Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Enabling the Fault Finders - Should Bloggers turn from the Carnage?

Tim Challies posted on fault finders (a.k.a. known as Watch Bloggers, an all together too referential and polite term for the worst of the vermin).

Filling our minds, our hearts, our computer screens, our blogs with all that is wrong in the church will do little to conform us into the image of the Savior. It can do little. My encouragement to you, whether you are a regular visitor to one of these sites or whether you simply visit them occasionally, is to examine your heart and to examine your motives. Do you visit such sites because they have information that you truly need to know? Or do you visit as a means of entertainment? Are you delighting in what is good and true and pure and lovely, or are you finding a strange, sick delight in all that is evil and ugly?

This has made it's way around the blogosphere, with interesting, if predictable results. including Challies having to shut down comments because of the crazies.

Phil Johnson tweeted it (and then deleted his tweet - that is odd), at which point it hit the fan, including when Justin Taylor picked up on, along with the usual suspects who are now calling for Challies to repent for calling them out (sort of, as he never named names).

The Question is this ---

If bloggers agree that Fault Finders function (at best) no more than watching bubble headed bleach blonde's telling us about plane crashes with a gleam in their eye ... Why do bloggers link to them? Why are they placed in their blog rolls???

If they function as parasites to peoples souls - then pluck them out and cast them away. De link Fault Finders. Get them away from you.

And yes, I mean Ken Silva, Ingrid, and all their ilk. I will name names, but I won't link. I stopped reading them because they are poison to the soul. And I began the process of de-linking long ago.

Postscript - Frank Turk in Challies meta (which Challies closed because of how it degenerated) describes watch bloggers as:

Any blog-like website which has the primary objective of “exposing” the church life errors of people in the English-speaking, North American church; sees “apologetics” as primarily the prosecution of guilty heretics and not as turning a brother away from sin; rarely turns its attention to exhorting the exceeeding beauty and sufficiency of Christ.

fair enough