I started Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins about a week ago, and I really wanted to read the book because of the multitudes of people that have read it and are influenced by it. I think that it is a very powerful cultural virus in the words of Richard Brodie from his book Virus of the Mind. I figured I should read something that has this much power in the world today. One of the books in this series was the best selling novel in the world last year.

Here are my problems with the book after plunging some ninety pages into it’s fourth grade level writing splendor. Besides the simplistic writing involved the fact that the word fastidious, a word that I have never heard used in spoken conversation and only infrequently seen in print was used twice in the pages I read. In the world that this book inhabits apparently everyone is trying to preach at you and bring you to Jesus and it is possible to strip some wires in your laptop computer and hook it up to wires in a phone and get that sucker to work. Also the book has a distinct lack of understanding of world politics. In this world for some reason Russia feels the need to attack Israel, and luckily God is there to thwart Russia where he has never really been in the last sixty years to protect them from Palestinian terrorists or any of it’s neighboring countries.

Those things don’t bother me so much, I’ve read books that were worse written. I read a book called Mutants Attack (I think that was the name) that was quite possibly the most poorly written action novel ever written, and I have a real soft spot in me for a series of science fiction books called Horn about a cybernetic cop. What really bothers me in this book is the anti-Semitism. The line that caused me to throw the book across the room in disgust was
“He’s already got me, Lucinda. But Jesus is another thing. The Israelis hate Jesus, but look what God did for them.”

You know, I wasn’t under the impression that the Israelis hate Jesus. I know that Jews don’t accept his divinity or status as the Messiah, but that doesn’t mean that they hate him. I don’t accept claims made about Mohammad or various other religious personalities, but I don’t hate them. I think it is the height of pretentiousness to state that any group hates another. Muslims don’t hate us. Palestinians don’t hate us. The French don’t hate us.

The worst part about this quote is that it is supposed to come from the mouth of an award winning journalist who knows his stuff and has traveled around the middle east. I don’t think even G. Gordon Liddy would say that the Israelis hate Jesus, and he is about as conservative as they come.

This is telling people who read this and don’t read it critically that this is how journalists think. It seems that everyone in this book thinks in exactly the same way, and none of them are too convincing as characters. To me most of the people who were described as being taken sounded like right pricks anyway. I think that authors have a real hard time thinking in the mode of the non-religious person. They go out of their way to make them seem unhealthy and unhappy, when I don’t think that is necessarily the case. People who are religious are unhappy just as much as we heathens, it’s just that they put it off on someone or something else, while we evil, evil ones try to work out our problems for ourselves, and alot of us are just find at doing that.

I’m starting to ramble so I think I’ll wrap this up for now.