The mirror tells no lies ...

From Frank Schaeffar's book, Patience with God: Faith for People who don't like Religion (or Atheism)

My aunt Janet -- my mother's older sister -- joined the U.S branch of [the Closed, or Exclusive, Brethren the Taylor/Symington/Hales] group in the late 1950s. Aunt Janet was ordered to leave her husband and two young sons, because they didn't join the group and she could have no fellowship with them, including even eating in the same room. She moved out, once my aunt was forbidden to sleep in the same house as "unbelievers"...
That gap, which all evangelical/fundamentalists say they believe is established between the "saved" and the "lost" -- now and for eternity -- was enforced here in this life by the Closed Brethern. In the midst of the Closed Brethern's ever-shrinking world, followers like my aunt were totally walled off from their families ... it must have been a nightmare of self-revelation for Mom because my aunt Janet was doing nothing more than practicing an exaggerated version of what Mom believed herself. My parents believed that the lost were to be eternally separated from the saved. And my parents always said that in this life, no one could be complete as a person without accepting Jesus, so the separation began right here on earth ...
My mother never did get over her sister's betrayal of her family. It must have been shocking for my mother to see the logic of the sort of Christianity my parents believed in lived out to a radical extreme.

Back when I was in college, an evangelical friend and I were in a bookstore, and found ourselves in front of the Left Behind series. She had already read the first one, and aside from finding it just bad writing overall, she hated the theology within it and said that it distorted what the Gospel actually was, as well as distorting what God was like.

I didn't say anything at the time, but that was because I was too stunned by her comment, and didn't know where to start. This was someone who went to a Baptist church, who believed that the death of Jesus was to satisfy the wrath of God and he took the punishment we all so justly deserved. This was someone who believed in the "saved" and the "lost," and that those who were "lost" had a one-way ticket to hell. This was someone who believed that that if you were "lost," God couldn't stand the sight of you, and you were disgusting in His sight. She believed that Jesus would return, and when he did, he wouldn't be in that great of a mood towards the vast non-Christian majority.

The Left Behind series was the "logic of her belief system taking to it's most radical extreme." If God was so wrathful that only the bloody death of His son -- the son who took on all the sins of the world -- satisfied Him, who believed that every person He created deserved to be tormented for all eternity, who was disgusted by His creation ... why *wouldn't* He behave in the manner the Left Behind series depicts?