How the world edits history






Henry Spencer; the protector of usenet archives. (Let me know if you think not)

I had forgotten this guy's name until recently when someone from wikipedia tipped me off from some other information I added. Henry Spencer. It's slowly coming back to me. However the incident I recall quite well. It's just that, I pay little attention to disreputable people who curse for 7 typewritten pages at someone for simply asking the *wrong* question. :-)

The fact that I have the freedom to expose this must drive the person mad. The year was 1986 when I first began to use the 'usenet' as most called it then though some of us were starting to call it the internet as it spread to what we saw would be the whole world eventually. Providers like compuserve had only email services and hadn't realized there was such a thing as 'newsgroups' which were bulletin board type constructs. Various readers like 'trn' or 'threaded read news' were implemented to allow people to see threads clearly and reply with great efficiency. I was fairly fast at using the 'vi' editor to scream through postings on my lunch break.

And I began to challenge a lot of people using logic. One day probably in 1987 a fellow named Kenn Barry had posted "If I could just see some good, solid, historical evidence for the resurrection, I *might* believe" or like that. I responded "What could I hypothetically give you"?

Now as you think about this, you realize that I have just deflated this persons statement. It has no substance. Basically the answer is 'nothing. There is nothing you could hypothetically give me'. In other words a video tape wouldn't work because everyone knows no such means of creating visual records existed then. Not to mention people would just claim it was a fraud/hoax anyway. You have guys saying there were 500 witnesses to the event. Guy's walking along and being visited by Jesus's resurrected body on multiple instances. And you have a government that killed him and would as soon leak any information about this as to eat their own fingers.

So really there isn't hypothetically any more information that would reasonably exist given that people were documented to have been killed for preaching the gospel and this increased to an extreme degree during Nero's reign of course. So I don't see how it would be likely that anyone would have recorded any more than what we see on the topic if it happened.

Well apparently Henry Spencer saw it the same way. If you do a search for Henry's 'contribution' to the talk.religion.misc group where this occurred, you will see that it's something talking about how "Christians" had persecuted witches. It's kind of a strange post just..hanging there by itself. I didn't recall seeing this guy post before he screamed cursings at me for about 7 pages titling it 'I spew thee off the usenet' I believe it was. :-) Cute. I thought it was just some dumb kid who had nothing better to do and I didn't even really try to remember the name.

Next thing you know though, the whole University of Oregon didn't have outside news anymore. I asked Dave Senkovich if it had to do with that incident (Our system administrator of the MC500 mainframe in chemstors. I was bob@greylady.uoregon.edu I believe at that time. Though the only thing you will find from me is a cross post to sci.research that somehow made it through Henry's archive filtering. Something got changed briefly there so we had a UUCP address instead of the usual. ) Dave said "I don't want to talk about it" in a fairly emotional way. I recall I was able to post a goodbye letter to the group and sadly not a soul stood up and said "Waiitttt a minute....who is this BULLY and why is this guy who just asked a question being kicked off the usenet?"

After someone finally telling me who had been responsible for the archives which were completely erradicated of ALL of the threads I was involved in (note the slump in posting volume that year..from 70 threads to 15!) I did a little research and saw that Henry's only contribution to the group on record was a post where he was talking about how Christians had persecuted witches. So I knew I had my man so to speak :-). I tried to update Henry's wikipedia page the other day and I see the information has already been deleted on this. So somebody is still, after 20 some years, hot on the job of deleting accurate history regarding this incident. I'd gladly forgive Henry if he was sorry for this. Especially if he like wanted to restore the archives or pay me for all the time I invested in reasoning with people to the tune of 140 hours of labor probably :-).

Anyway this stands as a great example of how people who have these motives of selectively altering history to their liking tend to worm their way into positions that allow them to do that. Those who trust politically affected history are foolish. There is one place to find ultimate truth. In a spiritual relationship with the God of Love and Truth. I'd never try to alter the history of how certain people murdered people they claimed were witches for instance. That kind of history needs to be SEEN so that people can understand how wicked people become when they are given power over other people's lives. Did Jesus command people to burn their enemies? No he commanded them to LOVE their ememies. To do GOOD to those who do evil to them. So people who claim these idiots who persecuted people were Christians are just not looking at the definition of a follower of Christ set forth by Yeshua himself are they?

-Bob Weigel. The maintainer of accurate internet history.

(Footnote: In my own 'environments', for example my youtube site, I delete stuff freely that is a waste of time. For example if someone says "I saw a UFO in my backyard" and I say "WHere's the evidence?" and they say "There is none because it just hovered and then flew off and nobody else saw it" I WILL probably erase that because it's a waste of people's time. If I can't have a multi-witness account that I can cross examine and correlate that these people are telling the truth then I refuse to be complicit in just filling up something I'm responsible for with a bunch of unsubstatiated claims.

LIKEWISE if someone just claims that I twist the scripture or someone else does, but they don't post anything constructive to support the allegation, I'll remove that by the same principle. A tidy house can have constructive purpose. A cluttered one is a danger to all who pass through. HAD someone actually posted something that I said and noted why they saw it as contradicting scripture then I'd be morally obliged to give an answer and if they were correct then I'd have to admit I was wrong because my whole intent is to understand the scripture. Nobody pays me a salary and I certainly don't get liked better because I stand for the truth. On the contrary. Most people genuinely despise me for my stand and it's cost me many things in this world not the least of which is a family that I can call my own. My heart breaks for that but oh well. What do I do? Compromise and do what everyone tells me I must do?

Anyway what we have above is a case of biased censorship. Censorship for the sake of sparing people the pain of sorting through lies is a *good* thing. Lies SHOULD be censored. Humanity has two very distinct problems. They like to lie for personal gain. But they also like to censor for personal gain. Fortunately a good investigator can always see the pathway to truth. WHY do I only appear in one thread in the whole usenet archives when ANYONE who worked with me will testify that I spent my lunch break every day almost for a year writing on newsgroups? Why don't you ask Henry Spencer, the glorious keeper of the archives. :-)