If you've read Baylyblog for a while, you've learned that we make changes to posts after they go up. Some of those changes are to correct my failure to honor Jesus in my tone or arguments, some are because I catch typos, some are to correct factual errors, and some are to improve clarity. Well over ninety-five percent of those changes are made in the first hour following publication and are insignificant. Four of the remaining five percent are made in the first twenty-four hours and are usually insignificant. Less than one percent are made later than that and those late changes are almost always due to more significant mistakes, so when those changes are made, they're usually noted at the beginning of the post. Which is to say significant changes are always noted.
Blogs aren't hard print publications and one of the principal differences is that blogs aren't static. After a magazine is printed it's impossible to make a correction, but it's the work of a moment to correct a post. Some online publications are mirror images of hard print publications, so they follow hard print rules. Others have no hard print version and are able to make insignificant changes without facing the problem of a discrepancy between the article's hard copy and its online version.
Online publications should not be forced onto the Procrustean bed of hard copy rules. Hard copy and online publications are as different as night and day, so new wine should be given new wineskins.
I mention this because a web site has noted that I changed the title of a post published yesterday and they assumed my title change was due to readers e-mailing me with negative feedback...
This has never been the case when I've changed a title. Every title change is for one of two reasons (or some combination of both): either I think the title doesn't do a good job of telegraphing to readers the subject of the post, or I want to spruce the title up to get more people to read it.
Yesterday is a good example of title changes. Originally, the post went up under the title, "Hitler has killed his thousands, utopian intellectuals their ten thousands, SCOTUS and Teddy Kennedy their billion..." Later in the day I changed the title to "Nations must face the blood shed by their fathers..." Why the change?
The web site that noted the change assumed the change was due to my receiving objections from readers for misrepresenting the number of Jews killed by Hitler as merely "thousands." Being haters of God and His holiness, it's easy to understand why they would come to this conclusion. They despise the Bible and therefore missed my Biblical allusion to what the women of Israel sang comparing young David to King Saul: “Saul has slain his thousands, And David his ten thousands” (1Samuel 18:7b). My point wasn't to become a Holocaust-denier, but to demonstrate the inverse correlation between number of innocents murdered and cultural acknowledgments of bloodguilt. The number of Christians, handicapped, and Jews killed by Hitler is less than a tenth of those killed by utopian intellectuals pursuing their brand of social justice in the twentieth century, and therefore my Biblical allusion to Saul's thousands and David's ten thousands.
So why did my original title switch midstream from "thousands" and "ten thousands" to a "billion?"
Because I wanted to make it clear that the bloodguilt of abortion dwarfs the bloodguilt of the Third Reich. Specifically, the number of innocents slaughtered in the Christian/handicapped/Jewish Holocaust of the Third Reich is less than one half of one percent of a conservative estimate of those little babies slaughtered in their mothers' wombs just in the last twenty years alone. If you're keeping score as every Christian should be, a very conservative estimate of worldwide abortions is fifty million per year, and this doesn't include babies prevented from implanting on the wall of their mother's uterus by birth control pills or ECPs, nor babies killed by chemical abortifacients taken in the first or second trimester.
So do the numbers and after ten years you're at five-hundred million. After twenty you're up to one billion--and again, this does not include chemical abortifacients!
My first title was an attempt to telegraph this reality, but later in the day I realized (and I'd received no e-mails about the post or its title) that I was trying to do too much with the title, and it needed to be simplified. Thus the new title. It's easier to get a handle on. So no, there's no conspiracy behind title changes; no embarrassment or caving in to a mass (or even a microscopic) outcry. Just attempts to improve clarity or to get more people to read particular posts.
And speaking of particular posts, readers might like to know that the posts most consistently bypassed by Baylyblog readers are those that address abortion. They have the fewest readers and the fewest comments.
