Ruth Gledhill's Articles of Faith (never knowingly updated on the Sabbath)
Mousetrap blog: suggest your own web commandments

Church leaders have drawn up a new set of the Ten Commandments aimed at delivering “God bloggers” from the temptations of the blogosphere.

Alarmed by the extent to which religious blogs can descend into vitriol, senior evangelical clergy are calling on bloggers to obey the new commandments or risk perdition.

The commandments, based on those delivered to Moses by God at the top of Mount Sinai, were drawn up at a “Godblogs” conference in Kennington, southeast London.

They have been engraved on cyberspace tablets by the Evangelical Alliance, the leading Christian umbrella group founded in 1846 that represents thousands of churches of most denominations nationwide.

The commandments order bloggers not to put your blog before your integrity; not to “make an idol” of the blog; not to misuse your screen name by using your anonymity to sin and to remember the Sabbath by taking one day off a week from blogging. They also order: “You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind.”

Bloggers are commanded to honour their fellow bloggers and not to get too upset by their mistakes. They shall not murder the reputation of another blogger, shall not give false testimony against a fellow blogger and shall not steal the blog content of another.

Bloggers are also told to be content with their own creation and not to covet their neighbour’s blog ranking. Many thousands of blogs have sprung up in the past few years, offering easy access to online opinion forums to any user of the internet.

The “instant access” nature of most blogs means people posting comments often do so in the heat of passion and rarely stop to reflect, as they would if giving a lecture or writing a letter.

The result can be intemperate and sometimes foul language aimed at either the author of the blog or other commenters, or both. Blogs have also generated a new class of internet user, known as “trolls”, whose mission is to post as many defamatory and hostile comments as possible with the aim of driving away other users and destroying the blog, its owner or both.

Church leaders are growing increasingly concerned at the defamatory and inflammatory content of some blogs, which unlike newspapers and television are unregulated.

If unwisely moderated by their owners, blogs can generate virtual wars across cyberspace, with right-wing bloggers in America among the most extreme in their postings.