L.B.: Fact and fiction

Left Behind, pp. 308-314

It is, at last, Tuesday. The previous Tuesday was the morning after The Event and Rayford Steele has had a very busy week since then, getting saved, pestering his daughter, creeping out Hattie, shopping for electronics, reading up on Romanian politics, flying to and from Atlanta and calling poor Bruce Barnes at all hours of the night.

And now it's Tuesday again. Rayford could never get the hang of Tuesdays.

Bruce Barnes called the core group together for an emergency meeting at New Hope Village Church [on] Tuesday afternoon. Rayford drove over, hoping it would be worth his time ...

Bruce gathered everyone around his desk in the office ... and then had everyone turn to the book of Revelation.

Well it's about time, isn't it? Bruce spent years at this church, listening to Pastor Billings preach sermon after sermon from the book of Revelation. Time and again he would have heard his boss say that this is the most important section of the Bible, the culmination of all that precedes it. He would have heard Billings stress that the meaning of every other section of the Scriptures -- the histories, the prophets, the psalms and philosophers, the epistles and even the Gospels themselves -- could only be understood properly through the prism of this strange final book which, he claimed, foretold a precise sequence of events. Now Billings is gone and the events he predicted have begun occurring in precisely the fashion that he predicted them -- so why did it take Barnes a whole week to finally have everyone turn to the book of Revelation?

It makes sense for Bruce and his new congregation to dive into this study of prophecy with an obsessive urgency. They find themselves suddenly living in an apocalyptic world, so studying the Apocalypse seems like a logical step.

What I don't understand, though, is why the Rev. Billings, who knew he would never live in such a world himself, spent so much of his time studying all of this. Billings' belief that Revelation is the most important passage in the Bible turns out to have been true only for the few members of his congregation who were otherwise unaffected by his preaching -- for Bruce and Loretta and the handful of other non-RTCs who were left behind. But for himself and the majority of his flock -- for Irene and all the others who were taken -- all those years spent preaching about Tribulation timelines, beasts, judgments and all the rest were just a waste of time.

Drilling your followers with the details of events that, by definition, neither you nor they will ever see seems like an odd understanding of Christian ministry. Even if Billings were right, such preaching would be bound to be fruitless.

In the religion of LaHaye and Jenkins, of course, "rightness" is all that matters, i.e., that the propositions to which one attests are correct. The Rev. Billings is the embodiment of their idea of rightness, which is why the authors seem to take Billings' fictional vindication -- in a story they imagined and wrote themselves -- as proof of their own actual vindication. But that earlier word, "fruitless," also carries a theological meaning. If L&J had not, like Billings, wasted so much of their lives with an exclusive focus on supposed "prophecy," they might have realized that the rest of the Bible teaches that to be "right" without bearing fruit is just another way of being wrong.

By that standard, the prophecy-mania religion of L&J is wrong. It is not wrong simply because it is based on the incoherent fever-dream of a long-dead Adventist, or because it replaces the Bible with its own unrecognizable reinterpretation of it. I'm sure those don't help, but they're not the main reasons the religion of L&J is wrong. It is wrong because it is fruitless -- it does not, and cannot, bear fruit.

Anyway, back to Bruce Barnes:

"As you know, I've been studying Revelation and several commentaries about end-times events. Well, today in the pastor's files I ran across one of his sermons on the subject. I've been reading the Bible and the books on the subject, and here's what I've found."

Bruce pulled up the first blank sheet on a flip chart and showed a time line he had drawn. ...

I've included a rough sketch of this timeline here:

That's actually one of Tim LaHaye's own Tribulation timelines, one of many such attempts to represent the events described in Revelation as a straightforward, linear narrative progressing from Point A to Point B over the course of seven years.

Why seven years? Because, as everyone knows, that's how long this Great Tribulation will last. If you're wondering where in Revelation it says this, the answer is it doesn't. The seven-year span comes from the ninth chapter of Daniel -- which is also where the idea of Nicolae's peace treaty with Israel comes from -- in which we read of "70 sevens." (Silly Daniel thought he was addressing the exiled Jews in Babylon, but LaHaye knows that he was really speaking to the enlightened American PMDs of the mid 20th late 20th early 21st century.)

The enthusiasm for these timelines arises partly from the challenge such a task presents. John's kaleidoscopic visions don't easily allow for such a straightforward, linear progression. This accounts for the wide variety of such timelines, most of which include something like Ptolemaic epicycles in their attempts to force John's narrative into line.

One delightfully strange thing about PMDs is the way they earnestly insist that all they're doing is providing a straightforward, linear reading of a straightforward, linear account. All the while they insist this they're jumping to and fro -- from Revelation to Daniel, to Thessalonians, back to an (earlier) chapter of Revelation, then to Ezekiel. Even as they tie themselves into knots flipping around, back and forth, to and fro, unable to work their way through John's apocalypse from beginning to end without recursive loops back to earlier chapters, even as they themselves get lost in the convoluted mess of it all and they are forced back to the drawing board to try again to force this narrative into a tidy timeline -- through all of that they seem utterly sincere in insisting that this impossible-to-follow-the-same-way-twice approach is really nothing more than a straightforward, linear and "literal" reading. It would be laughable if it weren't so heartfelt.

No, scratch that. It's still laughable.

Bruce Barnes displays this same naive approach here. He starts by having everyone open their Bibles to the book of Revelation but then he never once reads from it. For the next six pages of blatant exposition, Barnes works his way through his end-times timeline, implying that this is nothing more than what they all could simply read for themselves in the book of Revelation, yet he never has them read it for themselves because simply reading that book wouldn't obviously result in anything like his timeline.

For the purposes of this story, of course, it doesn't much matter what the actual book of Revelation says or means. On one level, quibbling about whether or not Bruce's interpretation is legitimate makes no more sense than pointing out that "Gerald Fitzhugh" isn't really the president of the United States, or that, in the real world, Ban Ki-moon's service as secretary-general of the United Nations does not actually make him the supreme overlord of every nation.

Left Behind is a fictional world, and as such its creators are free to invent a fictional president, a fictional Manhattan that's 50 miles long and a fictional U.N. with fictional powers. They are even free to invent a fictional Bible full of fictional prophecies. This is exactly what L&J have done. Their problem -- and it's a big problem -- is that neither they nor most of their millions of devoted readers realize that this is what they have done. They recognize that "Fitz" is a piece of fantasy and imagination, but they think the equally unreal Bible in their story is the same one we have here in reality. They present an inhuman planet inhabited by alien creatures who hardly seem to care that all of their children have vanished and yet they imagine that this imaginary world is a realistic portrayal of realistic people. The main differences between the world of Left Behind and the real world are not the products of the authors' invention, but the products of the authors' mistakes.

In any case, Bruce is in too much of a hurry to bog down his emergency meeting with Bible-reading. He's got to get through a thumbnail sketch of the entire Left Behind series in only six pages.

This is a rather unconventional form of exposition. Usually, exposition serves the purpose of bringing readers up to speed on what has already happened in a story. Not here. Bruce's six-page expository suppository tells readers what is going to happen later in this series. This isn't foreshadowing, it's foreclipsing. His timeline may not have much to do with the actual book of Revelation, but it's eerily prescient in foretelling what comes next in the outline L&J used for writing this book. I can imagine that form of prophetic knowledge providing the basis for an intriguing, Pirandello-ish bit of metafiction, but here it serves mainly as an embedded spoiler, eliminating whatever potential for suspense the series might otherwise have had. Foreshadowing can enhance suspense, fore-telling -- which is what L&J believe they are doing here -- just ruins the surprise.

Why would the authors do this? Why spoil their own story arc by summarizing it here in the middle of Book 1? I think this arises again from their confusion of fictional vindication and actual vindication. By writing a novel in which prophecies are foretold and then fulfilled, they believe they have not just illustrated but proven that the prophecies they claim to believe will also be fulfilled.

The difference between fact and fiction ought to be easier to discern if you're the one writing the fiction, but for L&J that doesn't seem to be the case.

Comments

[Chelsea]

Brilliant!

[Jos]

Well, of course the Revelations of Left Behind isn't the same as the one from reality.

After all, as has been established earlier, in LB-land the last verse of Revelations is a bunch mystical mumbo-jumbo that's totally incomprehensible to the non-RTCs.

[YetAnotherKevin]

I love the word foreclipsing. It sounds like what happens at a Bris.

[Ecks]

Not sure I quite got the 'fruitless' bit, but the idea about a detailed study of the end of times being pointless for RTC's was brilliant (though I guess they may still want to know out of morbid curiosity).
Still, "expository suppository" is grade A solid gold, and then there's the "Rayford could never get the hang of Tuesdays" Douglas Adams reference FTW.

nice.

[mmack]

It is not wrong simply because it is based on the incoherent fever-dream of a long-dead Adventist

Y'Know, if John had just laid off the Retsina that night . . .

[aunursa]

so why did it take Barnes a whole week to finally have everyone turn to the book of Revelation?

Too many phone calls.

All the while they insist this they're jumping to and fro -- from Revelation to Daniel, to Thessalonians, back to an (earlier) chapter of Revelation, then to Ezekiel. Even as they tie themselves into knots flipping around, back and forth, to and fro,

To and fro? Tying themselves in knots? Gee, it's just like the supposed prophecies of Jesus in the HB. I'm shocked! Shocked, I say! [Oops... wrong thread.]

Left Behind is a fictional world, and as such its creators are free to invent a fictional president, a fictional Manhattan that's 50 miles long and a fictional U.N. with fictional powers. They are even free to invent a fictional Bible full of fictional prophecies. This is exactly what L&J have done. Their problem -- and it's a big problem -- is that neither they nor most of their millions of devoted readers realize that this is what they have done.

You hit the nail on the head.

[Professor M]

Rayford could never get the hang of Tuesdays.

...I think I love you for that. The Douglas Adams end-of-the-world scenario makes more sense, though.

[Mau de Katt]

... so why did it take Barnes a whole week to finally have everyone turn to the book of Revelation?

Because he has to spend the previous week being ever so humble and self-effacing, in order to establish his New-n-Improved RTC creds. Self-flagellation takes a long time to do right, yanno.

. . . . . . .

Speaking of, the one scene I really remember from the LB movies (yes, I've seen them. I don't know why, but I have....) was Bruce's repentance/conversion scene in the empty church. For one thing, the actor who played Bruce was a pretty decent actor, all things considered; for another, his character reacted like a Real Person instead of a carboard "type." He's in the empty church, realizing that he's lived a lie, and has been caught out by God for it. He is angry, he reacts with rage, disbelief, accusations, all to the empty cross hanging on the wall, arguing with a silent God in a silent church until he finally falls to his knees in acceptance and repentance. It's actually very moving, and is the one scene that seemed genuine, which is probably why it's the one scene out of all that dreck that has stayed with me.

[Jeff Weskamp]

Fred has written yet another brilliant insight into why the Left Behind series fails on every level! The book of Revelation, the Christian religion, the people, the nations and organizations, the very God being portrayed in these books all have NO CORRELATION TO THE REALITY THAT WE MORTALS INHABIT!!! I've said this several times before, but the world of LB is not so very different from the world of Dungeons and Dragons. The series is really nothing more than a Christianized sword-and-sorcery fantasy. So, how the &%#@*# can these books be anything more than pure Escapist entertainment for the Evangelical market? What part of the series could possibly be helpful or useful to a Christian living in our actual world of matter/energy and space/time? Heck, the RTC's don't even believe that they'll be around for the show!

Either the book of Revelation is symbolic, or the world will at some point in the future become a Dungeons and Dragons campaign being run by a Dungeon Master under the influence of LSD. I tend toward the "symbolic" option.

[Jeff]

Y'Know, if John had just laid off the Retsina that night . . .

I think it was moldy rye bread.

I have a quibble. Perhaps Rev Billings wasn't just preaching to the RTCs (who didn't need it), but also to the Barnes' (and by extension, to Ray and Buck and so on). Sort of, "Neener neener, I won't be there -- here's what you're in for." How else are the not-quite-so_RTCs going to know what to do next?

[Bugmaster]

It's actually very moving, and is the one scene that seemed genuine, which is probably why it's the one scene out of all that dreck that has stayed with me.

I also liked Carpathia's big mojo-moment near the end of the movie, where he lays down his hypnotoad-sk33lz on the hapless UN (except for Buck, who's got Protection from Evil cast on him by that point). I think the actor did a really good job with that scene: he looked genuinely concerned, and benevolent, and he said such nice things, but somehow you could just feel this aura of ancient evil radiating from behind his eyes.

[Sarah Dylan Breuer]

Preaching on the gorefest that awaits those who don't subscribe in the right way to the right brand of PMT Christianity is meant to scare people into signing on to it at least superficially. It's what we used to call "fire insurance" -- telling a God who, if all this is true, is an incredibly sadistic and cruel being, what you think that God wants to hear on the offhand chance that these nutty people are right and the universe really is fundamentally cruel.

"Good News" it ain't -- thank God that the actual bible we've got (as opposed to the fictional one portrayed in LB) does have Good News for the poor, and news that the world was made by a God who is love, who never stops loving Creation, and who made the universe with an arc toward justice and wholeness.

[Chris Archer]

Perhaps it has happened just as THE BOOK(S)has said it will: the left behind series, not the Bible- we are in a fictionalized world. Tim actually mistaken? My goodness NO! He is far too wise and kind and by golly decent ever to be mistaken in any way, shape or form. The bookstores should carry the series in the reference sections, along with the dictionaries, thesaruses and concordances. Okay. Enough sarcasm. Thank you for pointing our the fruitlessness of such beliefs.

[Cowboy Diva]

I think L&J know their audience very well.
The [dreams read as] end-times prophetic texts of the bible are a great way to get your audience's attention for 2 reasons: 1) DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU! ala Late Great Planet Earth and b) if you already agreed to this stuff, then now it's your turn to gloat.
The books are like glorified Jack Chick tracts that a RTC can use to annoy their non-RTC friends without direct confrontation and at the same time the RTC can read them and feel superior, thinking, "well hey, all that icky stuff will not happen to me. Isn't that great?"

[Thlayli]

I think it was moldy rye bread.

The brown ergot, huh? ;)

[Ken]

1) So once more everything grinds to a halt for exposition/preaching at the reader. This is one of the reasons why all the great imaginative Christian fiction comes out of Western-rite Liturgical Churches -- the born-again RTCs are too busy preaching propaganda to tell stories. Internet Monk's Radio Podcast for the weekSex & Death & Christian Fiction. Two excerpts from the latter, regarding the effects of de facto CBA censorship:

My characters drink. Even the Christians. Beer and spirits. Why? I don’t think I need a reason to explain why. If King David can get drunk and dance naked to the Temple, two of my blokes can sit in a pub and have a swift half.

We could send them the Chronicles of Narnia, and have it rejected on the grounds of smoking, drinking, violence and a nasty outbreak of Universalism in The Last Battle. We could send them Lord of the Rings and have it rejected on the grounds of – again, smoking, drinking and violence, the fact that God doesn’t get a mention and no one gets saved in the third act.

But La Haye & Jenkins could send them Left Behind: the 22-Volume Series...

2) Make that "wish-fulfillment fantasy" as well as "escape" and "revenge". A lot of RTCs are looking for THE Irrefutable Proof of God's existence and the Bible's validity they can rub in the face of the non-RTCs. That's why all the brouhaha about Young Earth Creationism, Ark-ology, and finding PMD fulfillment in current events. It's all grasping for The Proof that "I WAS RIGHT! YOU'RE WRONG! BURN IN HELL! HA HA HA!" And like Homey da Clown, God Don' Play Dat Game. (If nothing else, could you imagine the I-love-the-smell-of-my-own-farts-level I-Was-Right arrogance PMDers would have in the New Cosmos if The End DID go down on their exact choreography? If nothing else, God wouldn't do it their way for just that reason. Aslan is not a tame lion.)

3) What do these PMD-RTCs think? That Aslan's not only a tame lion, but that He's their personal trained pet Who'll jump through their End Time Prophecy hoops on demand? That subject came up this morning (regarding a "Harry Potter is Witchcraft!" dust-up on LiveJournal that caused my writing partner to snap), and the best line in the conversation went that if you expect to order Aslan around on demand (like following the above chart), "You'll get the White Witch treatment -- they'll be burying you in a friggin' SHOEBOX!"

[Ken]

1) So once more everything grinds to a halt for exposition/preaching at the reader. This is one of the reasons why all the great imaginative Christian fiction comes out of Western-rite Liturgical Churches -- the born-again RTCs are too busy preaching propaganda to tell stories. Internet Monk's Radio Podcast for the week touches on some of the same subjects, as does Dr Morden's essay Sex & Death & Christian Fiction. Two excerpts from the latter, regarding the effects of de facto CBA censorship:

My characters drink. Even the Christians. Beer and spirits. Why? I don’t think I need a reason to explain why. If King David can get drunk and dance naked to the Temple, two of my blokes can sit in a pub and have a swift half.

We could send them the Chronicles of Narnia, and have it rejected on the grounds of smoking, drinking, violence and a nasty outbreak of Universalism in The Last Battle. We could send them Lord of the Rings and have it rejected on the grounds of – again, smoking, drinking and violence, the fact that God doesn’t get a mention and no one gets saved in the third act.

But La Haye & Jenkins could send them Left Behind: the 22-Volume Series...

2) Make that "wish-fulfillment fantasy" as well as "escape" and "revenge". A lot of RTCs are looking for THE Irrefutable Proof of God's existence and the Bible's validity they can rub in the face of the non-RTCs. That's why all the brouhaha about Young Earth Creationism, Ark-ology, and finding PMD fulfillment in current events. It's all grasping for The Proof that "I WAS RIGHT! YOU'RE WRONG! BURN IN HELL! HA HA HA!" And like Homey da Clown, God Don' Play Dat Game. (If nothing else, could you imagine the I-love-the-smell-of-my-own-farts-level I-Was-Right arrogance PMDers would have in the New Cosmos if The End DID go down on their exact choreography? If nothing else, God wouldn't do it their way for just that reason. Aslan is not a tame lion.)

3) What do these PMD-RTCs think? That Aslan's not only a tame lion, but that He's their personal trained pet Who'll jump through their End Time Prophecy hoops on demand? That subject came up this morning (regarding a "Harry Potter is Witchcraft!" dust-up on LiveJournal that caused my writing partner to snap), and the best line in the conversation went that if you expect to order Aslan around on demand (like following the above chart), "You'll get the White Witch treatment -- they'll be burying you in a friggin' SHOEBOX!"

[Fernmonkey]

If King David can get drunk and dance naked to the Temple, two of my blokes can sit in a pub and have a swift half.

That diagram reminded me - I'm sure I used to drink in a pub called The Cup and Trumpet.

[Indiana Joe]

"That diagram reminded me - I'm sure I used to drink in a pub called The Cup and Trumpet."

British pubs do have the best names, don't they? I heard reference made to one called The Slug and Lettuce.

[Thomas Reynolds]

"Silly Daniel thought he was addressing the exiled Jews in Babylon"

I love these posts, but I must interject that silly "Daniel" thought he was addressing rebellious Jews under the Seleucids. You can't really blame the PMDs too much for seeing a story pretending to be written 400 years in the past as actually being intended for 2000 years in the future.

[Jesurgislac]

I heard reference made to one called The Slug and Lettuce.

Oh, there's quite a lot of those. It's a yuppie chain, not a proper pub. Sells drinks called "Squashed Frogs".

[cjmr's husband]

Wouldn't The Cup and Strumpet be a cool name for a pub?

[Craig]

Wouldn't The Cup and Strumpet be a cool name for a pub?

Pub, no. Strip club, yes. That, or a Hooters knock-off.

[Zingo Stertch]

The Cup and Trumpet makes me think of an old smoky pub with a secret passage in the coat closet were secret meetings are held. It sounds so... hermetic. There's a place here called The White Horse, but seeing as how it's in a mall some of the allure is ruined. Or all of it.

[Lila]

How about The Sup and Crumpet? (Tea shop?)

[the opoponax]

I think this hearkens yet again to my pet theory about PMD-ism being about all kinds of weird vestiges of pre-Christian nonrational thought and belief patterns. The way that Jenkins and Le Haye seem to think that their fictional creation vindicates them in real life is eerily similar to (silly and oversimplistic) sympathetic magic -- "If we write down that these events really occur and thus vindicate PMD belief, this will actually serve to vindicate PMD belief!" It's basically a literary voodoo doll.

I don't know what I think of this idea, myself, seeing as I'm a neopagan who'd like to have respect for pre-Christian belief patterns. I'm able to vindicate paganism a bit by saying that this is the stuff that would have had to fade into obscurity had European Paganism survived into modern times -- in just the same way that it has largely disappeared from legitimate Christian practice, and the way that Cunningfolk and Alchemists eventually were forced to evolve into medical practitioners and research scientists.

[the opoponax]

Oh, and @ Zingo: the White Horse Tavern in NYC is where Dylan Thomas died (or is it simply where he alcohol-poisoned himself, later to actually die somewhere else?). The especially annoying thing, though, is that it's now a fratboy bar, full to the brim every weekend night with bridge and tunnel idiots who wouldn't know Dylan Thomas if Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night came along and dissed the Yankees.

[Marian Dalton]

It would be a lot easier to believe L&J's protests that these books are "just fiction" if they weren't *also* publishing Bible Study guides based on them.

Is it true, btw, that they actually had the chutzpah to record that "So You've Been Left Behind" video that Rayford sees? If so, I want a copy - Creative Suite and YouTube await.

[mcc]

Why would the authors do this? Why spoil their own story arc by summarizing it here in the middle of Book 1?

Would L&J have specifically known at the point at which they wrote this that they were going to be asked to write another eleven volumes?

Would L&J have specifically known at the point at which they wrote this that they were going to be asked to write another eleven volumes?

Even if they had intended to write only one novel (which is weird, because they set this book up for at least another sequel), it's still pretty tacky to spoil the entire book right in the middle. A good author could make this work somehow but L&J are not good authors (in case you haven't noticed).

And besides, their publisher is freakin' Tyndale House. Those guys will accept anything written by an evangelical Christian. They even publish James Dobson. James Dobson!

[Tim Lehnerer]

There was a bar in the old Nintendo game "Nightshade" named the Fox and Linear Particle Accelerator.

[Simon St.Laurent]

The part that disturbs me most about these supposedly factual / literal / detailed interpretations of Revelation (plus other pieces) is the lack of humility they demonstrate.

Revelation has never ever seemed to me to be a book meant for simple understanding. Its complications strike me as a clear sign that God is indeed mysterious, beyond our comprehension - God-like, not human-like.

But somehow the code-breaking PMDs have a tighter connection to God - or so they think. I suspect their need for certainty has led them to confuse their timelines with faith.

[Grumpy]

Drilling your followers with the details of events that, by definition, neither you nor they will ever see seems like an odd understanding of Christian ministry. Even if Billings were right, such preaching would be bound to be fruitless.

Is it really? Such preaching is meant to inspire fear, and from fear comes faith, and through faith comes salvation. See? It worked!

They are even free to invent a fictional Bible full of fictional prophecies. This is exactly what L&J have done. Their problem -- and it's a big problem -- is that neither they nor most of their millions of devoted readers realize that this is what they have done.

This wouldn't be the only parallel with Dan Brown's novels.

[Jeff]

The brown ergot, huh? ;)

That's what I was thinking, yup.

The Cup and Strumpet reminds me of the joke about four Professors of Literature who see a gathering of Ladies Of Easy Virtue and wonder aloud what the correct collective name would be. “What’s this?” said the first. “A flourish of strumpets?” “Nay,” said the second, “an essay of Trollope’s.” “Rather, a jam of tarts,” advanced the third. “No, gentlemen,” concluded the last. “Here we have an anthology of pros.”

[Ecks]

I prefer Pterry's term. "ladies of negotiable virtue."

[Technomad]

The odd thing is, Revelation/The Apocalypse of St. John almost didn't make the cut into what we now know as the Bible. There were a lot of these books flapping around the Mediterranean world in the first few centuries A.D., and a lot of Christians were very leery of them.

ISTR reading that John Calvin forbade preachers in his Geneva to preach from or try to interpret Revelation, saying that it was incomprehensible, and the Greek Orthodox Church didn't put it into their canon for quite a while. Once on LJ, in response to a friend's question in her journal about what you'd take out of well-known books or canons (i.e., getting rid of Titus Andronicus from the corpus of known Shakespeare plays) I said that I'd start by dumping Revelation out of Christian scripture. *pausing to imagine the differences in history if Revelation had never made it into what we know as the Bible---ahh, bliss would it be to be alive in that day, but to be young would be very heaven!*

[damnedyankee]

(looks over the timeline)

Psshht. What kind of cheap-ass Apocalypse is this, anyway? At no point does anybody bring doughnuts!

And one of those cups had better have some black coffee, or there's an angel who's going to get a trumpet in a very uncomfortable place.

It is not wrong simply because it is based on the incoherent fever-dream of a long-dead Adventist

Are you certain this isn't a reference to someone like, say, Scofield, rather than John? Just a thought.

Anyway, great stuff, Fred, as always, and same to everyone in the comments section. I think it would do a lot of good if people inclined to believe such things were to keep in mind that Aslan was never "a tame lion".

[Elmo]

The books are fiction. The authors say so and there are indeed many obvious fictions such as the nearly-omnipotent United Nations (even without the black helicopters) contained in them beginning with these early chapters of the first book. (Not to spoil anything but just wait until they introduce the ubergeek Donny -- that dude has awesome powers.)

Even so, they are believed as if they were the truth. This week I saw a film clip made by a Jew at a Christians United for Israel "summit meeting". There are people saying that he needs to learn the truth from Left Behind.

[linnen]

Ah yes. The Christians United for Israel group. They remind me most of all of one of Aesop's fables telling of a group of predators promising other animals safety and protection.

Just in time for lunch.

[josephdietrich]

Elmo, you mean This clip here? That was surreal. By the way, check out the name of the guy on the left at 2:39 in the clip. I suppose it's a common enough name ...

[stinger]

Jeff @ 1:55 am:
Thanks! I do love a good Trollope joke. And you are the Attila of puns.

[Jeff]

And you are the Attila of puns.

I'm just a humble story-Attila. :-)

[stinger]

LOL

[Elmo]

Yep, that's the one. I mistakenly put the link in the URL line here so it was associated with Elmo.

Being a big fan of Tele-Hot-Tubby-Tom DeLay, I thought he was going to have more to say though what he did say was scary enough. If he got raptured tomorrow -- unlikely as that may seem -- it would at least resolve some of his more material world problems. The woman doing Salome's dance -- or whatever she thought she was doing -- was another one of those moments that makes me wonder why anybody thinks they need to do drugs in order to see a twisted reality.

[Skyknight]

I think the main reason LaHaye and Jenkins feel justified in this right-at-the-beginning-of-the-heptology dodecalogy hexdecalogy-spoiling is that what they're writing isn't the usual sort of fiction. In his preface to "Babylon Rising", LaHaye called it "faction" (i.e. fact+fiction), and he said that the whole purpose was to call people's attention to the Bible's prophecies. In fact, the Babylon Rising series exists because he couldn't vector into Left Behind enough space/scenes to treatise on the Daniel prophecies.

Long story short: WHAT spoilers?

[Skyknight]

Not, by the way, that LaHaye's understanding of even Babylon was that good. In the second Babylon Rising book, his Biblical Archaeology professor is lecturing about the Babylonians' belief system. For the most part, his brief explanation of the gods' jurisdictions is pretty good. Except for two glaring mistakes...

1. He calls Kishar a "god of the earth". Um, no. Kishar was female (and wife of her brother Anshar, the sky god. Considering how few other beings besides Apsu and Tiamat there were at the time of their birth, they didn't exactly have a choice...Their Treacherous Wickednesses Mummu and Qingu probably don't count.).
2. Meaning that you probably saw enough references to Kishar as goddess-of-earth if you heard about Anshar (and he's in that list). So why did you say that their earth-mother was named "Gaea"?! That's a HELLENIC name, not Babylonian!

[stinger]

Skynight, these guys have a hard time attributing anything like power to female entities. Not surprising that they would, intentionally or otherwise, turn a goddess into a god. The only time they acknowledge a female entity having power or agency was Eve persuading Adam to eat of the fruit. And because she did that, forever more women are subordinate to, and yes, inferior to, men.

[Skyknight]

Except I think he got the other female deities right (definitely Ishtar/Inanna...although I'll have to go back and look to see if he remembered to associate her with both love and warfare. If I can remember which page...and whether this was the second or third book...). And even THEN, which part of "Gaea" sounds like it came from a Fertile Crescent-area tongue?

(Yes, I'm aware of claims that Zeus, for example, was just the Hellenic understanding of Marduk, Anu, or Enlil. My point is etymological, not philosophical/theological.)

[the opoponax]

I'm guessing it's because Lehaye and whoever his new cowriter are really don't give half a shit about whether they get their pagan pantheons right. I mean, it would be dangerous for them to do research on all that satanist crap. The point is, Jesus is Teh Savior!

besides which, we're talking about people who think Manhattan is 50 miles long. They make Dan Brown look like a venerated art history scholar.

[Hagsrus]

I prefer Pterry's term. "ladies of negotiable virtue."

"Negotiable affection," isn't it?