Is it ever OK to stay ignorant?

Recently this blog has been visited by someone who really seems to have a hate on for the Catholic Church. This person has a blog filled with stuff about the Catholic Church being the Whore of Babylon, and more stuff about how one should read the Bible in the 1611 King James Version only.

I suggested that this person read some books by Dave Armstrong, a former Evangelical/current Catholic whose books explain some of the misconceptions many people have about the Catholic Church. The person not only declined, but insisted that Dave Armstrong was never really a Christian and knew nothing about it or he wouldn’t have become Catholic.

I suppose people have the right to stay ignorant if they want to. But once you decide to be a writer or a blogger, even more if you write books or blog posts meant to inform, can you really insist on staying ignorant? I mean, my friend Dave Armstrong reads tons of books from the Protestant/Evangelical point of view, interacts with them online, even debates them. He also is well-read about the Catholic faith. So I regard his books and his blog as a trustworthy resource.

‘ChristianSpook’ on the other hand, so far as I can tell, reads only material from the more ignorant anti-Catholic sources and from the rather cultish KJV-only community. He also cannot be bothered to spell correctly, and uses the apostrophe to form what is intended to be the plural. (“Christian’s” for Christians)

Here is the thing: if you are serious about being a writer or a blogger, you can’t be like that. Even if your writing specialty is intended to appeal only to the more ignorant people. Because even ignorant people know a stray fact or two. They also expect a book writer or serious blogger to have their facts straight, and to spell and punctuate correctly. When once they realize that a writer is ignorant about something, they will cease to trust that writer.

So: if you want to call yourself a writer, even if all you write are blog posts, you must keep on learning. Read books with facts in them. Learn to tell the difference between books with verifiable facts in them and books that simply express opinions. Hint— good factual books make many references to original sources.

And posting or publishing anything that is not correctly spelled and punctuated is death to reader-trust. If you currently are weak in your basic English skills, keep studying until you can write correct English without a net.

 

The Great WordPress experiment

Blogger annoyed me today. Which is not a rare thing. But finally the Blogger-annoyance made me decide to start a blog on WordPress to see how the other half blogs.

This is that new blog. It might end up being a replacement for The Lina Lamont Fan Club on Blogger, or it might not. It depends on how it goes, how long it takes me to learn how to blog on WordPress, how long it is before WordPress starts annoying me the way Blogger does….

Anyway, I’d like some feedback: is blogging on Blogger better than blogging on WordPress? What do you think of the new blog, Nissa Annakindt: My Antimatter Life? What do you think of The Lina Lamont Fan Club?

My current intent is to keep both blogs going for a while, just to see how it goes, and then when I know what’s what, discontinuing one blog or the other. If I keep the new blog, I’ll lose all the history of the old one. But if I keep the old, that history may end up being a burden.

I’ve added a poll to this post just to see what the readers of the new blog think of the Blogger vs. WordPress thing.