Ray Gregory (Author of Dark Treats)

Ray Gregory rated a book it was ok The Fractured Union by James W. Parker	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this autho ...more
Oct 11, 2025 10:37AM · like · see review
Ray Gregory has read An Innocent Heart by Vikki Mount (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
A Good Story Hook, But… An Innocent Heart: A Supernatural Mystery Thriller (by Vikki Mount, an Australian author) has an interesting plot and pretty good characterizations, but much of the third-person, omniscient viewpoint writing has the antiseptic ...more
Sep 23, 2025 12:29PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of An Innocent Heart by Vikki Mount. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — An Innocent Heart by Vikki Mount <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Ray Gregory liked MelQ's review of Devious Love: Six Stories: "A Raw and Riveting Exploration of Love 'Devious Love: Six Stories' is an unforgettable collection that immediately grabs you and doesn't let go until the very last page. True to his raw approach toward universal themes, Ray Gregory delivers yet anothe" Read more of this review »
Sep 02, 2025 10:33AM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Devious Love by Ray Gregory. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Devious Love by Ray Gregory <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Ray Gregory rated a book it was ok The Fractured Union by James W. Parker	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this autho ...more
Sep 01, 2025 10:53AM · like · see review
Ray Gregory rated a book it was amazing Get a Life! A Guide to Finding a Philosophy to Live By by Alan Poon (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
An Excellent Philosophical/Practical Guide to Life Get a Life: A Guide to Finding a Philosophy to Live By (by Alan Poon) presents a smorgasbord of philosophies, both Eastern and Western, for the reader to choose from. And it’s hardly the stodgy philos ...more
Aug 30, 2025 08:02AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Get a Life! A Guide to Finding a Philosophy to Live By by Alan Poon. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Get a Life! A Guide to Finding a Philosophy to Live By by Alan Poon <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Ray Gregory rated a book it was ok The Fractured Union by James W. Parker	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this autho ...more
Aug 25, 2025 03:54PM · like · see review
Ray Gregory rated a book really liked it 20 Universal Laws of Success: Manifesting Your Path to Achievement (The Wisdom Perspective) by Ali Pournamdarian	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
A Primer on Success 20 Universal Laws of Success: Your Path to Achievement (by Ali Pournamdarin) is a generalized and eclectic self-help guide, with its chapter titles accompanied by quotes from the likes of Napoleon Hill, Deepak Chopra, and Tony Robb ...more
Aug 22, 2025 03:20PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of 20 Universal Laws of Success by Ali Pournamdarian. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — 20 Universal Laws of Success by Ali Pournamdarian <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Ray Gregory rated a book it was ok The Fractured Union by James W. Parker	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this autho ...more
Aug 19, 2025 08:18AM · like · see review
Ray Gregory liked MelQ's review of When Pigs Fly: My 100-Word Ideas for a Year: "Odyssey Through the Human Condition Having been utterly fascinated by Ray Gregory's 'Old Souls', I eagerly dived into 'When Pigs Fly', and once again, this author proves himself to be a master of unconventional and deeply thought-provoking insights. Th" Read more of this review »
Aug 16, 2025 09:22AM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of When Pigs Fly by Ray Gregory. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — When Pigs Fly by Ray Gregory <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Ray Gregory rated a book liked it Doctor Wolfstone’s Clinic: Patients 1-6 by Joshua Scribner (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Rambling, Indulgent, and Gratuitous Tales of Demonic Possession Dr. Wolfstone’s Clinic: Patients 1-6 (by Joshua Scribner) reads nominally like the case studies of a busy hypnotherapist. But Dr. Wolfstone is more reminiscent Professor Van Helsing of D ...more
Aug 15, 2025 11:47AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Doctor Wolfstone’s Clinic by Joshua Scribner. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Doctor Wolfstone’s Clinic by Joshua Scribner <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Ray Gregory rated a book it was ok

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An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario

The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this autho An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario

The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this author’s previous book Break Up of America (published in 2021) will get a strong sense of déjà vu from reading this iteration, because all the same points regarding what is wrong with America, plus the longed-for dissolution of the United States of America, were spelled out there too.

While its prolific author is capable of writing well and telling a good, if longwinded, yarn, his perspective is permeated by religious conviction and especially religious grievances, most notably the notion that the U.S. government has infringed on Christians’ right to practice their religion. We are told the fanciful (and oxymoronic) tale that while the Founding Fathers wanted to keep government out of religion, they did not want to keep religion out of government. For example, “The majority of the delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] were firm in their belief that the nation should be grounded in a moral law derived from biblical teachings” — yet the U. S. Constitution that the majority of these delegates voted into existence, this blueprint the author alleges to be for a government based on the Bible, does not contain even one mention of the Bible, God, Christ, the Ten Commandments, Christianity, etc. Again, the author writes, “But the foundational principles were set in stone, woven into the fabric of the nation: that the Lord is the ultimate judge, lawgiver, and King; that governance should reflect divine order; and that the rights of the people should be guarded through the careful separation of powers. The Founding Fathers, whether conscious of it or not, had created a system that echoed the divine wisdom found in the Bible, ensuring that justice, liberty, and faith would forever guide the nation.”

The Bible-thumping portrait that is painted of James Madison, especially regarding his contribution to the Constitution’s First Amendment (which insured the free exercise of religion as well as other rights), is bizarre, since while Madison often used biblical references, he was a strong advocate for individual conscience, religious freedom, and keeping the government separate from religion. Even Benjamin Franklin, who at the time of the Constitutional Convention was an advocate of deism and who questioned traditional Christian doctrines, is alleged by the author to have yearned for a government based on “the scriptures themselves.” But in truth Franklin, as were most of the rest of the Founding Fathers, were secularist sons of the Enlightenment who sought to save America from religious tyranny (including religious wars and religious persecution) as much as from political tyranny. The deistic God they paid lip service to was more of a philosophical construct than anything approaching a facsimile of the Christian deity. And indeed they chose symbols from Free Masonry and classical antiquity instead of from the Bible to decorate the national currency, government seals, government buildings, etc.

A small point, howbeit a picturesque example of the book’s questionable historicity, is its assertion that “the grand marble pillars of the Supreme Court building were a fitting backdrop” when the Supreme Court of John Marshall decided (in the early 1800s) that the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a national religion. Yet the Supreme Court building was not built until 1935. Before then the Court met in borrowed buildings in New York City and Philadelphia and later in the Capitol building in DC.

It is claimed that successive Supreme Court decisions got the meaning of Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state wrong. This is a common grievance of modern-day rightwing Christian nationalists who would like to impose the trappings of their religion on all manner of American life, private and public — and to hell with (pun intended) believers of other religions and non-believers in any religion. As if being able to publicly pray in any of the 350,000-400,000 churches that dot the American landscape isn’t enough for them, these authoritarian Christians particularly want to subject every American school kid, whatever his or her religious affiliation or lack thereof, to public prayers — even though Jesus himself told his followers that they should pray in private and not make a show of public prayer as the hypocritical Pharisees did.

In the blink of an eye, the narrative jets past the wall-of-separation chip on Christian nationalists’ shoulders to their other gargantuan bugaboo, the “liberals,” the very banes of their existence. Did you know, for example, that Adolph Hitler was “a product of the liberal ideology”? That by the 1950s, Britain, France, and the United States “had become the strongholds of liberalism” and “had convinced the masses that their oppressive measures — censorship, surveillance, militarization — were for the greater good”? And here most of us were thinking it was the world’s dictatorships, rightwing and leftwing — and not its democracies — who were the really bad guys.

A rant against the U.S. government's regulations and its imagined takeover of everything comes next as the story takes us into the lives of near-future everyday American rebels chaffing against the system run by those dastardly liberals, who are as clueless about making government work as they are about religion, and who are “demonizing anyone who disagrees with them” — and wow, how much like a revealing and hypocritical Freudian slip the word “demonizing” sounds here, with all its religious overtones. And even more so when one considers the present-day non-fictional reality of overtly Christian nationalist MAGA/Trumpism ruling the nation and cramming Project 2025 down all those liberals’ throats. But every perennial rightwing trope is trotted out, from states’ rights to secession to deporting all “illegals” to even returning the nation to the gold standard. One of the righteous rightwing rebels even accuses the story’s fictional liberal president of the United States of “threatening to pull state funding, override our laws, and use federal agencies as a political weapon.” WOW again, in this time of Trump.

And what are the answers to the imagined liberal nightmare? For starters, a somewhat cuddlier, more inclusive “Confederacy 2.0” — what one of the book’s characters actually calls it —though now known as the Conservative States of America, which will usher in a new Golden Age based on “Gold. Coal. Oil. Industry. And God.” And a few more new nations are carved out of the old U. S. of A. too: the New Republic of Texas, the Mormon Nation, the Republic of Alaska (gotta wonder how long Vladimir Putin would let that go ungrabbed), the Hawaiian Nation (which would make an excellent fueling station for the Chinese navy), Southern California (now a territory of Mexico again), and what is left of the U.S. now renaming itself (what else?) the United Socialist States of America, which. of course, is doomed to failure because it’s still being run by all those feckless liberal devils. The bottom line is, if this kind of rightwing Christian nationalist fever dream, the end of the United States of America, is what floats your boat, and you don’t mind wading through the ton of numbing political machinations that make it possible, then this book may give you a few hours of rousing, howbeit delusional, validation. ...more

Ray Gregory has read

An Innocent Heart
by Vikki Mount (Goodreads Author)

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

A Good Story Hook, But…

An Innocent Heart: A Supernatural Mystery Thriller (by Vikki Mount, an Australian author) has an interesting plot and pretty good characterizations, but much of the third-person, omniscient viewpoint writing has the antiseptic ...more

Ray Gregory liked MelQ's review of Devious Love: Six Stories:

"A Raw and Riveting Exploration of Love

'Devious Love: Six Stories' is an unforgettable collection that immediately grabs you and doesn't let go until the very last page. True to his raw approach toward universal themes, Ray Gregory delivers yet anothe" Read more of this review »

Ray Gregory rated a book it was ok

The Fractured Union
by James W. Parker

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario

The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this autho An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario

The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this author’s previous book Break Up of America (published in 2021) will get a strong sense of déjà vu from reading this iteration, because all the same points regarding what is wrong with America, plus the longed-for dissolution of the United States of America, were spelled out there too.

While its prolific author is capable of writing well and telling a good, if longwinded, yarn, his perspective is permeated by religious conviction and especially religious grievances, most notably the notion that the U.S. government has infringed on Christians’ right to practice their religion. We are told the fanciful (and oxymoronic) tale that while the Founding Fathers wanted to keep government out of religion, they did not want to keep religion out of government. For example, “The majority of the delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] were firm in their belief that the nation should be grounded in a moral law derived from biblical teachings” — yet the U. S. Constitution that the majority of these delegates voted into existence, this blueprint the author alleges to be for a government based on the Bible, does not contain even one mention of the Bible, God, Christ, the Ten Commandments, Christianity, etc. Again, the author writes, “But the foundational principles were set in stone, woven into the fabric of the nation: that the Lord is the ultimate judge, lawgiver, and King; that governance should reflect divine order; and that the rights of the people should be guarded through the careful separation of powers. The Founding Fathers, whether conscious of it or not, had created a system that echoed the divine wisdom found in the Bible, ensuring that justice, liberty, and faith would forever guide the nation.”

The Bible-thumping portrait that is painted of James Madison, especially regarding his contribution to the Constitution’s First Amendment (which insured the free exercise of religion as well as other rights), is bizarre, since while Madison often used biblical references, he was a strong advocate for individual conscience, religious freedom, and keeping the government separate from religion. Even Benjamin Franklin, who at the time of the Constitutional Convention was an advocate of deism and who questioned traditional Christian doctrines, is alleged by the author to have yearned for a government based on “the scriptures themselves.” But in truth Franklin, as were most of the rest of the Founding Fathers, were secularist sons of the Enlightenment who sought to save America from religious tyranny (including religious wars and religious persecution) as much as from political tyranny. The deistic God they paid lip service to was more of a philosophical construct than anything approaching a facsimile of the Christian deity. And indeed they chose symbols from Free Masonry and classical antiquity instead of from the Bible to decorate the national currency, government seals, government buildings, etc.

A small point, howbeit a picturesque example of the book’s questionable historicity, is its assertion that “the grand marble pillars of the Supreme Court building were a fitting backdrop” when the Supreme Court of John Marshall decided (in the early 1800s) that the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a national religion. Yet the Supreme Court building was not built until 1935. Before then the Court met in borrowed buildings in New York City and Philadelphia and later in the Capitol building in DC.

It is claimed that successive Supreme Court decisions got the meaning of Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state wrong. This is a common grievance of modern-day rightwing Christian nationalists who would like to impose the trappings of their religion on all manner of American life, private and public — and to hell with (pun intended) believers of other religions and non-believers in any religion. As if being able to publicly pray in any of the 350,000-400,000 churches that dot the American landscape isn’t enough for them, these authoritarian Christians particularly want to subject every American school kid, whatever his or her religious affiliation or lack thereof, to public prayers — even though Jesus himself told his followers that they should pray in private and not make a show of public prayer as the hypocritical Pharisees did.

In the blink of an eye, the narrative jets past the wall-of-separation chip on Christian nationalists’ shoulders to their other gargantuan bugaboo, the “liberals,” the very banes of their existence. Did you know, for example, that Adolph Hitler was “a product of the liberal ideology”? That by the 1950s, Britain, France, and the United States “had become the strongholds of liberalism” and “had convinced the masses that their oppressive measures — censorship, surveillance, militarization — were for the greater good”? And here most of us were thinking it was the world’s dictatorships, rightwing and leftwing — and not its democracies — who were the really bad guys.

A rant against the U.S. government's regulations and its imagined takeover of everything comes next as the story takes us into the lives of near-future everyday American rebels chaffing against the system run by those dastardly liberals, who are as clueless about making government work as they are about religion, and who are “demonizing anyone who disagrees with them” — and wow, how much like a revealing and hypocritical Freudian slip the word “demonizing” sounds here, with all its religious overtones. And even more so when one considers the present-day non-fictional reality of overtly Christian nationalist MAGA/Trumpism ruling the nation and cramming Project 2025 down all those liberals’ throats. But every perennial rightwing trope is trotted out, from states’ rights to secession to deporting all “illegals” to even returning the nation to the gold standard. One of the righteous rightwing rebels even accuses the story’s fictional liberal president of the United States of “threatening to pull state funding, override our laws, and use federal agencies as a political weapon.” WOW again, in this time of Trump.

And what are the answers to the imagined liberal nightmare? For starters, a somewhat cuddlier, more inclusive “Confederacy 2.0” — what one of the book’s characters actually calls it —though now known as the Conservative States of America, which will usher in a new Golden Age based on “Gold. Coal. Oil. Industry. And God.” And a few more new nations are carved out of the old U. S. of A. too: the New Republic of Texas, the Mormon Nation, the Republic of Alaska (gotta wonder how long Vladimir Putin would let that go ungrabbed), the Hawaiian Nation (which would make an excellent fueling station for the Chinese navy), Southern California (now a territory of Mexico again), and what is left of the U.S. now renaming itself (what else?) the United Socialist States of America, which. of course, is doomed to failure because it’s still being run by all those feckless liberal devils. The bottom line is, if this kind of rightwing Christian nationalist fever dream, the end of the United States of America, is what floats your boat, and you don’t mind wading through the ton of numbing political machinations that make it possible, then this book may give you a few hours of rousing, howbeit delusional, validation. ...more

Ray Gregory rated a book it was amazing

Get a Life! A Guide to Finding a Philosophy to Live By
by Alan Poon (Goodreads Author)

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

An Excellent Philosophical/Practical Guide to Life

Get a Life: A Guide to Finding a Philosophy to Live By (by Alan Poon) presents a smorgasbord of philosophies, both Eastern and Western, for the reader to choose from. And it’s hardly the stodgy philos ...more

Ray Gregory rated a book it was ok

The Fractured Union
by James W. Parker

Rate this book

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario

The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this autho An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario

The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this author’s previous book Break Up of America (published in 2021) will get a strong sense of déjà vu from reading this iteration, because all the same points regarding what is wrong with America, plus the longed-for dissolution of the United States of America, were spelled out there too.

While its prolific author is capable of writing well and telling a good, if longwinded, yarn, his perspective is permeated by religious conviction and especially religious grievances, most notably the notion that the U.S. government has infringed on Christians’ right to practice their religion. We are told the fanciful (and oxymoronic) tale that while the Founding Fathers wanted to keep government out of religion, they did not want to keep religion out of government. For example, “The majority of the delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] were firm in their belief that the nation should be grounded in a moral law derived from biblical teachings” — yet the U. S. Constitution that the majority of these delegates voted into existence, this blueprint the author alleges to be for a government based on the Bible, does not contain even one mention of the Bible, God, Christ, the Ten Commandments, Christianity, etc. Again, the author writes, “But the foundational principles were set in stone, woven into the fabric of the nation: that the Lord is the ultimate judge, lawgiver, and King; that governance should reflect divine order; and that the rights of the people should be guarded through the careful separation of powers. The Founding Fathers, whether conscious of it or not, had created a system that echoed the divine wisdom found in the Bible, ensuring that justice, liberty, and faith would forever guide the nation.”

The Bible-thumping portrait that is painted of James Madison, especially regarding his contribution to the Constitution’s First Amendment (which insured the free exercise of religion as well as other rights), is bizarre, since while Madison often used biblical references, he was a strong advocate for individual conscience, religious freedom, and keeping the government separate from religion. Even Benjamin Franklin, who at the time of the Constitutional Convention was an advocate of deism and who questioned traditional Christian doctrines, is alleged by the author to have yearned for a government based on “the scriptures themselves.” But in truth Franklin, as were most of the rest of the Founding Fathers, were secularist sons of the Enlightenment who sought to save America from religious tyranny (including religious wars and religious persecution) as much as from political tyranny. The deistic God they paid lip service to was more of a philosophical construct than anything approaching a facsimile of the Christian deity. And indeed they chose symbols from Free Masonry and classical antiquity instead of from the Bible to decorate the national currency, government seals, government buildings, etc.

A small point, howbeit a picturesque example of the book’s questionable historicity, is its assertion that “the grand marble pillars of the Supreme Court building were a fitting backdrop” when the Supreme Court of John Marshall decided (in the early 1800s) that the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a national religion. Yet the Supreme Court building was not built until 1935. Before then the Court met in borrowed buildings in New York City and Philadelphia and later in the Capitol building in DC.

It is claimed that successive Supreme Court decisions got the meaning of Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state wrong. This is a common grievance of modern-day rightwing Christian nationalists who would like to impose the trappings of their religion on all manner of American life, private and public — and to hell with (pun intended) believers of other religions and non-believers in any religion. As if being able to publicly pray in any of the 350,000-400,000 churches that dot the American landscape isn’t enough for them, these authoritarian Christians particularly want to subject every American school kid, whatever his or her religious affiliation or lack thereof, to public prayers — even though Jesus himself told his followers that they should pray in private and not make a show of public prayer as the hypocritical Pharisees did.

In the blink of an eye, the narrative jets past the wall-of-separation chip on Christian nationalists’ shoulders to their other gargantuan bugaboo, the “liberals,” the very banes of their existence. Did you know, for example, that Adolph Hitler was “a product of the liberal ideology”? That by the 1950s, Britain, France, and the United States “had become the strongholds of liberalism” and “had convinced the masses that their oppressive measures — censorship, surveillance, militarization — were for the greater good”? And here most of us were thinking it was the world’s dictatorships, rightwing and leftwing — and not its democracies — who were the really bad guys.

A rant against the U.S. government's regulations and its imagined takeover of everything comes next as the story takes us into the lives of near-future everyday American rebels chaffing against the system run by those dastardly liberals, who are as clueless about making government work as they are about religion, and who are “demonizing anyone who disagrees with them” — and wow, how much like a revealing and hypocritical Freudian slip the word “demonizing” sounds here, with all its religious overtones. And even more so when one considers the present-day non-fictional reality of overtly Christian nationalist MAGA/Trumpism ruling the nation and cramming Project 2025 down all those liberals’ throats. But every perennial rightwing trope is trotted out, from states’ rights to secession to deporting all “illegals” to even returning the nation to the gold standard. One of the righteous rightwing rebels even accuses the story’s fictional liberal president of the United States of “threatening to pull state funding, override our laws, and use federal agencies as a political weapon.” WOW again, in this time of Trump.

And what are the answers to the imagined liberal nightmare? For starters, a somewhat cuddlier, more inclusive “Confederacy 2.0” — what one of the book’s characters actually calls it —though now known as the Conservative States of America, which will usher in a new Golden Age based on “Gold. Coal. Oil. Industry. And God.” And a few more new nations are carved out of the old U. S. of A. too: the New Republic of Texas, the Mormon Nation, the Republic of Alaska (gotta wonder how long Vladimir Putin would let that go ungrabbed), the Hawaiian Nation (which would make an excellent fueling station for the Chinese navy), Southern California (now a territory of Mexico again), and what is left of the U.S. now renaming itself (what else?) the United Socialist States of America, which. of course, is doomed to failure because it’s still being run by all those feckless liberal devils. The bottom line is, if this kind of rightwing Christian nationalist fever dream, the end of the United States of America, is what floats your boat, and you don’t mind wading through the ton of numbing political machinations that make it possible, then this book may give you a few hours of rousing, howbeit delusional, validation. ...more

Ray Gregory rated a book really liked it

20 Universal Laws of Success by Ali Pournamdarian

20 Universal Laws of Success: Manifesting Your Path to Achievement (The Wisdom Perspective)
by Ali Pournamdarian

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

A Primer on Success

20 Universal Laws of Success: Your Path to Achievement (by Ali Pournamdarin) is a generalized and eclectic self-help guide, with its chapter titles accompanied by quotes from the likes of Napoleon Hill, Deepak Chopra, and Tony Robb ...more

Ray Gregory rated a book it was ok

The Fractured Union
by James W. Parker

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario

The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this autho An American Christian Nationalist Dream Scenario

The Fractured Union (by James W. Parker) is another screed about politics and religion posing as a near-future novel, which includes a hefty batch of historical backstory. Anyone who has read this author’s previous book Break Up of America (published in 2021) will get a strong sense of déjà vu from reading this iteration, because all the same points regarding what is wrong with America, plus the longed-for dissolution of the United States of America, were spelled out there too.

While its prolific author is capable of writing well and telling a good, if longwinded, yarn, his perspective is permeated by religious conviction and especially religious grievances, most notably the notion that the U.S. government has infringed on Christians’ right to practice their religion. We are told the fanciful (and oxymoronic) tale that while the Founding Fathers wanted to keep government out of religion, they did not want to keep religion out of government. For example, “The majority of the delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] were firm in their belief that the nation should be grounded in a moral law derived from biblical teachings” — yet the U. S. Constitution that the majority of these delegates voted into existence, this blueprint the author alleges to be for a government based on the Bible, does not contain even one mention of the Bible, God, Christ, the Ten Commandments, Christianity, etc. Again, the author writes, “But the foundational principles were set in stone, woven into the fabric of the nation: that the Lord is the ultimate judge, lawgiver, and King; that governance should reflect divine order; and that the rights of the people should be guarded through the careful separation of powers. The Founding Fathers, whether conscious of it or not, had created a system that echoed the divine wisdom found in the Bible, ensuring that justice, liberty, and faith would forever guide the nation.”

The Bible-thumping portrait that is painted of James Madison, especially regarding his contribution to the Constitution’s First Amendment (which insured the free exercise of religion as well as other rights), is bizarre, since while Madison often used biblical references, he was a strong advocate for individual conscience, religious freedom, and keeping the government separate from religion. Even Benjamin Franklin, who at the time of the Constitutional Convention was an advocate of deism and who questioned traditional Christian doctrines, is alleged by the author to have yearned for a government based on “the scriptures themselves.” But in truth Franklin, as were most of the rest of the Founding Fathers, were secularist sons of the Enlightenment who sought to save America from religious tyranny (including religious wars and religious persecution) as much as from political tyranny. The deistic God they paid lip service to was more of a philosophical construct than anything approaching a facsimile of the Christian deity. And indeed they chose symbols from Free Masonry and classical antiquity instead of from the Bible to decorate the national currency, government seals, government buildings, etc.

A small point, howbeit a picturesque example of the book’s questionable historicity, is its assertion that “the grand marble pillars of the Supreme Court building were a fitting backdrop” when the Supreme Court of John Marshall decided (in the early 1800s) that the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a national religion. Yet the Supreme Court building was not built until 1935. Before then the Court met in borrowed buildings in New York City and Philadelphia and later in the Capitol building in DC.

It is claimed that successive Supreme Court decisions got the meaning of Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state wrong. This is a common grievance of modern-day rightwing Christian nationalists who would like to impose the trappings of their religion on all manner of American life, private and public — and to hell with (pun intended) believers of other religions and non-believers in any religion. As if being able to publicly pray in any of the 350,000-400,000 churches that dot the American landscape isn’t enough for them, these authoritarian Christians particularly want to subject every American school kid, whatever his or her religious affiliation or lack thereof, to public prayers — even though Jesus himself told his followers that they should pray in private and not make a show of public prayer as the hypocritical Pharisees did.

In the blink of an eye, the narrative jets past the wall-of-separation chip on Christian nationalists’ shoulders to their other gargantuan bugaboo, the “liberals,” the very banes of their existence. Did you know, for example, that Adolph Hitler was “a product of the liberal ideology”? That by the 1950s, Britain, France, and the United States “had become the strongholds of liberalism” and “had convinced the masses that their oppressive measures — censorship, surveillance, militarization — were for the greater good”? And here most of us were thinking it was the world’s dictatorships, rightwing and leftwing — and not its democracies — who were the really bad guys.

A rant against the U.S. government's regulations and its imagined takeover of everything comes next as the story takes us into the lives of near-future everyday American rebels chaffing against the system run by those dastardly liberals, who are as clueless about making government work as they are about religion, and who are “demonizing anyone who disagrees with them” — and wow, how much like a revealing and hypocritical Freudian slip the word “demonizing” sounds here, with all its religious overtones. And even more so when one considers the present-day non-fictional reality of overtly Christian nationalist MAGA/Trumpism ruling the nation and cramming Project 2025 down all those liberals’ throats. But every perennial rightwing trope is trotted out, from states’ rights to secession to deporting all “illegals” to even returning the nation to the gold standard. One of the righteous rightwing rebels even accuses the story’s fictional liberal president of the United States of “threatening to pull state funding, override our laws, and use federal agencies as a political weapon.” WOW again, in this time of Trump.

And what are the answers to the imagined liberal nightmare? For starters, a somewhat cuddlier, more inclusive “Confederacy 2.0” — what one of the book’s characters actually calls it —though now known as the Conservative States of America, which will usher in a new Golden Age based on “Gold. Coal. Oil. Industry. And God.” And a few more new nations are carved out of the old U. S. of A. too: the New Republic of Texas, the Mormon Nation, the Republic of Alaska (gotta wonder how long Vladimir Putin would let that go ungrabbed), the Hawaiian Nation (which would make an excellent fueling station for the Chinese navy), Southern California (now a territory of Mexico again), and what is left of the U.S. now renaming itself (what else?) the United Socialist States of America, which. of course, is doomed to failure because it’s still being run by all those feckless liberal devils. The bottom line is, if this kind of rightwing Christian nationalist fever dream, the end of the United States of America, is what floats your boat, and you don’t mind wading through the ton of numbing political machinations that make it possible, then this book may give you a few hours of rousing, howbeit delusional, validation. ...more

Ray Gregory liked MelQ's review of When Pigs Fly: My 100-Word Ideas for a Year:

"Odyssey Through the Human Condition

Having been utterly fascinated by Ray Gregory's 'Old Souls', I eagerly dived into 'When Pigs Fly', and once again, this author proves himself to be a master of unconventional and deeply thought-provoking insights.
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Doctor Wolfstone’s Clinic by Joshua Scribner

Doctor Wolfstone’s Clinic: Patients 1-6
by Joshua Scribner (Goodreads Author)

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Rambling, Indulgent, and Gratuitous Tales of Demonic Possession

Dr. Wolfstone’s Clinic: Patients 1-6 (by Joshua Scribner) reads nominally like the case studies of a busy hypnotherapist. But Dr. Wolfstone is more reminiscent Professor Van Helsing of D Rambling, Indulgent, and Gratuitous Tales of Demonic Possession

Dr. Wolfstone’s Clinic: Patients 1-6 (by Joshua Scribner) reads nominally like the case studies of a busy hypnotherapist. But Dr. Wolfstone is more reminiscent Professor Van Helsing of Dracula fame, because all his cases turn out to be literally diabolical horror tales, and his hypnotic techniques border on the darkly supernatural.

Now for the TRIGGER WARNINGS: There’s lots of graphic (as in mostly anatomical) sex and lots of graphic (as in gory) and sadistic violence, but to call this a headlong dive into psychosexual perversity would be an understatement. Dr. Wolfstone’s patients are possessed by some particularly nasty demons, and the accomplished hypnotherapist has learned how to exorcize or incapacitate these demons with his hypnotic techniques. The identities of the patients change, but each new patient feels like just more of the same as the reader wades through all the sordid — and gratuitous? — details of what these demons have urged their human hosts to do, with one horrific crime after another, every dark recess of the psyche visited, from assorted forms of murder to vampiric bloodsucking and vivisection and cannibalism — and, of course, all that lurid sex to spice things up. Readers may well wonder if the point is anything more than the sheer indulgent excess of it all. How many times, for example, can a character eat people’s hearts, which he rips out of their living bodies (usually after having sex with them) before readers groan, “Enough”? Expect to witness that savage excess nine times in this book.

Yet the writing has a natural conversational ring that lends lifelike authenticity, though this includes lifelike rambling, repetition, and tedium as well. It’s as if the reader is eavesdropping on actual (howbeit preternatural) hypnotherapy sessions, including the hypnotherapist’s clinical if often cryptic or pseudo-parapsychological observations, but the depravity of the actions that the demons have got their human wards to take is as exhausting as it is repugnant. In short, if you’re into graphic, gruesome horror shows and get a scary jolt out of imagining yourself the victim of one of these demonic monsters, and you find all the sex more a turn-on than mere gratuitous titillation, this book might be up your alley. But if those kinds of thrills aren’t your thing, maybe keep browsing for your next read. What’s ultimately scary, and possibly the metaphorical point of the whole exercise, is that some actual human beings out there might identify with these monsters. ...more

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