I drove Darin to work the other day and ended up listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross as a result. She was interviewing Tim LaHaye, one of the authors of the apparently unreadable Left Behind series, which has reportedly sold 58 million copies. (Slacktivist is a better person than I, subjecting himself to those books.)
You have got to listen to this interview; it is unreal.
If LaHaye and Co.—and their millions of readers—actually believe this stuff…I am aghast. I really didn’t know this kind of nonsense was out there. In the interview, LaHaye spouts what can only be generously termed “garbage” about Christianity and the Apocalypse and the End of Days. And this is, I am sure, the sanitized version, suitable to share with the “unbelievers” on NPR.
These guys want the world to end. They want us all to die. Of course, they’ll be fine, having been saved in the Rapture.
Other than the obvious warm fuzzies of superiority, what do these people get out of believing this shit? And that’s what it is: shit designed to turn off the critical thinking, to turn believers into bleating, fleeceable sheep who pray for death—not theirs, of course, but the evil ones, like Catholics and Jews.
Gross had on another author after LaHaye, Gershom Gorenberg, author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. What Gorenberg had to say about the Left Behind series, along with Fundamentalism in general, made me immediately sign up to get his book at the library. I’ll report back after I’ve read it.