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war - churches deplore

A church near my apartment is tolling its bell continuously. I don't know if it's to protest the war or what, but it certainly adds an air of gloom to an already dark and stormy night.

Churches deplore war in Iraq

In Reading Iraq, it says

In the mass of pulp novels dealing with the Middle East, there is one title that stands alone in shaping U.S. attitudes toward the region. Tim LeHaye's Left Behind Tribulation novels, eight of which have been published, have sold a mind-boggling 50 million copies.

The books portray the "end time" as described in the Bible's Book of Revelation and interpreted by U.S. fundamentalists. With images of people on an airplane being "raptured" into heaven and leaving their shoes behind, the series is scorned by the media. But, writes critic Edmund Cohen, they are "consumed by grownups who receive them as deadly serious instruction about soon-to-come cataclysmic events."

Iraq figures prominently in the Left Behind series. Satan returns to Earth at the time of the Apocalypse and rises up in the city of Baghdad, where he establishes a world totalitarian government.

...

Left Behind is shot through with what Thompson calls "never explicit anti-Semitism." And Muslims are simply satanic.

One poll found that 46 per cent of Americans, including George W. Bush, now identify themselves as born-again Christians. Although Thompson does not believe Bush would accept the extreme views of the Left Behind novels, he feels they help "normalize" a dialogue of evil doers and avenging righteous Americans.

"There's something deep in the American heart that's very ready to respond to a series of books like that. And when the rhetoric of those books starts coming from a [White House] press conference, it seems familiar to them."

Hmm, must be a typo. Must mean to say 46% of Americans consider themselves bomb-again Christians.

If you're in the States and you want to know what it looks like from the outside, it's something like this:
Steve Allen called it Dumbth. Carl Sagan worried about the return of The Demon-Haunted World.
Quite simply, these both describe an America where rationality has been lost, and replaced with some combination of fantasy, delusion, and distorted religion. Where the fundamental critical thinking required to sustain a healthy democracy has been replaced with lazy habits of thought. An incurious public ill-prepared to make good choices about matters of any complexity whatsoever.

It appears this has come to pass. posted by Richard at 18:56 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)