Thursday, February 7, 2013

Living a Double Life

That is the title of my biographical guest post at the blog Republic of Gilead. The name of the blog comes from the book, The Handmaid's Tale, a futuristic novel where a fundamentalist militant group called the Sons of Jacob takes over the United States, and turns it into the Republic of Gilead.

In the about page on the blog, the blog creator, Ahab, says that he does not want to wake up one day in the Republic of Gilead. His blog is a fundamentalism/cult watch site, dedicated to exposing extremism  and looking at trends within extremist groups.

Well, enough of my blathering on, about the post, read my guest post, Living a Double Life, about my life undercover within fundamentalism at Republic of Gilead.

As a side note, I always like to share blogs of note with you, my readers, I read quite a few blogs myself, as you can see from my blogroll here to the right, here's a few things I have found interesting in the blogging world lately:

Andrew Hall, creator of the satire blog Laughing In Purgatory is someone that I am honored to know. He's a great comedy writer, and has even wrote two guest posts, both of which were very popular with readers, especially his last guest post, Evangelicals Are Excited That Science Is Wrong Again.

Yesterday on his blog, he published a project that he worked on with several fellow atheist bloggers called What Would You Put In The Bible?, it is what is sounds like, the bloggers were asked what should be written in the Bible, but isn't in there currently. Some submissions were serious, others were rather hilarious.

On a unrelated note, I have started running across blogs opposing religious extremism and cult groups by writers who are Christians themselves. I think this is a great trend, and it goes to show that even Christians are getting tired of the extremism.

One of these blogs that I have been following for about the last 6 months or so is Commandments of Men. The writer of this blog, Lewis, is a very liberal Christian (read his post on "worshiping the Bible", it will help you to understand just how liberal of a Christian he is), who nearly married a woman whose family was a part of the "Christian Patriarchy" movement (his series, The Joke Was on Me, talks about this).

He writes about that experience, his viewpoints on faith, and about various extremist/cult organizations.

Another great blog in this blogging genre is The Wartburg Watch This blog focuses mostly on the cult group, Sovereign Grace Ministires, which I have written about in the past, and was started to expose SGM but now focuses on other extremist and abusive

The writing is so good, and backed up by plenty of links, resources and personal stories that I have used The Wartburg Watch as a resource and reference in some of my blog posts, like a recent post exposing the extremist connections of the Kendrick Brothers, two popular Christian film makers, responsible for movies such as Fireproof, and Facing the Giants.

If you know of any great blogs that I currently do not have in my blogroll, or I haven't mentioned before, tell me about them, I'll take a look, I always like to keep up with the great blogs that are out there.

4 comments:

  1. I just read "The Joke Was On Me" at Commandments of Men. YIKES. What the author described between his romantic interest and her father was enmeshment, pure and simple.

    http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stop-walking-eggshells/201301/enmeshment-in-family-relationships-111

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I posted the wrong link there's actually 16 parts to it if you want to read it all.

      http://thecommandmentsofmen.blogspot.com/p/joke-was-on-me.html

      I've heard the overly close and unhealthy relationships between parents and children (especially father/daughter) called "emotional incest" by survivor/anti-cult blogs.

      I think it's rather fitting of a term.

      Delete
  2. Hi Sheldon
    Thank you for your kind review of our blog, The Wartburg Watch. We have not ever been members, or attendees, of any Sovereign Grace Church. We just happened upon SGM Survivors when we encountered a pedophile situation at a former church and were doing some research.

    After we started out blog, SGM continued to be a source of concern for us so we have always posted stories about them since they appear to offer the some of the most extreme examples of shepherding activities disguised as Neo-Calvinism that we have seen.

    With the class action lawsuit against SGM, we believe it promises to be one of the leading religious stories for 2013.

    If we can ever be of assistance to you, please let us know. You have a nice blog here.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My mistake, Dee, I assumed as much as The Wartburg Watch wrote about SGM, that the writers had past connections to them.

      I'll be sending you an e-mail.

      Delete

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