs is to engage threats to our right to free speech and “liberty of the press” that offend against libel laws or come very close to it, or which insult persons or assume them to be in bad faith. Perhaps the blogging community needs to be self-regulating. Sometimes, it is best to haul cantankerous cranks out of the sacristy just so that the priest can put on his vestments and say Mass – if you get my analogy…

So, there we are. As I suggested to a fellow blogger, Keep calm and carry on, as they used to say to people during World War II and as you can now read on coffee mugs. We have not to justify ourselves to our detractors, simply take the high moral ground and not be deterred in our own work.