Glorious Appearing: The End of Days (Hardcover)

In "Glorious Appearing," Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."

"The riders not thrown," the novel continues, "leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated. . . . Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they, too, rattled to the pavement."

One might have thought that Jesus would be more of an animal lover.

As ... David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.

This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself - and infidels headed for hell.

(words above quoted from NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF's July 17, 2004
column in the New York Times. Below, my own words.)

Well, if rolling back about 1,000 years of progress in religious tolerance is a good thing, then this book must be a blessing to the world. If insisting on the literal truth of ancient myths is the mark of education, then fans of this book must count themselves among the most educated.

It's positively chilling to find that the sales of a series such as this can consistently become #1 on the three major bestseller lists: the hardcover fiction lists of the New York Times and Publishers' Weekly, and the consolidated list of USA Today.

If ignorant religious intolerance suits your vision of how to live in the world, you should certainly enjoy this piece of nonsense.

Yes,people have a right to believe in a God who likes to rip open bodies and melt flesh into bloody messes. But I only hope they can keep their religious intolerance to themselves. If there is a devil, he certainly did a good job on these pious people who claim to love the book.

The book's depicitons of violence and bloodshed are shocking to say the least. Far worse are the predications of violence based on differences in faith.

Christianity teaches to "love thy neighbor," yet the story we have in this book says that if your neighbor is of a different religion or ethnicity, then they will die an agonizing death at the hands of the Messiah. This is not why God made us all different. This is not what the United States stands for.

I seriously question the authors' intent in writing this piece. Also at question are the hearts and minds of those who blindly accept this dribble.