Excerpt #114 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
In his book The Carbon Wars, Greenpeace activist Jeremy Leggett notes that during the Kyoto climate change negotiations, he asked a Ford Motor Company executive how opponents of the pact could believe there is no problem with “a world of a billion cars intent on burning all the oil and gas available on the planet?”
The executive asserted first that scientists get it wrong when they say fossil fuels have been sequestered underground for eons.
The Earth, he said, is just 10,000, not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely accepted by scientists.
CHECK FOR FACTS BEFORE LEAPING TO CONCLUSIONS.
Then the Ford executive declared, “You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible.”
The Book of Daniel, he told Leggett, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the “End Time” and return of Christ.
Paradoxically, Leggett notes, many fundamentalists see dying coral reefs, melting ice caps, and other environmental destruction not as an urgent call to action, but as God’s will.
Within the religious right worldview, the wreck of the Earth can be seen as Good News!
THE ARROGANT FOCUS ON THEIR ANSWERS, NOT OUR QUESTIONS.
Some true believers, interpreting biblical prophecy, are sure they will be saved from the horrific destruction brought by ecosystem collapse.
They’ll be raptured: rescued from Earth by God, who will then rain down seven ghastly years of misery on unbelieving humanity.
Jesus’ return will mark the Millennium, when the Lord restores the Earth to its green pristine condition, and the faithful enjoy a thousand years of peace and prosperity. (Excerpted from Glenn Scherer’sarticle “Religious Wrong.”)
Christian fundamentalists believe that the messiah will return for the rapture.
True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.
For these reasons many fundamentalists believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed, even hastened as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
People under the spell of these prophecies cannot be expected, as environmental journal Grist puts it, “to worry about the environment.
Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible?
Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture?
And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?”
Those of this mindset believe that until Christ returns, the lord will provide.
One of their texts is a high school history book, America’s Providential History by Stephen McDowell and Pastor Mark Beliles.
In it, you will find these words: “The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.
However, the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s earth . . . while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.”
IGNORANCE IS AN INDEFATIGABLE FOE.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. – William Shakespeare
RELIGION IS YET ANOTHER INTOXICANT THAT KEEPS US OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY.
THERE ARE NO LAWS HIGHER THAN NATURE’S.