Final Update on the UCC Church Banner Thing

Bene Diction is reporting that the St. James UCC site has been hacked, and that the church was going to be putting a statement on their page. Bene heard from the pastor of the church via email, and he confirmed that.

I haven't heard anything in response to my email -- of course, I wasn't expecting to, because I know they got a LOT of email about it, and they probably don't have the time to answer everyone. If it was a hacker, it was a pretty clever hacker who knew enough about the Bible to pick that verse out. It's not a verse that would necessarilly set off alarms, unless it was read in context.

We can react to something like this in several ways. We can laugh and move on, we can laugh and let the people in charge know, and we can sit in outrage and judgement, only to feel foolish when the real story is told. Thankfully, in this case, it looks like the blogosphere did the second -- we laughed, but we let them know something was up.

{EDIT: Hack or not? That's still the question.

We were recently made aware that the former quote we had posted in the header on our site was actually not based on the word of Jesus but was a quote posed to him during his temptation. As soon as we were made aware of this we removed the quote from our site. We removed it...not hackers as some ill-informed bloggers would have you believe.

Haven't heard anyone who was saying the hackers took it down -- we were saying that a hacker put it there in the first place. I don't know if that's true anymore or not. It just sounds like someone picked the quote out and didn't check the context before they posted it.

FURTHER update -- just received a VERY nice email from the webmaster of the site. The verse was pulled from a Scripture quote search engine, and the context wasn't checked until after they were informed about the problem. I figure half the Christian blogosphere emailed them yesterday. Innocent mistake on their part -- it happens. Let he who hasn't messed up in public cast the first stone -- and that certainly isn't me.

Posted by Warren Kelly at February 13, 2006 08:15 PM | TrackBack