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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JeffA who wrote (49736)	6/14/2005 3:08:49 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

A stretch? I've heard that these books are the best selling in the world: 65 million copies. washingtonpost.com "...In fact, the series offers an instructive if unsettling 5,000-page tour of the alternative universe of Protestant fundamentalism and its dominant belief system, a convoluted doctrine called premillennial dispensationalism. (Although fundamentalist and evangelical are often used interchangeably, evangelicalsm is a much broader category, encompassing a multiplicity of religious views, including premillennialist fundamentalism.) Followers of fundamentalist doctrine hold that the Bible is infallible and that salvation comes through personal faith and not good deeds. They interpret the world through biblical prophecy and are famously encouraged to read with a newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other. Premillennial dispensationalism is no obscure religious byway. In the anthology Rapture, Revelation and the End Times, Bruce David Forbes, a professor of religious studies at Morningside College, points out that the same conservative Christians who are a major portion of the Left Behind readers constitute "a significant base for President George W. Bush, who numbers himself among them."... The storyline sticks closely to a timetable of events that fundamentalists believe will pave the way to history's end. During a seven-year global ordeal known as the Tribulation, billions of people will perish and the Antichrist will rise to dominate the world. Jesus will then return to Earth to triumph over Satan and lead the surviving Jews (now converted to Christianity) back to an Israel that has been restored to its biblical boundaries. This will usher in a thousand-year reign of peace centered in a realigned Middle East. The high-concept premise of the Left Behind books derives from a relatively recent doctrinal refinement to this scenario. In the mid-1800s, an Irish minister named John Nelson Darby wondered why the righteous should be made to suffer the harsh events of the End Times. Drawing on a couple of disconnected Bible verses, Darby came up with an ingenious escape hatch he called the Rapture. This powerful recruiting tool promises that the Saved will be whisked up to heaven right before the start of the Tribulation unpleasantness.... Does prophecy beget policy in the Bush White House? Left Behind readers who believe that it does have many other administration policies they can point to. When President Bush rejected a treaty to curb global warming, he reinforced the premillennialist bias against environmental protection. (Why bother, since Jesus will be along soon to straighten things out?) And when he waged war in Iraq, prophecy believers viewed it as the prelude to Armageddon, a titanic conflict foretold in the Bible that will ultimately be fought in the Middle East....