{"id":772,"date":"2008-05-05T11:57:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-05T16:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/2008\/05\/inside-the-cult.html"},"modified":"2008-05-05T11:57:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-05T16:57:00","slug":"inside-cult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2008\/05\/inside-cult.html","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Cult"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/rights\/84043\/?page=1\">This is a long but fascinating read<\/a>.  It is an article by a Rolling Stone reporter who went along on a weekend retreat sponsored by one of those big born-again mega-churches.   He&#8217;s got a pretty cynical attitude, but his insights are telling nonetheless.  He wasn&#8217;t there to make fun of the people, but rather to get a sense of the experience from the outside.  I think his experience would not have been different if he had been a run-of-the-mill neighborhood Methodist instead of an atheist.<\/p>\n<p>What was most interesting to me is the degree of outright brainwashing that&#8217;s done on these folks.  If this were not a &#8220;Christian&#8221; organization, it would be branded a cult.  And while this sort of thing is certainly not indicative of all Christian organizations, or even of all born-again groups, I suspect it&#8217;s not as uncommon as you might hope.  While the extreme techniques employed in the article might not play as well in other areas of the country, if you&#8217;ve spent any time with hardcore born-agains, the results of people with hyper-Christian veneers over sinner&#8217;s souls and the anti-intellectual dogmatic position based on spoon-fed group-think can&#8217;t help but ring true.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">\n<h6><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">Brought to you by Tim&#8230;<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/\">-Read the whole blog here-<\/a><\/span><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a long but fascinating read. It is an article by a Rolling Stone reporter who went along on<\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\"><a href=\"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2008\/05\/inside-cult.html\" title=\"Read Inside the Cult\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}