The Last-Minute Rapture Reading List - top 11

[Swede]

snip


As Maud Newton writes in the Awl, people who truly believe that the Rapture is nigh make huge life changes; as a child, she was suffused with doomsday fear. NPR spoke to a couple who quit their New York City jobs and moved to Florida to proselytize about the end of the world. "We budgeted everything so that, on May 21, we won't have anything left," 27 year-old Adrienne Martinez told the reporter. The New York Times reports on a family whose teenage children were trying to make plans for college without the help of their parents, who believe there is nothing but heaven to plan for.

The rest of us sinners will be left behind. Which brings me to your Last-Minute Rapture Reading List.

1. "Left Behind: A Novel of Earth's Last Days" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Published in 1995, it kicks off a 12-volume series of novels that illustrate the Rapture. Worried you won't have time to read them all? Get a taste by watching the 2005 film "Left Behind: World At War" starring believer Kirk Cameron.

2. "The Book of Revelation for Dummies" by Richard Wagner and Larry R. Helyer. The yellow-and-black "For Dummies" series turned its attention to the Bible's Book of Revelation in 2008. But should you take seriously a book about the end times co-authored by a man named "Helyer"?

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/05/the-rapture-in-books.html?cid=6a00d8341c630a53ef014e888e85c6970d

[LongTomH]

1. I was raised with this sort of crap!

My grandmother handled my religious education in the Assembly of God church. I spent a lot of sleepless nights worrying about Hell and the Unpardonable Sin and the End Times. Fortunately, I escaped at 16; but a lot of the damage had already been done. As a former girlfriend told me: "You even take these people to bed with you!" You can guess what she meant.

Sadly, another generation of young people is being exposed to this Holy Shit! The hopeful thing I can see: The polls that say the Evangelicals are losing their young people as they go off to college or just leave home.