Getting over the messiah complex

I have a confession to make: I want to fix everything.

Back when I was a Christian, I never really had to worry about injustice. The suffering we endured in our life here on earth wasn't all that meaningful, since we were guaranteed a happy and peaceful afterlife for our faithfulness. I figured that God would make everything work out for the good in the end.

Now, as an atheist, I have no such assurances. I look around at the amount of suffering in the world and I feel simultaneously motivated to do whatever I can to reduce it and impotent to actually accomplish anything meaningful in response to it.

Last Thanksgiving, I spent a week with my parents down in Mexico. On my second to last day there, while we sat comfortably in our condo watching people pass us by on the road, a homeless woman came along with her two children. While my parents commented about how amazing it was that she seemed so comfortable carrying her infant on her back in a sling fashioned from a scarf, I was watching her collect soda cans from trash cans along the street. All I could think of was that this woman was, because of purely random and meaningless circumstance, resigned to a life of struggle and hardship, scraping along with whatever she could manage just to be able to live to see another day. I desperately wanted to figure out what I could do to help her, and as soon as I started to think about it I realized that there must be tens of millions of people just like her all over the planet.

From my perspective as a person living in a first-world nation, this seems to be something that disappears all too quickly from view. There's no reason that I should have a better life than these people, and I shudder to think of all the potentially brilliant minds that fade into the background of the story of humanity simply because they're not wealthy enough to reach their potential.

So... what? Am I crazy to feel guilty about this? Is it wrong for me to willfully ignore these people so that I can get on with my life? What can I actually do to help fix the underlying roots of their suffering? Should I even worry about it?

Regarding the 'Left Behind' prequels

For reasons I can't really explain, I've just listened to all three of the 'Left Behind' prequels in audiobook form.

These books hold a strange fascination for me. I'll freely admit that it's largely because I was reading the original series when I became a born-again Christian. These stories are deeply embedded in my memory. But when I first read them, I was just thinking about how glorious the future was going to be - as if the books were not just fictional descriptions of future events, but actual works of prophecy. The lines between fiction and prophecy were totally blurred for me.

Now, when I listen to them as a nonbeliever, I can't help but be struck by how trite and silly they seem. The characters are totally unrealistic, the plot lines are predictable and full of pointless delays, and the dialogue is stilted and utterly unlike any kind of dialogue that real people have. Everyone seems to speak the same way, eschewing contractions for the full versions of words (in what seems like an attempt to conform with the formal, Victorian English of the KJV of the Bible).

The whole thing is ridiculous, and it's packed with straw man versions of the arguments that atheists actually use. It's amazing that I was ever so drawn into something like this...

And that doesn't even begin to describe just how stereotypical the non-white characters are in this series. Jenkins and LaHaye actually portray the only explicitly African American characters as being stereotypically 'sassy' and obsessed with barbecued ribs. They could really only have been more racist if they'd gotten into a discussion of watermelon and chitlins... I mean, come on! Their straw man black people even started talking about how white people don't know how to cook ribs! What the fuck?