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

[Joolya]

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.

Doctor Science, your description was awesome.

[Mabus]

Regarding the proof of God's existence represented by the mass vanishings and the bloodless (okay, ashless) nuclear strike:

These days I pretty frequently come across atheists arguing that, faced with a miraculous event, they would rather doubt their senses and assume they were hallucinating than conclude that something supernatural was happening. I don't know if L&J are intelligent or well-read enough to know of or understand that perspective, but it does kinda dovetail with the continuing skepticism by a lot of the characters. Of course, that's one mighty big hallucination--you pretty much have to figure your whole life is now fake and you're really locked away in an institution, since everyone else is confirming your observations. But then, there obviously are such people.

[Spalanzani]

"Face it, Edward! It's not that we've all turned into teddy bears, it's that you've gone crazy!"-an old Gahan Wilson cartoon

[Mabus]

*snicker* Cute, Spalanzani.

But seriously--anyone whacked-out enough to see humans as having turned into teddybears is certainly capable of hallucinating that he doesn't hear you.

The way I see it, all I really have of the world is my own experience (including hearing other people's accounts of their experience). If I can't trust my senses, I'm screwed anyway, so I may as well assume that what I perceive is real no matter how crazy it seems.

[ako]

These days I pretty frequently come across atheists arguing that, faced with a miraculous event, they would rather doubt their senses and assume they were hallucinating than conclude that something supernatural was happening. I don't know if L&J are intelligent or well-read enough to know of or understand that perspective, but it does kinda dovetail with the continuing skepticism by a lot of the characters.

Not really, though. If I honestly thought I was having a hallucination, I'd notice and react to that (basically, I'd freak right out). Particularly if I thought I was so delusional as to be perceiving such an ongoing string of apparently impossible events. The characters here don't seem to doubt the reality of their perceptions; they just don't think much about what anything means. It's like "All the children have vanished. Huh, that was weird."

[MikhailBorg]

it does kinda dovetail with the continuing skepticism by a lot of the characters.

That's not skepticism. A skeptic is not necessarily a debunker of any and all supernatural claims, but simply one who asks for evidence to back them up - the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary evidence required.

Once you've had the Nuclear Nothing and the Great Transporter Accident, any skeptic would be forced to admit that Something Was Up, and it certainly matched up nicely with what those PMDs have been saying, even as he entertained other explanations as well.

[Painini]

Ken - orthodox Islam? Whaaa?
(Dead-on about the Utah salad, though.)

[Reynard]

What? Buck soul-search? From what I've read so far he'd have to search *for* his soul...

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.

Sounds like Hell to me. I can't imagine anything worse than to have to spend my afterlife being forced to listen to an eternal sermon on the glories of Mormonism in a church with all of the exits blocked and no opportunities for a bathroom break.

[Vermic]

Well there it is: Buck was "Ivy League educated" and therefore "knew better" than to believe in God.

But not only that: he's worldly. I suppose I'm late in realizing it, but it just now occurs to me that both of our unsaved protagonists -- the airline pilot and the globe-trotting reporter -- are well-traveled types, and I'm wondering if we're supposed to read anything in that. It might just be a way for L&J to facilitate the telling of their world-spanning adventure tale, of course; but might they also be making a statement about worldliness vs. faith? Something like, "Well, of course Buck and Rayford don't have much faith -- they've been out seeing the world, exposing themselves to other cultures and their ungodly ways, when they should have stayed at home with church and family!" If you're a good RTC, you stay home ... or at least you don't leave the USA.

I might be reading too much into this, but I get a bad vibe from the whole deal -- like they're saying that not only is education inimical to faith, but life experience is as well. That's a pretty harmful philosophy.

[Jon]

If you're a good RTC, you stay home ... or at least you don't leave the USA.

I think that travel is acceptable as long as you keep a closed mind and don't let a sense of worldliness creep in. If you travel to some distant land full of godless heathens you just have to make sure you're properly judgmental about everything you see and and that you insist on looking at everything through the lens of your RTC beliefs. More than likely - with this way of looking at things - travel will only confirm what you already knew about the world. The evidence of your actual senses won't be able to change your mind if you're a faithful enough RTC.
So really there's no need to go out and experience things, but there isn't necessarily any harm in it, provided you have the "correct" mind-set.
Besides, travel gives you the opportunity to proselytize to the unsaved masses, even if only by leaving Chick Tracts lying around.
(If you're ever in Mecca, be sure to let any praying Muslim you see know that he's worshipping a pagan moon god. I'm sure it'll go over great, just like it did in this Chick Tract.)

[Johnny Pez]

Another thing to bear in mind is that the Bible According To L&J says that most of the world's population continues to reject Real True Christianity even after the PMD God starts hanging up these huge neon signs saying HERE I AM, YOU DUMMIES. So of course L&J have to show people continuing to question the obviously supernatural nature of the Harmless Nuclear Attack and the Event.

[Tonio]

Iorwerth Thomas, thanks for the background. I admit I'm having trouble understanding the concept of metaphysics. I would be very concerned if it amounted to the unscientific "god of the gaps" idea.

My own position is that the physical universe and the mental universe are two separate entitles. Positivism would certainly apply to the former but not the latter. Other than that limited type of positivism, how would one defend against fundamentalist notions about Genesis, as embodied by the Creation Museum? From what I've seen, the issue there is not the age of the universe, but the hateful idea that humanity is to blame for all suffering.

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...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.

Doctor Science, I have a strong layman's interest in science but I'm no scientist. The concept of uncertainty you describe is a healthy and honest one - it's irresponsible to claim to know things that one does not or cannot know. I hear fundamentalists criticize science for not having answers to such questions as what led to the Big Bang or what was the exact origin of life. I suspect they simply cannot tolerate those questions not having answers. Is that what you had in mind when you mentioned uncertainty?

[Tonio]

Side-stepping the slashfic bait there...

I admit I didn't know what Fred was talking about. I had to go look up the definition of "slashfic," and then I had to re-read the paragraph. The homosexual implications of the paragraph completely escaped me on my first reading.

[Tonio]

These days I pretty frequently come across atheists arguing that, faced with a miraculous event, they would rather doubt their senses and assume they were hallucinating than conclude that something supernatural was happening.

The atheists I've encountered would conclude that the event probably has a natural cause that hasn't yet been discovered. But they wouldn't rule out the possibility of hallucination. That's my position as well even though I don't consider myself an atheist. One has to establish that the supernatural exists before one can consider whether an event has a supernatural cause. When faced with an event that cannot be explained through natural causes, the scientifically and intellectually responsible position is to admit that one doesn't know the cause. Using the supernatural to explain them is like Spielberg having Indiana Jones escape from the Nazis by creating a magic carpet out of nowhere.

[MikhailBorg]

Tonio, I'm reminded of what Swoopy said on a recent "Skepticality" - "If you can' prove it happened, it isn't supernatural."

In other words, if the Red Sea parts before us, and we can rule out all the explanations besides God, then God becomes an active participant in the Universe and, by definition, part of it; though a part we might never be able to explain or understand.

[Scott]

I'm assuming that this is because their target audience is turned off by any entertainment depicting sex.

Shame, that's what makes their Pure Evil so boring. Nicky Hilltop is just a career minded bureaucrat. A real Satan would be doing body shots out of a 12 year old hooker's twat. Evil is supposed to be more interesting (fiction-wise) than good, and these clowns even fail at that.

If you're a good RTC, you stay home ... or at least you don't leave the USA.

Unless it's to convert grateful brown people and sell them El Purpose Driven El Life-o books.

(If you're ever in Mecca, be sure to let any praying Muslim you see know that he's worshiping a pagan moon god. I'm sure it'll go over great, just like it did in this Chick Tract.)

(I know I shouldn't read Chick Tracts. I know this. So why do I do it anyway?)

Wow. Because there's nothing in the Christian tradition that one could read as originating in other (pagan) religions. I...I just don't get it.

[Ember Keelty]

"If I were Buck, living in that world and under those rules, I would convert to Tim LaHaye's brand of PMD Christianity. Duh."

If I were selfish, near-sighted Buck, sure. But if I were? I dunno. I'm not sure I could. Because that would mean accepting that most of the people I've ever known are damned, and that there's little I could do about it.

Honestly, my first impulse might be to look into this whole Antichrist business. If you're in Hell with the Devil, and the Devil wants out, then who's the bad guy? I'd figure that, hey, if he's against the Great Tyrant, it's possible he's on our side. And he's supposed the be God's Adversary – how could you be an "adversary" if you were too insignificant to matter? And yeah, Revelations ends with his defeat, but the Bible was written by God, right? So it's propaganda. And anyway, the Antichrist must know about all that. Why would he even bother if there were no chance it could go otherwise?

[Alex Scotts)]

The note about God's nuke-swatting and everyone's subsequent state of denial reminded me of Death Note, which takes the exact opposite direction. When criminals start dropping dead because Light Yagami wrote their names down in his book, people around the world can tell the supernatural is at work, and start worshiping Light (without knowing who he really is) as God.

This just makes me wonder how Death Note would work in the Left Behind universe, given the average intelligence there.

[Turcano]

In this context it reads a bit like Moses casually saying to the burning bush, "I've never considered myself religious ..."

"...But I am deeply spiritual."

[Shannon]

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.

As someone who has been both an "Ivy Leaguer" and at Oxford, I can say that I don't identify myself as either in my own thoughts. Rather, if I am talking to someone about my education, I would say, "I went to Cornell University, and Linacre College at Oxford" (only because most people have never heard of Linacre, even people in Oxford). The only times when I ever explained I was an Ivy Leaguer was when someone had a question about what the Ivy League was.

Then again, I would never think, "Because I was Cornell educated!" Where you were educated really has nothing to do with it. What the hell is the use of a good education if you aren't going to use your brain? Just look at what good W's Yale education has gotten us.

[Spalanzani]

Alex Scotts): "This just makes me wonder how Death Note would work in the Left Behind universe, given the average intelligence there."

I think it's fairly safe to conclude that there wouldn't be the slighest chance of Light getting caught. Looking at Buck, I shudder to think of what the Left Behind world's L would be like (the Greatest Three-in-one Detective of All Time!).

[Cyllan]

Posted by: | Nov 09, 2007 at 10:09 PM

*sigh*

That was me.

[shryockke]

In Left Behind: The Kids, the absolute cut-off age of innocence is twelve. All children under the age of twelve (including all unborn children) are raptured. Twelve year olds who have not professed are left behind. One of the central characters of the kids series has just turned twelve.
In the Kids series, the character who has just turned twelve is Ryan. His parents are not raptured. They both die because of accidents caused by the rapture. His father died in a plane crash because the pilot was raptured. His mother died in a car accident. His parents were not professed Christians so Ryan must deal with knowing that they are in hell while the other child characters only have to deal with the fact that their parents are in heaven, thus still living somewhere.
And, no, Hibryd, you really do not want to read the kids series. It is truly even worse than the adult series because all the complicated ideas presented in the adult series, no matter how badly, are simplified and made worse in the kids version.

[rm]

On being well-travelled:

Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

[Abelardus]

You mentioned Origen in the "sexual=evil" tangent; I however immediately thought of Augustine of Hippo -- I have always had it out for him. His interpretation of sex as somehow inherently sinful, and the followers of his interpretation pondering whether enjoying sex was a minor sin or damned you forever: sorry, my 21st-century mind finds that ... words can't describe it.

I'll say one thing in the Hippo's defense, however: LaJenkins blames him for somehow "distorting" the truth of Christianity by saying it should be interpreted spiritually; when Christians have been doing that long before Augustine. And of course it's just another attempt to say that Dispensationalism was the true faith all along. Talk about retcon.

Anyway, keep at it, Fred!

[Abelardus]

Interpreting scripture spiritually, I meant; sorry.

I particularly enjoy the racial considerations of Chick Publishing:

"Who is Allah?
Adapted for black audiences.
The message of "Allah Had No Son" redrawn for black readers."

Tonio,
I assumed that Dr. Science was referring to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
The basics are this: Newton wrote down the universal laws of motion based on direct obersvation of the world around him. Taking routine observations procures enough data to accurately predict, say, the positions of planets at any given time in the future.

However at the atomic level, not observable through a microscope, Newton's laws can not predict the location of electrons around an atom. Until the observation is made, the location is not known, only the probable area in which the electron is usually located (the area of it's orbit, not it's exact location).

[Cactus Wren]

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?

Actually RTCs of the LaJenk stripe tend, when confronted with the “people who’ve never heard of Jesus” problem, to fall back onto Romans 1:20-21: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” This, apparently, means that EVERYBODY really knows, not only that there’s a God, but that there’s One Specific God And Only One; so if you claim to believe in (say) the Hindu pantheon as you were taught by your parents, or if you claim to believe in the Indonesian tribal gods that are the only gods you’ve ever heard of, you have consciously and knowingly decided to believe things you know to be lies.

Doctor Science, I have a strong layman's interest in science but I'm no scientist. The concept of uncertainty you describe is a healthy and honest one - it's irresponsible to claim to know things that one does not or cannot know. I hear fundamentalists criticize science for not having answers to such questions as what led to the Big Bang or what was the exact origin of life. I suspect they simply cannot tolerate those questions not having answers.

This reminds me of the all-too-frequent creationist decrial of evolution theory: “Science can’t even answer Simple Questions like ‘How did the first living things arise’ or ‘Why are there two sexes?’” Leaving aside the definitions of “even” and “simple” in this context, I’ve always thought that the answer “We don’t know” was not only perfectly acceptable, but was at certain stages the only acceptable answer – because it’s from the dread “We don’t know” that all science arises. Because after “We don’t know” comes, “How can we find out?”

OTOH, the creationists’ only answer to such “simple” questions is apparently, “Goddidit, now STOP ASKING QUESTIONS.”

[MichaelR]

That reminds me. In what would be a delicious slice of irony if it didn't make me choke on bile and rage, one of the Google banner ads for this post was for Ben Stein's movie Expelled, which is about how "Big Science keeps new ideas out of the classroom."

Clicking the link to see what these "new ideas" confirmed my fear that, yes, "Intelligent Design" (better known as "Creationism in a lab coat," or if you want to be less polite, "STEAMING BULLSHIT") was one of the subjects.

There was probably more, but I get randomly pissed off at enough stuff without actively seeking stuff that makes me want to club people with a science textbook.

[DonaQuixote]

I think we're making a mistake assuming that there's a consistent standard within PMD Evangelicalism or even within individual PMD Evangelicals. I had a friend in college who got very involved with such a group (which was also pentecostal and tried to exorcise her depression). When she converted they had her throw away everything she owned that was not "of God," including a jade carving that her Godparents had bought her on a trip to China. The carving was of a gazelle or somesuch completely innocuous creature (unless the horns were somehow seen as inherently problematic?). On a side note, they also made her toss her CD of Handel's Messiah and a beautiful poster of the earth titled "Genesis," and some stuffed penguins she had tacked to her wall (because they thought she had "crucified" the penguins, see).

Point being, she was under the impression that all foreign stuff was inherently suspect (a highly upsetting notion for her, seeing as she is Korean and all), until she saw the home of the assistant pastor who took the gazelle from her. Place was brim full of decorative pieces from trips the lady had taken around the world.

So apparently travel is only bad if you haven't yet mastered the art of extreme cognitive dissonance.

[DonaQuixote]

Meant that to say "consistent standard for travel."

[Ryan Ferneau]

If I honestly thought I was having a hallucination, I'd notice and react to that (basically, I'd freak right out). Particularly if I thought I was so delusional as to be perceiving such an ongoing string of apparently impossible events. The characters here don't seem to doubt the reality of their perceptions; they just don't think much about what anything means. It's like "All the children have vanished. Huh, that was weird."

I've been thinking about this... Clearly the world of Left Behind is fundamentally different from our own, even in the beginning. For people to gloss over such reality-shattering miracles, these sorts of Events must be happening with such regularity that everybody has learned to deal with them calmly, move on as though nothing's wrong, and try to forget anything strange happened... even though strange things are ALWAYS happening every year. "Hey, remember back in '91, when all the air in the world turned into WOOD? Boy, that was a doozy!" Buck, then, is just one of the people whose brains haven't fully adapted to this fact of life and still have a faint urge to question why such absurd and impossible things happen.

Now I admit this doesn't really explain why all the characters are overreacting to the trip-and-die guys. But, maybe the major miracles bring along a few minor miracles around the same time, and people have made a game out of trying to find them. The harmlessly exploding nukes came right after someone found a magic potion that turned sand into soil, right? So there's got to be SOMETHING that comes along with The Sudden Disappearance of Certain People, and some folks have it pegged as the trip-and-die guys!

[Freelance_Physicist]

I think I have a simpler way of expressing the change from 19th to 20th century science (especially physics).

In the latter half of the 19th century, scientists thought that they were on the verge of completing physics. That is, they would have a complete description of everything that occurred in the universe (Maxwell's Equations for electricy, magnetism and light; Newton's Laws for gravity and all forces acting on masses). James Clerk Maxwell (the same Maxwell as above) predicted that the only remaining job of future scientists would be to measure the fundamental constants of the universe (speed of light, charge of an electron, etc.) to a few more decimal places of accuracy.

Scientists thought that they were on the verge of achieving the goal of revealing absolute Truth about the way the universe worked. Unfortunately for them, quantum mechanics and relativity saw fit to end that dream.

Twentieth-century physics is no longer concerned with discovering Truth--that is, a perfect theory of everything in the universe. To show that some candidate theory constituted Truth (the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything), one would have to possess perfect knowledge of the universe. Perfect knowledge is impossible since perfect instruments of measurement cannot be built. There is always some uncertainty in the values of any measurement.

In fact, the situation is even worse than Anon@12:23 describes. Not only does quantum mechanics specify that one cannot measure the position of a particle to arbitrary accuracy, quantum mechanics says that the particle does not even have a definite position. It's not that we can't access perfectly accurate information about the universe. Such information doesn't exist.

In light of this, modern scientists speak of building a model of the universe that accurately approximates what the universe does. As new experiments and observations are performed, theses models get replaced by new ones.* However, none of these models will never attain the status of Truth. Such a concept no longer exists in science. In fact, physicists are annoyed at how well our best models (the Standard Model of Particle Physics and General Relativity) predict the outcome of experiments (something absurd like 12 to 20 decimal places of accuracy). It's hard to guess where to look for the next best theory.

Luckily, there's dark matter and dark energy--the stuff that makes up 96% of our universe. And we have no idea what this stuff is! *rubs hands with glee*

* Of course, these theories of everything are asymptotically approaching 42.

[DonaQuixote]

One more thing about that particular fun-filled campus ministry - I attended a few of their meetings years before these things happened to my buddy, and the first time I walked in they handed me a Bible to keep (apparently not understanding that many of the rest of us already own one), and proceeded to ask me if I'd "ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth" and then tell me stories about him as if I had never heard anything about Christianity ever in my life (despite my being a religion major, among many other things that would predispose me towards prior knowledge of Jesus and Christianity - like, I dunno, being conscious!). The whole exchange came off to me like what you'd expect hearing someone ask you if you'd ever heard of their second-cousin Vito from Newark, as if they didn't think they were speaking of someone I was likely to have heard about, just someone who I would figure from their tone of voice was very very important and could have me seriously injured if I disagreed with them about anything.

The impression I came away with was that this subculture really does think the rest of us are morons. Either that, or they figure we're as insular and ignorant of people different from ourselves as some of them are.

It was also a stunning thought to me that it never crossed any of their minds that I might already be a Christian. A few dozen of them on a campus of tens of thousands of students, and they figured if I was saved they'd already know me.

[Cactus Wren]

DonaQuixote, they've been programmed to believe that there are only two possible reasons for anyone not to be their preferred flavor of Christian: either you're irredeemably Evil (which you apparently did not strike them as being), or you just don't know.

Think of the scene in a typical Chick tract:

"Mr. Spencer, I'm sure the thought of your daughter dying breaks your heart, right?"

"Of course!"
"Well, God was even more heartbroken when He sent His Son from heaven to die on earth."
"Why did God have to do THAT?"
"Because all people are sinners and God would never allow sin to enter heaven. Because of our sin, we ALL deserve hell. The only way man could ever get into heaven was for someone sinless to die in his place and pay the penalty for his sin."
"Who could that be?"
"That someone was God the Son, Jesus Christ. Three days later, Jesus rose from the dead, and returned to heaven."
"You mean Jesus died for US!"
"That's exactly right!"

The late Madeleine L'Engle, in one of her books, cited a breakfast-table argument about baseball between her husband and their then ten-year-old son: "But Daddy, you just don't understand!" "It's not that I don't understand -- I just don't agree with you." "If you don't agree with me you don't understand!" That's where such people are coming from: if you're not one of Us, it's because you don't understand, and as soon as we (to borrow Goldwyn of Britain's phrase) explain it at you, then you will understand which necessarily entails realizing that we are right.

[ako]

It was also a stunning thought to me that it never crossed any of their minds that I might already be a Christian. A few dozen of them on a campus of tens of thousands of students, and they figured if I was saved they'd already know me.

When I was in the Philippines, I saw a number of missionaries have a similar reaction; they'd come determined to spread the gospel to the heathen foreigners, often perversely buoyed by the tragic situation with the Burnhams (apparently for some people, the prospect of being killed while out doing mission work seems genuinely appealing), and wind up one of the majority-Catholic parts of the Philippines.

Which lead to a lot of very polite people explaining 1) they already considered themselves Christian, 2) they did know who Jesus was, and were allowed to read the Bible, and 3) they weren't interested in becoming the 'right' kind of Christian, thanks all the same. A lot of the missionaries were just not mentally equipped for the non-Chick Tract reactions.

Speaking of which, I'm almost sad that the most disturbing Chick Tract ever has been taken down. It's called Lisa. It's utterly horrifying, but makes the logical implications of Jack Chick's "magic words are all" approach to theology wonderfully clear.

[Spalanzani]

Cactus Wren:
"Mr. Spencer, I'm sure the thought of your daughter dying breaks your heart, right?"
" Of course! "
"Well, God was even more heartbroken when He sent His Son from heaven to die on earth."
"Why did God have to do THAT ?"
"Because all people are sinners and God would never allow sin to enter heaven. Because of our sin, we ALL deserve hell. The only way man could ever get into heaven was for someone sinless to die in his place and pay the penalty for his sin."
"Who could that be?"
"That someone was God the Son, Jesus Christ. Three days later, Jesus rose from the dead, and returned to heaven."
"You mean Jesus died for US!"
"That's exactly right!"
==============================

"And how do you know this?"
"It's all in the Bible!!"
" The Bible? "
"Yes, you can learn all about it right here!"
"You mean that strange paper block is the Bible?"
"Yes, this kind of block is called a book ! When you open it up, you can see stylized characters that signify abstract concepts!"
" Amazing! "

[Wesley Parish]

Abelardus, His interpretation of sex as somehow inherently sinful[...]

Kinda makes God's command in Genesis to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, kind of suspect, doesn't it?

"Sex is sin, and sin is in"
Phrase I heard at High School; never believed in it.

"My father was a man, my mother was a woman - no wonder I'm so confused!" Ashleigh Brilliant (who deserves to be quoted more often!)

"LaHaye and Jenkins have placed their cut-off for childish innocence at roughly the point of puberty."

Which makes one wonder about the child soldiers of Africa, doesn't it? And the child prostitutes worldwide ... and the child of the famous (grim) joke, who killed his mother and his father, and then pled for clemency on the grounds that he was an orphan ....

A deficient theory of mind is at fault, here. The best comment on children's faults that I've heard, is that "children don't lack for motive, just opportunity". (I've forgotten who said that. ;)

[Selcaby]

Jon: (If you're ever in Mecca, be sure to let any praying Muslim you see know that he's worshipping a pagan moon god. I'm sure it'll go over great, just like it did in this Chick Tract.)

This Chick tract linked from the first one is even more revealing. The devout Muslim meets a Christian at medical school who tells him The Truth, and he rejects it because "My family would disown me." Er, not because there's no reason for him to believe this random guy above everything his family, school and mosque have taught him? I don't understand why these chicks think failing to be convinced by their rhetoric is such a crime. Like someone said, if the medical school guy really wanted to save his friend's soul, he should have kept quiet.

[Iorwerth Thomas]

I admit I'm having trouble understanding the concept of metaphysics. I would be very concerned if it amounted to the unscientific "god of the gaps" idea.

It's not really. What I tend to mean by metaphysics is 'how things -- in the broadest possible sense of the word -- hang together -- in the broadest possible sense of the word'. (What the moral philosopher Mary Midgely calls the conceptual plumbing. Most positivists (logical and otherwise) wound up constructing a fair bit of this, which made their strenuous denials as to what they were doing rather hilarious [1].) When you're constructing a scientific model, at some point you're going to either implicitly or explicitly make use of an assumption about how the universe works that may not be empirically testable (though it may be rationally justifiable) -- this assumption may even be embedded in the theoretical language that you're using to construct the model [2]. These metaphysical bits aren't very strongly determining -- in fact they can be slotted into sufficiently flexible pre-existing metaphysics (say a theistic or atheistic ones) in different ways, which is handy, as it means that a wacky theistic physicist like me can talk with my atheistic colleagues without much difficulty.

[1] Popular science is really bad for illegitimately smuggling in metaphysics in this fashion; positivism didn't really die, it just migrated to areas where the intellectual predation was less fierce.

[2] That's actually a bit misleading, since a given theory can be read as being compatible with many different metaphysical underpinnings [3]. However, when constructing the theory, one will usually choose a specific one.

[3] Newtonian and Hamiltonian mechanics are examples of this -- they describe the same things and can be shown to be mathematically equivalent (you can derive the laws of motion from the Hamiltonian, and vice versa), but they carry slightly different implications about the nature of things.

[car]

Was "Lisa" the Chick tract about D&D, where she was led by the elder, sexy, and presumably lesbian game master to give her soul over to Satan in the course of playing the game?

[Angelika]

Vermic: I might be reading too much into this, but I get a bad vibe from the whole deal -- like they're saying that not only is education inimical to faith, but life experience is as well. That's a pretty harmful philosophy.

I think you read that quite correctly. - Life experience has the nasty habit of making people think, even more so than education. I guess, it is very difficult to go through a traumatic experience, or meet admirable people with fundamentally different views and life styles, and not having to reevaluate one's faith. For people like LH/J with a very narrow definition of 'faith' any reevaluation of one's belief would signify losing faith all together.

Selcaby The devout Muslim meets a Christian at medical school who tells him The Truth, and he rejects it because "My family would disown me." Er, not because there's no reason for him to believe this random guy above everything his family, school and mosque have taught him?

Actually, that argument is not all that weird: I do know a some young Christians from (mostly Buddhist backgrounds) who experienced massive rejection by their families, once they had become Christians. Luckily, they were not disowned, but the fall from Daddy's favorite daughter to the black sheep of the family can't have been fun. - There is definitively a strong component of 'what would my family think?' that mingles into any decision of adopting a new faith or particularly of dropping an old one valued by the family. It works the other way around as well: I know enough agnostic people who have their children baptized, just so the grandparents would not be up-set at the realization that they have had long since lost their faith.

[Reverend Ref]

LaHaye and Jenkins have placed their cut-off for childish innocence at roughly the point of puberty.

It just occurred to me that this actually might be correct. There's a scene in "God, the Devil and Bob" (sorry, don't know how to do the link thing) where Bob's son can see God. Normally, Bob is the only one who can see him. When Bob asks about this, God responds, "The Devil and I have an agreement: I get the kids until they're 13; after that, it's his turn."

That, of course, presumes L&J actually ever watched this short-lived sitcom. Which, btw, has better theology than anything those two could come up with.

Regarding the short discussion about miracles (the Baptist dude moving south and the RTC buying the wrong car): Are these miracles? No. There might be some hand-of-God thing there, or some guidance from the Holy Spirit.

Was it a miracle that I attended seminary? No.
Was it a miracle that I forgot to lock my car in downtown and none of my portable valuables were stolen? Maybe.

Was God's hand in telling the RTC that she bought the wrong car? No, she's just whacked.

[Left Behind: The Kids] is truly even worse than the adult series because all the complicated ideas presented in the adult series, no matter how badly, are simplified . . ."

You mean they simplify these books even more???

Oh

Sweet

Jesus.....

[Selcaby]

Angelika, I forgot about that. Yes, disapproval from your family is a very strong reason not to change the way you think. Even in my family - I'm an atheist child of atheist parents, of whom one was brought up Jewish and the other was not - I wouldn't be cast out, but I'd expect to be ridiculed and heavily reasoned with if I became a religious believer. It's just the Chick tracts' unshakeable belief that their Truth inherently sounds better than all the others to any sensible person that gets to me.

[Selcaby]

And to my Jewish grandmother we tend to keep quiet about what we actually believe. No point in upsetting her.

[Jos]

Was "Lisa" the Chick tract about D&D, where she was led by the elder, sexy, and presumably lesbian game master to give her soul over to Satan in the course of playing the game?

No, that was "Dark Dungeons", if I'm not mistaken. That one wasn't that actually that disturbing when compared to other tracts. Mostly it was just hilariously disconnected from anything resembling reality.

[Chan]

Car:

"Was "Lisa" the Chick tract about D&D, where she was led by the elder, sexy, and presumably lesbian game master to give her soul over to Satan in the course of playing the game?"

No, that was "Dark Dungeons." I have read it. It's not so great.

I've never heard of this "Lisa." Can someone give me the gory details?

Darkrose:

"'Evil' in the D&D verse is defined as 'selfishness.'"

Well, in a broad sense. It's the sort of selfishness that leads one to make deals with devils and demons, take glee in gratuitous pain for others, and make human sacrifices. The exact definition, and what gets you that much-renowned "Chaotic Evil" title, is something that has been hotly debated on chat groups and bulletin boards since the beginning of the Internet. I bet you, back in the late '70s, you could find some long email chain titled "Would I lose my paladinhood for doing this?!"

Which brings me to tie into the Original Post, here:

There isn't even any entertaining evil going on here. Nicky Mons Olympus ought to be conducting secret midnight rituals and sacrifices to Satan in order to keep his mind whammy potent and his Babel Fish alive. He's just been complicit in a couple three car bombings; at the very least he should have set the bombs himself. He could use his mind whammy to keep out of trouble! "I am not the car bomber you're looking for!"

If it turned out, later in the books, that every child under 12, including the unborn, had not ascended to Heaven, but been snatched by Satan and ferreted away in Nicky White Plume Mountain's volcano lair, there to grow into his elite Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, feed his twelve dozen vampire mistresses, or be the subject of blood-drenched full-moon Satan orgies, that would be far more interesting.

Then the heroes could get down to some ass-kicking. But then I guess the heroes would not be Ray and Buck.

I have heard tell that James Fenimore Cooper wrote the Leatherstocking books after complaining that the dime novels he'd been reading were crap, and he could write better than that.

Please God, save me from stubborn competition with L&J! Just because I can write better than them, doesn't mean I want to waste my time trying!

"Was "Lisa" the Chick tract about D&D, where she was led by the elder, sexy, and presumably lesbian game master to give her soul over to Satan in the course of playing the game?"

No, that's Dark Dungeons, which is completely hilarious and, to the best of my knowledge, still in print.

If the "Lisa" tract is the one I'm thinking it is, well... it's about child sexual abuse, and how Finding Jesus And Accepting Him As Your Personal Savior (Comes With A Handy Carrying Case and 10-Year Warranty!) will magically make it all better, so that the abused girl and her no-longer-pedophile father can be reunited and Live Happily Ever After. Gag.

[interloper]

"Lisa" is listed and described on this page, together with links to scans if you really want to read it.