When I decided to read some books of the “Left Behind” series to discover what fundamentalist Christians of the ‘The Messiah Will Return Soon’ sort believed in I was unprepared for a news report that it has done very well indeed at least as reward for the two writers, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

I should not be critical but I can’t help it.  People who write tripe write it for people who read tripe.  I can be criticized by my readers and have been, although it is for the half-baked conclusions that I reach for at times, rather than the quality of my writing.  I write essays but I also read a lot.  As you know I have just finished reading the book that inspired the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  This is the “Turner Diaries” that was very hard to find and only obtained one on inter-library loan from the Space Academy Library.  The Academy offers the book to readers in order to alert them about the believers in strange and arcane subjects because the soldiers who go to the Academy should realize what they are up against from home grown enemies.

The “Left Behind” series, now ten books, and the single volume “Turner Diaries”  are highly specialized works.  They are directed towards a narrow segment of the American reading society.  Despite the political nature of the “Diaries” is it a terribly written book and belongs in the garbage.  The religious superstition and fundamentalist dogma about the end of the world has sold more than 35 million copies in the ten book series.  Popularizing blowing up buildings or warning about a “World Federal Government” in “New Babylon” wrought by a charismatic Rumanian Anti-Christ are examples of how believers can be made to dedicate their lives to death.

The Turner Diaries made a hopefully tiny number of bombers out of impressionable loner types of militaristic minded men.  The Left Behind series has made readers if not believers out of millions, who buy, read, share and discuss the ideas of a preparation for a Christian world to come with a revived Jesus who will take over the world when the world as we know it will end.  This is another crazy idea but it has attractions for the kind of people who in the middle of the 1800’s divested themselves of worldly goods, dressed themselves in white robes and collected at the tops of mountains to await the end of this world and the beginning of the next.

I have a lot of strange beliefs that must seem bizarre to others, and perhaps to you.  I know that some of my friends who are conservative cannot understand how I can continue to believe that Liberalism is a sound idea in which to invest.  I think they must still believe in the Stock Market as the salvation of Social Security.  We both have nutty ideas although I think that the Liberal approach is more people oriented than capital and investments. What do the “end of the world” believers think about the next elections?