Tuesday, August 08, 2006

"Believe in our benevolent, peace-loving God, or suffer torture and dismemberment at His hands!"

What the ‘Left Behind’ Series Really Means

It's a chilling article. This in particular struck me, though, as going above and beyond the simple exposé of these books as hate literature:
The Rapture—the time when God takes up all saved Christians before he lets loose slaughter, pestilence and torture upon the earth—is very real to people in whom its glorious and grisly promise was instilled and cultivated from birth. Even those who escape fundamentalism agree its marks are permanent. We may no longer believe in being raptured up, but the grim fundamentalist architecture of the soul stands in the background of our days. There is an apocalyptic starkness that remains somewhere inside us, one that tinges all of our feelings and thoughts of higher matters. Especially about death, oh beautiful and terrible death, for naked eternity is more real to us than to you secular humanists. I get mail from hundreds of folks like me, the different ones who fled and became lawyers and teachers and therapists and car mechanics, dope dealers and stockbrokers and waitresses. And every one of them has felt that thing we understand between us, that “skulls-piled-clear-to- heaven-redemption-through-absolute-self-worthlessness-and-you- ain’t-shit-in-the-eyes-of-God-so-go-bleed-to-death-in-some-dark- corner” stab in the heart at those very moments when we should have been most proud of ourselves. Self-hate. That thing that makes us sabotage our own inner happiness when we are most free and operating as self-realizing individuals. This kind of Christianity is a black thing. It is a blood religion, that willingly gives up sons to America’s campaigns in the Holy Land, hoping they will bring on the much-anticipated war between good and evil in the Middle East that will hasten the End Times. Bring Jesus back to earth.
One other thing that struck me in that piece: Evangelical NASCAR?!?!?! What the fucking fuck?

There's a lot more great stuff in that article. I may have to put a link to that blog in the sidebar at some point.

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