One question...
Why does Nicolae Carpathia bear such a close resemblance to a certain semi-elected, semi-literate president? Carpathia believed in his own purity of spirit as well, and attempted to destroy anyone who stood in his way.
Having said that...
I freely admit I've read nothing of your work save what's been excerpted in the mainstream press. Then again, I have read Revelations, and I must say brevity is the soul of wit! What can this cryptic document that only has twice as many chapters as you have novels written about it say of these days, if indeed this is what they speak of at all? To cull all the evidence from it and half a dozen other books, both New and Old Testament, and be this certain, takes a great deal of what our Jewish friends call chutzpah. What, you don't have any Jewish friends? Who could blame them, since forcible conversion is a certain dynamic if the twain should ever meet? Interesting that Nicolae Carpathia is a Slav, taking his name from the same region of Poland from which the previous Pope, soon-to-be-sainted John Paul II, once called home. What are we to read into that? Any surprises for Catholics we don't know about? Though I may never read your books, short of winning the lottery and having loads of free time to burn, I am still intrigued!
Instead of critiquing something I cannot, I shall comment on the movement you've propelled into the culture instead. A recent ad run in my local paper, titled "8 Compelling Reasons Why: Christ Is Coming Very Soon!", is enough fodder to engage this inanity that history is coming to a known end. This is apparently a recurring theme in the second millennium, when Western civilization, in no small way thanks to Christianity's influence, achieved some sense of historical narrative and the meaning of destiny. Are you familiar with Karl Marx's theory that history has a sane and definable conclusion in communism? Sure you are. You are probably less so with the writings of a neo-conservative named Francis Fukuyama, who opines that capitalism instead is that culmination of which Marx fantasized. Behind Fukuyama's thesis, of course, is the putrid belief that capitalism's victory is America's vindication in whatever happens next, including this stupid war in Iraq. I lump all of you together in the same group of nitwits and nincompoops who care nothing of shortchanging every generation yet to come. We know you abhor abortion. How can you be silent in the face of every atrocity committed in the past 100 years by people who just know how to tidily end human affairs so that we may all live happily ever after?
So by what signs...
is this ending evinced? Let's start with this prophecy in Second Timothy that morality will plummet. "Studies show a shocking breakdown just since mid-century." Besides not naming which mid this century is, it neither enumerates any such studies. And how is morality defined? It doesn't say, but we can assume it must have something to do with SEX! Yes, more people are having it without asking permission from the authorities. Yes, there are consequences for untoward sexual behavior on occasion, like unplanned pregnancy and STDs. But sex is always a dynamic in every culture, and its ebb and flow has never been responsible for ruining any great social order. The Roman Empire fell because its elite no longer felt compelled to share the burden of defending it, not because of something Caligula started. There are other forms of morality that have seen marvelous improvement: the outlawing of slavery, the strides against racism, even religious tolerance. Anything to object to here? Morality, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder, but since sex is more ubiquitous than a firm knowledge of history, plenty of suckers are born every minute!
Next comes...
"increased famines, violence and wars, a clear picture of our planet." Increased compared to what? "More than 100 conflicts have erupted since 1990, more than twice the number from previous decades." Which decades? By what criteria are we to define intensity of conflict? The number of dead? The WWs left us with 60 million. Vietnam alone took another at least another 3 million. How many have died in 90s clashes? We may not be done counting, but I don't believe we'll top even what Hitler and Stalin accomplished in four years from their match made in hell. I do know this: in the past 14 years, Rwanda's and Congo's intertwined self-mutilations and genocides are the only thing to top what the world, led by the Bush family, have done to Iraq in the past two decades.
“Increase in earthquakes.”
This one brings home full force Mark Twain's "Lies, damned lies, and statistics!" After concocting the silly metaphor of birth contractions, this paragraph tells of another yet-to-be-named study of a dramatic increase in Richter 6-plus tremors "just since the decade" of Israel's inception in 1948. This is so misleading as to bring up the commandant against bearing false witness, but since it's only lying about the fate of a doomed planet, I guess it doesn't count. "In the 1940s there were 51 above Richter 6.0; the 1950s, 475; the 1980s, 1,085, the 1990s, 1,514." Reading carefully, you can see they're showing a cumulative increase. Yes, there were only 51 in the decade of Israel's inception (the 19 1/2 months left of the 40s) and averaging less than fifty a year in the next ten. Why do they leave out the 60s and 70s? I recall some horrors from those decades. Could it be the average went down for 20 years? If earthquakes were so common as they would have you believe, the entire Pacific Rim would have been abandoned long ago, lost to raging torrents of lava or consumed by the sea.
“Increased travel and education.”
A sign of the Second Coming derived from Daniel. This could have just as easily applied to the Renaissance, when hard science gained traction against church resistance and Europe proceeded to colonize the world. Then again, maybe if the public schools are failing as terribly as most of your ilk want us to think, we can put this thing off indefinitely. As for increased travel, it's now obvious that, as the widely-played excerpt of the movie made from your book portrays, Jesus plainly has held back until enough of the faithful would occupy positions of responsibility in our massive transportation infrastructure to achieve maximum carnage in the aftermath of the Rapture. What a feelgood scenario!
As for the explosion of the occult, the ad wants us desperately to believe, like plummeting morality and earthquakes, that only we the living are responsible. Explosion implies something happening instantaneously. When lumping witchcraft and nature worship in with devotion to Satan, these charlatans are being too clever by half. Witchcraft and nature worship predate Christianity, and thus the concept of evil embodied as the guy with the horns and pitchfork, back to time immemorial. The New Age movement they condemn is simply a continuation of this embedded human trait. If getting in tune with the natural world is counterfeit spirituality, I can only reply that no grand wars were launched in the past 2000 years on account of who was the better tree hugger!
The New World Order
Beware of centralized political, financial and military power. Although doomsday prophets think this is a sure indictment of the UN, it could just as easily apply to everything we as a nation have done in the last 3 years. Wait a minute. "New World Order?" Wasn't Poppy Bush supposed to head this thing up? Maybe he's the Antichrist! No, this guy's supposed to deceive most of the world. It's his son! Oh, yeah, beware the mark of the beast. Pat Robertson once said with the proliferation of computers the number 666 could be found everywhere, from bank account numbers to driver's licenses. After hearing that I delighted in pointing out that counting the letters in the name Ronald Wilson Reagan conjured the magic number in spades. This argument can be reduced to a tautology by preschool children.
Evangelical Christians
who come across this trifle will be predictably enraged, lamenting their persecution at the hands of the godless secular humanists. This is not my intention, far from it. Such rage begets the motivation to drive the killing machine through the garden of life more than anything else. I and people of similar belief can be enraged, too, but it's unlikely we'll take up arms and speak openly of whether it's time to expand the death penalty to sanction apostasy. I can believe George W. when he speaks of the critical nature of the new century. There is as much uncertainty about the direction civilization is taking as there ever has, and America is in a unique position to sway the seesaw to whatever side it wants. But it seems clearer day by day that this President has no thought to the future, and though guessing at motive is a hollow exercise, it could easily be that he has secretly sided with those like you who really believe this nonsense of imminent end is all around us. The denouement of the last book in your series casts Jesus as the ultimate deus ex machina, appearing as a mighty super hero with magical powers to stop the armies of perdition dead in their tracks. If there is time to get this one to the silver screen, the special effects required would keep George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson in work for decades.
I have a better idea
If Jesus came to earth once as a man, why couldn't he again? Perhaps Jesus incarnate has been among us every day ever since, a child in the sights of a sniper's rifle in some new Herod's pay, a girl brutalized by backward patriarchy, a stripling under the open bay doors of a B-52, a nobody starved so another nation can have the Bomb, and we've been putting off the Paradise of the Millennium by our own greed and stupidity for 2000 years. In that, the wages of sin have been earned by all of us. That is the real message of the Bible, my friends, not your "it all makes sense now" claptrap.