I understand, but changing the name "Westboro Baptist Church", or to take it one step further, "Christianity" to "Exceptionalism" doesn't make it different. Anyone with half a brain will see through the analogy and it's not a clever one. It's obvious you're using it to put across your anti-religion or perhaps anti-church sentiments. Now, I'm not saying you cannot promote your own message through your book - plenty of authors, whose books turn into classics, say 1984, have their own message. But it doesn't sound like you're saying anything new - instead you're just repeating, with fiction and through a very thin veil, what we all already know about fundamentalists. And let me tell you, just because someone follows a fundamentalist religion doesn't make them "corrupt" - perhaps their thinking is warped but they certainly believe in what they say and do. They're not doing it as an excuse to bully people. The very fact that you seem to see it so black and white shows me there's going to be little depth in your book because there's simply nothing to think about, is there? Religion is bad, anti-religion is good. Anyone who follows said religion is corrupt. Anyone who fights this religion and the people in it are obviously not corrupt. Why would I read such a book? Let me say again - make your readers think. Changing a name doesn't make anything different. If it's preaching you wanted to do, write a non-fiction account with interviews of victims and survivors of such fundamentalist religion and what's actually being done in real life to counter such atrocities. Yes, it is a worthwhile message, but unless it has any more depth than you've expressed, a non-fiction account will be far more valuable. Someone purporting their own message through bad fiction isn't worth anyone's time - you do realise that's why so much Christian fiction is kinda rubbish and the whole genre's been stigmatised? Someone purporting their own message backed with real life accounts - that's valuable.
I agree with Mckk--and I'm not religious. It's not going to work to take the worst example of religion that you can find in the real world, apply that to all religion in your fictional world, and treat that as proof that all religion in the real world is bad. It may make you feel good--speaking a truth makes a person feel good, and I'm sure that to you this is a truth, one that others don't want you to speak. But there's a difference between unburdening your feelings, and persuading others. The way you've described this, it's not going to persuade.
I must be getting old - I can no longer tell men from women! Please accept my apologies. I think that building your entire society on a "church" with 40 members, out of a nation of 300 million and a world of 7 billion, IS a little unrealistic. However, there have probably been stranger realities that have been successfully carried off within fantasy.
Yes; I don't think of the Westboro Baptist Church as a church, I think of it as a large, deeply dysfunctional family.
A brief smattering of jobs women did in the 19th century in England: Worked as nurses, in the post office, in a millinery shop, in department stores, as brewers, took over husband's business after he died. It was also common for women to work in the family business. In addition to lower class things like washerwomen, seamstress, factory worker, governess, housekeeper or servant, etc
I've already got they symptoms down, now I just need for my character to recover from those symptoms.
Okay. But what does "1889" have to do with it? Or is it 1889 in this alternate world, and are things totally different there in that year than they were on this earth? I think that's what's throwing people off.
It's an alternate world. The year is actually modern times, but the technology never advanced past 1889.
