{"id":14144,"date":"2013-03-01T20:50:44","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T01:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=14144"},"modified":"2013-03-01T20:50:44","modified_gmt":"2013-03-02T01:50:44","slug":"nra-like-theres-no-tomorrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/03\/01\/nra-like-theres-no-tomorrow\/","title":{"rendered":"NRA: Like there’s no tomorrow"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist;<\/em> pp. 126-127<\/strong><\/p>\n

In real life, the problem with most energy and environmental policy is that it\u2019s too short-sighted. Here in the world of Left Behind, Nicolae Carpathia has the opposite problem. His energy and environmental policies are not short-sighted enough<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Antichrist\u2019s first mention of his new policies for oil and energy is a bit silly, but at least it\u2019s something we can comprehend:<\/p>\n

\u201cI am also initiating a one-dollar-per-barrel tax on oil at the well, plus a ten-cents-per-gallon tax at the pump on gasoline.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is another of Nicolae\u2019s many \u201cDr. Evil\u201d moments \u2014 \u201cOne million<\/em> dollars!\u201d This new tax on oil and gas is meant to be evidence of Carpathia\u2019s tyrannical nature, but it\u2019s unlikely most people will really notice, since both costs are well within the range of normal volatility. He\u2019s supposed to be the epitome of cruelty and evil. Seems like that ought to involve a bit more than prices at the pump rising from $3.67 to $3.77 a gallon.<\/p>\n

But the Antichrist\u2019s next little bit about oil really gets confusing. This will take a bit of work to unpack:<\/p>\n

\u201cAs you know, the second largest pool of oil, second only to the one in Saudi Arabia, was discovered above the Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. \u2026 The Global Community will appropriate the vast oil fields in Alaska, including that huge pool. Years ago it was capped off to satisfy environmentalists; however, I have ordered teams of laborers into the region to install a series of sixteen-inch pipelines that would route that oil through Canada and to waterways where it could be barged to international trade centers. We already own the rights to oil in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and the rest of the Middle East. That gives us control of two-thirds of the world\u2019s oil supply.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will gradually but steadily raise the price of oil, which will further finance our plans to inject social services into underprivileged countries and make the world playing field equal for everyone. From oil alone, we should be able to profit at a rate of about one trillion dollars per year.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some parts of that are impossible and baffling. Other parts of it are infuriating. In places it\u2019s both. It seems that Nicolae\u2019s grand plan is to raise the price of oil by rushing more of it to market so that his one-world government Global Community won\u2019t be dependent on foreign oil. Once again I\u2019m deeply confused, but not quite as confused as the authors and their characters seem to be.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the notion that Nicolae Carpathia\u2019s totalitarian one-world government controls only \u201ctwo-thirds of the world\u2019s oil supply.\u201d Who could possibly control the other<\/em> third of it? Is it multinational oil companies like Exxon\/Mobil? How are they still around under the evil reign of the Antichrist?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Apparently, just like Pan-Continental Airlines, those multinationals continue to operate as powerful, independent, private enterprises. It seems that after abolishing all national sovereignty, instituting global disarmament, a single world government, single currency, single language, single religion, and single, state-controlled media monopoly, the Antichrist chose not to interfere with Wall Street and the other \u201cinternational trade centers.\u201d One would think that all three words of that phrase \u2014 international trade centers \u2014 would be meaningless here, but it seems that the Great Tribulation is not a market holiday.<\/p>\n

This is a strange surprise in an apocalypse created by long-time John Birch Society member Tim LaHaye. It was there, among the Birchers, that LaHaye learned to view the United Nations through the lens of paranoid conspiracy theories he then turned around and imposed onto the book of Revelation. But the whole point of that conspiracy was that the UN was the first step toward a socialist<\/em> one-world government. LaHaye\u2019s Antichrist-led OWG is, by contrast, remarkably capitalist.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t figure out quite what to make of the sneering at \u201cenvironmentalists\u201d here either. I thought that environmentalists \u2014 like the UN, and pacifists, and every other kind of liberal \u2014 were supposed to be part of the conspiracy paving the way for the eventual reign of the Antichrist. Yet here the Antichrist himself seems to regard them with the same contempt he expressed for evangelists and real, true Christians. If the Antichrist<\/em> hates environmentalists, doesn\u2019t that make them the Good Guys? Here is the Antichrist undoing<\/em> the environmental agenda of conservation, so doesn\u2019t that mean Christians today ought to be fighting for<\/em> conservation as part of our \u201cTribulation Force\u201d agenda of opposing the coming Antichrist?<\/p>\n

That general principle is clearly at work in the following paragraph, where Nicolae reiterates his support for \u201csocial services [in] underprivileged countries.\u201d It seems there that his enthusiasm for such efforts is meant as a warning to Christian readers not<\/em> to support such an agenda.<\/p>\n

The weird phrasing there reflects the authors\u2019 incurious ignorance about what aid and development really look like. Their only idea of any effort to assist poor people is through some vague sort of \u201csocial services\u201d \u2014 some dependency-inducing bureaucratic program wasting our<\/em> tax-dollars on handouts for the undeserving poor. That\u2019s what that phrase \u201csocial services\u201d connotes here \u2014 an international version of their mythological caricature of anti-poverty efforts as food stamps that strapping young bucks and welfare queens can spend on alcohol, color TVs and Cadillacs. (I said color<\/em> TVs and not flat-screen TVs because I\u2019m guessing Tim LaHaye hasn\u2019t bothered to update the technology in this right-wing fantasy since the Reagan Era.)<\/p>\n

I suppose Nicolae\u2019s betrayal of environmentalism here is meant to parallel his betrayal of pacifism earlier in the book \u2014 meaning that it\u2019s not a betrayal at all, but an unmasking of the true nature of all supposed environmentalists and pacifists. LaHaye believes that one day soon the real Antichrist will rise, just like Nicolae in these books, by preaching a message of pacifism and disarmament. And then, having lulled everyone into a false sense of security, he will turn around and make war on a world no longer able to defend itself.<\/p>\n

But LaHaye is not suggesting that the Antichrist will be a counterfeit pacifist. He believes, rather, that pacifism is always counterfeit \u2014 that all<\/em> pacifists are like this, deviously pretending to be peace-loving and nonviolent until the world lets its guard down and they can strike. This is another place where LaHaye\u2019s Bircher roots can be seen \u2014 another remnant of the Cold War paranoia that sees all talk of peace and diplomacy as appeasement by dupes, fellow-travelers and fifth-column spies.<\/p>\n

But the biggest problem with the plans that Nicolae outlines above is that he is, in fact, the Antichrist, and he\u2019s now more than half-way through the second year of his reign. And that means that human history has just under five and a half years remaining.<\/p>\n

Consider what that fact means for Nicolae\u2019s proposed oil and energy policies.<\/p>\n

Among other things, it makes his whole Prudhoe Bay project a waste of precious time. He\u2019s correct in no longer caring about the conservation of natural resources or wilderness habitats. Conservation is pointless here. But so is drill, baby, drill. By the time his new pipeline gets built and this oil is ready for transport, Killer Jesus will already have landed on the Mount of Olives to close the curtain on human history.<\/p>\n

This vast new pool of oil isn\u2019t necessary<\/em> in Nicolae\u2019s world. Energy scarcity is no longer a problem. Time<\/em> scarcity has replaced it. If the world has 30 years\u2019 worth of oil left, but only five years\u2019 worth of years<\/em> left, then for all intents and purposes, the world now has an infinite supply of oil.<\/p>\n

The Antichrist doesn\u2019t seem to realize that this changes everything. Think of all the current limits and drawbacks of our dependence on fossil fuels here in the real world. They present huge problems regarding both wells and sinks. The wells are running dry and the sinks are filling up. We can\u2019t go on burning oil like there\u2019s no tomorrow because tomorrow we might run out of the stuff and because future generations will be saddled with a poisoned environment and an altered climate.<\/p>\n

But Nicolae doesn\u2019t have to worry about tomorrow or about future generations. He\u2019s only got about 2,000 tomorrows left, and he doesn\u2019t have to care about future generations because: A) he\u2019s evil, and B) there won\u2019t be<\/em> any. He doesn\u2019t need to go around singing, \u201cI believe the children are our future\u201d because the future evaporated in this story right about the same time all the children did.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a sense in which I find it encouraging that the authors don\u2019t seem to have given much thought to any of this. It would have made for a better story if they had bothered to work out all the implications of the constrained future facing Nicolae\u2019s government, but it\u2019s probably much better for us here in the real world that they haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Tim LaHaye says that our remaining time is short. The Rapture, he insists, could occur at any moment. Like most premillennial dispensationalist \u201cBible prophecy scholars,\u201d LaHaye believes that the Rapture and the consequent End of the World is prophesied to come within one \u201cgeneration\u201d of the restoration of the nation of Israel \u2014 a prophecy they insist was fulfilled with the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948. In the 1970s, Hal Lindsey and many other popularizers of these prophecy schemes said that a biblical generation was 40 years \u2014 a number repeated with great enthusiasm up until 1988 had come and gone. It\u2019s been almost 65 years since the modern state of Israel gained its independence, but that PMD belief in \u201cone generation\u201d persists, and in the minds of people like Tim LaHaye, the clock is ticking ever closer.<\/p>\n

That has an influence on Tim LaHaye\u2019s politics \u2014 and on the politics of the millions of people who read his books. It encourages them to disregard long-term thinking and to dismiss long-term concerns \u2014 particularly with regard to the very kinds of energy and environmental matters discussed in this section of Nicolae<\/em>. But this influence has mostly been vague and general \u2014 as hazy and hasty as the plans of LaHaye\u2019s fictional Antichrist described above.<\/p>\n

And I suppose that\u2019s good. Or, at least, that it\u2019s better than if they had given this more thought and really begun to plan a detailed agenda for using up the last of the Earth\u2019s resources during what they insist are the final decades before the Rapture and the end of time.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019ve seen that Tim LaHaye\u2019s ideology and mythology provide him two reasons to oppose environmentalism and the conservation of resources. First because it\u2019s pointless and wasteful to conserve resources for future generations when an imminent Rapture means there won\u2019t be such generations or such a future. And second because he suspects environmentalism is part of the UN conspiracy to gradually usher in the one-world government which will one day be ruled by the Antichrist.<\/p>\n

LaHaye\u2019s anti-environmentalism is ironic, considering that Revelation is his favorite book of the Bible. It\u2019s there, in Revelation, that we read this:<\/p>\n

The nations raged,
\nbut your wrath has come,
\nand the time for judging the\u00a0dead,
\nfor rewarding your servants,\u00a0the\u00a0prophets
\nand saints and all who fear your\u00a0name,
\nboth small and great,
\nand for destroying those who destroy the earth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If I believed that the book of Revelation must be read \u201cliterally,\u201d then I\u2019d be a little more careful about siding with \u201cthose who destroy the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"NRA: Like there's no tomorrow","description":"This vast new pool of oil isn't necessary in the world of this story. For Nicolae Carpathia, energy scarcity is no longer a problem. Time scarcity has replaced it. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}