WILLIAM HARWOOD
In The Late Great Planet Earth (Zondervan, 1970), Hal Lindsay concludes that the human race is on the verge of extinction. He reaches that accurate conclusion by starting from the inaccurate assumption that the Christian Bible, a 2,000-year-old equivalent of National Inquirer, is filled with psychic prophecies about events that were going to happen more than two millennia later. Yet instead of grasping that time is unidirectional, and that knowledge of the future cannot exceed what can be extrapolated from events already in progress (I can safely prophesy that the sun will rise tomorrow), incurable addicts of the god delusion purchased 35 million copies of Lindsey’s masturbation fantasy in the belief that calling ancient psychics “prophets” makes them any less fraudulent than their modern-day equivalents.
“It was a perfect night for a party. In the warm California evening the lemon trees perfumed the patio and the flickering Tiki torches cast shadows over a lavish table.” Whether that opening paragraph of Hal Lindsey’s fantasy novel is more or less imaginative than, “It was a dark and stormy night,” is irrelevant. What is significant is that 21 reprintings were purchased in the seven years following its initial publication by people so illiterate that they were able to mistake it for nonfiction. Since readers with functioning human brains would have read no further, Lindsay was freed to aim the rest of his theobabble at scientifically illiterate unteachables who lacked the rationality to recognize that the snake oil they were being sold could be valid only if information can travel backward in time. And if anyone believes that can happen, I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn that I think will interest him.
Hal Lindsey received a “certificate” from Dallas Theological Seminary, and therefore conforms to H. L. Mencken’s definition of a theologian as a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that is not there—and finding it. But he is able to write (p. vii) that, “This is not a complex theological treatise.” In fact that is precisely what it is. Like all theologians, Lindsey ignores the methodology of scientific history, in which conclusions must conform to the evidence, and instead uses the methodology of theology in which evidence is distorted to whatever degree is necessary in order to make it conform to predetermined conclusions. Yet he is able to ridicule astrology and other forms of tealeaf reading while ignoring the reality that those other forms of prognostication use the identical techniques he uses himself in the rest of his book. The only difference between astrology and Lindseyology is that ancient astrology started from the assumption that lumps of fusing hydrogen were gods, while Lindsey’s virtual astrology starts from the assumption that a 2,000-year-old book of fairy tales was written by persons who received information about the future from the most sadistic, evil, insane, mass-murderer in all fiction.
Hal Lindsey knows as much about the composition of the Judaeo-Christian bible as I know about the Etruscan language—which has never been deciphered. He backs up his claim that his bible contains soon-to-be-fulfilled prophecies by arguing that it successfully prophesied events that are now part of history. And he is right. It did. There are many fulfilled prophecies in the bible. What Lindsey tries to rationalize away is that they were already fulfilled before they were prophesied. For example, Genesis shows the god Yahweh promising Abraham that his descendants will conquer and occupy the land that is now the nation of Israel. Since David was already king of Israel at the time the prophecy was concocted, the probability of the prophecy failing was zero to a million decimal places. The reason historians are able to date much of the book of Daniel to precisely 163 BCE is that all prophecies of events prior to that date were fulfilled, whereas events prophesied to occur after 163 BCE failed to be fulfilled. And the Essene portion of Revelation can be dated to July/August of 70 CE, because it “prophesied” that the Jerusalem temple would be occupied by the Roman invaders, an event that happened in July, but that the temple would never be destroyed, an event that happened in August.
It requires no supernatural or paranormal power to make an accurate prophecy ex post facto. I hereby prophesy that Hitler will lose World War Two. Now was I right or was I right? Lindsey’s inability to grasp such a self-evident reality makes him an embarrassment to the kindergarten that graduated him. But the full extent of his crass gullibility is revealed by his belief that twentieth-century psychics are something other than lying, swindling humbugs. He not only parrots the delusion that Edgar Cayce accurately prophesied the future and had the nonexistent power of telepathy; he expresses similar belief in the self-serving lies of the humbug Jeane Dixon (p.4), and swallows the Big Lie that her prediction of John Kennedy’s assassination was made before the event she allegedly prophesied. No doubt he also regards the tales attributed to Baron Munchausen as true stories. How he rates Alice in Wonderland, I can only guess.
Lindsey is fully aware (p. 15) that, “Many so-called Biblical scholars today try to ‘late date’ such predictions as Isaiah’s to make his prophecies seem to be after the fact.” His response is that any scholar who recognizes retroactive prophecies for what they are, “also makes the Jewish people religious charlatans and deceivers.” That was essentially the same response pathetic Mormon apologists gave to the discovery that Joseph Smith plagiarized the Book of Mormon from a historical novel written by Solomon Spalding. Incurable Mormons argue that accusing that nice Mr. Smith of lying is dirty pool, and Lindsey argues that accusing biblical fantasizers of lying is dirty pool. Presumably he also sees accusing Richard Nixon of lying as dirty pool.
When I requisitioned The Late Great Planet Earth from my local library, I had in mind to write a whole book refuting Lindsey’s points one by one. What I discovered is that he only makes one point—over and over and over. He cites one after another fulfilled biblical prophecy, and argues that its fulfillment proves that ancient psychics really did have knowledge of the future. And the rebuttal of every one of those repetitions is that the spokesmen (which became prophetes in Greek) composed their alleged prophecies after the fact. He then goes on to misinterpret Revelation’s failed prophecy that the final battle of the war of 66-73 CE would end in a Jewish victory at Armageddon (it ended in a Roman victory at Masada) as a prophecy of events still to come. And he declares that his bible foretells the coming of an “antichrist.”
Hal Lindsey has clearly learned nothing in the forty years since The Late Great Planet Earth was published, and is as morally retarded, educationally handicapped, rationally unevolved, intestinally challenged, and intellectually bankrupt now as he was then. He was obliged to resign from Jim and Tammy Baker’s Trinity Broadcasting Network in 2006 over statements too racist even for them. But TBN still permits him to broadcast his propaganda at his own expense. And as recently as 2008 he described Barack Obama as the foretold “antichrist,” thereby firmly aligning himself with the far-right Republicanazis of the Christian Taliban. I am only amazed that he has not been given a regular timeslot on the Faux News Channel, where subhuman evolution is not merely an advantage but a prerequisite.
Nonetheless Lindsey’s conclusion that the species Homo sapiens is facing extinction is consistent with observable reality that is not based on, “Because Mother Goose said so.” Humankind is indeed committing species suicide, and it is anthropocidal god addicts like Lindsey who are encouraging it to do so. Global warming, overpopulation, and air and water pollution are producing a planet incapable of supporting human life—and pushers of the god delusion are allowing it to happen in the conviction that their imaginary deus ex machina will intervene to save us in the last act. Newsflash: The Sky Führer that the godphuqt are counting on to save them DOES NOT EXIST! Anyone who does not know that either has not read Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis, or is dangerously insane, or perhaps both. (Note that Stenger does not attempt to prove that entities we would consider gods do not exist on the fourteenth planet of Betelgeuse, only that a god with the characteristics Judaeo-Christian-Moslem religion attributes to the character mistranslated as ” God” cannot and therefore does not exist.)
If The Late Great Planet Earth had been published forty years later, would it have achieved success? Or would today’s more educated society have recognized Lindsey as the same kind of embarrassment to Christianity as Fred Phelps, Mel Gibson, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh? Before attempting to answer that, one should keep in mind the success of Left Behind, a series every bit as mindless, fanatic, ignorant, hate-ridden, intolerant, and subhuman stupid as anything Lindsey has written before or since.
All godworshipers are insane. Anyone who was not insane before he started believing that mass murder was evil when Hitler did it with gas chambers but is not evil when his imaginary Sky Führer does it with disease, famine, religious wars, natural disasters, transportation accidents, and old age, is certainly insane once he does acquire such a belief. But not all are so dangerously insane that they belong in cages with padded walls where they cannot pass on their mind-AIDS to the uninfected. That level of insanity is found only among the authors of books like The Late Great Planet Earth and Left Behind, and fanatics like Osama bin Laden, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Pat Robertson. The one point on which all of those incurables agree is that all of the others are raving lunatics. How any of those self-inflicted brain amputees are able to remember to take their pants down in the toilet, I cannot figure.