For the past eight years Fred Clark’s blog Slacktivist has been essential reading if you want to know what’s wrong with the world view of large parts of the religious right. He blogs a lot about the excesses of rightwing fundamentalism from an evangelical Christian perspective. Among other things he’s been dissecting the appalling but hugely popular “Left Behind” series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, pointing out not only how bad they are theologically, but why the utterly fail as literature. A constant theme is how a mindset based on fear and anger is completely at odds with what the central message of Christianity is supposed to be.
And he’s on form today:
Your aunt, unfortunately, didn’t mention either your name or hers when she drunk-dialed me Thursday to let me know I was at the top of the list of Bad People she’s praying against due to my supposedly contributing to your doubts about the inerrancy and infallibility of the footnotes in the Scofield Reference Bible.
Your aunt was too intoxicated — three sheets to the wind on self-righteous indignation — for me to make a great deal of sense of your situation or hers. She is, I think, your father’s sister, and she used to live in California, but now has an area code that Google tells me is in the really lovely part of Washington State. She seems to really enjoy telling people that if they believe in evolution then they don’t believe in the Bible. And by “the Bible” she’s apparently referring to some set of scriptures that includes the Complete Works of Hal Lindsey.
Read the whole thing.