I am no stranger to the end times hullaballoo. When I was in High School (my senior year, I was really into books by Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth and There’s A New World Coming and Satan is Alive and Well On Planet Earth and a guy named Salem Kirban, who wrote a novel called 666 (on the Rapture and 7 year Tribulation and then a sequel called 1000 (on the Millineum or Thousand Year Reign). I still remember how, even though I was fascinated with all the “Bible passages” and conjecturing about “clues hidden throughout Scripture”, and however strongly I took these seriously (which I did to some extent), I was negatively impressed with Kirban’s idea of who the “elect” were. He made frequent reference to the “missing people” who were also members of Churches that sang traditional hymns and not all this “newfangled stuff”. Even at 18, I was mature enough to see the blind fundamntalism of that confusion of faith and forms of piety.
I am wondering how much of this I am going to see in this first episode of “Revelations”. I already notice in the trailers the crazed “satanic-like” guy who is , I suppose, one of the “evils” let loose (ie the Four Horsemen, etc.”), and provides a good “white hat-black hat” way for the audience to side with the good guys who have rightly divbined the signs (probably using their Schofield Bibles along with their Left Behind secret decoder rings. Ok sorry, a bit too heavy on the sarcasm. More at 11 (or in the morning, as I may be hitting the sack afterward)
“…Left Behind secret decoder rings…”
Bwa ha ha ha! That’s straight-up comical genius right there.
I used to devour Hal Lindsey and LaHaye/Jenkins stuff like crazy during my senior year of high school. The thing is, though, was that I believed every drop of that nonsense they fed me. I read Hal Lindsey’s The Apocalypse Code and the first four books of the LaHaye/Jenkins’ Left Behind series just before going to college where God freed me of my fundamentalism.
Actually, the thing that turned me off about the Left Behind series of books was that not only were they very, very poorly written, but every time somebody “converted” to being a Christian, they turned into these ridiculous conservative religious squares. I was 19 at the time and had to pose the thought, “I’m still a Christian, but I still rock, damnit!” Anyway, that probably sounds weird, but who I was at that point of my life was nothing like the squares LaHaye/Jenkins made all their Christians into in their poorly-written evangelical pornography.