asterroc | Books

I've decided I hate preachy religious books that masquerade as fiction. "Left Behind" and "Summer's Path" are two examples.

"Left Behind" I read a year or two ago because I felt it was an important cultural work, and might help me understand the mind of the evangelist. The premise is that one day half of the world's population disappears suddenly, leaving behind their clothing and all worldly goods, and the remaining people slowly come to the realization that they have missed the Rapture. While I do feel that witnessing something like this would be compelling, the manner in which the main characters become converted is unrealistic. Right after the rapture happens the main character and his college-aged daughter are skeptical and confused about the disappearance of the mother and baby brother. Then the father attends a sermon and suddenly sees the light. He takes his daughter to the priest and she suddenly sees the light as well. Mere exposure to The Holy Word is all it takes for them to suddenly become utterly converted.

"Summer's Path" I am reading the audiobook b/c Audible.com gave it away for free and I thought it was fantasy. I was deceived - it's New Age pseudo-Christian evangelism. The main character is dying of terminal cancer and contemplating suicide (this book is not for the triggery) when he meets a non-denominational angel who offers to take over his body for him. The main character only passingly wonders if the angel is an alien body snatcher, and never wonders whether it's a devil instead because the angel tells him to "trust his feelings". The book is now devolving into preaching about how all physical ills are caused by not being in touch with your emotions, and depression is caused by suppressing your physical sensations. No that doesn't make any sense to me either. The main character (now in the body of a dog) is currently sitting in a car with some New Age hippies (who keep calling the angel now in the main character's body a hippie, ironically) who are guiding him in connecting with his inner energy source, and of course he believes it as soon as he hears about it and is able to do it on the first try.

Yeah, if religion really worked that way - all you needed was to be exposed to the One True Religion to suddenly convert - then just about everyone in the world would have come to the same One True Religion by now.

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I haven't read it, but I think being witness to the Rapture might be a heavy factor in one's conversion. I could see myself hypothetically believing in Christianity were I to witness such evidence firsthand.

Of course, I would probably be a little skeptical and consider other explanations, but if nothing else panned out, I would believe it, I think.

Honestly though, I would be thankful that the world population had suddenly been reduced and feel that I were living with more freedom than I had before. :)

The part that bothered me was that even after witnessing the Rapture, the main characters did NOT believe Christianity, and continued to be skeptical of Christianity for weeks. Until the INSTANT they heard someone else talk about Christianity, and then they converted instantly. And swallowed not only every last part of Christianity entirely, but also every last personal interpretation of the preacher, such as exactly which European politician was the Antichrist. (Yeah, the preacher was a sinner, that's why he wasn't raptured himself.)

I agree with your analysis, but it was the instant conversion AT A LATER DATE that bothered me. The main character was a lapsed Christian, if he was going to believe the things of Christianity, why not as soon as the Rapture happened? Why did he need to hear The Word?

What I got out of reading it was an insight into the evangelical mindset that people just need to hear The Word and will be instantly converted. I still don't get WHY they think it'll work, but I get that they do think it'll happen and that's why they keep preaching at me.

Of course, I would probably be a little skeptical and consider other explanations, but if nothing else panned out, I would believe it, I think.

I don't know what evidence one could present that would convince me that the Christian Rapture had just occurred. So a bunch of people have just disappeared; that's certainly congruent with some predictions of what the Rapture would be like, but not all of them...and it's also congruent with (for example) large-scale abduction by any aliens possessing Star Trek transporters and cloaking devices...and anyone with that sort of technology can put on whatever sound-and-light show that they want in an attempt to further convince someone that the Second Coming has Come and Gone. *shrug*

The correlation between people who had disappeared and their Christian tendencies would support the theory of the Rapture.

And who's to say that large-scale abductions by aliens is different than the Christian rapture? Maybe we're just putting two different labels on the same reality.

I'd agree that such correlation would support the Rapture theory. But it would also support any number of other stories. (Among other things: once they're gone, how do we know that they haven't all gone to Hell for getting it wrong?--as long as we're hypothesizing such things.)

The Rapture is said to involve supernatural entities and processes whose existence and nature are beyond proof and . How should one prove the existence--past or present--of same? It seems to me that the closest that one might come is "we have no explanation of what happened here that accords with physical laws as we know them, so it could have been the Rapture (or aliens, or we're all living in a simulation that just had a major-but-not-fatal system error, or ...)".

I'd expect that many Christians might object to the notion that the Rapture might manifest as alien abduction to some. (Many more might find it entirely appropriate, of course.)

Then it comes down to an Occam's Razor fight: which is less believable?

...I suppose it's impolite of me to bring a pun to an Occam's Razor fight, but, well, I just did. :)

I don't see how Occam's Razor helps in the absence of critical physical evidence (which we are required to assume in the case of the specific fictional Rapture to which you referred). You can't slice fog. *wry smile*

Applying Occam's Razor to the possibility of the Rapture is just as acceptable or not as applying it to the possibility of highly evolved deceptive aliens or that we are living in the Matrix. If half the world's population disappeared today, none of those ideas are testable, so technically none are actually hypotheses, so technically we cannot strictly apply Occam's Razor to any.

We should discuss string "theory" sometime. ;)

Well...mostly. In the case of aliens operating according to physical laws as we know them (or may come to know them later as our data collection and models improve), we might at least be able to demonstrate, later, that the data are consistent with a specific set of technologies that were known to be possessed by the aliens at the time of the 'Rapture'. I agree that in the case of the Christian Rapture and the simulation argument, since literal miracles are possible, we basically can't test (or falsify) anything.

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