L.B.: Martyr envy

Or, Tribulation is a force that gives us meaning.

Left Behind, pp. 418-421

Meanwhile, in the suburbs outside of Chicago, a warm, domestic scene with the remaining members of the Steele family. Newly converted Chloe Steele voraciously reads in her dear departed mother's Bible and her father, immensely pleased, sits watching her. But not at all in a creepy way:

Rayford Steele was a happy as he had been since his own decision to receive Christ. To see Chloe smiling, to see her hungry to read Irene's Bible, to be able to pray with her and talk about everything together was more than he had dreamed of. "One thing we need to do," he said, "is to get you your own Bible. You're going to wear that one out."

"I want to join that core group of yours," she said. "I want to get all that stuff from Bruce firsthand."

Unlike her father, Chloe is at least able to stay awake while reading the Bible. We're not told what it is, specifically, that she's reading. Revelation, one assumes, and parts of Daniel but not the other parts. And little snippets from Ezekiel and Zechariah, the odd-numbered verses of Matthew 24, every third word in John's second and third epistles, and carefully redacted chapter fragments from 1 & 2 Thessalonians. For premillennial dispensationalists, the rest is just padding that doesn't apply to our "dispensation."

The PMD prophecy enthusiasts really would "wear out" a Bible if they tried to read one the way they claim it should be read. All that tearing out and reshuffling and re-editing on the fly would be tough on the binding. It's not really possible to pick up the physical book and read it this way. Even a Scofield Reference Bible, with its footnotes indicating all the arbitrary cross-references, would exceed the capacity of a ten-fingered reader to keep track of all the various and disparate passages it tries to stitch together as an allegedly single, secret narrative.

This is why the authors can tell us about Chloe hungrily reading the Bible, but they can't get more specific. It's also why Chloe herself realizes that she'll never be able to understand the End Times Checklist simply from reading the Bible on her own -- she needs Bruce's help to read it with the PMD decoder ring.

The telling word here is "firsthand." Bruce's interpretive overlay -- "all this stuff" -- is the "firsthand," primary source. The Bible is secondary at best.

It's also strange here that Irene's Bible seems to be regarded only as just another Bible. Here is an artifact of the wife and mother they have lost. It is a thing she treasured, that she held every day. Its margins are filled with notes in her own handwriting. My mother's Bible is not like any of the other Bibles, or any of the other books, I own. it is not merely a sacred text, but a sacred edition. It's impossible for me to read that volume without thinking of the hours my mother spent with it, of the prayers she prayed for me during the years she spent in those pages. To read that Bible is to have the sense, both sad and comforting, that I am somehow reading it with her.

So it's just alien-seeming that Rayford and Chloe seem to be treating Irene's Bible as indistinguishable from some Gideon edition pinched from a hotel room. It's alien-seeming, too, that they can sit together in this house and not be reminded, constantly, of Irene and Raymie. Yet there's no sense here of their presence or their absence.

I can't help but think of John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire when reading these scenes, and of the sadness that pervades that book due to the death of mother and poor Egg.¹ The authors of Left Behind seem to think they've already dealt with that sadness, that this sorrow and loss could be dealt with in a scene or two, allowing their characters and their checklist plot to move forward without ever looking back. There's never the sense here that sadness and loss linger. In Left Behind, sorrow doesn't float.

"The only part that bothers me," Chloe says as she wraps up her vague Bible study, "is that it sounds like things are going to get worse."

That's a major theme of LaHaye's prophecy scheme: "Things are going to get worse." This is the trajectory here in history -- so anyone who says different, or who tries to make things different, is likely evil. And it's even more the trajectory of the post-history "tribulation" period in which Chloe finds herself.

Late in the afternoon they dropped in on Bruce, who confirmed Chloe's view. "I'm thrilled to welcome you into the family," he said, "but you're right. God's people are in for dark days. Everybody is. I've been thinking and praying about what we're supposed to do as a church between now and the Glorious Appearing."

The "Glorious Appearing" is what LaHaye calls the Second Coming of Jesus. He can't call it that because, in his way of seeing things, it's really the third coming, with the Rapture being the second. PMDs have Jesus returning and re-returning to Earth so often that it'd make sense for him to spring for the EZ-Pass.

A pastor thinking about "what we're supposed to do as a church" might not seem unusual, but for LaHaye-types it is. From their perspective, "what we're supposed to do as a church" right now is wait for the Rapture, which could occur at any moment.

It could even happen ... riiiiiight ... now!

...

(Checks watch. Looks around.)

...

No? OK, maybe ... wait for it ... now!

...

Hmm, nope. OK, let's try again. ...

That pretty much is the PMD notion of the church's business agenda between Christ's ascension and the (first) second coming. There's plenty, of course, that the church and its members shouldn't be doing -- dancing, drinking, sneaking peaks at Playboy like the pre-conversion Bruce Barnes did. As their truncated version of James 1:27 reads, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: ... [snip] ... to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." The only thing they have to do besides sit around and wait for Jesus to come back is evangelism -- which as far as they can figure means recruiting others to also, um, sit around and wait.² Not terribly inspiring.

Bruce Barnes, however, knows that the second coming 2.1 won't be happening at any second. He has some time to kill before the (second) second coming, so he has to figure out something for his flock to be doing for the next seven years. At least for those few who manage to live that long.

Chloe wanted to know all about that, so Bruce showed her from the Bible why he believed Christ would appear in seven years, at the end of the Tribulation. "Most Christians will be martyred or die from war, famine, plagues or earthquakes," he said.

Chloe smiled. "This isn't funny," she said, "but maybe I should have thought of that before I signed on. You're going to have trouble convincing people to join the cause with that in your sign-up brochure."

Bruce grimaced. "Yes, but the alternative is worse. We all missed out the first time around. We could be in heaven right now if we'd listened to our loved ones. Dying a horrible death during this period is not my preference, but I'd sure rather do it this way than while I was still lost. Everyone else is in danger of death, too. The only difference is, we have one more way to die than they do."

"As martyrs."

"Right."

Ooooh, martyrs! How exciting!

And here we come to the vicarious appeal of these books for American evangelicals. The perilous Tribulation that Bruce Barnes describes is frightening, yes, but at least it's not as dull as the uninspiring sit-around-and-wait, do-nothing existence they've come to believe is their lot in life here in history.

Here in Left Behind they can reimagine the Christian life as an exciting adventure. It's similar to the speakers we had on youth group retreats back in high school. They would tell these thrilling stories of Christians who were persecuted for their faith -- first century believers or 20th-century Christians in China or behind the Iron Curtain. The stories would reach a crescendo where the persecuted faithful were forced to choose between denying their faith and certain death. "What would you do?" the speakers would ask. And then, with every head bowed and every eye closed, we were given the opportunity to come forward yet again to re-re-dedicate our lives to Christ.³

I don't know whether those speakers realized the secret envy we had when listening to those stories. The lives of those martyrs seemed so much more exciting and meaningful than our own did. Plus there was something weirdly appealing about a one-time, one-question, pass-fail test in place of the tedious day-after-day. In our imaginations, at least, the martyr's egress sounded almost easier than the pilgrim's progress (as somebody once said, the hardest thing in this world is to live in it.) We imagined that, like the grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," we could've been good kids if it had been somebody there to shoot us every minute of our lives.

This is something Christopher Hedges captures in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning:⁴

The eruption of conflict instantly reduces the headache and trivia of daily life. The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. War, in times of malaise and desperation, is a potent distraction. ...

War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.

Which is quite similar to one of my favorite passages from Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman:

What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war -- or the end of the world.

The intended readers of Left Behind are waiting for the end of the world. Or for war. Either one would do. Either one would seem more meaningful than the headache and trivia of daily life that constitutes what they now think of as "discipleship." And Left Behind lets them experience both, at least vicariously.

That sense of excitement, of how much more thrilling this would all be, can be seen in the next paragraph:

Rayford sat listening, aware of how his world had changed in such a short time. It had not been that long ago that he had been a respected pilot at the top of his profession, living a phony life, a shell of a man. Now here he was, talking secretly in the office of a local church with his daughter and a young pastor, trying to determine how they would survive seven years of tribulation following the Rapture of the church.⁵

The "phony ... shell of a man" refers to Steele's life before his conversion, but it's hard not to think of the authors and their readers relating to that as a description of their own mundane lives when contrasted with the thrilling adventure of life as God's guerrillas during the Tribulation.

Bruce tells the Steeles about a new core group he has decided to form (not to be confused with the original core group, of which Rayford is already a member):

"I've also been thinking about a smaller group within the core. I'm looking for people of unusual intelligence and courage. I don't mean to disparage the sincerity of others in the church, especially those on the leadership team. But some of them are timid, some old, many infirm. I've been praying about sort of an inner circle of people who want to do more than just survive."

Here they are, just nine days after the Rapture has caused them to start rebuilding the church from scratch, and already they've begun creating hierarchies and inner circles. Give them another week and they'll break out the robes and funny hats.

"... It's one thing to hide in here, studying, figuring out what's going on so we can keep from being deceived. ... But doesn't part of you want to jump into the battle?"

Rayford was intrigued but not sure. Chloe was more eager. "A cause," she said. "Something not just to die for but to live for."

"Yes!"

"A group, a team, a force," Chloe said.

"You've got it. A force."

Chloe's eyes were bright with interest. Rayford loved her youth and her eagerness to commit to a cause that to her was only hours old. "And what is it you call this period?" she asked.

"The Tribulation," Bruce said.

"So your little group inside the group, a sort of Green Berets, would be your Tribulation force."

"Tribulation Force," Bruce said, looking at Rayford and rising to scribble it on his flip chart. "I like it."

The authors' only regret about this passage was that they couldn't get Tyndale House to bind in pre-order cards for Left Behind II: Tribulation Force right here on this page.

Once you get beyond the overweening self-congratulation and general awfulness of that passage (take your time, I had to go out and run some errands and then come back to it), it's interesting to note that Bruce and Chloe, in searching for "something not just to die for but to live for" settle on "a group, a team, a force" and not a cause, a purpose, a mission. Bruce attempts to imagine a cause or a mission that this "force" would be fighting for, but the best he can manage is to imagine what it would be fighting against:

"When it becomes obvious who the Antichrist is, the false prophet, the evil, counterfeit religion, we'll have to oppose them, speak out against them."

So again they aren't for Christ, they're anti-Antichrist, which again is far from the same thing. The former really could be "something to live for." The latter might be something to die for, but more likely is merely something to kill for. That tends to be the problem when you define yourself in terms of what you're against instead of what you're for. That also tends to be the problem, as Hedges notes,⁶ with relying on war as your source for meaning.

The authors, fortunately, are only tangentially interested in giving readers something to kill for. Their main interest is just in supplying enough of the tantalizing possibility of such vicarious excitement that readers will go out to buy the sequel. And what was that sequel called again? Oh, right:

"You still want to be part of the Tribulation Force?"

Rayford nodded and smiled at his daughter's firm reply. "I wouldn't miss it."

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

¹ So much so that I've come to picture a young Seth Green as Raymie. Jodie Foster as Chloe wouldn't work, but Jodie as meta-Chloe would be perfect.

² And, yes, thereby also to escape Hell. If what you're being saved to seems pointless then what you're being saved from has to be especially vivid. My favorite picture of Hell is the gray, isolating London of C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. Lewis' vision of Hell is difficult to distinguish from life in the church as envisioned by the PMD crowd.

³ Eventually I started keeping track of the number of times I had done this. It seemed absurd to me and I couldn't help but think it would look the same to God. So I decided that I was done with that. No more re-re-re-dedications. This was considered bad form, since the pattern for these speakers was first to invite the unsaved to get saved, then to invite the already saved to re-dedicate themselves, then to continue gradually widening the invitation until everyone had left their seats and gathered down front. I was never fully able to convince my youth pastor that, for me, not going forward was more important, more meaningful, than doing so for the umpteenth time. He was deeply worried about me every time we had one of those altar calls and I wound up being one of only two people who didn't go forward. (I never asked, and so never learned, what her story was.)

⁴ Thank you, Amanda, for getting me this. If book recommendations come on a scale from one to 10, consider this an 11: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

⁵ I've written before about one of my favorite movie plot formulas -- the Innocent Man Embroiled in an International Scheme. Part of the appeal of that formula is something similar to what Hedges and Percy describe -- crisis shatters, and thus enlivens and gives meaning to, the mundane. That paragraph about Rayford presents what is probably the most inept and least appealing variation of this formula that I've ever seen.

⁶ Seriously, go read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Comments

[Cynic Sage]

"Screw the rules! I have faith!"

"I'm the Greatest Reporter of All Time...in America."

MY HAIR is laying down its life for the sake of the Gospel.

[Reileen]

Hey, Tea's dialogue would work really well, too. All you have to do is replace "friendship" with "Jesus."

So the design that she drew on Yugi's, Joey's, Tristan's, and her own hand would be a cross, not a smiley face, eh?

"NO! NOT THE JESUS SPEECH!"

...now I'm getting the image of Captain Planet crossed with L.B.-style theology. I think I need to go sleep.

[Jack Bishop]

It's one of those pervasive problems that authentic Good-Doing is simply not sexy, nor, for the most part, attention-grabbing. Nobody daydreams about volunteering in a soup kitchen, or even (recognizing that daydreams are often on a grander scale) of organizing a major charitable organization, or making a bundle of money wherewith to perform philanthropy.

One of the more revealing places for this, IMO, are in games which try to give you a moral choice. The original Escape Velocity had this problem, definitely -- you could spend hours and hours shuttling cargo and escorting traders and the like to raise your alignment maybe 20 points -- but that doesn't advance the plot or your ship nearly as much as a single act of piracy (or, aiding the rebels, but, still, shooting at things) which completely cancels that alignment gain.

Alternatively, a comment from the RPG world, in the form of the Tome of Fiends (which says several intelligent things about interpretations of morality, some of which are even applicable outside of D&D):

[t]he inverse of Evil is not Good. It really takes a lot less harm to be Evil than it takes aid to be Good. If you fix twenty people's roofs, you're Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat your neighbor's daughter, you're Jimmy the Cannibal - and no additional carpentry assistance will change that. This is why the Book of Exalted Deeds is such an unsatisfying read... you can't just take the material in the Book of Vile Darkness and multiply by negative one to get Good.

Here in the real world, people actually seem to be able to justify "doing the same sorts of things the bad guys do, only we're the good guys" as heroic, which is kind of sad.

[Izzy]

Jeff: Fucking *thank you*.

Evangelical fundamentalist atheists are just as bad, at least on a personal level, as evangelical fundamentalist Christians, or Muslims, or Wiccans.* I believe stuff that you don't. There may be times when I want to talk about it, and then I'll indicate as much. Meanwhile, it makes you look like an intolerant ass when you keep bringing it up.

I mean, honestly, patb: why don't you just put on a suit and go door-to-door asking people if they've heard the Good Word of Dawkins?

*People will tell you there aren't evangelical fundamentalist Wiccans. People are generally wrong. q.v. Something Positive for an only-slightly-exaggerated example of the type I mean.

[Praline]

The only difference is, we have one more way to die than they do."

"As martyrs."

"Right."

Seems to me that if they were really gunning for martyrdom, it's not completely out of the question that you could get it before the Rapture kicks off. Liberals in the West, Ultimate Enemies and AntiChrist quislings though they may well be, are frustratingly unlikely to kill people for being Christians. But there are, well, plenty of places abroad where Christians are being persecuted or suffering. If a martyr's crown's what you want, you could always go there and take your chances.

Of course, that would mean leaving America, which, based on these books, seems tantamount to stepping off the edge of the world. But, well, that could make your courage all the more impressive. Unless, of course, your martyrdom doesn't count unless it happens in America, or else New Babylon, because real things don't happen in those funny foreign places. God's not interested in 'em, really; you couldn't be sure he was watching when the firing squad lined up, and then where would you be?

I think there's also another problem with martyrdom in this world. One of the most moving fictional martyrdoms I've seen is the death of the priest Father Jean in Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants. The priest, a kindly, sensible man, runs a boarding school for boys which is, if not perfect, a faily humane place where the priests are on pretty good terms with the children. During the Second World War when the Nazis are occupying France, the school takes in and hides three Jewish boys. The story is seen from the viewpoint of a boy based on the young director, who becomes friends with one of the Jewish boys - all of whom are being protected from the Nazis under the guise of being Protestants. One day, the school is betrayed, and the Gestapo come. They take away all the boys, and also Father Jean, who walks quietly out the door with his guards, says goodbye to the children, and is taken away to a concentration camp, where he dies.

He doesn't die for professing his faith; he dies for living by it. His religion and his humanity, which are intertwined, simply prevent him from standing by and letting children be killed if he can help it. So, without fuss, he tries to protect them. When he's betrayed, he leaves with dignity, not frightening the remaining kids any more than he can help. It's simple, undramatic heroism. Most of the heroism I've seen has been from matter-of-fact people who just thought that of course they should do it, what else were they going to do?

The thing is, that's martyrdom by works. Father Jean dies for doing something. Now, L&J don't believe in salvation by works, only by faith. Getting killed for a verbal profession of faith is extremely hard to accomplish in a nation with free speech. That, I think, is why they have to saddle up in this theologically impractical way if they want any kind of martyrdom, or, indeed, an interesting story. Martyrdom for faith alone is difficult to conceive - especially for such ethnocentric imaginations as L&J's; really the flip-chart expresses their entire problem, and they lack the imagination to work out how martyrdom for faith might actually happen. Besides, these are manly men, and there's something a bit sissy about just quietly being faithful until somebody comes along and kills you for it.

Hence, because of the exclusion of salvation by works, there's an awful lot of fudged logic here. It's the only way to manage it.

[Tonio]

What you're citing aren't reasons to give up theism (as you'd know if you read ANY of this blog), but ritual. And ritual has its own use, quite apart from theism.

I would agree. What would religions look like if they were Jeffersonized, stripped of their supernaturalistic elements? What if we kept the rituals and any useful moral teachings, treating the latter not as rules but as principles for making moral decisions? Our culture doesn't have a framework for pondering questions about the human experience in a humanistic and naturalistic context. English doesn't seem to have a word for that concept. "Spirituality" conveys a belief in some entity greater than ourselves, and there is no evidence for such an entity. There is a naturalistic alternative - Einstein's sense of wonder about the universe.

[Ken]

We're not told what it is, specifically, that she's reading. Revelation, one assumes, and parts of Daniel but not the other parts. And little snippets from Ezekiel and Zechariah, the odd-numbered verses of Matthew 24, every third word in John's second and third epistles, and carefully redacted chapter fragments from 1 & 2 Thessalonians.

i.e. the "3 1/2-book Bible": Revelations, Daniel, the "Nuclear War Chapter" of Ezekiel, and Late Great Planet Earth. I had that inflicted on me by PMDs in the heyday of Left Behind's predecessor, The Gospel According to Hal Lindsay.

This is why the authors can tell us about Chloe hungrily reading the Bible, but they can't get more specific.

Any resemblance between this and forced memorization/rewordgitation of the Koran in a Taliban madrassa is purely coincidental.

It's also why Chloe herself realizes that she'll never be able to understand the End Times Checklist simply from reading the Bible on her own -- she needs Bruce's help to read it with the PMD decoder ring.

Hee hee hee...

That's a major theme of LaHaye's prophecy scheme: "Things are going to get worse."

Like what happened to me last Tuesday. I was meeting with my financial planner, who was advising me to go into a full-defensive portfolio (cash, money-market, etc). Then he says right out of the blue "You know we're living in The End Times". When your financial planner/broker starts talking to you about End Time Prophecy, things have just GOTTEN worse.

A pastor thinking about "what we're supposed to do as a church" might not seem unusual, but for LaHaye-types it is. From their perspective, "what we're supposed to do as a church" right now is wait for the Rapture, which could occur at any moment.

And while you're waiting around for the world to end, the future has a way of happening regardless -- until you find yourselves Left Behind (TM).

Ooooh, martyrs! How exciting!

And here we come to the vicarious appeal of these books for American evangelicals. The perilous Tribulation that Bruce Barnes describes is frightening, yes, but at least it's not as dull as the uninspiring sit-around-and-wait, do-nothing existence they've come to believe is their lot in life here in history.

Here in Left Behind they can reimagine the Christian life as an exciting adventure. It's similar to the speakers we had on youth group retreats back in high school. They would tell these thrilling stories of Christians who were persecuted for their faith -- first century believers or 20th-century Christians in China or behind the Iron Curtain. The stories would reach a crescendo where the persecuted faithful were forced to choose between denying their faith and certain death. "What would you do?" the speakers would ask. And then, with every head bowed and every eye closed, we were given the opportunity to come forward yet again to re-re-dedicate our lives to Christ.

I experienced this eager-for-persecution, martyrdom-seeking attitude during Hal Lindsay's heyday. Almost word-for-word as Slack describes. "Being Martyred by The Antichrist's One World System" could have been written on job applications as a career goal.

Funny thing... I never heard of a RL Holocaust survivor (the closest approximation to what the PMD martyr-wannabes envision) who described it as an "Exciting Adventure". Or "thrilling crescendo".

Like the time I heard two veterans commenting about a role-playing game called "Nam":
"Who'd want to role-play being in The 'Nam?"
"Somebody who was never there for real."

I don't know about you, but my Church takes a very dim view of active "martyrdom-seeking". More often than not, these eager-to-be-martyr types were actually suicidal, just trying to commit suicide without the stigma. Kind of like "Suicide by Cop". And, from experience during the Roman Imperial persecutions, a lot of these wanna-be martyr types would lose their nerve at the last minute (suicides are often ambivalent) and took the Emperor's Incense anyway.

[mcc]

Then he says right out of the blue "You know we're living in The End Times". When your financial planner/broker starts talking to you about End Time Prophecy, things have just GOTTEN worse.

...just checking, are you sure this wasn't a cutesy way of predicting the mortgage bubble is about to progress into recession?

[Praline]

I don't think L&J are exactly 'eager for persecution'. That would involve being persecuted, which might hurt. I think they're eager to feel persecuted, which they can accomplish by pointing a trembling finger and shouting 'PERSECUTOR!' at people who disagree with them. Perhaps coincidentally, the people who disagree with them tend to be humanitarians, scientists and liberals, who aren't likely to subject you to the inconvenient kind of persecution, even if you point and shout. They want the satisfaction of feeling victimised without the discomforts of being actual victims.

[Ken]

I see the same thing in housing bubble groups. It's not that we're in a housing bubble. It's not that it can lead to a recession when it bursts. Nope. We're heading towards the Greater Depression!!!! The 1930s will look like the tech bubble! THEN EVERYONE WILL KNOW WE'RE RIGHT! -- Zzyzx

I've been dealing with that for about a year; the various Housing Bubble Blogs are as apocalyptic in tone as LaHaye, Jenkins, and Hal Lindsay combined. Kook-rant mantras like "TOTAL GLOBAL ECONOMIC COLLAPSE!", "GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!", "WHEELBARROWS FULL OF WORTHLESS GOVERNMENT FIAT PAPER!", "GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!", and talk of self-sufficient Survival Refuges well away from the cities like they're channelling John Todd or something.

Then some of the comments in the threads get LITERALLY Apocalyptic. Like "COMING ONE-WORLD ECONOMIC SYSTEM", "COMING ONE-WORLD CURRENCY", and "COMING ONE-WORLD GOVERNMENT", i.e. one step removed from "SIX SIXTY SIX! DON'T TAKE THE MARK!!!!!!"

Like I said, when your financial planner starts telling you about End Time Prophecy...

[Ken]

Then he says right out of the blue "You know we're living in The End Times". When your financial planner/broker starts talking to you about End Time Prophecy, things have just GOTTEN worse.

...just checking, are you sure this wasn't a cutesy way of predicting the mortgage bubble is about to progress into recession? -- Mcc

I wouldn't call it "cutesy".
More like "Surreal".

[aunursa]

Izzy: Evangelical fundamentalist atheists are just as bad, at least on a personal level, as evangelical fundamentalist Christians, or Muslims, or Wiccans.*

Every month or so, following some article about religion, I read a condescending letter to the editor from a militant atheist lecturing theists about how stupid we are for believing in an invisible man in the sky and how the world would be a much better place without religion.

[practicallyevil]

That tends to be the problem when you define yourself in terms of what you're against instead of what you're for.

Alright men, this is our enemy. We know nothing of their history or their culture but, we can be certain of one thing, they stand for everything we don't stand for.

[Ursula L]

Like what happened to me last Tuesday. I was meeting with my financial planner, who was advising me to go into a full-defensive portfolio (cash, money-market, etc). Then he says right out of the blue "You know we're living in The End Times". When your financial planner/broker starts talking to you about End Time Prophecy, things have just GOTTEN worse.

If your financial planner is talking to you about End Time Prophecy, why the heck is this person your financial planner. I can just imagine the conversations:

Client: "This textbook company looks like an interesting stock - constant demand for textbooks, after all."

Advisor: "Oh, no, textbook demand will be dropping off completely next year, when the kids are gone."

Client: "Okay, but what about my retirment planning. I'm looking to retire in about fifteen years."

Advisor: " Well, by that point, the world will have ended. This bomb shelter and home grain storage unit would be excellent for getting you through the Tribulation, however."

[Robb]

Nobody daydreams about ... organizing a major charitable organization, or making a bundle of money wherewith to perform philanthropy.

Um. . . I do!

[Ken]

So again they aren't for Christ, they're anti-Antichrist, which again is far from the same thing. The former really could be "something to live for." The latter might be something to die for, but more likely is merely something to kill for.

This is also very well put. A lot of people are looking for something to kill for. -- Joolya

More like "something to be violent for", to sanction what is normally forbidden (to be violent) but is still there within. (I remember this from a book called The Violence Within by a Swiss Christian psychologist named Paul Tournier -- must have been 25 years since I read that book, but your comment brought that fragment to mind. His example was Italian soldiers mobilizing for World War 2, singing the Fascist anthem as the troop trains shipped out, and the general undertone of festivities in their attitude.)

[Robb]

Um. . . I do!

I should add (before I look totally like a self righteous ass) that it's certainly not the only thing I day dream about, but running around giving needy people & worthy causes money is far more fulfilling than imagining being a commando in a post-apocalyptic elite death squad.

[Ken]

The authors, fortunately, are only tangentially interested in giving readers something to kill for. Their main interest is just in supplying enough of the tantalizing possibility of such vicarious excitement that readers will go out to buy the sequel. And what was that sequel called again? Oh, right:

"You still want to be part of the Tribulation Force?"
Rayford nodded and smiled at his daughter's firm reply. "I wouldn't miss it."

Uh, Slack?
I have a BAD feeling that these are the last two lines in Left Behind: Volume 1.
Are they?

[Lauren]

I was meeting with my financial planner, who was advising me to go into a full-defensive portfolio (cash, money-market, etc). Then he says right out of the blue "You know we're living in The End Times". When your financial planner/broker starts talking to you about End Time Prophecy, things have just GOTTEN worse.

Sounds like it's time for a new financial planner. You should be invested in the alchohol and pornography industries. After all, if you are raptured, you won't need it, whereas if you aren't you ought to make a killing.

How about you just send all your cash to me, and I'll find something sinful to invest it in? ;)

[aunursa]

The authors, fortunately, are only tangentially interested in giving readers something to kill for. Their main interest is just in supplying enough of the tantalizing possibility of such vicarious excitement that readers will go out to buy the sequel.

According to L&J, Left Behind was originally intended to be a single book. It was only when Jerry Jenkins noticed that he had barely covered a week over 300 that he realized they were going to have to extend it to three or four books, then later seven, then finally twelve.

[aunursa]

I have a BAD feeling that these are the last two lines in Left Behind: Volume 1.

IIRC, the last line is a statement about the four banding together to battle the antichrist and his forces during the seven most turbulent years in world history.

[mcc]

According to L&J, Left Behind was originally intended to be a single book. It was only when Jerry Jenkins noticed that he had barely covered a week over 300 that he realized they were going to have to extend it to three or four books, then later seven, then finally twelve.

But they realized this while they were still late in the process of writing the first book, right? Makes you wonder if this chapter, where the Tribulation Force suddenly appears, was written at the exact point in the process they got the call back from the publisher greenlighting books 2 and 3.. :)

People will tell you there aren't evangelical fundamentalist Wiccans.

I think most people who have spent much time around the Wiccan/neopagan community have are likely to have at some point seen a certain bumper sticker that says "fundies are fundies, whether they worship a God or a Goddess"...

[practicallyevil]

Force 10 From Navarone

F Force 10 From Navarone, and I liked "The Guns of Navarone" better, but F Force was good too.

Well, supposedly they're to spread the Good News about Jesus, and try to protect the saved and undecided -- in that order.

Actually, to kill the minions of the anti-christ, and then save those that are merely undecided, although the criteria for who falls into which group is kind of sketchy. But as they say in missionary school, "Shoot First, Evangelize Later."

Also anyone want to join my five man Basketball Force for some pick-up games this weekend?

[Jeremy]

I like the way Fred avoids admitting he's citing Buffy with "as somebody once said"... :-)

[aunursa]

Makes you wonder if this chapter, where the Tribulation Force suddenly appears, was written at the exact point in the process they got the call back from the publisher greenlighting books 2 and 3.. :)

It's possible, but doubtful. The publisher had no idea that book sales would be so high. There wasn't much Christian suspense fiction in 1994.

[McJulie]

Praline: I know nothing, so I may be totally wrong about this, but it sounds to me as if the re-re-re-dedication ceremonies are a fundie-Protestant equivalent of taking Communion.

Much weirder, actually.

Most Protestants actually have communion -- same as Catholics except that it's passed around instead of people going up to the front to receive it.

The re and re-re and re-re-re dedication ceremonies are pretty much pure cultish behavior, where inspirational sales pitches and peer pressure are used to quash doubts and stifle dissent. They are like pep rallies for God.

Actually, I suspect they are direct descendants of the classic revival tent phenomenon, so maybe they don't have them in England so much.

[Vermic]

The first time I ever noticed Left Behind on a bookshelf -- it was many years ago, but they were already several volumes along -- I remember picking one up and reading the back-cover synopsis. The moment I learned that this book, written by and for adults, contained a group of characters, also presumably adults, calling themselves the "Tribulation Force" -- it was that phrase, all by itself, that told me everything I needed to know about the series. I even chortled aloud, right there in the K Mart. It sounded like "ksnorph."

So this Left Behind Friday, in which the phrase "Tribulation Force" is first coined by our heroes, is a special one for me. It feels like coming full circle.

[Rosina]

Most Protestants actually have communion -- same as Catholics except that it's passed around instead of people going up to the front to receive it.

Anglicans go to the altar rail to receive Communion. The main difference was that Protestants have Communion of both kinds (bread and wine) while in Catholic Churches the communicants only got the wafer - the priest drank the wine. It was a bad day for Protestants when they decided that 'wine' should be unfermented grape juice. Although this allows alcoholics to take communion (or does it?), I think it was more of a Puritan kill-joy decision than a open-doors inclusive policy.

[Jeff]

How about you just send all your cash to me, and I'll find something sinful to invest it in? ;)

No, no, send it to me! I'm a lot more sinful than she is! In fact [looks around] I'm probably the most sinful person here (in RTC terms)!

TOTAL GLOBAL ECONOMIC COLLAPSE!", "GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!", "WHEELBARROWS FULL OF WORTHLESS GOVERNMENT FIAT PAPER!", "GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD

I've never really understood this. Gold is just another form of money - that is to say, something that we all agree upon as a token of exchange that wouldn't be worth much if it weren't for that agreement. I mean sure, it's pretty and fairly rare, but there's not a whole lot you can do with it. I'd assume that in the event of a total economic collapse, we'd go straight back to a barter economy:

"Hey! I'll trade you this krugerrand for some of your canned goods!"

"And then what? I'll eat gold? Get the hell out of here!"

"Think you can spare me some, then? I'm a doctor, and I have some antibiotics here in my bag..."

"Now you're talkin'. Come right this way, friend. The kid's got an ear infection..."

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

It really takes a lot less harm to be Evil than it takes aid to be Good. If you fix twenty people's roofs, you're Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat your neighbor's daughter, you're Jimmy the Cannibal - and no additional carpentry assistance will change that.

"But screw ONE SHEEP...."

..

People will tell you there aren't evangelical fundamentalist Wiccans. People are generally wrong. q.v. Something Positive for an only-slightly-exaggerated example of the type I mean.

Reminds me of a particular troll on a Pagan Yahoo! group I currently maintain. (I was not in charge during his heyday, or it would have been a heyhour.) Someone posted about a "Magick for Peace" event; he ripped her a new one for suggesting that it was appropriate to pray for peace to/do peace magick in the name of Athena, because She was a war Goddess, duhhhh. He went on shortly after that to mock Hindus for worshipping Ma Kali as a mother Goddess because She's a Goddess of destruction, duhhhhh. (Tell it to Sri Ramakrishna, asshat.) Wiccan fundamentalist? Yes he was!

Also another guy who lectured me about how "the threefold rule" should always be taken literally, as in, kick a puppy and you will get kicked three times. Of course, same guy the next week was threatening to shoot a neighbor's dog if it kept barking at night. Presumably he believed it was worth getting shot three times over.

What is it about fundamentalists of any stripe, that they're often hypocrites too?

..

Aw, heck, let's do the pile on again.

Fred, I'd like to see you use your talents to post an equally critical look at "The God Delusion." Tell us how you can believe in fairy tales after having obvious taken a rational look at your beliefs.

Leaving aside that "believing in fairy tales" is begging the question, leaving aside its breathtaking rudeness as a way to talk to the host of this party, etc... What the heck is it about fundamentalist atheists that they're constantly harping on us theists to justify our beliefs? Why is their outrage supposed to be our homework? Patb, you sound like an Intelligent Design adherent demanding that a fellow Christian justify believing in the Theory of Evolution, or a fundamentalist born-again Pagan demanding that I justify my being Wiccan and yet not having disowned my Catholic family.

That you are confused by our noncomformity to your sense of consistency does not oblige us to explain anything to you.

[Praline]

Gold is just another form of money - that is to say, something that we all agree upon as a token of exchange that wouldn't be worth much if it weren't for that agreement. I mean sure, it's pretty and fairly rare, but there's not a whole lot you can do with it.

Total amateur economics here, but ... I think the reason for the Gold Standard is the fact that gold isn't just rare, but finite. You can print almost unlimited amounts of money in times of inflation, hence situations where a wheelbarrow full of notes barely buys a sandwich. But because there's a limited amount of gold in the world, you can't just keep making more of it; the amount stays constant, whatever the economy is doing. Hence, its value is less changeable in times of rapid inflation. If an economy collapsed entirely, it might be of limited help, but having it around might be an attempt at maintaining a baseline of stability.

Is that right, economists? I'm only guessing here.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

The main difference was that Protestants have Communion of both kinds (bread and wine) while in Catholic Churches the communicants only got the wafer - the priest drank the wine.

Nuh-uh! Us done-growed-up-Catholics learned how to ritually take the wine as well as how to take the wafer in First Communion class. Some particular churches didn't actually bother with the wine--ours didn't--but we were told that taking wine was absolutely part of the Sacrament of the Eucharist, if optional, and they'd darn well prepare us so that if we went to a church that didn't opt out of it we would know how it went.

Or are you talking about some past time in Catholic history?

[Rivikah]

I was one of those kids who sat in my chair while everyone else went up for altar calls. For me it was a matter of being aware that I was being manipulated and feeling that any commitment I made under those circumstances would ultimately be false.

[Praline]

What is it about fundamentalists of any stripe, that they're often hypocrites too?

Fundamentalism is, by its nature, inflexible and absolute. It's highly unlikely for any system in the world to be so perfect that it never runs into a situation where it doesn't need to be adapted to circumstances - and if it's an intolerant system and you live around other human beings, it'll run into it fast. When you get to that point, you're caught between your absolute beliefs and the fact that the situation you're in doesn't seem to work with them.

At that point, you either get less fundamentalist or you start compartmentalising. And once you've started keeping things in different boxes, hypocrisy is almost inevitable.

[jamoche]

"GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!"

Ah, dwarf opera, Discworld style.

Gold isn't *always* finite, as the Spanish learned to their dismay during their colonial years, when a sudden massive influx of it did bad things to their economy. The British had the opposite problem when China would only take gold for tea and wouldn't give it back - well, not for any *legal* products, leading to the opium-tea-gold trading triangle.

[Spalanzani]

"Tell us how you can believe in fairy tales after having obvious taken a rational look at your beliefs."

I know this isn't quite what you meant, but I would suggest reading G.K. Chesterton's essay "The Dragon's Grandmother" for how (and in what sense) a rational person can believe in fairy tales.

Or are you talking about some past time in Catholic history?

Apparently - it was one of the demands of the Protestant Revolution, wasn't it? According to Wikipedia (OK, not the most reliable source, but I just googled it) Regular use of Communion under both kinds requires the permission of the bishop, but bishops in many countries (such as the United States) have given blanket permission to administer Holy Communion in this way. But it became 'more common' since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

I don't know what the practice is in the UK now, or when I was young. My husband (Irish lapsed Catholic) remembers that only priests got the wine when he was young in Ireland.

[Rosina]

Me at 8.17pm

[Technomad]

This sounds like that classic film The Last Temptation of Schwarzenegger.

"Do unto others---and then shoot them."

"Love thy enemy---and shoot him!"

"He who has not sinned may cast the first stone. I will use my rocket launcher."

"Listen, I don't care if it's not in the script, I'm going to kill everybody."

[Nick]

According to Wikipedia, assuming Fred is using the paperback edition there are 468 pages in total... which means there's still 47 pages to go.

Good luck, Fred. Hang in there.

[Jon]

It was a bad day for Protestants when they decided that 'wine' should be unfermented grape juice.

In my church - Lutheran - we went up to the altar for Communion. And we used wine - essentially Mad Dog at that - not any wimpy grape juice.
(My dad was a recovering alcoholic, and he always drank the Communion wine without it ever being a problem. It was always a minimal amount anyway.)
The bread portion was usually the wafer variety, and the wine was was served to everyone in little shot glasses.
While going through Confirmation, I and the other Confirmation students served as Acolytes, helping with the distribution of the wine and bread (and lighting and putting out candles, and passing out the collection dish, etc.).
Sometimes if we were were short on wine or were out of the wafers, the wine was just poured into a goblet and the pastor had a loaf of bread which he would tear off a piece of and dip in the wine before giving out.

[Randy Owens]

Plus there was something weirdly appealing about a one-time, one-question, pass-fail test in place of the tedious day-after-day. In our imaginations, at least, the martyr's egress sounded almost easier than the pilgrim's progress (as somebody once said, the hardest thing in this world is to live in it.)

I'm rather fond of the formulation of this idea from (where else?) Babylon 5: "It's easy to find something worth dying for. Do you have anything worth living for?"

[Tonio]

What the heck is it about fundamentalist atheists that they're constantly harping on us theists to justify our beliefs? Why is their outrage supposed to be our homework?

Although I don't consider myself an atheist, I see myself as entitled to harp on other people to justify their beliefs in a very specific circumstance - when they believe that I personally am deserving of eternal damnation for not sharing their beliefs. And if they told my young children that they deserved hell, the universe would not be large enough to contain my rage. I can't imagine how Jews can keep their temper when they're told over and over that they're to blame for the death of Christ.

[Chris]

"Alright men, this is our enemy. We know nothing of their history or their culture but, we can be certain of one thing, they stand for everything we don't stand for."

And they said our mothers were fat.

This is probably one of the more sickening LB Fridays instalments so far. Also excellent. But seriously, these "martyrdom fantasies" brings me back to the "rape fantasy" discussion a few weeks back. Being executed isn't fun, authors! Seeing the second hand of the clock carry you inexorably closer to the scaffold, while your palms are icy with sweat and your stomach is full of the poison of fear... gee willikers. And that's discounting the possibility of torture to make you recant. (I'm given to understand that Nicky's government guillotines the condemned, so he seems more humane than LB!Jesus, at least, who seems to prefer disembowelling people before stuffing them into the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.)

Everything relevant has already been said: the inanity of the "let's found the Tribulation Force" dialogue, the fact that a military organisation seems to be the only thing the characters can imagine. Absolutely hideous.

Do hang in there, Fred.

[Chris]

I've seen the thought "it's more important (and harder!) to live for something than to die for it" in quite a few places. I certainly agree.

[hapax]

alec: Whether the Islamofascists, the Germano-Hitlero-islamofascists, or the Italo-Mussolino-islamofascists are worse is, certainly, a nuanced matter.

What about the Judean Popular People's Front?

[Praline]

I've seen the thought "it's more important (and harder!) to live for something than to die for it" in quite a few places. I certainly agree.

From the way this story's going, it seems even easier to make sure some other bugger dies for it.

(As Fred has pointed out, of course... And yes, Fred, please keep doing this. We think you're great!)

[hapax]

Praline: Getting killed for a verbal profession of faith is extremely hard to accomplish in a nation with free speech.

I am irresistibly reminded of a column in, I think, The Weekly World News back during the previous War Against The Greatest Enemy Evah (that would have been the filthy Commie Russkies). The columnist talked in breathless tones of his clandestine trip to Red square, when he had surreptitiously secreted a REAL AMERICAN FLAG in the lining of his shirt pocket. Upon facing the Kremlin (or possibly, to judge by the stock photo, St. Basil's), he pulled out his REAL AMERICAN FLAG and danced around the square singing "God Bless America."

Naturally, the filty Commie Russkie Red Guards immediately came and "manhandled" him, by his account promptly deporting him from the country before he could singlehandedly bring Brezhnev to his knees.

(If this experience actually took place anywhere outside his perfevid imagination, I suspect it more likely that the soi disant Secret Police were actually psychiatric attendants, but I digress).

But really, if they were so longed for martyrdom, why didn't the Tribbles just stand up in the middle of Nicky Appalachia's Babylonian Bijoux and recite the Magic Jesus Prayer?

[Praline]

God's people are in for dark days. Everybody is.

He says that like 'God's people' and 'everybody' were two different things. So who made the 'everybodys'? Did God subcontract?

Sheesh.