text: This series may be good for a laugh. Some of the writing is engaging. 
  
  But the premise is absurd. 
  
  WHY, in this day and age, should anyone accept the world-view of the Bible? A book that tells us to buy and sell slaves, stone our wives to death if they accept some other tribe's beliefs, and subordinate our minds to an absolute despot up in the clouds of Mt. Sinai? 
  
  In a sense, Bible believers have been "left behind" since the 1700s Enlightenment. Tom Paine's "The Age of Reason" showed the God of the Bible to be a cruel, vindictive monster. And what did Thomas Jefferson call the book of Revelations? "The ravings of a madman." 
  
  Read this series, if you like. Enjoy parts of it. But make no mistake: to take any of this seriously, you have to regress to a prehistoric world-view, before men learned to think, to ask questions; before logic or science -- a time when dazed, superstitious primitives believed stars could fall to the earth, if they didn't grovel humbly enough to their supposed god. 
  
  Do the absurdities and contradictions bother no one? When the "sheep" are raptured up to heaven, their clothes are left behind. So heaven is a nudist colony? 
  
  The basic contradiction, of course, lies in using worldly action (some of it exciting) to proselytize for the unworldly, the supernatural. 
  
  But why should we care whether any of the "good" guys gets killed? And why should THEY mind -- won't they go straight up to heaven? That's what they WANT, isn't it? Why even lift a finger against the "bad" guys -- didn't Christ say, "Resist not evil"? 
  
  Worried about who will win? "God" is infinitely powerful. So Jesus (who is 1/3 of God -- or something like that) is sure to win when Armageddon rolls around, in book 12 of the series. And the "sheep" -- the believers -- will happily worship him, looking just like the pictures of dim-witted, bovine people you see in the tracts Jehovah's Witnesses leave at your door. 
  
  The going price for a used copy of "Tribulation Force" is one cent. Does that tell you something? 
  
  Actually, the story-telling is worth more. The basic premise is worth less. Perhaps it averages out
  