L.B.: Buck's soul searching

Left Behind, pp. 356-357

Most of the end of Chapter 19 is taken up with Buck's taxi-cab suspicions about Nicolae Carpathia. In the midst of his pondering, Buck also takes a page or so to reconsider his suspicions about God.

The loss of his sister-in-law and niece and nephew tugged at his heart almost constantly, and something made him wonder if there wasn't something to this Rapture thing. If anybody in his orbit would be taken to heaven, it would have been them.

Here again is a bit of retroactive correction. We've been privy to Buck's every waking thought for the last 350 pages, and this is the first time he's remembered his missing family members even in passing. He flew halfway around the world to investigate Dirk's death, but he hasn't even placed a follow-up phone call to his brother to ask about three people whose disappearance, we're now supposed to believe, has been a source of "constant" pain. I'm not buying it.

Buck's observation that his niece and nephew were more deserving of heaven than anyone else he knew is also interesting. One wonders what it is that Buck knows about, say, Marge Potter, that makes him feel she's deserving of hellfire and brimstone.

What Buck seems to mean here is that his brother's children were young and innocent, which points to a strange undercurrent in Left Behind's interpretation of the idea of an "age of accountability." LaHaye and Jenkins have placed their cut-off for childish innocence at roughly the point of puberty. Consider that alongside the sexless Millennium of the later books in the series and you get a picture of humanity in which sexual=sinful and vice versa. L&J aren't the first to mangle the meaning of sin in this way. Origen did it too, and of course, as a consequence, that's not all he mangled.

But he knew better than that, didn't he? He was Ivy League educated. He had left the church when he left the claustrophobic family situation that threatened to drive him crazy as a young man. He had never considered himself religious, despite a prayer for help and deliverance once in a while. He had built his life around achievement, excitement, and -- he couldn't deny it -- attention. He loved the status that came with having his byline, his writing, his thinking in a national magazine.

Well there it is: Buck was "Ivy League educated" and therefore "knew better" than to believe in God. Education and book-learning and the intellect are all in the service of pride. They are stumbling blocks, obstacles to faith, to be viewed with suspicion if not avoided altogether.

L&J have provided a stark illustration of what Richard Hofstadter describes in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:

One begins with the hardly contestable proposition that religious faith is not, in the main, propagated by logic or learning. One moves on from this to the idea that it is best propagated (in the judgment of Christ and on historical evidence) by men who have been unlearned and ignorant. It seems to follow from this that the kind of wisdom and truth possessed by such men is superior to what learned and cultivated minds have. In fact, learning and cultivation appear to be handicaps in the propagation of faith. And since the propagation of faith is the most important task before man, those who are as "ignorant as babes" have, in the most fundamental virtue, greater strength than men who have addicted themselves to logic and learning. Accordingly, though one shrinks from a bald statement of the conclusion, humble ignorance is far better as a human quality than a cultivated mind. At bottom, this proposition, despite all the difficulties that attend it, has been eminently congenial both to American evangelicalism and to American democracy.

This seems, at first glance, to be an odd situation. Hofstadter, the Pulitzer-Prize winning intellectual, seems to be wholly in agreement with LaHaye and Jenkins about the incompatibility of faith and learning. But look again and notice the distinction: What Hofstadter presents as a diagnosis; L&J present as a prescription. Hofstadter describes what he regards as a mistake, a misapprehension, an unnecessary wrong turn taken by "American evangelicalism and American democracy." But L&J don't regard this as a mistake, they see it as how things ought to be. They point to the serious of dubious wrong turns that Hofstadter describes and see it as a road map to the Promised Land. L&J prove Hofstadter right just as he proves them wrong.

The above passage from Hofstadter is quoted, mostly approvingly, in Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Noll adds, however, that, "The question for American evangelicals is not just the presence of an anti-intellectual bias but the sometimes vigorous prosecution of the wrong sort of intellectual life." In particular, he points to the way that dispensationalists like Darby, Scofield and Ryrie -- LaHaye's (anti-)intellectual ancestors -- regarded their approach to biblical interpretation as "scientific."

(Instead of doing what I'm tempted to do here -- quoting the entirety of Noll's chapter on "The Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism"* -- let me just again say that if I could recommend only one book to explain American evangelical Christianity, it would be The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.)

And yet there was a certain loneliness to his existence ...

Having shown us why Buck has thus far resisted conversion -- his Ivy League schooling and his worldly pride is getting in the way -- the authors then aim to show us that Buck still longs for it, that he needs to fill the "God-shaped hole" in his life. That's what they start to do, at least, but then they take a weird turn:

And yet there was a certain loneliness to his existence, especially now with Steve moving on. Buck had dated and had considered escalating a couple of serious relationships, but he had always been considered too mobile for a woman who wanted stability.

Side-stepping the slashfic bait there, I think this is intended as a lead-in to the following chapter, in which Buck meets Chloe and instantly falls in love. The juxtaposition of his existential loneliness and his lack of a romantic partner might have led to a potentially interesting consideration of the way that romantic love is sometimes pursued as a surrogate for separate questions about the meaning of life. If that's what the authors intended here, then they cut short and confuse the issue in the pages to come by having Buck find God and romance (chaste, sexless romance) at the same time. What I suspect they intended here, instead, was to emphasize Buck's unspoiled innocence. Sure he'd had "a couple of serious relationships," but he had never "escalated" them (nudge nudge, wink wink) so he remains pure and deserving of Chloe's love. But since, again, Buck yields his heart to Chloe and to God almost simultaneously, this also confuses the issue. It seems to suggest that Buck's chastity somehow made him worthier and more deserving of God's love.

All of this soul-searching and pondering might be somewhat plausible in some other book, with some other character, it's screamingly implausible with this character in this book. In this context it reads a bit like Moses casually saying to the burning bush, "I've never considered myself religious ..." The authors want to treat Buck's dawning faith as a typical representation of a typical conversion experience, but Buck is far from typical. The game here is rigged. Unlike those of us here in the real world, Buck has already seen proof of God's existence -- the Babel Fish itself. He has seen the hand of God swatting aside nuclear missiles like snowflakes. Buck's report on that undeniably, unambiguously supernatural event, the authors say, won him a Hemingway Prize. It would also have won him a $1 million check from the Amazing Randi.

The authors acknowledge this, but still try to suggest that Buck would have room for doubt:

Since the clearly supernatural event he had witnessed in Israel with the destruction of the Russian air force, he had known the world was changing. Things would never again be as they had been. He wasn't buying the space alien theory of the disappearances, and while it very well could be attributed to some incredible cosmic energy reaction, who or what was behind that? The incident at the Wailing Wall was another unexplainable bit of the supernatural.

This parallels Buck's worries about Carpathia. We're supposed to see that, too, as evidence of his skeptical, cautious journalist's mind, but both cases just make Buck look dimwitted. He knows, he has seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, that Nicolae has been involved in at least three murders, that he is complicit in a criminal conspiracy to game the international monetary system, and that he is a megalomaniac seeking unchecked absolute power. Given that he knows this, his reluctance to reach any conclusions about Carpathia seems impossibly obtuse.

But Buck also knows that God exists. The "clearly supernatural event he had witnessed in Israel with the destruction of the Russian [and Ethiopian] air force" is also something that he saw with his own eyes and heard with his own ears. His reluctance to reach any conclusions about this also makes him look impenetrably dim.

That "clearly supernatural event" doesn't only change the context for Buck, it changes the entire world of this story. Left Behind does not take place in a world like our own. It takes place in a world in which the existence of God -- of a very particular, sectarian notion of God -- is a settled question. It has been demonstrated, verified, televised.

That undercuts all of these soul-searching pre-conversion and conversion scenes. These are meant to lead the reader to ponder their own relationship with God, but what they actually do is cause the reader to consider how they would respond to the "God" of this story if they lived in the fictional parallel universe of this story. If the question is "What would you do if you were in Buck's shoes?" then the only answer that makes any sense is, "If I were Buck, living in that world and under those rules, I would convert to Tim LaHaye's brand of PMD Christianity. Duh." But since that world is not this world, and its rules are not the rules we live under here, it seems strange for the authors to consider this a persuasive basis for evangelism.

(This rigged game also allows the authors to take some unwarranted cheap shots. Having created a fictional world in which you would have to be an idiot to be skeptical about the existence of God, they then turn around and portray all skeptics as idiots.)

It's odd to be reminded of the Babel-Fish incident this late in the story. Like Buck and everyone else in the book, I had nearly forgotten about it. That forgetting is necessary if almost anything else in LB is to make any sense. The context of "clearly supernatural event" No. 1, the injury-free nuclear war, would necessarily shape the interpretation of clearly supernatural event No. 2, the disappearances. A thousand possible scenarios suggest themselves from such a sequence of miraculous phenomenon,** but the events of this book are not one of them.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* Here's a relevant, somewhat abridged, excerpt, from pages 126-129:

Simple anti-intellectualism, however, was not the major problem in fundamentalism for the life of the mind. More serious damage was done by the way in which the fundamentalist movement reinforced 19th-century assumptions about the conduct of thinking itself.

A major impediment created by fundamentalism for a doxological understanding of nature, society and the arts was its uncritical adoption of intellectual habits from the 19th century. Especially dispensationalism was heavily dependent upon 19th-century views of the goals and systematizing purposes of science. This overwhelming trust in the capacities of an objective, disinterested, unbiased and neutral science perhaps was excusable in the early 19th century, but by the early 20th century it was indefensible. Fundamentalist naivete concerning science was matched by several other 19th-century traits that undercut the possibility for a responsible intellectual life. These included a weakness for treating the verses of the Bible as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that needed only to be sorted and the fit together to possess a finished picture of divine truth; an overwhelming tendency to "essentialism," or the conviction that a specific formula could capture for all times and places the essence of biblical truth for any specific issue concerning God, the human condition, or the fate of the world; a corresponding neglect of forces in history that shape perceptions and help define the issues that loom as most important to any particular age; and a self-confidence, bordering on hubris, manifested by an extreme antitraditionalism that casually discounted the possibility of wisdom from earlier generations. ...

The difficulty perpetuated by the objectivist language of 19th-century Baconian science is not with the notion that theology must proceed carefully, systematically, and by giving thorough attention to all relevant evidence -- that is, in "scientific" fashion. The difficulty is rather that the lack of self-consciousness characteristic of the 19th century's confidence in science continued in full force among some of the most influential popularizers of evangelical theology well into the late 20th century.

** Let's run with the "space alien theory." If we're going to consider this as a possibility for event No. 2, then we must also consider it a possibility for event No. 1. The first case would suggest that the space aliens were acting on behalf of Israel. Given that, the disintegration of the world's children would likely have been interpreted as somehow also occurring at Israel's behest. That would give the rest of the world someone to blame, thus making the need for Nicolae's peace treaty a bit more credible.

Comments

[Reverend Ref]

No way ... I'm first??

Woo Hoo.

[Antigone]

Oh, that's so sweet. You're actually trying to give us some ability in "temporary suspencion of disbelief" in these horrible novels.

[Scott]

but he hasn't even placed a follow-up phone call to his brother

They passed up an opportunity for another phone call?

Buck had dated and had considered escalating a couple of serious relationships...

...(chaste, sexless romance)

Buck is so far in the closet he's finding Xmas presents (hat tip to Family Guy). Hmmmm.... Where does Jenkins spend his time during those long book tours? :-)

It takes place in a world in which the existence of God -- of a very particular, sectarian notion of God -- is a settled question.

They think it's a settled question in this world, too, and we all ignore all the proof we get daily and so would just ignore the Russian nuke thing and The Event. You've already mentioned the "everyone really knows we're right and just refuse to admit it" belief of the evilvangelicals.

[Spalanzani]

Since the clearly supernatural event he had witnessed in Israel with the destruction of the Russian air force, he had known the world was changing. Things would never again be as they had been. He wasn't buying the space alien theory of the disappearances, and while it very well could be attributed to some incredible cosmic energy reaction, who or what was behind that? The incident at the Wailing Wall was another unexplainable bit of the supernatural.

I absolutely love how the trip-and-fall guys are mentioned as being even remotely in the same category as The Event and the Babel Fish. You know, the supernatural destruction of an entire nuclear arsenal, the instantaneous disintegration of one third of the world’s population, some guy having a conveniently-timed heart attack…all these are pretty much the same, right?

[Keith]

Left Behind does not take place in a world like our own. It takes place in a world in which the existence of God -- of a very particular, sectarian notion of God -- is a settled question. It has been demonstrated, verified, televised.

That is what is so bothersome by this narrow minded, PMD world view (at least to this atheist): it's irredeemably grim. There's no choice but blind devotion to a very authoritarian God or self delusion that borders on narcissism if not solipsism. L&J's answer to doubt is to just submit to a dictatorship of the soul. That this is the only way of finding any sort of peace or fulfillment in their world is bad enough but that they are so gleeful about it is just horrific.

If I were Buck, I'd tell the cab to take me to the empire state building and jump off.

[Hibryd]

What Buck seems to mean here is that his brother's children were young and innocent, which points to a strange undercurrent in Left Behind's interpretation of the idea of an "age of accountability." LaHaye and Jenkins have placed their cut-off for childish innocence at roughly the point of puberty.

I'm really temped to read the "Kids" LB series, because in all those books the authors would have to, at some point, address where God's cutoff occured. I can see why they put this cutoff in; if God had doomed children to hell just because they were too young to even know who Jesus was, well, that wouldn't be very loving.

But where does God (actually, the authors) draw the line? What age, what minute, are you suddenly held accountable to Christ? What about the mentally handicapped? What about people who were raised in isolated cultures who never even heard of Jesus? What if you heard of Jesus but your entire family dismissed it as nonsense - do you get a few extra bonus years tacked on to the age of accountability?

I think the Mormons have a workaroud here - if you never hear their "truth", you don't go to hell. Hell is reserved for people who have learned the truth and then rejected it.

[Hibryd]

I absolutely love how the trip-and-fall guys are mentioned as being even remotely in the same category as The Event and the Babel Fish.

Hey, now that there aren't any more missing children stories, and no big wars to report on, the major news networks have a *lot* more time on their hands to devote to guys who trip and die in the Middle East.

[GeoX]

When I was small, I read mostly-pretty-bad Dungeons & Dragons novels, and what always struck me was the way that "faith" seemed irrelevant in those world: priests get to cast rad spells, fergawdsake--these here gods' are obviously there. In spite of this, you would occasionally see characters with crises of faith, which seemed pretty nonsensical.

Still, at least no one tried to claim that this was an accurate representation of how the real world worked.

[Scott]

What about the mentally handicapped?

AKA their target audience.......

Why side-step the slashfic bait?

[Spalanzani]

Hibryd: "I think the Mormons have a workaroud here - if you never hear their "truth", you don't go to hell. Hell is reserved for people who have learned the truth and then rejected it."

If that were the case, wouldn't they then be morally obligated to not tell anybody about the 'truth'? That way, nobody could go to hell. Spreading thier faith just spreads the risk that people will reject it and damn themselves.

[Thlayli]

Side-stepping the slashfic bait there,....

Aw, go on. You know you want to ;)

[Spherical Time]

Actually, I don't think that he would have been able to win Randi's $1 million. Randi requires that the supernatural event to be repeatable in a laboratory setting, which the attack on Israel could not have been.

Otherwise, brilliant commentary as always, Fred.

[Apsalar]

Actually, I think Mormons have got a pretty good afterlife policy, as far as it goes. Hell (as I understand it, I'm not nor have I ever been a member of the LDS church, but I was seeking for a while), is reserved for the truly evil and those who have been members of the LDS church but then left it or were excommunicated. Everyone else, including those who are familiar with the Mormon church but were never members of it, get to be preached to after death. That's what all those baptisms for the dead are for, since they believe that you still get to accept the LDS church as true, even after you die, but you have to be baptized to become a member for all eternity. This baptism, after you are dead, can come before or after you actually accept the truth when you are dead, as long as it happens at some point. Hence the great Mormon genealogical records.

Heaven is divided into levels. People who were LDS members when they were alive get to go to the best part. People who accepted the LDS church after they died get to go to another part, but still, way better than hell.

[Darcy Pennell]

People who accepted the LDS church after they died get to go to another part, but still, way better than hell.

What a bummer, to wake up in Heaven and then realize you're stuck in coach.

[zim]

That would give the rest of the world [Israel] to blame

So that would be one realistic detail, then.

[Tonio]

Dumb question about the passage from "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" - how is the modern view of science different from the 19th-century view?

[Bugmaster]

Don't top-level Mormons get to become Gods of their own Earth-like worlds ? I remember reading that a while ago. That'd be neat.

[MikhailBorg]

Having created a fictional world in which you would have to be an idiot to be skeptical about the existence of God,

That's been on my mind since you began this series. My friends range in belief from devout Catholics to worshipers of Dionysus, Eris, or Spike the vampire. But they are all reasonably sensible people, and I can't imagine one of them who, presented with the salvation of Israel and the Rapture as portrayed here, wouldn't at least take seriously the premise that the PMDs were right. I'd sure as heck have to accept it as a hypothesis.

[Bugmaster]

In spite of this, you would occasionally see [D&D] characters with crises of faith, which seemed pretty nonsensical.

Actually, that part does make sense. In D&D, a crisis of faith would occur when you realized that the god you've been following all your life is an asshat... Ok, they're all asshats in D&D, so let's say, you realize that he's more of an asshat than you previously thought. So, for example, the crisis of faith could precipitate your conversion from Talos to Lathlander -- for instance, after you watch a lightning storm destroy your beloved village, despite your fervent prayers.

[Tonio]

Buck was "Ivy League educated" and therefore "knew better" than to believe in God.

That portrayal of Buck certainly has its roots in anti-intellectualism. But I suspect LH&J's conscious motive was simply to play to readers' prejudices. Their description of Buck as a lonely deluded secularist is certainly a straw man that gives the authors' target audience a sense of superiority about their beliefs.

[ako]

And yet there was a certain loneliness to his existence, especially now with Steve moving on. Buck had dated and had considered escalating a couple of serious relationships, but he had always been considered too mobile for a woman who wanted stability.

So Buck is:

- A virgin at thirty. Not because of any particular standards or concerns on his part, but because he didn't want to offer a long term commitment (and globe-trotting reporters never meet women interested in anything but stability), and/or was too busy with work to bother with sex (I think both versions come up).

- Expecting to be lonelier without Steve playing the same role in his life.

- Prone to hanging out in airport restrooms for long stretches with odd reasons (doing inventory of his pants; see "LB: 10 pages in the men's room").

- Deeply enamored with the a charismatic man who looks like a young Robert Redford.

- Weirdly jealous when Hattie scores Nicholae's number, despite no apparent romantic interest in Hattie.

- The admitted author identification figure of Jerry Jenkins, a man who wouldn't recognize subtext if it hit him over the head with a hammer.

Huh.

[Rosina]

As a matter of interest, would an 'Ivy Leaguer' identify himself, in his own thoughts, in those terms, or would he think of himself as an old Harvardian or whatever? I'm sure Oxbridge men would think 'I was educated at Kings!' not the generic category.

Just wondering. If I'm right, someone else can run with the thought that perhaps J&LH have never met an Ivy Leaguer.

[Spalanzani]

Sometimes I suspect that they've never really met anyone at all, they've just had various people come in and out of their field of vision.

[Jesurgislac]

I thought we were sidestepping the slashfic subtext?

[Rob]

Does anybody else get gray boxes that appear on Slacktivist, covering up some of the text? It's really aggravating. I have to increase and decrease the text size so that the missing paragraphs appear.

Tonio: Through most of the history of science, it was regarded as an offshoot of philosophy. It wasn't until roughly the beginning of the 20th century that the dredges of mysticism were finally cast off and the scientific method was more or less (OK, mostly less) formalized.

[Dahne]

Steve Plank is my favorite name in these books, because it's so stupid it verges on brilliant. It's right out of one of those 80's sitcoms where a guy who's pretending not to be himself is standing in a construction sight. "No, I'm not Jack Tripper, I'm....uh....Steve! Steve, uh...nail, board, thermos....Plank!"

It's interesting to consider this anti-intellectualism among the modern religious right in the light of recently reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. In among a lot of nonsense about 17th century European politics and economics that you'd have to be a hell of a lot more intellectual than me to follow, there's some mention of the Royal Society of London. One of the more interesting aspects is how the members approach scientific discovery as an application of faith - that is, what they're doing is investigating the workings of God's creation. During a discussion of microscopes, one makes the point that, the more they magnify things, the more the imperfections of man-made things like knives become obvious, and the more beautiful even the meanest natural thing like a louse becomes. It's an interesting reversal of today's mentality. But then, I guess that's the difference between an Isaac Newton and a LaJenkins.

[Bugmaster]

@ako:
Hey ! What are you doing ? Fred told you to ignore the slashbait !

Hehehehehe

[Iorwerth Thomas]

Dumb question about the passage from "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" - how is the modern view of science different from the 19th-century view?

I think from context this would be a reference to the 'positivistic' trend in 19th century science [1]; that is, (if I recall correctly) theories exist mainly to link together sense data gotten from experiment; they don't refer to real things, because that would be metaphysical, and it is a truth universally acknowledged amongst positivists that metaphysics is shameful and wrong, like masturbation [2,3].

Most philosophers of science have moved on to more interesting views of science; some low level positivism combined in an incoherent fashion with strong scientific realism and Popperian falsificationism [4] still persists amongst scientists, largely because it's rare (at least in the UK) for them to be formally taught philosophy of science. Which is a bit of of a pity, because the unconscious metaphysical assumptions we make probably shouldn't only be examined by outsiders. Still. birds don't need to know ornithology and all that.

[1] For science, read 'physics', since that was held to be the paradigm of how science should be done; never mind that a lot of the assumptions they made only make sense for physics, and are disastrous if applied to biology or, as in the case of the behaviourists, psychology.

[2] All this meant was that they constructed ersatz metaphysics without realising it, and without analysing them. A bit less messy than unconsciously masturbating, but still embarrassing if you're caught doing it.

[3] This is a simplification, of course. Pierre Duheim held positivist type views on the practise of science, but was fine with metaphysics so long as it occurred between consenting adults.

[4] Which is more to do with falsificationism sounding like a good criterion for being a scientific theory than it actually being a good one, though why it fails is a bit tricky to articulate.

[Jon]

If I'm right, someone else can run with the thought that perhaps J&LH have never met an Ivy Leaguer.

I'm sure they would avoid meeting an Ivy Leaguer for fear that, like homosexuality, intellectualism is something that can happen to you!
They wouldn't want to run the risk of catching a case of smart.

[Doctor Science]

Tonio:

how is the modern view of science different from the 19th-century view?

I'm cutting-and-pasting from a post I made based on a comment I made to one of the Gay-hatin' Gospel posts:

IMO the greatest philosophical achievement of 20th-century science was realizing that the quest for capital-T Truth means you have to give up capital-C Certainty. It took a while, but I'd say most scientists are now content with the idea that there are things that are in principle uncertain, that one way to learn is to get proved wrong, and that your ideas about the world are going to change. That's why scientists can face situations like oops, we seem to have misplaced 80% of the universe -- AGAIN without getting terribly bent out of shape about it.

Does that make sense to you? I'm so used to this stuff that it can be hard for me to see what it looks like from the outside.

I second Fred's recommendation of Mark Noll's book, btw. It's symptomatic of the problems in evangelical Christianity that Noll (currently the leading evangelical historian) left Wheaton (the leading evangelical intellectual college) for Notre Dame, a Catholic University where he is intellectually freer.

[Tabigarasu]

I absolutely love how the trip-and-fall guys are mentioned as being even remotely in the same category as The Event and the Babel Fish. You know, the supernatural destruction of an entire nuclear arsenal, the instantaneous disintegration of one third of the world’s population, some guy having a conveniently-timed heart attack…all these are pretty much the same, right?

Spalanzani: For many evangelicals they are in fact exactly the same thing, as all three events demonstrate the hand of God in the world. If your God will perform miracles on command like a parlor magician, then all coincidences are equally magical.

I heard a Baptist preacher Wednesday afternoon talking about how his brother loaned him some cash to move his family from a big city in the north to a small town in the south, and that this was absolutely a miracle from God. Once in the small town he "got saved" and became a missionary and that this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the loan from his brother was a bona fide miracle.

As a Christian, I can say that perhaps the hand of God was guiding the preacher in his decision to move, or to join his brother's church, and certainly the brother's beliefs about God and charity were part of his decision to offer the loan, but was it a miracle? The part of my brain that was trained as a physicist says no.

[Cyllan]

As a Christian, I can say that perhaps the hand of God was guiding the preacher in his decision to move, or to join his brother's church, and certainly the brother's beliefs about God and charity were part of his decision to offer the loan, but was it a miracle?

It really boils down to the definition of a miracle. If you define it as the hand of God in action, then the preacher's tale (from his perspective) was miraculous. If a miracle requires something supernatural happening a la statues weeping tears of blood, then it was not.

[Hibryd]

Heaven is divided into levels. People who were LDS members when they were alive get to go to the best part. People who accepted the LDS church after they died get to go to another part, but still, way better than hell.

If only Rayford had know, he could have spent eternity in the next level up, eating steaming piles of produce drenched in ranch dressing.

[Jos]

I thought we were sidestepping the slashfic subtext?

No, no, Fred said that he was sidestepping the slashfic bait. He didn't say anything about the rest of not being allowed to go and have a little fun with it.

That said...

I don't think it's... too stupid that Buck still hasn't realised LH&J!God is behind everything. He has, at least, admitted the supernatural nature of certain events, but he simply hasn't yet tied a particular supernatural worldview to it.
Sure, he has ruled out space aliens, but that doesn't automatically mean LH&J!God did it. Clearly the Russian airforce was wiped out by a group of sylphs who were annoyed about all those planes messing up their aerial picnic or something.

As for all the people who've vanished... well, obviously they were reduced into nothingness by Necrons using cloaking technology during their first assault against Holy Terra.

[Spalanzani]

Tabigarasu: "For many evangelicals they are in fact exactly the same thing, as all three events demonstrate the hand of God in the world. If your God will perform miracles on command like a parlor magician, then all coincidences are equally magical."

That is a good point. Still, since Buck isn't saved yet, there's really no reason for him to think that way. Although I guess you could easily chalk it up to yet another instance of the authors' ineptness at portraying people outside of their subculture.

[mmack]

Tabigarasu,

Along that vein, for many fungelicals God's hand is in any action or decision in life. Which reminds me of a true story from a Bible Study Group at the "mega-church" I attended for a while:

A young lady was recounting how she relied upon God's word in her life on major decisions that she made. Except for one time with the car that she recently bought. It was a Honda with a keyless remote entry. She said she wasn't quite sure if the purchase was the right one since a keyless remote was an "luxury", but she made it anyway. One day while out shopping she was trying to get her keys out of her purse to unlock the car door with the remote entry. She dropped the keys and the remote key fob hit the ground and broke open. THAT was her sign that God did not want her to buy that car.

I bit my tounge and stopped short of saying "No, that was a sign Honda uses crappy plastic in their keyless remotes".

[Jim]

Well there it is: Buck was "Ivy League educated" and therefore "knew better" than to believe in God. Education and book-learning and the intellect are all in the service of pride. They are stumbling blocks, obstacles to faith, to be viewed with suspicion if not avoided altogether.

Which explains Avery Dulles. I have to wonder if LH&J would consider a conversion from modernist Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism as getting closer or farther away from being an RTC.

[Ken]

One begins with the hardly contestable proposition that religious faith is not, in the main, propagated by logic or learning. One moves on from this to the idea that it is best propagated (in the judgment of Christ and on historical evidence) by men who have been unlearned and ignorant. It seems to follow from this that the kind of wisdom and truth possessed by such men is superior to what learned and cultivated minds have. In fact, learning and cultivation appear to be handicaps in the propagation of faith. And since the propagation of faith is the most important task before man, those who are as "ignorant as babes" have, in the most fundamental virtue, greater strength than men who have addicted themselves to logic and learning.

This is what happened to Islam around 1000 years ago, when Mohammed al-Ghazali declared logic and secular learning incompatible with Faith in his Incoherence of the Philosophers. As al-Ghazali's ideas took root and became Orthodox Islam, Islamic Faith came to be Total Blind Faith ("Al'lah Said It; I Believe It; That Settles It!), and we see the results in today's headlines from the Middle East.

[Ken]

If that's what the authors intended here, then they cut short and confuse the issue in the pages to come by having Buck find God and romance (chaste, sexless romance) at the same time.

According to this PDF paper on the Christian Apocalyptic genre convolutions to ensure "chaste, sexless romance" are characteristic of the genre (presumably a spillover from Christian Romance fiction), as are dwelling on Conversion Experiences almost as a substitute.

(Scary that the paper also describes Left Behind as having better-than-average characterization for the genre.)

[Jim]

If that's what the authors intended here, then they cut short and confuse the issue in the pages to come by having Buck find God and romance (chaste, sexless romance) at the same time. What I suspect they intended here, instead, was to emphasize Buck's unspoiled innocence. Sure he'd had "a couple of serious relationships," but he had never "escalated" them (nudge nudge, wink wink) so he remains pure and deserving of Chloe's love.

I really feel sorry for the authors here. They have to portray how depraved the characters are (I'm thinking mostly of Buck and Rayford here) without being able to show any actual depravity. I'm assuming that this is because their target audience is turned off by any entertainment depicting sex.

[Ken]

Buck is so far in the closet he's finding Xmas presents (hat tip to Family Guy). -- Scott

I wouldn't put too much stock in Family Guy; all it means was that week the manatees pushed that particular bingo-ball out of the draw-tank.

[aunursa]

Given that, the disintegration of the world's children would likely have been interpreted as somehow also occurring at Israel's behest. That would give the rest of the world someone to blame

That's right, because in the real world, Israel doesn't get blamed enough. (In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the authors blame Israel for -- among many other things -- Palestinian terror attacks, the election and radicalism of Hamas, the war in Iraq, Iranian nuclear ambitions, Osama bin Laden, and American foreign aid to Egypt and Jordan.)

[Darkrose]

So, for example, the crisis of faith could precipitate your conversion from Talos to Lathlander -- for instance, after you watch a lightning storm destroy your beloved village, despite your fervent prayers.

Except if that's going to make you convert, you probably weren't a very devout Talosian anyway. Talos is Chaotic Evil. "Evil" in the D&D verse is defined as "selfishness" (except in Neverwinter Nights, where "evil" seems to equate to "rude and snarky"). So a truly devout worshipper of Talos would be dancing in the rain and laughing as the village was destroyed and all of those foolish sheep got what they deserved.

Any resemblance between Talos and the deity portrayed in LB is left as an exercise for the reader.

[cjmr]

I have to wonder if LH&J would consider a conversion from modernist Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism as getting closer or farther away from being an RTC.

Farther away.

[Ken]

Heaven is divided into levels. People who were LDS members when they were alive get to go to the best part. People who accepted the LDS church after they died get to go to another part, but still, way better than hell.

If only Rayford had know, he could have spent eternity in the next level up, eating steaming piles of produce drenched in ranch dressing. -- Hibryd

No, "Utah Salad" -- Jello with unidentifiable bits of fruit in it.

[LMM]

(In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the authors blame Israel for -- among many other things -- Palestinian terror attacks, the election and radicalism of Hamas, the war in Iraq, Iranian nuclear ambitions, Osama bin Laden, and American foreign aid to Egypt and Jordan.)

Um, not to start a flame war, but you say this as if it's supposed to come as a surprise.

[mcc]

Fred, just for the record, your links to "Anti-intellectualism in American Life" and "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" are broken.

[Joolya]

I had this later-to-come-out-as-gay-like-we-didn't-always-know-it friend in high school who swore he was a virgin because he "didn't like the feel of condoms".
Think about it ...
Buck.

Thanks again as always, Fred, for your interpid plumbing of the depths of American "literature".

[Joolya]

As a matter of interest, would an 'Ivy Leaguer' identify himself, in his own thoughts, in those terms, or would he think of himself as an old Harvardian or whatever?

"He was wearing my Harvard tie. Like, Oh sure, he went to Harvard!"