Deleting a Recommended Blog: One Year Out

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the quandry of feeling I had to remove a
website from my list of recommended blogs.

https://cross-purposes.blogspot.com/2018/06/why-delete-link.html

The writer was a man I'd considered a brother.  His blog was more floridly "pious" than
I cared for, but sometimes he had a good insight about God's "call to the remnant" of
saints alienated from the current church, which was the focus of his blog.

Over time, I'd noticed his blogs about events happening in the church and the world
took attitudes that seemed at odds with reality. One shrill post compared the Nazis
to (as he claimed) the crowds of Obama-supporters on college campuses who shout
down everyone who disagrees with them.

I still remember the pains I took to craft a scripture-based reply, non-judgemental and
diplomatic, but saying "surely you know that isn't reality ?"  He didn't post my reply--which
I considered dishonest blogging--and he never responded, on his blog or privately.

It seemed that was a good time to remove his blog from my recommendations, and to
stop following it myself.  I fiercely believe real piety, and any insight God is pleased to give
us, corresponds to reality.

I got to wondering last night if that blogger had come to his senses, so I looked up his blog.
Many of his posts were, still, couched in the flowery language and tropes of Nineteenth-
century religiosity, and off-putting.  Nothing there struck me as spiritually insightful.

And then he had a post about the coming persecution of the saints, a regular topic on his
blog.  It began this way:

"Prosecution plus politics equals inquisition. In an inquisition it is not about guilt or innocence.
One is already presumed and announced to be guilty. Only by bowing to the authority of the
inquisitors can one be exonerated. You may believe what happened to Brett Kavanaugh or
President Trump are isolated cases of judicial madness, where the strongest and most dominant
voice in the room is the shrill scream of the demented masses, but you would be wrong."

The responses to his post were also enlightening.  All spoke agreement with his words (any that
didn't may have been suppressed).  Most were also in the same florid piety of language and
terms he favors.

But one angry response railed at the "Demoncrats" for persecuting God's people.  No blogger,
of course, is responsible for what his commenters say.  But it seemed significant that this blogger
published, and let stand, such a response.

But most telling to me was that this blogger adduced "what happened to Brett Kavanaugh or
President Trump" as the prototype of the coming persecution of the saints.  That probably told
me everything I needed to know about this individual's perception of spiritual reality.