April Showers

It's April and the rain has been falling and flooding many parts of S.E. Queensland and much more rain is forecast for the coming week. It's a nice change from the many years of drought but there have been some personal costs for many.

For me life has been busy. I had hoped to put up a post yesterday but just didn't have time. I'm also conscious that last month there was little biblioblogging as opposed to other topics and that the state election dominated things somewhat. This month I plan to focus on biblioblogging and, as we are now in Holy Week, it seems an appropriate focus for the month. But for now I want to point you in the direction of some recent postings on a couple of other blogs.

First off Rollan McCleary, looks at the latest manifestation of that peculiarly American religious phenomenon of prophetic preachers announcing gloom and doom and, in the latest pronouncement from David Wilkerson, the penchant for visions of burning cities. As Rollan observes:

American films and culture thrive on disaster scenarios. It may have something to do with the role of the apocalyptic in American religion or the feeling engendered by the competitive atmosphere of American capitalism that life itself is one big crisis.

Wilkerson, of The Cross and the Switchblade fame, has a long track record of foreseeing US cities in flames. Perhaps the US inner city riots in the late '60s left an indelible impression on Wilkerson. Anyway, last month Wilkerson issued yet another urgent prophecy on his blog. In the American and David Wilkerson Disaster Syndrome, Rollan examines Wilkerson's latest prophecy against his previous record. Rollan then draws on some insights from astrology to further explore Wilkerson's visions of cities on fire.

Meanwhile don't forget to check out the Left Behind Fridays series on Slacktivist. When I first found this site he was reading and deconstructing the first of the Left Behind books, a reading that extended for many years. His readings were not only incisive but side splittingly funny as well. This year he has started on the second book of the series, Tribulation Force. His readings are still sharp and incisive but now there is little to laugh about. Perhaps it's because in the first book the main characters were still working out what was happening and were in the process of 'getting saved'. However in Tribulation Force they are now officially 'saved':

here the malice and contempt is premeditated and intentional. Buck Williams' despicable behavior toward Verna Zee -- and toward Alice, actually -- is not merely weak and obtuse and fearful, but careful and deliberate.And the authors celebrate this painstaking viciousness. It is our first glimpse of the newly saved and sanctified Buck Williams and the authors thus suggest that this is how godly, real, true Christian men ought to behave toward women or anyone else they regard as their inferiors.

The fruit of the Spirit, St. Paul writes, "is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."If you sat down and tried to write a scene in which a character displayed the opposite of all of those characteristics, you'd come up with something like Buck's actions in the first 20 pages of Tribulation Force.

In urging the Galatian Christians to live up to these fruits of the Spirit, Paul warns them of the alternative. "Let us not become conceited," he writes, "provoking and envying each other." And again, if you sat down to write a scene in which a conceited character was driven to provoke others out of envy, you'd come up with something like Buck's actions in the first 20 pages of Tribulation Force.

In John's epistles, he gives a name to this behavior, this antithesis of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. He calls it "the spirit of antichrist."That is, again, the only place in the Bible where the word "antichrist" appears.

The really horrifying aspect of this subplot is the way it's driven by a gleeful misogyny.

Read it all on T.F.: Not Funny

UPDATE: Rollan has more on Wilkerson and his holy homophobia (as well as a swipe at Oz news media for it's handling of Rudd's reported spat over being served wrong type of meal in flight) over at his blog with Kevin Rudd's Dinner Dispute and David Wilkerson's Fireworks.

Left Behind Fridays on Slacktivist

If you haven't checked it out yet I strongly recommend the Left Behind Friday series of posts over at Slacktivist. The latest instalment, TF: The Militant Verna, continues his reading of Tribulation Force, the second instalment of the probably world's worst series of of novels of all time, which Fred Clark began last month. Here Fred exposes the misogynist and homophobic assumptions that underpin LaHaye's and Jenkins' worldview and indeed the worldview of that conservative, US-centric, born-again, rapture expecting Protestant Christianity. As Clark points out, as well as misogyny, there is an incredible double standard based on male privilege that underpins L&J's representations of their male heroes as is shown in this incident concerning the journalist character, Cameron "Buck" Williams and his dressing down by his new boss, the "militant" Verna Zee. I quote directly from Fred Clark:

Every sentence in these pages portrays Buck as a swaggering idiot whose only response to his demotion is an expanded sense of entitlement and self-importance, yet we're not meant to perceive Buck this way at all.... It's hard enough to keep liking a character despite such a passage, but L&J want readers to like Buck even more because of it. It's not Buck they want us laughing at and despising here, but the militant Verna.

Yet the word militant is used here without further explanation because LaHaye & Jenkins assume that their intended audience will understand it in the context of a larger, ongoing story. That story is what they like to call the "culture war" here in the United States, and Verna Zee is, in the familiar phrase of the culture warriors, either a militant feminist or a militant homosexual. They needn't explain which, specifically, since in their view the two categories overlap.

The phrase "militant homosexual" is so common in religious-right jargon that L&J seem not to realize how peculiar it sounds to anyone who doesn't share their phobias. It provides us a glimpse of how they perceive the Pink Menace of homosexuality -- a faceless horde in refugee camps south of the border, lobbing deadly, indiscriminate rockets of gayness toward their peaceful homes.

But the key point here, as it applies to the militant Verna, is that for L&J and their intended audience, "militant feminist" is always regarded as a subset of "militant homosexual." For them, in other words, all feminists are presumed to be lesbians, and all lesbians are presumed to hate men.

This leap from sexual orientation to a presumption of militant hatred is illuminating. L&J's visceral opposition to the presumed militant feminists/lesbians is proclaimed as a defense of sexual morality, but that claim is ironic, since lurking just below the surface here is a staggering sexual incontinence. Their cartoonish depiction of the militant Verna Zee is simply L&J's expression of frat-boy douchebag sexual entitlement. Their purported complaint that she fails to display a requisite femininity or wifely submission seems really just the insistence that women -- all women -- provide universal sexual access. They are saying, in effect, "If you don't agree to have sex with me when I want, whenever I want, then you must be a lesbian. A militant lesbian."..

...If we can manage, however, to screen out the appalling contempt piled on poor Verna here, it's also worth taking a closer look at Buck Williams' behavior in this scene so we can try to figure out what on earth he's thinking.

We're told that upon arrival, "Buck winked at Alice, Verna's spike-haired young secretary." After Verna informs him that he will need an appointment to get a meeting with her, he sits down next to Alice's desk and proceeds to flirt with her for the next two pages.

"You can call me Buck," he whispered.

"Thanks," she said shyly, pointing to a chair beside her desk.

They whisper together for several more paragraphs, Alice giggling even though Buck never says anything actually funny.

The authors intend us to view Alice sympathetically. She's accommodating, subservient, fawningly grateful for Buck's very presence. She is, in other words, available...

There are at least two obvious problems with Buck's idly passing the time here with his idea of light-hearted flirtatious banter. First, he's supposedly still in the throes of sappy, first-blush-of-love smittenness over Chloe. Do you think the authors would have approved if instead of Buck and Alice, it had been Chloe and Allen whispering, giggling and winking at one another? Me neither.

But apart from the question of whether light-hearted, flirtatious banter is appropriate with Alice, there's the matter of whether such frivolous chit-chat is at all appropriate or human-seeming just two weeks after the Event... In the wake of the sudden disintegration of every child on the planet and the deaths and disappearances of millions more adults, greeting people with a flirty wink just seems terribly, terribly wrong.

Indeed, as several people observe in the comments to this post, L&J's portrayal of "Buck"'s swaggering ineraction with women borders on pornography. Women must always be available for male desire. And indeed the Left behind series can be considered a species of Protestant porn, both in its sexual and gender dynamics as well as its schadenfreude. I can't praise Left Behind Fridays enough and I encourage you to make it a part of your regular reading, especially if you've at any time had to live in the shadow of the Rapture heresy.

Pet peeves of a fellow blogger

I've got quite a few blogs listed in my blog list. A great number of them are biblioblogs. There's also a range of blogs on political and socio-spiritual issues. And a handful of oddities, blogs that I wouldn't see eye to eye with but maybe worth checking out from time to time.

Slacktivist is definitely a blog I feel an accord with and it's definitely worth checking out regularly. I first came across the site in 2005 at which stage the author was 2 years into his practice of Left Behind Fridays. For the previous two years, he had been reading and writing about undoubtedly one of the worst novels ever written, the La Haye/Jenkins Left Behind He would continue for another two to three years before finishing the novel, now the first in a series of what has become the worst novels ever written. Since finishing Left Behind the book he has been watching and writing about the film version which he only finished about the beginning of the year. He has now started on the second novel of the series, Tribulation Force. I can only say thank you to Slacktivist for saving us all the trouble of reading these execrable books and, sadly, books which have so corrupted US-style Christianity and its affiliates and offshoots around the world.

You see Slacktivist is not anti-Christian, far from it he is a 'progressive' evangelical Christian who regards Left Behind theology and the allied fundamentalism (recognising that fundamentalism does not have to be LeftBehindist) as a serious blight on, if not corruption of the evangelical tradition. Slacktivist is determined to expose not only the incoherency and inconsistency of LeftBehindism but also its inhumanity and complete contradiction to what Christianity is all about. I plan to pick up some of the threads of his devastating (and very amusing) critiques in later posts but for now I'm going to respond to a cope of his posts on fundamentalism and creationism.

Slacktivist's pet peeve is young earth creationism i.e. the 6 day account of creation in Genesis 1 is a literal factual account of the way the Earth and the universe came to be. As he says young earth creationism is demonstrably false. It is also a lynchpin for the fundamentalist house of cards, a 'particularly brittle and fragile belief system that insists, emphatically, that all of it must be true or else none of it is true'. The fundamentalist position is 'salvation by neither grace nor works, but rather by the knowledge of and mental assent to a very long list of arcane biblical interpretations'. Consequently if one part isn't literally true then none of it is true. Consequently ex-fundamentalist Christians can make some great militant atheists.

But just as often, the whole edifice collapses. Hard. They wind up rejecting everything they ever believed. Everything, that is, except for that pernicious notion that "all of it must be true or none of it is." These kids shoot way past what their parents feared would happen to the rest of us at Wheaton or wherever (with our dangerous book learnin' and dancing and movie-going and such) and they become the mirror-opposite of their old fundamentalist selves. They become as strident and binary in their unbelief as their failed mentors at Bob Jones were in their belief. Yet even their rebellion tends to remain shaped by that world and its narrowly imagined options.

This scenario is not hypothetical and it is not rare. And it's not something I forgive easily. The proponents of young-earth creationism are responsible for this very scene playing out a thousand times over. Jesus spoke to exactly such people. Something about how it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their necks and be drowned in the depths of the sea. (Jesus was fond of hyperbole, but I'm not sure he's using it there.)

In a subsequent post, Slacktivist picks up on one of the comments made by one of his readers that

Fundamentalism is a reaction to "modern" criticisms of the Bible and Christianity. It started out defending what have traditionally been regarded as the core beliefs of Christianity (e.g. that Jesus was the divine Son of God, that he was really raised from the dead, etc.), but in the process of making that defense they came up with (seemingly without quite realizing it) a new approach to reading the Bible, arguing that every word of it was "inerrant" (whatever that means). This tossed out the window a couple thousand years of traditional, orthodox approaches to reading and interpreting the Bible in favor of this new standard which was initially defined in reaction to the German Higher biblical criticism, but which has morphed in various weird ways since as subsequent people have all had different ideas about what exactly it means for a book to be "inerrant."

Slacktivist develops this point to say

Precisely. It's a bit odd, perhaps, to say that "morphed in various weird ways" is a precise statement, but it's about as accurate as one can be in trying to describe the strange new mischief that has been introduced by this imprecise notion of "inerrancy." That weird morphing also explains why the claim that beliefs like young-earth creationism or PMD rapture mania are "conservative" is false, but not disingenuous. These are new and radically innovative ideas introduced or adopted by people who had set out, initially, to uphold "the authority of the scriptures" (to use one of their favorite phrases). That this effort to defend the Bible's "traditional" meaning has resulted in their introducing replacement meanings that override and disregard its traditional meaning is bitterly ironic, but this irony is lost on them.

And he cites this comment from another reader "If you tried to explain it (young earth creationism) to a person who lived 150 years ago, they would think you were on crack, if they knew what crack was."

And this point was brought home to me when I followed a biblical link sent to me a couple of days ago. It's at the dispensationalist Blue Letter Bible site. Amongst its study aids is the text of a book by Clarence Larkin a pre-millennial dispensationalist. This book, Dispensational Truth, was published in 1918. Now Larkin beleives that the events in Genesis 1 did take place 7000 years ago. However he does not believe the Earth is 7000 years old. He accepts what the science of his day tells him abiout the age of the earth and the solar system. He cites the nebular theory of the formation of the solar system. He then says

But the "Word of God" and the "Works of God" must harmonize. There can be no conflict between the Bible and Science. Science demands thousands of years for the formation of the earth and all the time it demands is given to it in the sublime words of Gen. 1:1, "In the BEGINNING God created the heaven and the earth." This verse then covers the whole period of the formation of the earth and its preparation for the habitation of man.

Larkin believes in a pre-Adamite world that was destroyed by water before the unfolding events of Genesis 1. What the rest of Genesis 1 recounts is not the creation of the earth but the restoration of the earth. Larkin also engages in some specualtion about the pre-Adamite world and its inhabitants. In some respects his work echoes Blavatsky's vision of lost pasts and lost continents, e.g. Lemuria and Atlantis, destroyed in ancient cataclyms. I haven't yet had a chance to read how Larkin reconciles Genesis 1 with Genesis 2-3. But I find his biblical literalist reconciliation with scientific understandings of his day quite fascinating. And maybe he is not so much of a literalist if he insists that Word of God must harmonise with the Works of God.