Blog Post Recommendation from "Diary of An Autodidact"

I haven't had much time over the last few weeks to write a new blog post, but I do want to recommend a post from another blogger.  The name of the blog is Diary of an Autodidact, and the post is titled "Underground by Haruki Murakami".  Like me, the author of this blog is a survivor of an American white supremacist fundamentalist/Evangelical cult, and he has noted several similarities between present-day white evangelicalism and the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult which perpetrated a massive terrorist attack on Japanese subway commuters in March 1995.  I have myself commented on the lessons which I learned from reading (or in my case, listening to the audiobook version of) Haruki Murakami's book Underground, with its detailed description of the process by which many Aum participants lost their souls to the delusions of the evil man named Shoko Asahara.  It is interesting to see how others are drawing the same lessons in order to understand the present partly destroyed state of much of mainstream American culture.  To quote from the author of Diary of an Autodidact, "In the end, this is the legacy [of cults of narcissism] - dozens of deaths, thousands of injured, and little else to show for it. Thus is the end of every doomsday cult eventually. And, for that matter, of every Fascist movement. Death, destruction, and ultimately oblivion."  These sentences give us some idea of the final outcome of Trumpism.

And as for white evangelicalism/Protestantism (particularly the American flavor) - which has been the enabler of slavery, attempted genocide, and wars of conquest for centuries - I too am struck - as the author of Diary of an Autodidact was struck - by this quote from Underground:

“People the world over turn to religion for salvation. But when religion hurts and maims, 

where are they to go for salvation?”