Enigma Babylon One World Faith is a fictional world religion in the Left Behind series that ostensibly seeks to harmonise the remaining faiths on earth after the Rapture as portrayed in the novel.
During the period for a year and a half after the Rapture, where Christians were taken away from earth, Nicolae Carpathia rises to power. He begins to deal with the idea of a one-world religion with top officials in the Global Community. The "Global Community Faith" is established in the Vatican City after the Global Community was established in New Babylon. This new syncretistic, global religion accepts any religion and faith in the world, claiming equality. The "Global Community Faith" is quickly renamed "Enigma Babylon One World Faith" and Cardinal Peter Mathews is named Pontifex Maximus of Enigma Babylon One World Faith by Nicolae Carpathia.
Enigma Babylon's slogan is "God is in all. God is all. We are God." which appears to be reminiscent of pantheistic Universalism.
According to the faith's beliefs, any way to God is a valid way, and people can follow their "spirit guide", similar to Universalism. The scholars of Enigma Babylon say that they accept all of the sacred writings (the Bible, the Torah, the Qur'an, etc.), but they truly believe that many things in the holy books are symbolic or allegorical, misinterpretations or metaphors.
The world eagerly accepts the newly-formed world religion, but after the Global Gala (see Global Community), Enigma Babylon One World Faith is abolished and supplanted with "Carpathianism", a one-world religion worshiping Nicolae Carpathia himself, with Carpathia's majordomo Leon Fortunato as its Most High Reverend Father.
Famous quotes containing the words enigma, babylon, world and/or faith:
“His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that “obscure inner necessity” of which Conrad tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of what passes understanding.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The stars which shone over Babylon and the stable in Bethlehem still shine as brightly over the Empire State Building and your front yard today. They perform their cycles with the same mathematical precision, and they will continue to affect each thing on earth, including man, as long as the earth exists.”
—Linda Goodman (b. 1929)
“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In spite of rock and tempest’s roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,
Are all with thee,—are all with thee!”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)