L.B.: The Pope of Mount Prospect

Left Behind, pp. 421

After the Steeles meet with the Rev. Bruce Barnes, it's Buck Williams' turn:

Two hours after the Steeles had left, Buck Williams parked his rental car in front of New Hope Village Church in Mount Prospect, Illinois.

The real Mount Prospect is home to more than a dozen churches. I can't help but wonder if they also exist in the fictional world of Left Behind and, if so, what's going on at their buildings while Bruce stays up late at New Hope trying to design a cool logo for the Tribulation Force.

Were the parishioners or members or attendees of those other churches -- the Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians and Catholics -- among the disappeared? If so, have they also, like New Hope, begun to gather small cadres of those who realize what happened and what they missed?

The gist of LB thus far suggests that all of those mainline Protestants and Catholics would not make the cut come Rapture time. They might call themselves Christians, but they're not Real True Christians according to Tim LaHaye's idea of God's standards (which is to say, Tim LaHaye's standards -- he seems to think that on the day of judgment God will hire him as a consultant to separate the wheat from the tares). But even so, non-RTCs still have children. Or had children. The disintegration of every single child of every single family at all of those churches would lead to crowded sanctuaries filled with grieving, traumatized parents seeking answers.

Pastors like the now-departed Vernon Billings tend to stick to themselves. They don't associate or cooperate much with other clergy in their communities. They don't get involved with ministerial councils or interdenominational efforts. The stated reason for this is usually that light should have no fellowship with darkness, by which they mean that they would consider it a sin to associate with people like that liberal Methodist pastor who got arrested at that protest last year, or that woman from the Episcopal church who calls herself a priest, or that "welcoming and affirming" [epithet] from the local UCC church who wears a rainbow prayer stole.

Plus when the rabbi shows up at those interfaith meetings, they ask you not to mention Jesus when you pray, and you know the spell doesn't work if you don't say "in Jesus name."

Working with other churches is perilously ecumenical. Ecumenism -- cooperation among disparate Christian churches in recognition of our underlying unity -- is not considered a Good Thing by people like Billings, or Lahaye and Jenkins. Even the most harmless-seeming forms of cooperation, such as taking turns providing shelter through a local interfaith hospitality network or some such, are too dangerous. It's a slippery slope from there to syncretism, the collapse of absolute standards, moral relativism, one world religion, One World Government, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria.

The Ghostbusters quote at the end there is hyperbole. The rest of that isn't. This is exactly what they believe. What they will tell you they believe. What they teach. Left Behind teaches this explicitly. Readers are intended to see the slippery slope between a metropolitan ministerial council and Carpathia's "Enigma Babylon One World Faith." This is meant as a warning.

This objection to interdenominational and interfaith cooperation was much-discussed in evangelical circles following 9/11. The scale and impact of that tragedy was such that a few RTC pastors for once set aside that objection, participating in some of the various memorial vigils and prayer services. That participation was a source of "controversy" and recrimination for months afterward. (That same kind of controversy never seems to follow, however, when the interfaith activity in question is a vigil for Terri Schiavo or an anti-abortion rally. That's interesting.)

The willingness to interact or associate with clergy from other denominations or faiths used to be one of the markers for differentiating between fundamentalists and evangelicals. Evangelicals rallied behind Billy Graham as he effectively worked with local churches from every denomination (even papists!) to help coordinate his mass-evangelism "crusades." Graham's mega-church heirs -- people like Bill Hybels and Rick Warren -- have taken a similar approach. I may not like everything Warren says, but I appreciate that he's willing to work with clergy of other denominations and even other faiths. This new generation of leaders, like Graham, insist that such cooperation is possible without compromising one's own identity. Their critics disagree, vehemently. And those critics are no longer found only in the fundamentalist/separatist wings of the subculture.

The fundies' white-knuckled anxiety -- their barely repressed doubts and their fear that their faith may be a house of cards that would crumble if exposed to the wider world -- seems to be spreading to other branches of the evangelical movement. That's the predictable result of adding weird mythologies to one's faith. The fundies convinced themselves that if the world is any older than 10,000 years then Jesus doesn't love them. Thus they have to avoid all exposure to science. Evangelicals are trying to convince themselves that homosexuality is a choice and that the invasion of Iraq was God's Will. Like the fundies, they have welded these ideas to the bearing walls of their faith, so that if they are not true, then nothing is true. They thus find themselves, like the fundies, having to avoid exposure to an awful lot of the real world around them.

There's one other reason that I think people like the Rev. Billings oppose interdenominational cooperation. It has to do with power and influence. Evangelical polity -- the structure of this unstructured, nondenominational movement -- is roughly feudal, like a collection of competing fiefdoms. It's very important to a guy like the Rev. Vernon Billings that he be the biggest fish in the pond. Acknowledging that his is not the only pond, and that it is far from the largest, threatens his sense of authority. Once you recognize the legitimacy, or even the existence, of all those other churches in town then it's much harder to maintain the illusion that you're the Pope of Mount Prospect.

Getting back to those other churches in town, if we accept the world of Left Behind as the authors have sketched it out for us, then we have to assume that most of the adults from those other congregations were not RTCs and so were not among the disappeared. Bruce Barnes was until very recently a faux-Christian himself, but he seems to view the clergy and laity of these other churches as an even more reprobate species of fraud. It thus never occurs to him to speak to them about what he knows or to attempt to recruit them to his cause.

But while it's not surprising that he doesn't reach out to them, it's strange that none of them are reaching out too him. Those other clergy may not believe the premillennial dispensationalist heresies that Billings taught, but they would all be familiar enough with the substance of them to recognize what they were seeing. They would realize by now what was happening -- realize that they, like all the church fathers and theologians they had ever studied, were wrong and that Billings and Hal Lindsay and (especially) Cassandra LaHaye were right. And despite their being overwhelmed with their duties chaplaining the traumatized community, those other clergy would all be getting in touch with Bruce Barnes.

That doesn't happen here. It doesn't happen for the same reason that Bruce has no problem renting a car or driving 20 miles out I-90 to Mount Prospect despite all the chaos and debris that should be but isn't affecting anyone, anywhere in this book a mere 10 days after The Event.

And but so anyway, Buck pulls up to the church:

He had a sense of destiny tinged with fear. Who would this Bruce Barnes be? What would he look like? And would be be able to detect a non-Christian at a glance?

The authors apparently imagine that his is a common question unbelievers have about RTC clergy: Does their non-Christian detection power work at a single glance, or does it require physical contact?

I can't figure out why anyone would ever think this. Nor can I figure out why the authors would think that anyone would ever think this. It's not just wrong, it's bewilderingly wrong.

And anyway why should Buck care? He's not trying to pass himself off as a Christian, so he shouldn't be worrying that Bruce's spiritual gaydar will penetrate his cunning disguise.

Buck sat in the car, his head in his hands. He was too analytical, he knew, to make a rash decision. Even his leaving home years before to pursue an education and become a journalist had been plotted for years. To his family it came like a thunderbolt, but to young Cameron Williams it was a logical next step, a part of his long-range plan.

What family wouldn't be thunderstruck? Buck finishes high school and then astonishes them all by announcing that he's going away to college to pursue a career. It's so utterly unprecedented.

We're constantly being told that Buck is methodical and analytical (always a bad trait in LB), but we never see this. It seems that by "analytical" in this case the authors mean his stubborn refusal to accept the undeniable implications of explicit divine intervention. That actually seems like the opposite of analytical.

We've also seen that not only is Buck capable of making a "rash decision," he has a propensity for it. He flew to England to expose an international conspiracy, but less than 24 hours later he was cutting a deal with them and helping them to cover their tracks. He met Chloe yesterday, fell in love at first sight and impulsively booked the seat next to her on a flight to Chicago.

Again, this could have worked in a different novel where this was an intentional device -- the self-deceived voice of an unreliable narrator rather than the voice of one writer's Mary Sue substitute. But here the chasm between Buck's concept of himself and his actual character and behavior escape not just his notice, but the authors' as well. They don't perceive any such gap, and even if they did they seem to think that their assertions trump the actions they describe. We've never seen Buck think "analytically" and we have seen him, time and again, make rash decisions, but when the authors contradict this -- "He was too analytical ... to make a rash decision" -- that's supposed to settle the matter.

This is Bad Writing, but it's not wholly unrelated to the authors' Bad Theology. The same gap between what they tell and what they show, between asserted character and actual character, can be seen wherever the novel touches on the nature of God. They tell us that the God they believe in is good, just and loving. But the God they show us is a bloodthirsty, capricious, evil monstrosity.

That's partly the result of Bad Writing, too, but more than that it seems to be Bad Writing by Bad People. The character of God in LB is, like Buck and Rayford, another Mary-Sue wish-fulfillment surrogate for the authors. They have recreated God in their own image. And that image isn't pretty.

Comments

[SueW]

I think "spiritual gaydar" needs a name-change; for originality's sake.

Praydar?

[Omorka]

Marsten: "and is a god not omnipotent?"

Well, the Modern English word "god" isn't much changed at all from the Old English, pre-Christian word, in which it referred to the same divinities that Norse legend records as Thor, Odin, Loki, Freyr, Freya*, Sif, etc. And they were never considered omnipotent, just much more powerful than humans. Some of the better stories dwell on the limitations of the Aesir. The same can be said for the divinities named by the Greek word theos that "god" translates - the aforementioned Apollo, Athena, Hephaestus, Poseidon, Hermes, even mighty Zeus.

So, I would say no, that the majority of the divinities that have been recognized byt the word "god", at least in Western culture are not omnipotent (or omniscient, or eternal, or omnibenevolent, for that matter).

*Since it's just the feminine form of the same word, I'm not considering "[Gg]oddess" a separate term here.

[Abelardus]

Praydar?

That clicks with me.

[SueW]

He was too analytical, he knew, to make a rash decision.

As usual, this makes no sense. Who asked him to make a rash decision anyway? Is he afraid Barnes is going to propose on the first date or something? :-D

[hapax]

Today is Good Friday. We hold a community-wide Stations of the Cross procession through town. I had 18 people show up for that and the noon liturgy. Of those 18, four . . . four!! . . . were my parishioners.

Sheesh. We had over 50, Rev Ref. Of course, 35 of them were in the choir loft...

Time to quit procrastinating. People are expecting an Easter sermon.

And what's wrong with John Chrystostom's, nu?

[Cactus Wren]

Surely *one* of us is allowed to turn into a parthenogenetic mutant!

Conclusion: Jesus was a woman. And Mary was not only her mother, but her sister.

Hey, I'm cool with that.

You never realized? The "H" in "Jesus H. Christ" -- it stands for "Haploid".

[Reynard]

There's one other reason that I think people like the Rev. Billings oppose interdenominational cooperation. It has to do with power and influence. Evangelical polity -- the structure of this unstructured, nondenominational movement -- is roughly feudal, like a collection of competing fiefdoms. It's very important to a guy like the Rev. Vernon Billings that he be the biggest fish in the pond. Acknowledging that his is not the only pond, and that it is far from the largest, threatens his sense of authority. Once you recognize the legitimacy, or even the existence, of all those other churches in town then it's much harder to maintain the illusion that you're the Pope of Mount Prospect.

This brings to mind the cordial (if uneasy) rivalry in the movie Needful Things (not sure if it's in the book, not having read it); wherein, IIRC, the town's Catholic and Protestant clergymen are concerned with the size of their respective congregations and Mr. Gaunt/Satan (The creepily incomparable Max von Sydow) uses this hidden paranoia to cause each to eventually destroy the other.

[damnedyankee]

My favorite interpretation of Hell is the one from C.S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce". Basically, Hell isn't some place with flames and demons with pitchforks and so on that you get chucked into. Rather, it's a place where all the pettiness and selfishness from this world is magnified until that's all that's going on. The scariest part is that some people can't tell the difference between it and their life on Earth.

And in another edition of Things That Probably Shouldn't Be Mentioned In The Same Breath, that sounds a lot like the hell of Jhonen (Invader Zim) Vasquez's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, wherein it's established that Hell, for all of its faults, makes a good bagel.

[damnedyankee]

Agh! Italics!

[damnedyankee]

Die! Die! Die!

[Salamanda]

damnedyankee: wherein it's established that Hell, for all of its faults, makes a good bagel.

While according to the demon Crowley in Good Omens:
"Heaven has no taste...And not one single sushi restaurant."

[J]

J, what's the significance of eel? Is it trayf?

Yup. No scale-less seafood. So no shellfish, no catfish and no eels.

Except, of course, I love eel. It takes like sesame seeds, except that it's meat!

Oh and just to head any and every apologist for kashrut off at the pass: there is no good evidence that the dietary laws had anything to do with avoiding trichinosis. The ancient Israelites had no clue what trichinosis was or what caused it. And if you're going to avoid certain categories of food because of the potential for disease, then it hardly makes sense to eat meat at all. Want to know the stuff--the brain-eating encephalophagic worms, the prion K-J bugs, and such--that you can get from a nice rare steak?

The kashrut laws were about distinguishing the Israelites from the other peoples around them--which, if you think about it, makes it clear that they weren't ethnically distinct to being with. There was never a firm distinction between Israelites and Canaanites--not even religiously. It was the same reasoning behind circumcision and endogenous marriage. And, since I reject all ethnocentrisms, it's why I've chosen to dump the lot of it.

Now, if you'll excuse me I'm going to go out on a Friday night and eat some eel with my Irish wife. Hmm, it's a bit chilly: I should put on my wool-blend sweater. Oh and I'll need a shave, too.

[Reverend Ref]

hapax: And what's wrong with John Chrystostom's, nu?

Absolutely nothing. There's something to be said for a sermon that looks to be all of 3 minutes long from a guy who had a reputation of preaching for hours.

I'm reminded of The Muppet Christmas Carol when the Marley brothers were listening to Fozziwig's Christmas speech: "It was boring. It was stupid. It was ... SHORT!"

Sometimes short works.

[Technomad]

I've been playing with the idea of "Blackadder: The Antichrist Years," and herewith, the theme song!

TTTO "The Blackadder Theme"

Let joy fill every Christian's heart,
At last, the world will end in fire!
The saved will all be set apart,
The others trampled in the mire!
Blackadder, Blackadder,
He missed the Rapture's call!
Blackadder, Blackadder,
His soul was just too small!

Though Blackadder was Left Behind,
He joined the Tribulation Force,
With Baldrick following him blind,
Just like the arse-end of a horse!
Blackadder, Blackadder,
Though he was full of sin,
Blackadder, Blackadder,
He made sure Nick wouldn't win!

With his "spiritual gaydar," the Reverend Bruce Barnes could be played by the Witchsmeller Pursuivant. Chloe could be played by Bobbie/Bob, and Hattie could be played by Queenie.

And who could play our favorite Antichrist-wannabe but...Lord Flasheart! "Hel-LO there, Hattie! Wanna hear me list off the countries of the UN in their own native languages? WOOF! WOOF!"

What do you all think so far?

[Monkay]

The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod — and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.
-Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

[Nenya]

hapax: Wow, thank you for that. That may be the best sermon I have ever read in my life. (I *need* to hear "those who have come late, do not hesitate or be afraid" and "first and last together/conscientious and lazy/let no one go away hungry." It is an excellent antidote to, well, the sort of mindset the Tribbles here are promoting.)

Also, I have been thinking of you this week, remembering some of the things you have said here about your own style of worship and ritual. My best friend, who recently became a lay Eucharistic minister in the Episcopal church, told me that sometimes she envisions the altar rail at the front of the church as just a small section of the worldwide altar rail, as it were, and that if she squints *really hard*, she imagines she can see her friends far away worshipping farther along the rail. So, I thought of you this Holy Week. I hope it has been a good one for you this year.

Anyway, um. :-)

[Dahne]

And would be be able to detect a non-Christian at a glance?

Holy crap, he's a guard from oldschool EverQuest.

Considering that their job was to stand in one place with no mind of their own moving only to beat the hell out of whatever rats and bugs wandered near, this explains a lot.

[Wesley Parish]

How about the power to kill a yak from 200 yards away...WITH MIND BULLETS!?

Hey, Salamanda, have some mercy on us poor Royal Kilted Yaksmen!

[Turcano]

What, I wonder, does "a sense of destiny" - with or without the "tinge of fear" - feel like? Excitement, yes; felt that. Ditto anticipation, trepidation, and nervousness. But Destiny?

You do see "destiny" used that way a lot in the Star Wars franchise. Which makes one wonder if Jerry Jenkins is a closet Warsie. It would make the "New Hope" reference intentional, for one thing.

Oh come on Buck, just go to one of the other eleven Temples in town and have them cast undetectable alignment on you, rookie move. It's 20 gold a pop, plus material components...

Actually, it's 40 gold at least; you forgot to factor in the caster level.

In my quick scan of the thread I didn't see that anyone else had posted a link to this, but speaking of what would be an ecumenical matter ...

"FECK! DRINK! ARSE! GIRLS!"

[Praline]

Yes, thanks Hapax, that's a fantastic sermon. I particularly like:

Conscientious and lazy, celebrate the day!
You who have kept the fast, and you who have not,
rejoice, this day, for the table is bountifully spread!

It takes genuine charity not to hoard up your superior virtue and want more reward than people you think have slacked off - but it's only hurting yourself to think like that.

[Cerberus]

On the whole eternal justice idea:

That's sort of why I prefer the Greek idea of the afterlife. Duality systems and omnipotent deities often come with the idea that one saved puppy can divide heaven from Hell. However, the Greek system seems to correlate with actual justice. Their Hell is reserved only for the worst, those who spent their one life making the one lives of others worse and shorter for little more than personal glory or evil. These are punished eternally for spending their one life destroying the one lives of others. The Heaven goes to those who spent their one lives making everyone's one lives better, easier, and more pleasant. The rest, who merely lived, the vast majority have a vast open afterlife before them. They can wonder, persist, converse, and if bored, despairing, or finished, they can forget their lives and begin again in that space much like life.

On Spotting Christians:

The spotting Christians game has more effects than just making their flock frightened of leaving and traumatizing them if they do. It's more than the prevention of their flock seeing for themselves that those they build up as monsters are no more different than they are. It also has the very important effect of justifying their world view as a tiny oppressed minority.

Basically, by stating that anyone who isn't in your Church is a false believer who is a slippery slope to Christian-hating atheism, the seemingly large numbers of fellow Christians become infiltrating infidels corrupting the pure. As such, "Christianity" proves to be under attack and the flock needs to remain vigilant. They are easy to believe they are a minority, because they are a minority if they only include their church and every neighbor is a sinner. It also pumps up the scariness of non-Christians. If people who agree 99.99% of the time about beliefs are evil and corrupted, then how scary must those non-christians with their 100% different traditions be? By simultaneously being hostile to anyone not of your Church, you also ensure you will only see the worst of those not of your inner-circle.

Honestly, it becomes easier to understand their "Cricket is the most popular sport in America" beliefs when you understand the fear of leaving instilled combined with the exclusionary tactics. If being tainted by infidels comes at the highest price you can pay, then you will only trust the sources that come infidel free. In the infidel-free spaces, you only hear about cricket and curling scores and so...

[J]

Blackadder, Blackadder,
Though he was full of sin,
Blackadder, Blackadder,
He made sure Nick wouldn't win!

You win the internet, Technomad.

Now we just need a Red Dwarf: Apocalypse Edition.

[Alex Scott]

There are two versions of Hell that I find rather interesting:

First is Dante's. In the Inferno, the punishments people receive are based on the desires that led them to sin. Want to be blown away by lust? That's what you get. Give in to anger too much? Have fun fighting in that lake. Like flattering people with a giant load of crap? Guess what you wallow in for all eternity!

Second is the Eastern Orthodox version of Hell. The one I'm familiar with has God's love immersing every human being, without exception, in the end. The difference is whether you're righteous, and accept it, and feel it as eternal bliss; or wicked, in which case you reject it, and feel it as unending pain.

[Dash]

the Greek system seems to correlate with actual justice. Their Hell is reserved only for the worst, those who spent their one life making the one lives of others worse and shorter for little more than personal glory or evil.

If we're talking about the pagan Greek system, the afterlife gives you a pass on harming your fellow human beings. Tartarus is just for those who offended the gods--and, I guess strictly speaking those who offended the gods and didn't have another god to back them up. (The Greeks are the people who invented cynicism.)

Hapax, thanks for linking to the St. John Chrysostom sermon. It was a moment of refreshment. It would be cool to see a preacher/priest just repeat that sermon for the Easter message/homily/sermon. (I'm being ecumenical this week.) Would anyone be annoyed, I wonder, at the shortness of the sermon? If anyone let me anywhere near a pulpit on Easter, I'd be tempted to hand out copies of the sermon, and then have someone with a really good reading voice read it over slowly, so the congregation could hear it/read it/think about it. And that would be it.

Technomad: Blackadder--excellent!

[Karen]

Hell: My favorite version of Hell is my own idiosyncratic one, developed when I was a teenager. Each of us gets to live eternally -- or at least until our immortal souls learn the lesson and can move on -- as the type of person we most reviled in life. Not the individual person, mind, but as a member of whatever broad category of people against whom we held unreasonable prejudicdes. This could be racial, class-based, even our in-laws, provided the reason we held a grudge wasn't based on some harm one individual person or unique group had done to us. The idea is that if we never thought through our prejudices in life, we have to live them out in eternity. My naive belief is that most of us will catch a clue pretty quickly in the Hereafter and go on to some place much better, but that with some people it would take much longer than others. The key is that we have no idea in this life who goes to Heaven after a nanosecond and who gets stuck until the next geologic era.

[practicallyevil]

I liked to think that the four men in practicalevil's story were angels. (Is that the point, actually?)

That's not how I originally wrote it, but it's a pretty good way of interpreting it.

Actually, it's 40 gold at least; you forgot to factor in the caster level.

Not in fourth edition.

"Kill the Mutant, Purge the Witch, Burn the Heretic!"

"Blessed is the mind too small for doubt."

We could do this all day Bugmaster, it's been awhile since I had an "Imperial Thought of the Day" Battle.

Events retold through Genesis do certainly seem to hint towards a more complicated story than that which is commonly supported by modern accepted dogma. In many ways, it's one of those types of tales that need to be looked at closer.

The Bible is not a hard and fast depiction of actual historical events, but more like an extended allegory with historical events mixed in for good measure. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of children (Adam and Eve), and their Parents, (God). God doesn't want His kids to leave Him, and is more than capable of providing them with everything they'd ever need, and does everything in His power to prevent them from growing away from Him. But as all kids do eventually Adam and Eve branch out and explore things on their own and have to leave their Parent, so God regretfully lets them go. The story of Adam and Eve does nothing to explain this whole original sin gobbledy gook, in so much as it explains why if God made humans we aren't just chilling out with God right now with no suffering or want.

[Technomad]

I thought that J.K. Rowling had an interesting idea, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, about Voldemort. Like in Dante, the punishment fitted the crime.

Voldemort had torn his soul apart, in a vain quest for immortality; therefore, his punishment was to spend eternity as a flayed homunculus, while Harry, whose soul was whole, looked just like he always did.
[Draco Malfoy} Of course, that was a far crueller punishment, wasn't it? I mean...spending eternity looking like Harry Potter? Compared to that, the Lake of Fire looks refreshing! [/Draco Malfoy]

[hapax]

Nenya: sometimes she envisions the altar rail at the front of the church as just a small section of the worldwide altar rail, as it were, and that if she squints *really hard*, she imagines she can see her friends far away worshipping farther along the rail. So, I thought of you this Holy Week. I hope it has been a good one for you this year.

Much better for hearing your friend's image. What a lovely thought.

In re Chrysostom's Easter sermon, many liturgical churches *do* preach it every year, at the Easter vigil. Bestest service evah!

[hapax]

Never did get the "eternal punishment" sort of Hell. If evil is conceived as privation, and sin as "falling sort of the mark", then the consequence is... not-being, I guess. The more evil you are, the more you choose to not live up to what you could and should be, the less you are.

That's how it seems to work in this life, anyhow. I don't worry much about any potential afterlife, but it seems that any God who spent too much time setting up exquisitely tuned torments to match every conceivable sin would be indulging in the cosmic equivalent of Feeding the Troll.

Turcano: You do see "destiny" used that way a lot in the Star Wars franchise.

DES-TI-NY
DES-TI-NY
NO ESCAPING THAT FOR ME!

[damnedyankee]

Now we just need a Red Dwarf: Apocalypse Edition.

Kind of a done deal already, isn't it?

Lister: Where is everybody, Hol? Holly: They're dead, Dave. Lister: Who is? Holly: Everybody, Dave. Lister: What, Captain Hollister? Holly: Everybody's dead, Dave. Lister: What, Todhunter? Holly: Everybody's dead, Dave. Lister: What, Selby? Holly: They're all dead. Everybody's dead, Dave. Lister: Petersen isn't, is he? Holly: Everybody is dead, Dave. Lister: Not Chen? Holly: Gordon Bennett! Yes! Chen, everybody. Everybody's dead, Dave. Lister: Rimmer? Holly: He's dead, Dave. Everybody's dead. Everybody is dead, Dave! Lister: Wait. Are you trying to tell me everybody's dead? Holly: [Beat] I should've never let him out in the first place...

That's ship's computer Holly, by the way, with an IQ of 6000. That's roughly equal to the collective intelligence of 3000 Left Behind writers...

[damnedyankee]

Agh, sorry about that. It all lined up in the preview, oddly enough...

[patter]

Cowboy Diva -- I need an address!

Not certain, but I think it might be this one. The "theology statement" on the side of the building ('traditional' red brick, steeple) is in lettering almost as big as the name.

[Jeff]

Who would this Bruce Barnes be? What would he look like?

After meeting a young Robert Redford and the manly-man Rayford Steele, how could anyone measure up? [More gay sub-text! The slash in this book writes itself!]

=======================

And it's somewhere you choose to go, because the alternative requires you to give up the part of you that likes to wallow in the pettiness and selfishness. And for some people, that's all there is left of them. In the book, the damned get regular tours of heaven, with their loved ones begging them to stay. They never do.

I can be petty and selfish and cruel (ask anyone here). But, in this scenario, my girlfriend is going to Heaven, as is my mom (although their theologies are COMPLETELY different), and they wouldn't have to beg me at all. (I kind of like this version of Heaven. Compare and Contrast to Shaw's Don Juan in Hell...)

====================

While Cassandra is in the overmind -- she specifically got cursed with foresight no-one would believe because she wouldn't give in to Apollo's seduction. I can't remember Apollo ever successfully seducing anyone, which is odd in a beautiful divinity of music. But now it makes sense: he talked to them like Buck.

It's even odder that course, old Zeus was more successful than Apollo (of course the line "I'm the King of the Universe, baby!" probably helped; he also didn't warn them of the "ole ball-and-chain"!).

==========================

"It was boring. It was stupid. It was ... SHORT!"

The sermon our Pastor Rt. Rev.
Began, may have had a rt. clev.,
But his talk, though consistent
Kept the end so far distant
That we left since we felt he mt. nev.

[Kelly]

They tell us that the God they believe in is good, just and loving. But the God they show us is a bloodthirsty, capricious, evil monstrosity.

And that, in two sentences, sums up exactly why I found these books so profoundly disturbing, and not in that good way that makes you think and want to make some changes in your own life. Mostly, it made me want to take a reaaaaaaaaaally long, hot shower.

[smgt]

Many Orthodox churches use the St. Chrysostom sermon as part of their Easter liturgy. Of course, the last Pasca service I went to was five hours long.

[Tehanu]

My idiosyncratic idea of hell is more like Purgatory -- a place where the occupants experience every harm they did to another person exactly in the same way that the other person did, and with the same knowledge, history, and feelings. Hitler would die in gas chambers millions of times with exactly the memories and experiences and feelings of his victims. I can't imagine a person who wouldn't repent bad deeds -- even if they were just nasty remarks, not mass murder -- after that.

[Fraser]

I wonder if the reason Buck is so fearful of Rev. Barnes' Praydar is that it gives the readers a sense of satisfaction: That smug, worldly, sophisticated guy with all his logic suddenly realizing that he's lower than dirt compared to even a failed RTC like Bruce Barnes. Because some of us are just a teensy bit superior ...

Quite aside from the absurdity Fred points out of Buck's family being shellshocked by his decision to go to college (I have this vision of a Dogpatch family horrified that their boy is gonna get all citified and full o' useless book-larnin'), what does it mean that his college plans had been "plotted for years?" Did he start dreaming of becoming the GIRAT when he was six?

Maybe the Dogpatch theory isn't that far off: Perhaps readers are supposed to imagine Buck leaving some idyllic small town full of RTCs and becoming one of those pretentious intellectuals who don't realize every jot and tittle of the Bible is absolute fact. Of course, I don't recall anything that indicates that, but these are the world's worst writers.

[Praline]

Fraser: considering how corrupted by college Chloe's supposed to have been, that's not a bad theory. :-)

[Tokyo (was Edo)]

A friendly public service announcement:

Should it become necessary or desirable to do so, the ability to Detect Non-Christians can be stopped by three feet of wood or dirt, a foot of stone, an inch of metal or any amount of lead. I'd recommend a lead sheet, since it has the additional advantage of being multipurpose.

Also, since it's a supernatural ability, it won't function in an antimagic zone.

This has been a friendly public service announcement from your local rules lawyer.

(Sorry, late to the show, I know...)

[bellatrys]

One of the things which really stuck with me about CLS's version of Hell in The Great Divorce (and oh yes, this is a book which causes fundamentalists of all stripes much angst, and some to declare Lewis a horrible heretic and agent of Satan, even - I take it they've never even cracked the covers of Till We Have Faces) is that Hell is both isolation, and other people (no, it's not high school, but it could be...) - people who are so narcissistic that they only regard other persons as extras in their own psychodramas, which means that they are continually trying to simultaneously get away from each other (that is, to be away from the people who are trying to psychically vampirize them) and also find other people to be their audiences, willy-nilly (no, he wasn't writing about internet trolls, except ab ovum.)

--To the point where they would rather drag their nearest and, presumably, dearest, back to the Dead Grey City of Dis, so as to have them there as their permanent audience again, now and forever, than move outside their own comfort zones an inch.

The scene between the Bodhisattva and her ex-husband (till death do us part, which it has) who has so thoroughly X-ed himself as to become only his facade, his public performance for the outside world, struck (and strikes me still) as an extremely valuable lesson in terms of life, not afterlife: sometimes it's time to end a relationship (love affair, friendship, familial connection) because the person you loved at the beginning isn't there any more.

This universalist & voluntary vision of Hell is the only one I can tolerate as consonant with a Deity worth worshipping, any more, which makes me a heretic, but oh well. That's the price of obeying one's conscience, as ever. (And I'd be a long sight happier with the Golden-Tonguéd's lovely sermon there, if I hadn't read some of his truly vile anti-Jewish and anti-woman works, since first hearing it...)

[Karen]

Bellatrys, The Great Divorce is, by far, my favorite of Lewis' didactic works, and I like Lewis a whole big bunch. I think in that book he provided an answer to how humans can have free will and at the same time God can be omnipotent and loving at the same time. I also loved the Saint and the Trajedian scene, especially where Sarah cracks a joke about how the nursing home matron would never tolerate abandoned bodies lying around. I also liked the scene where the addict suddenly casts off his addiction and turned into a saint, while at the same time the addiction spirit turned into a pegasus. I thought it a beautiful image of how conquering something harmful can in fact transform the harmful practice itself.

"then it hints that Yahweh may be no more in power or rank than Lucifer, and perhaps himself child of something far greater."

The Bible's description of god sounds more like the Star Trek episode The Squire of Gothos where the seemingly omnipotent Trelane turns out to be an interdimesional kid using humans as play-toys. "Abraham, kill your son! - Just kidding! - Dude, you were really gonna do it!"

"The rest, who merely lived, the vast majority have a vast open afterlife before them. They can wonder, persist, converse, and if bored, despairing, or finished, they can forget their lives and begin again in that space much like life."

I never bought the Christian soul thing: an infinite pool of souls waiting for eternity to be incarnated - only on Earth, then one single short life-span here, finally an infinite number of souls spending eternity in the location determined by that one life-span. Reincarnation makes much more sense: an infinite number of souls making repeated trips to 3 Dimensional Reality to refine themselves spiritually; the Tibetan Book of the Dead explains it better than I can. And there's got to be more than one inhabitable planet in this galaxy with sentient life on it, much less the whole universe.

"DES-TI-NY
DES-TI-NY
NO ESCAPING THAT FOR ME!"

Elevate me!

I'm not overly attached to any one belief structure, and try to keep laughing to spread the Cosmic Joke.

[Technomad]

As I understand it, Cassandra got cursed, not because she wouldn't give in to Apollo's seduction, but because she'd said something like: "Give me the power to know the future, Apollo, and I'm yours!" and, when Apollo had done it, she still wouldn't Do It.

In Greek mythology, a god's gift, once given, couldn't be rescinded...but Apollo made sure that she'd rue the day, by saying "Oh-kay, sweetie. You tricked me, fair and square. Now it's my turn to trick you---I'll make sure that nobody believes a thing you say! BWAHAHAHA!"

[damnedyankee]

I'll make sure that nobody believes a thing you say! BWAHAHAHA!

You've been listening to Hamilton's Mythology, adapted for radio by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis.

[Rum Sodomy & the Lash]

Reincarnation makes much more sense:

No it doesn't. BOth concepts make exactly the same amount of sense.

[dale]

re: the human judge thing

There is a short story wherein a petty criminal dies and is escorted into a courtroom. There he finds three human judges who will decide his fate. God is the witness: because he knows everything, he would find it impossible to sentence anyone. So he tells the judges everything he knows about the criminal, his sins and his virtues, and the judges make the final call.

I cannot remember who wrote it, and I cannot find the short story compilation it came from.

[Lila]

Mark Z @ 3/21, 8:23 pm: if parthenogenesis were involved, Jesus would indeed be female, but Mary would be, in addition to her mother, her *identical twin*; ordinary sisters share only 50% of their genes.

cerberus @ 3/22, 7:59 am, re "the idea that one saved puppy can divide heaven from Hell"--actually, I kind of like that idea. For example, there's a Russian folktale about a nasty, ill-tempered, miserly old woman who never did anything to help anyone, except that one day, intending to throw a rock to drive off a starving beggar, she accidentally threw an onion at him instead; he ate it, and was saved from starvation. When the old woman died, as she was being dragged down to Hell, an angel appeared. Reaching down to her from heaven, he held out the onion she'd thrown at the beggar. "Grab onto this," said the angel, "it will draw you up to heaven." AND THE STORY ENDS THERE--you never know whether the old woman chose to acknowledge her (inadvertent) act of charity and be saved, or to reject it in keeping with her lifelong pattern of behavior and be damned.

[Tonio]

The fundies' white-knuckled anxiety -- their barely repressed doubts and their fear that their faith may be a house of cards that would crumble if exposed to the wider world -- seems to be spreading to other branches of the evangelical movement.

Fred, how does this square with the NAE divide over global warming? From my reading, the organization's naysayers on this issue seem to be the fundamentalists, the ones who see all environmentalists as green on the outside and pink on the inside.

I strongly recommend Bart Ehrman's recent God's Problem, though the subtitle somewhat misrepresents the contents (he does not ultimately reject all Biblical interpretations of suffering, just the theistic and dualistic ones).

Froborr, I'm not aware of other Biblical interpretations of suffering other than the theistic and dualistic ones. Can you explain? I read and enjoyed Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus," although that book was likewise saddled with a misleading title.

I've never understood that argument about "perfect justice". A human is a finite being, and therefore any evil committed by that human is necessarily also finite (as is any good). Infinite punishment for finite crime is unjust, and therefore a perfectly just deity would not subject any human to eternal torment.

Good point, and one that I had not considered. I had thought of justice as involving human finiteness, where punishments reflected our lack of power over suffering. If humans had infinite power, we would have no need to mete out justice since we could avoid or prevent all suffering.

[Tonio]

The Bible's description of god sounds more like the Star Trek episode The Squire of Gothos where the seemingly omnipotent Trelane turns out to be an interdimesional kid using humans as play-toys. "Abraham, kill your son! - Just kidding! - Dude, you were really gonna do it!"

While I agree, I also criticize Roddenberry for repeatedly telling the same story, throughout the original series and later with V'Ger and Q. Done once, the story is a valid allegory about hellfire-and-damnation religion. Done over and over, it's really a reflection of Gene's personal issues, not about religion but about power and authority.

[Dash]

practicallyevil, the story of the four reverends is excellent. Glad to see it's been posted on Right Behind. I sort of wish one of the revs. could have been a woman. But having them all be men perhaps moves more smoothly into the ending--Barnes could be expected to cooperate with men and react negatively to a woman pastor right from the get-go. If one were a woman, they'd never have gotten to the punch line.

The segment is reminiscent of Genesis 18, where Abraham receives three divine visitors. Of course, being Abraham and not Bruce Barnes, he gives all the right answers.

(Those invested in a very literal reading of Genesis 18 will make it the Lord and two angels, because the first verse of Genesis says Abraham saw the Lord and then three visitors arrive. So three minus one = the two other guys, who therefore have to be angels. No chance "seeing the Lord" can mean encountering his messengers or even encountering some travelers who need shelter. A movie version managed it rather nicely, with all three men being played by the same actor. Unfortunately, the actor was Peter O'Toole, and, um, of all the actors to select to play the Deity, . . . um, . . . no. I just don't think that the Deity deals with His responsibilities by doing quite so much drinking as O'Toole always looks like he does.)