I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm really into sci-fi. I always have been. In addition to that, I've always had a tremendous fascination with the lure of the Apocalypse or Judgment Day or the Mayan calendar, etc., etc.
The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions - dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war.
In the prequel we're going to tell about the characters before Left Behind, and the book would end with the rapture instead of start with the rapture like the first one did.
I am fascinated with religion or things that people believe in and question that. I think it's interesting.
I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch - it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time.
We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily.
I grew up with a lot of Muslim friends, and the whole idea of revelation has been a lifelong interest of mine.
I'm not a dispensationalist - I don't believe in the Rapture. I think it's an unbiblical doctrine, and in North American Christianity, at least, it is the teaching that is the root of much of our subculturalism.
When I was a junior camp counselor and it was my job to tell the campers a bedtime story or devotional, I would tell them a rapture story.