Credibility

I was reading today about the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings, and wanted to know more. So of course, I went to my trusty google search and typed in "Elisha" - after filtering out the closely pornographic photos of a certain blond actress, I hit on the links of various bible-history.org, biblestudy.com, bible-this-and-that websites. What struck me was the utter and complete lack of credibility these websites had. There was no accredation, no endorsement by my church, nothing really to say that these interpretations and historical backgrounds are accurate.

Yet it is so easy to just hop onto the website without thinking, grab whatever information I want, probably print it out for the bible study I'm leading next week, and off I go.

If you thought going to my church's website would help, it didn't. Redeemer Presbyterian is oddly lacking in helping me understand what information out there on the web is credible or not. An affiliation or stamp would really be useful here.

This plays into the larger conversation I had earlier with a colleague, about the rise of citizen journalism on the web and blogosphere and news-by-twitter. For all the benefits of mass democratization of internet ownership, there is also a huge issue of credibility and reliability.