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?

Charlie Crist, Defender of Florida

Apparently Florida governor Charlie Crist stuck a written prayer into the Western Wall in Jersualem asking God to protect Florida from hurricanes.

Crist said he isn't trying to take credit, but he told a group of real estate agents Friday that he's had prayer notes placed in the Western Wall in Jerusalem each year and no major storms have hit Florida.

Crist noted that just before his election in 2006, Florida had been affected by a total of eight hurricanes in 2004 and 2005.

"Do you know the last time it was we had a hurricane in Florida? It's been awhile. In 2007, I took my first trade mission. Do you know where I went?" said Crist, a Methodist, referring to a trip to Israel.

He then told of going to the Western Wall and inserting a note with a prayer. He said it read, "Dear God, please protect our Florida from storms and other difficulties. Charlie."

"Time goes on — May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December — no hurricanes," Crist said. "Thank God."

Maybe Charlie could expand a bit and ask God to keep hurricanes away from the entire country. Wouldn't that be nice?

Wonder what he's going to say when Florida is inevitably hit by a hurricane, considering that the years 2000 to 2008 have had more recorded tropical or subtropical cyclones than any decade on record. I'm sure he'll come up with some sort of rationalization...

The Problem with Prayer

One of the strongest evidences I've seen against the existence of God is the problem of the unreliability of prayer. The basic problem is this: every Sunday, in all the Christian churches in all the cities in all the states of this country, there are millions (if not tens of millions) of people praying - most likely, for many of the same things. An end to war, an end to hunger, healing of the sick, and so on; these are consistent themes for prayer in most moderate-to-liberal churches. More conservative and fundamentalist churches will pray for the return of Jesus, the spreading of the gospel, God's protection over the nation, et cetera.

It seems that the only "answered" prayers are those that are ambiguous - basically, praying that God's will be done (isn't it always?) or that God will protect our loved ones (in which case "nobody in my family died" means my prayers were answered). We still have plenty of war, hunger, and sickness. When I ask apologists why we don't see prayers about these things answered, I tend to get one of a few responses:

1. God moves in mysterious ways. We aren't meant to know the mind of God, simply to accept that he knows what needs to be done.
2. God isn't a genie. That's not how prayer works. You don't get everything you want just by asking.
   
3. If God wants it to happen, it will happen. God has a plan, and sometimes we just have to wait.
4. God answers all prayers. The answer is either "Yes", "No", or "Wait".
5. (Matthew 7:21) "Not everyone who says to Me, "Lord, Lord," shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. In other words, just because you cry out, that doesn't mean you get what you want.
   

There are, of course, serious problems with these defenses.

1. All well and good, but couldn't God be mysterious without being unnecessarily cruel and indifferent to the suffering of the people he "fathered"? I'd say it's much more mysterious for all sickness to be instantly healed than for it to just keep on going. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why on earth can't he figure out a way to work out his plan that doesn't leave us high and dry?
2. This is despite Jesus supposedly saying, repeatedly, that it is precisely how prayer works - Mark 11:24, John 15:7, John 14:13-14, and so on. I bring this up often, and the response I tend to get is that, even though he literally says you'll get whatever you want, that's not really what the words mean. Plus, even if it were, you're only supposed to ask for things that glorify God. How convenient; if you ask for something practical, and you don't get it, clearly it wasn't going to glorify God anyways.
3. Fine. He has a plan. But this is nothing more than Stockholm syndrome. We're told that despite being in the grip of horrifying, needless suffering and being victims to the whim of a being that set our fate at our birth, it's really okay, because we can just trust that he knows what he's doing. Forgive me if I'm not convinced that we should blindly trust and love a person who doesn't explain himself - and, what's more, who tells us that we're wrong to expect him to.
4. These are the only three options. This is not specific to any sort of real being. You can pray to a brick and get the same results. It's a matter of postdiction rather than prediction. You just have to massage the results to fit into one of the "answers". This isn't proof of prayer being answered; it's an exercise in intellectual flexibility.
   
5. (Romans 10:13) "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." In other words, just because you cry out, that means you do get what you want. Also see Joel 2:32. The Bible is, after all the Big Book of Multiple Choice. Of course, this all only applies to the Christian god. Other gods might catch a break for not matching up with all of his personality traits. Somehow, though, I doubt that any (personal) god's existence would fare better, considering that the failure rate is so huge.

Behind all five objections is one larger objection: If God doesn't answer every prayer, and in fact he only answers those which align with his plan, why on earth would he want us to pray at all? He's already got his mind made up; is our prayer nothing more than a symbolic-only, non-functional, groveling appeal to his vanity?

It seems to me that the fact that our prayers aren't answered the way we expect them to be shows that God is a bit short-sighted, seeing how it leads to reasonable doubt. It also makes him appear capricious, unreliable, uncaring, and irrational. Seems better to me to just say he's not there at all than to continue to make up nonsensical excuses for his lack of action.