L.B.: A routine flight

Left Behind, pp. 233-234

It's Monday and Rayford Steele is back at work (pilots get weekends off?). He has a pretty busy day ahead: flying to Atlanta and back, converting his daughter and explaining to her about his years of toying with Hattie's emotions.

The flight to Atlanta was full and busy, and Rayford had to change altitudes continually to avoid choppy air. He got to see Chloe for only a few seconds while his first officer was in the cockpit and the plane was on autopilot. Rayford made a hurried walk-through but had no time to chat.

That's a bland, normal-seeming paragraph, unless you consider the context. In context, the bland normalcy here is stark raving mad.

It's like that time at Starbucks when you were getting the lid for your coffee and found yourself talking to a very polite, well-dressed, normal-seeming woman pouring cream, and she was so blandly polite, matter-of-fact and normal-seeming, her speech so closely imitating the rhythms and intonations of normal small talk, that it took you several seconds to realize that she wasn't just commenting on the weather, but was, rather, explaining that she was in a hurry to get home so she could cook more pancakes for the basement, and that it was her basement full of pancakes that had ordered her to kill the dog.

In context, this paragraph makes the Pancake Lady seem sane.

The last time Rayford flew a plane, about a week ago, he had to turn around because dozens of his passengers had disappeared without a trace. Dozens of other airliners crashed that day and he had been forced to land between piles of smoldering wreckage, only to learn that the disappearances were a global phenomenon, reducing the world's population by 2 billion. There are no more children. Anywhere.

"Rayford had to change altitudes continually to avoid choppy air," Jenkins writes, and yet no one panics. The passengers, like Rayford, apparently just think to themselves, "Hmm, that's a bit choppy. Hope the pilot changes altitude." No one looks around the cabin after every bump, wild-eyed with fear, to see if anyone else has disappeared. No one breathes a sigh of relief when Rayford walks through the cabin, reassured that the pilot hasn't vanished. No one recalls the dozens and dozens of plane wrecks they've seen on the news for the past week and thinks to themselves, "My God, this is insane! What was I thinking getting back on an airplane?"

Rayford himself has no qualms about leaving the plane in the hands of his new first officer, the guy who replaced Chris Smith. Chris couldn't be on this flight because he took his own life after learning his wife and kids had been killed in one of the uncountable crashes that accompanied the disappearances. The last time Rayford saw him, his last glimpse of the first officer the last time he flew a plane, all he saw was a bloodied wrist sticking out from under the coroner's sheet.

That was a week ago.

I realize this isn't the first time I've pointed out this weird disconnect, this absence of consequences, this apathy and incuriosity toward the victims of the story. By this point it's clear we should expect nothing else from Left Behind. But once more let me say again that there's more to this than just Bad Writing.

It also is Bad Writing, of course, a failure of imagination, craft and work ethic that destroys any sense of reality in the story. And part of the reason for that, as we've seen, is that the authors don't have time for such work. They don't have time to research the correct details (even to glance at a map) or to re-read what they've written to see if it makes sense, or if they're repeating phrases and descriptions from earlier chapters.

They don't have time because they have too much ground to cover. The Great Tribulation is unfolding, a seven-year period crammed full of bowls of wrath, seals, judgments and horrors. All of these events, they believe, must occur in their proper order to fulfill their detailed scheme of End Times prophecies. So they can't afford to linger on the effects of Event No. 1, the Rapture. Any physical or emotional consequences from that must be swept away as quickly as possible so they can move on to event No. 2: The Rise of the Antichrist. This is the only way they know to approach the story of the Great Tribulation.

This is also the only way they know to approach real life, now, in this time and place. Just as the Great Tribulation consists of a long checklist of prophecies, so too now there is a checklist of prophecies they believe must occur before the Rapture occurs and all the fun starts. That checklist is a bit more vague: wars, rumors of war, earthquakes, floods, famine, plague, Bad Stuff in general.

Preoccupation with this checklist in real life can lead to real people, people like LaHaye and Jenkins and some of their tens of millions of readers, behaving with the same blindness toward, and sociopathic disregard for, the suffering of others that Rayford displays in the novel. Dec. 26 tsunami? Check. Katrina? Check. Pandora's box opened in Iraq? Check, check, check!

When this is your primary response to such tragedies, there's a lot more wrong than just Bad Writing.

Comments

[LL]

Word. Many religious people I've encountered (down here in OK and TX) seem like creepy pod people from a science fiction movie. They only seem to be really concerned about tiny little unborn babies and Christians in China who are oppressed by the government. The rest of us can just go to hell, I guess. They seem incapable of empathy, they're just God's little scorekeepers, making sure none of the riff-raff get into heaven.

[The Old Maid]

Chloe ends up taking several flights with Rayford, and in fact she keeps flying with him until she gets saved; then she stops. But these last-minute travels do bring up the question of Why, exactly. Even before the passengers and crew could get into a debate as to whether it is safe, there's Rayford and Chloe by themselves. Without development, it does rather make him look like a single parent who brings the family to work because there isn't a sitter.

We can do our own development: the Steeles are scared, scared enough to risk dying together rather than outliving each other again, or Rayford has control issues, or Chloe is bored but not bored enough to go back to school. (A critic once commented that the characters are painted in broad brush strokes to give the reader room for self-insert/reflection. Yet these developments so often involve adding some texture, substance.)

But travel writer Bill Bryon commented that, "One of the small, sad truths of travel seems to be to see things before they are gone." Would that Rayford and Chloe also traveled together as a sort of mourning, for their world as well as themselves.

[grenadine]

So. In the really real world, the U.S government shut down all flights everywhere for days when four (4!) planes went very wrong on 9/11. In LB world, it only takes a week to for everything to return to business as usual when presumably hundreds of planes crash and burn everywhere in the world and the air travel industry workforce is reduced by a third and the wreckage is presumably still smoking.

I know we've discussed this before. But... Holy bad writing, Batman. How dim do you have to be to think this is better literature than say, the U.S. tax code?

[cjmr]

No one recalls the dozens and dozens of plane wrecks they've seen on the news for the past week and thinks to themselves, "My God, this is insane! What was I thinking getting back on an airplane?"

It's five years out from 9/11 and I've still yet to step foot on an airplane since then. Despite at least one trip that would have been made much shorter and easier by doing so. I can't imagine doing what some of my friends did and getting back on a plane the same week to fly home from where they'd been stranded when all the planes were grounded.

[ako]

I first got on a plane about eight months after 9/11. Not out of any aversion, just because that was the first time I had a reason to fly. I'm from the West coast, and my entire family was there. I hadn't lost or feared for the safety of anyone I knew. I hadn't even seen it happen live on television, having slept late that day. At the time, I didn't live near any strategic targets. I was about as unaffected as any reasonable adult American could be.

I still didn't shrug it off as a routine flight. I noticed all of the extra security measures, and spent a portion of the time thinking about what I'd do if the plane was hijacked and we all had to fight back. And I was really stunned to see at least one gaping hole in airport security, (which if you're in that business, don't assume that someone with crutches can't possibly be a terrorist). I didn't have any major stress, but it was a bit scary and distinctly weird.

Whis is more of a reaction than Rayford has to the first flight after the flight where half his passengers vanished and he had to land on a runway full of wrecks because of dozens of crashes and his first officer committed suicide, and he went home to find his wife and son just gone, and his daughter's on board right now.

[New Duane]

Dec. 26 tsunami? Check. Katrina? Check. Pandora's box opened in Iraq? Check, check, check!

Horsemen? I don't hear hooves! Where are my four horsemen of the apocalypse!?! FAMINE! Are you still eating?? Get over here! PESTILENCE! What the hell is bugging you now!? We've got a scene to shoot! WAR! Stop fighting with the gaffer and get in costume! DEATH - look alive!! It's SHOWTIME!

[Val]

I suppose that the people who are working on their own Great Tribulation checklists might be able to overlook the entirely unnatural emotional reactions (or lack thereof) of the characters in this most poorly written novel. If LeHaye didn't have the wherewithal to publish this himself, no self-respecting editor whould ever let such tripe through without an intaglio of red pencil, that much is certain.

As has already been noted, look how many weeks people were in shock over what happened on 9/11 (and how many still suffer from PTSD) and how many people still refuse to get on a plane. The only explaanation for this book being so widely read must be the captive audience thing.

All this said, I am enjoying your comments on this and other topics (via a feed on LiveJournal) and I wanted to tell you that it makes me feel better to see that there are Christians out there that are not barking mad.

[Edo]

I remember reading somewhere about an account of a flight on the only commercial airline in Afghanistan in November 2001 or so... there were seven pilots, all of them jockeying to spend time in the cockpit so that they could get paid more.

Post-Rapture, especially if anywhere near as many flights were grounded as L&J would like us to believe, you'd think that having several redundant pilots might be SOP or something, to prevent repeats... *sighs*

Maybe there's some unwitting symbolic reason why everybody spends so much time travelling, the way there is with the telephones?

[L]

cmjr: This is a matter of rational risk assessment. You have a far better chance of getting killed while driving to the airport than you do being killed by an act of terrorism on the airplane. That was true even before the added post-9/11 security.

It's not that flying isn't a PIA these days, what with having to get your shoes X-rayed and your toothpaste confiscated. But safety isn't any more of an issue than it ever was.

It seems to me that the approach to eschatology that Fred describes allows the believer to be all about Jesus somehow while providing an excuse to ignore the bulk of what Jesus actually talked about. It's a lot easier to sit there believing, "saved", and anticipating than it is to make your faith live by your good works.

[Bugmaster]

Well, sometimes I think that the main feature of religions is all the exclusivity, and the little checklists, and the rituals -- not their actual moral teachings.

As Fred mentioned in one of his previous posts, you can be a good person all on your own; you don't need a religion for that (though it does help some people). Yes, Jesus taught people to love their neighbours and to be kind to the poor (among other things), but, in and of itself, that's not very special. It just makes sense. Miracles, resurrections, fish signs, obscure Latin phrases... now that's something you can really build a religion around. So, we shouldn't be surprised that most religions, Christianity included, inevitably devolve into the kind of eschatology that Fred describes.

[cjmr]

This is a matter of rational risk assessment.

For me, I think it's a matter of irrational risk assessment. My brain is perfectly capable of running the numbers and realizing that it is 'safer' to fly than drive (especially considering the distances I drive when I travel and the traffic in the DC area), but I still feel in my gut that at least in an automobile I have a snowball's chance of being able to do something to prevent the accident from occurring. There's also a bit of 'you can only be lucky x many times' going on as well, as I was flying from Paris to Frankfurt the morning TWA 847 was hijacked.

[Angelika]

Just to play devil's advocate here:

What are people supposed to do, except than trying to go back to normal as quickly as possible? If Rayford is anything like a prototype of how unbelievers feel and act according to LaHaye and J, they actually don't have lost enough to be paralyzed by grief. I didn't get the impression so far, that Rayford cared much about his family - and he still has Chloe for company, anyway. So why shouldn't he go back to work? Why should we assume that anyone else of the left-behind pagans would care any more for their families than Rayford did?

[L]

Don't think that the PMDs represent Christianity. They're a tiny, tiny minority, even moreso worldwide than in the US. Sure, the rituals are there in the majority Christian traditions, as well as the miracles and so forth. These things are not incidental, but if you don't see them as the means of grace by which you can better manifest Christ to your neighbor you've missed the point, and being a Christian does not get you a "bye" in this -- you are *more* responsible to do it, not less, and will be judged accordingly. All these traditions are very clear on that.

And you don't "manifest Christ to your neighbor" by preaching at him. You do it by as illustrated in the parable the good Samaritan, among many other places. (And of course, part of the point of that parable is that you don't need to be part of the "in crowd" in order to do good and be Christlike. "He who is not against us is for us," tells us that too.)

[ako]

Angelika,

If the left-behind pagans are human, there should be some reaction. Maybe not the full-scale freak out that Fred described (although given the scale of events, maybe), but setting foot on a plane a week after a worldwide disaster on an unprecedented scale would lead to SOMETHING other than "routine". At the least, even if you assume he didn't love his wife and son, he never liked his first officer, and he's not bothered by widespread human suffering (and I think a case could be made for calling him a sociopath), he should be concerned for his OWN safety.

It's simply part of human nature that experiences have impact beyond the strictly rational. A person might know in their head that it's not going to happen again (as Rayford would now that he's been saved), but put in a situation that's a contstant reminder of the day everyone vanished, he should have some noticeable reaction.

[Reverend Ref]

The lectionary for this coming Sunday is concerned with the end times, desolating sacrilege and antichrist; you know, all that Bad Stuff in General that Fred mentioned in his post.

As I'm basically saying in my sermon, there is a major problem with looking at these apocalyptic readings and trying to determine just when those last days are supposed to occur. The problem is this: THESE ARE the last days, not some future date arrived at by mathematical gyrations more complicated than what is needed to hold the Copernican system together.

Referring back to Acts 2, it was at Pentecost that God poured out the Holy Spirit on the apostles and they spoke in other languages proclaiming the word of God. Peter, quoting Joel, says: In the last days it will be, declares God, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh . . .

We are the heirs of that event. God's Spirit has been poured out upon us, and is being poured out upon us. The "last days" have been here for almost 2000 years.

People need to quit wasting time on calculating the hour, minute and second Jesus is going to come back, and get out there and do what Jesus asked them to do.

Here's a hint: Creating a Rapture checklist isn't part of either the Summary of the Law or the Great Commission.

[Grumpy]

No one recalls the dozens and dozens of plane wrecks they've seen on the news for the past week and thinks to themselves, "My God, this is insane! What was I thinking getting back on an airplane?"

Probably because for every plane crash caused by a "disappearance" that day, there were hundreds of crashes due to suddenly "unmanned" cars and trucks. So what are airline passengers gonna do? Drive??

[Col Bat Guano]

While the PMD's might be able to rationalize restarting the airlines in a week, I have the strong suspicion that the remainder of humanity might be a little skeptical of their explanation. I find it hard to believe that everyone would just shrug their shoulders and say "Eh, just the rapture. No need to be concerned. Please have your boarding passes ready."

[Monty]

I can see parallels between the reaction of the world to the rapture and the reaction of the Israelites to God’s miracles. Didn’t they see plagues in Egypt and have the sea parted before them and yet it didn’t take them long to forget.

[Mark]

Well said, Ref+. My sermon is trending that way, too. I'd like to know how much time and energy has been wasted calculating the time and date of the rapture... When we could be out there doing the work Christ commanded us to do.

[L&J's Advocate]

ako

If the left-behind pagans are human, there should be some reaction.

If the left-behind pagans are humans, a notion with which I assume even L&J would agree, they would still have to eat and pay their bills. Since in the L&J scenario, the fundamental structures of the society are still in place (children under 12 seldom work as bankers, pilots or policemen) and it might be safely assumed that most of the higher ranking bank-agents are still on earth, unless they died in a plane crash, everyone can expect his/her rent/mortage payment due at the first of the month. Which means they better get their buds into the office or into a plane to attend the next business meeting in Atlanta, least they loose their houses as well.

[cjmr]

Which means they better get their buds into the office or into a plane to attend the next business meeting in Atlanta, least they loose their houses as well.

Going back to work, yes. Pretending that nothing was different, maybe. Having absolutely no physical reaction at all to being in exactly the same situation you were in when the traumatic even occurred, extremely unlikely.

How many people in the US were back in their offices productively working with absolutely no thoughts of the events of the previous week on 9/18/01?

[1982_Cygni]

Again, WHAT ABOUT CHLOE??? What is she feeling/thinking? What the hell is she doing on a plane with her dad, following him around like she has no identity or telos of her own? Are all the "good" women of the Left Behind series like this? At the very least, she'd probably be on the computer (and tapping her fingers and swearing because she has to put up with Dad's crappy AOL/Prodigy dial-up, probably) working on her website, www.whatthehelljusthappenedhere.com.

It's like Chloe and her feelings and opinions don't really matter until she is totally saved, and from what I can gather of what happens to her, by that point she has no self to save. I understand about handing yourself over to Jesus--your good parts and your neutral parts and your sinful parts--and all. However, I think that by quitting her formal education (not that the universities are going to be around much longer anyway), marrying the first male schmuck she sees, and settling into the role of Good Unquestioning Baptist Wife, she may have to have a lot of explaining to do to Jesus about why she didn't use the mind and will God gave her to the fullest. Haven't L&B ever read the Parable of the Talents?

Did I mention that I really hate these sorry-ass authors?

[1982_Cygni]

RE: 9/11. I wasn't affected personally by it much at first, since I only knew one person living in NYC, and she was unharmed. (She was probably affected pretty hard, though--we're all connected to each other somehow.) But I sure noticed that the world became a nastier and more paranoid place afterwards. I had a friend in college, already sick with depression, who'd talk about it nonstop. My overprotective mother went into a tizzy because I went to see a late-night showing of Harry Potter at the Mall of America (I went to college in St. Paul, MN nearby), and MoA was then believed to be a potential terrorist target. She also advised me not to attend any Halloween parties, probably because someone could poison the bite-sized Milky Ways with antrax.

Then one day, out of nowhere, the campus post office was closed and webbed with yellow police tape. We had an anthrax scare; it turned out to be a false alarm, but the whole campus, myself included, was pretty tramatized by the event.

[cjmr's husband]

At the time, I used to go to a post office/sorting station where a couple of the actual anthrax letters went through; it was near my office. It as closed for a few weeks, but no one at my office was worried about it.

I drove past the hotel some of the 9/11 hijackers had been staying in on my way to work evrey day. Didn't worry about that.

Now the beltway snipers: we were worried about that.

[New Duane]

Rev, don't you feel a little complicit in the delusion of the PMD types by insisting we are in the "last days"? What is the point of scaring people half to death with such careless nonsense? Is it too hard to understand that folks don't want to be surprised with a terrible and catastrophic end and so will jump through scriptural hoops to make sense of and prepare (to the degree one can) for such an event?

Why not start your sermon out by saying "Folks, we're not in the last days. We don't know who wrote Revelations but we know who it was written to, and it's not us, nor is it about us."

Once folks realize they aren't in the last days and Jesus isn't coming back for them in a stellar magic trick, they begin to focus on what Jesus asked them to do in the here and now.

I've seen it work in Preterist churches.

[Mark]

Ah! But Refs point isn't to scare people, or to say Christ is coming really, really soon. The "Last Days" refers to the period of time from Pentecost forward. The Kingdom of God has come near, and we are waiting for the completion of all things... We don't know when that will come, but we know that it is the next step, be it next year or 10,000 years from now.

Ref's point (correct me, Ref, if I'm wrong) isn't that the end is near, it is that it is futile and distracting to sit around trying to figure out the exact date and time.

Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will Come Again!

[New Duane]

Christ came back already and you missed him, Mark. All the wishing in the world isn't going to change that.

[cjmr]

AAAARGH! One of the two houseguests I thought were coming next weekend just called from the airport, she's here now! AAAAARGH!

Sorry, I now return you to your regularly scheduled comments thread.

[Mabus]

Duane, I think you're misunderstanding Rev. If I read him correctly, he's saying, "Yes, this entire era of time is 'the last days'. We have no idea how long the era as a whole will last, though, so don't go selling your stuff, donning white robes, and waiting about on the rooftops. Go on with your lives." It's how my church tends to handle things too.

There wasn't that much personal impact on my life from 9/11, because no one in my family flies. We don't have the money for plane trips, and none of us really live that far away except for Uncle Gary and Aunt Danita (missionaries--last in China, that I recall). But it was about that time that one of the people in my role-playing group mysteriously disappeared, and I was freaked out about it for months. (A couple of years later she turned up; she'd just lost internet access due to a move.) I have trouble imagining anyone being as unaffected as Rayford and his fellow fliers. ....And yet when I read this, back when it originally came out, I never really noticed there was anything wrong with it. Dunno...maybe I just wasn't paying attention.

[New Duane]

Mabus, there is no evidence at all - none - that "this entire era" is the last days. That is just nonsense.

[shannon]

I don't know enough about religion to be an expert, but it seems to me that maybe the last days could be a really long time by the human standpoint, since time would be different for a being that has lived for trillions of years than it is for beings that live around 70ish years...

[Mnemosyne]

Is it too hard to understand that folks don't want to be surprised with a terrible and catastrophic end and so will jump through scriptural hoops to make sense of and prepare (to the degree one can) for such an event?

I hate to break it to you, but each and every one of us will be surprised by the terrible and catastrophic end that is our death. As the poet/mortician Thomas Lynch puts it, "The human mortality rate is holding steady at 100%."

The entire delusion of Left Behind is that they can somehow, some way, by putting the right magic words in the right order, escape their inevitable deaths.

[binder girl]

As a widow one year out, all I would like to say is this: if you are on a plane, and you learn that your pilot lost his wife - and son - one week ago, GET OFF THE F***ING PLANE. One week after his wife dies? Even without a perfect marriage, and even with everything else going on in their world, there is no way this guy is going to fly safely. It was a month before I could walk into the next room and remember why I had gone in there. Driving? I did it a lot, but probably shouldn't have.

While Jenkins' and LaHaye's bad theology drives me crazy, what strikes me most in is that they have no connection to the every day bad/sad things that happen in life. The same is true for many non-Christians. But one can always expect, or at least hope, that the church is more understanding, especially those who are in ministry. I shudder to think what their church's bereavement groups are like – having “a sure hope” means nothing when the person you love isn’t coming home. How can Christians expect to speak to others about eternal truths, when we can't relate to our co-workers talking about an ordinary bad day?

Sorry for the rant.

[New Duane]

As the poet/mortician Thomas Lynch puts it, "The human mortality rate is holding steady at 100%."

As my buddy Bill says "Good health is the slowest possible rate at which one dies."

[Skyknight]

It does make me wonder where the disconnect is coming from. I'm curious if LaHaye could see HIMSELF operating anything even moderately well a scant week after the death of his wife (I think we can guess how likely he thinks it is that exactly one of them gets raptured), what with the Steele=LaHaye self-insertion suspicion. Or maybe LaHaye thinks that now that Steele has sworn fealty to Jesus in the Proper Fashion (tm), and thus gotten the One True Fellowship with him, he's somehow warded off from the uncertainty et al. that must ravage non-Christians in his eyes. The fashion might be similar to how Carpathia's illusions fail to affect Williams because he's Saved (c).

[Pho]

I think the disconnect comes from L&J's utter lack of empathy. Not only do they fail to generate emotional empathy for their characters, they also fail in what I call "logical empathy" -- the ability to evaluate an argument based on the assumptions of an opponent. They don't look at the rapture of two billion people as a tragedy, but as the Good People receiving their eternal reward. Fine, but they can even take the step of acknowledging that people outside their worldview would grieve for the people lost. They "know" that Rayford's plane isn't going to suddenly find itself without a crew because the rapture has already been, but they lack the imagination to understand that people outside the PMD fold won't know that.

It is another cause of the Bad Writing as well as the Bad Theology that infests these pestilent little books.

[Anton Mates]

Rayford himself has no qualms about leaving the plane in the hands of his new first officer, the guy who replaced Chris Smith. Chris couldn't be on this flight because he took his own life after learning his wife and kids had been killed in one of the uncountable crashes that accompanied the disappearances. The last time Rayford saw him, his last glimpse of the first officer the last time he flew a plane, all he saw was a bloodied wrist sticking out from under the coroner's sheet.

That was a week ago.

It should be even more wrenching than that. During that same week, Rayford converted to a worldview that says Chris and his entire family are now suffering fiery agony, and will do so for the rest of eternity.

[1982_Cygni]

I really believe that Jesus Christ set forth a New Cosmic Order when He came the first living being to die and then to come back to life in both body and spirit. Alas, we won't see the fruits of that order for some time. The Second Coming probably won't take place for thousands of years, by which point human beings would have colonized space. And the idea of Christ shepherding humans to the New Jerusalem from various stars--or, more probably, making those stars into the New Jerusalem (or Rome, or Mecca, or Nara, or whatever holy city your faith is)--isn't sacriligious. It just makes the Second Coming on a much larger scale than Revelation could have thought up. At the same time, the Second Coming will probably be much more subtle--and hopefully less violent, especially towards women and children and plants and animals--than described in Revelation.

Let's not dwell on it too much, though. We need to feed the hungry, write letters to the government, write letters to the editor, be kinder to our neighbors, tend to the sick, volunteer, consume less, share the wealth more, care for Creation, etc. in the meantime.

[Reverend Ref]

New Duane:

I in no way feel complicit in assisting in the PMD "last days" delusion. Being in the last days does not mean, as Mark said, the end is near. I'm not assisting anything, just trying for a better interpretation.

What is the point of scaring people half to death with such careless nonsense?

It's not about scaring people half to death, and it certainly isn't careless nonsense. As Mark and Mabus correctly read, the last days are a period of time from Pentecost forward. We don't know, we can't know, the exact time that these "last days" will end. Until such time as Christ chooses to return, we cannot, and should not, sit around here trying to calculate that return date. We have things to do and we should be busying doing that, not filling out Rapture checklists.

It's almost like the "last minutes" of a football game in which the game clock reads 5:00. There really is only 5 minutes of game time left, but as we all know, that can take close to 10 or 15 minutes of real time. The players in the game can't sit around trying to calculate when the game will actually stop, they have things to do and plays to make. They are, in essence, in the end times of the game, yet they don't know when in real time it will actually stop.

We are in the same position. We have things to do and plays to make. These may be the last days, but that doesn't mean we can sit around and go through our Rapture checklist.

[Robert]

Fred, I know you only got through a paragraph this time and just this book will drive you insane, but you MUST finish the entire series. The combination of snark, despair and education is too brilliant to end.

Also it must be published and sold alongside Left Behind in every Christian bookstore.

[Robert]

Reading the comments I'm also delighted by the readers.

When did air travel resume?

How many backup pilots are required per flight? Does this put a crimp on the number of flights? Are those pilots resentful of their deadhead status. How often do they check to make sure the cockpit is manned? Does that piss off the pilots?

How often does a plane (which can continue to cruise on autopilot after crew loss) need to check in with ground control? Is this another pain in the ass? Does a pilot get put on hold because there aren't enough controllers to handle all the check-ins?

How many fighters are on CAP prepared to intercept planes that lose their crews? Are those guys on edge because their children are gone? Are they acting reckless and even suicidal with their close approach of the cockpit on any plane approaching a city?

Who made up these rules? Were they traumatized by the Event and make up a lot of ridiculous nonsense that makes no sense? (68 percent of all crashed flights had a flight number that was odd. Now all flight numbers are even.)

Did the people making up the rules do only what was necessary to restore confidence in air travel? Why? What premises are they operating off of?

And if I remember correctly all fetuses were raptured away during the Event. Does that mean the human race is sterile? Has a pregnancy been reported since then? Is that possible with the way things work? When will pregnancy tests start turning up positive? What about in vitro fertilization?

Can any human being be so incurious about the ramifications of what they believe to be the ultimate event in human history?

The answer is YES!

[ako]

L & J's advocate,

cmjr made my point. It wasn't the going on with the business of their lives that struck me as so cold and creepy, it was not even getting a glimpse of the unease that they should have logically felt in this situation. If Rayford had gotten on the plane to keep his job, or pick up bonuses, but had shown some unease, some memory that he'd been in the same situation a week ago during the massive world-wide disaster where he'd lost half his family, perhaps if he'd been repeatedly checking on Chloe just to make sure she was still there, or the authors had even thrown in a couple sentences about the weirdness and unease, or anything like that, he'd look human. It's not having them get past the fear that's so wild. It's the complete failure to acknowlege that anything about this flight was different from the usual.

[bulbul]

1982_Cygni, your link doesn't work. And I tried .org and .info, too.

[Jeff]

bulbul:

Did you try .biz, .tv (island nation makes windfall off internet!) and .gov?

[rowan]

I am certainly enjoying reading this, and I look forward to reading it for a long, long time! But, Fred - are you going to finish with just this one book, or actually do the other books in the series as well? I certainly agree that this all deserves to be published in book form - and sold alongside the LB books themselves!

Commenters, if you like reading reviews of LB, you might enjoy these: "Tribulation Farce" and "Laughed Behind":

http://qos.enrious.org/index.php?name=Content&pid=59
http://qos.enrious.org/index.php?name=Content&pid=60

Does anybody know of any others?

[Fernmonkey]

Horsemen? I don't hear hooves! Where are my four horsemen of the apocalypse!?! FAMINE! Are you still eating?? Get over here! PESTILENCE! What the hell is bugging you now!? We've got a scene to shoot! WAR! Stop fighting with the gaffer and get in costume! DEATH - look alive!! It's SHOWTIME!

I think it's an indicator of how many times I've read Good Omens, that I read this and thought "Pestilence? Where's Pollution?"

[Jeff]

Off-topic, but I wonder what Scott would make of this:

WTO Announces Formalized Slavery Model for Africa. via Making Light

Please note that this is not rumor or casting aspersions -- it's from the GATT website. Free markets: Proving that slavery is good for slaves since 1863 (year chosen at random).

[Lila]

Jeff: rumor, no. Spoof, yes. Check these other "WTO" headlines: http://www.gatt.org/ifront.html --click on the story about Dow's "Acceptable Risk" (TM).

By contrast, the WTO's actual website: http://www.wto.org/

[Ray]

"Being in the last days does not mean, as Mark said, the end is near. "
Right, because the phrase 'last days' in no way implies a short period of time - it could mean 'last ten million days'. There could be 300 million days yet to come, and it would still be accurate, if you adopt the viewpoint of an eternal being that exists outside time.
I am so never ordering pizza from you guys.

("There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom." Matthew was talking about the invisible immortal angels in the crowd, obviously. "This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled." - this generation of Silurians from planet Shazbot, who, as Luke well knew, only reproduce every ten million years. "Be ye also patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh." - just don't ask James how nigh, exactly.

[Scott]

So. In the really real world, the U.S government shut down all flights everywhere for days when four (4!) planes went very wrong on 9/11. I

All the Manly, Decisive Evangelicals were raptured and weren't there to take Manly, Decisive Action to protect us like they did after 9/11.

What children's book do you suppose Bush was reading at the time of the rapture?