How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [13]
The next day I attended church services with my friend and his family, and when the minister called for anyone to come forward to be saved, I went up to make it official. My friend assured me that I did not need to be saved twice, but I figured maybe it was more official at a church than at a bar. From that moment on everything seemed neatly explained by the Christian paradigm. Anytime something good happened, it was God’s will and a reward for good behavior; anytime something bad happened, it was part of God’s larger plan, and even though I did not at present understand the long-term benefits, these would become clear in due time. Either way it was a neat and tidy worldview—everything in its place and a place for everything.
A LEAP OF FAITH
The whole process was premised on faith. With faith in Jesus, I now had eternal life. With faith in God, I was saved. I had found the One True Religion, and it was my duty—indeed it was my pleasure—to tell others about it, including my parents, brothers and sisters, friends, and even total strangers. In other words, I “witnessed” to people—a polite term for trying to convert them (one wag called it “Amway with Bibles”). Of course, I read the Bible, as well as books about the Bible. I regularly attended youth church groups, one in particular at a place called “The Barn,” a large red house in La Crescenta, California, at which Christians gathered a couple of times a week to sing, pray, and worship. I got so involved that I eventually began to put on Bible study courses myself.
In my sophomore year at Glendale College I read Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. The front cover of the book pronounced “AMAZING BIBLICAL PROPHECIES ABOUT THIS GENERATION!” (with “OVER 2,000,000 COPIES IN PRINT!”), while the back cover asked provocatively, “IS THIS THE ERA OF THE ANTICHRIST AS FORETOLD BY MOSES AND JESUS?” My Christian friends and I began reading the newspapers to watch the millennial drama unfold as Lindsey said the Bible had predicted. I recall taking a political science course in which the professor was talking about the possibility of a European Common Market, and comparing his take on this event to Lindsey’s, who claimed this is a reincarnation of the Roman Empire as prophesied in Daniel and the Book of Revelation: “We believe that the Common Market and the trend toward unification of Europe may well be the beginning of the ten-nation confederacy predicted by Daniel and the Book of Revelation.” Following this there will be “a revival of mystery Babylon,” and the rise of “a man of such magnetism, such power, and such influence, that he will for a time be the greatest dictator the world has ever known. He will be the completely godless, diabolically evil ‘future fuehrer.’” Skeptics beware, says Lindsey: “If this sounds rather spooky, bring your head out from under the skeptical covers and examine with us in a later chapter the Biblical basis and the current applications.” I threw the covers off and devoured the book with great credulity. So did millions of others: Through the 1970s The Late Great Planet Earth sold 7.5 million copies, making it, according to the New York Times Book Review (April 6, 1980), the bestselling nonfiction book of the decade. By 1991, notes the Los Angeles Times (February 23, 1991), the book had reached an almost unimaginable figure of 28 million copies sold in 52 languages worldwide. Prophecy sells, especially prophecies of biblical proportions.