Bill Moyers: Welcome to Doomsday (Impact of Christians on the Environment)

[Bill McBlueState]

Why are religious conservatives so eager to destory ANWR? Because the world's going to end next week anyway.

From the New York Review of Books:

Welcome to Doomsday
By Bill Moyers

...

In the just-concluded election cycle, as Mark Silk writes in Religion in the News, the assiduous cultivation of religious constituencies by the Bush apparat, and the undisguised intrusion of evangelical leaders and some conservative Catholic hierarchs into the presidential campaign, demonstrated that the old rule of maintaining a decent respect for the nonpartisanship of religion can now be broken with impunity.

...

What has been less apparent is the impact of the new political religion on environmental policy. Evangelical Christians have been divided. Some were indifferent. The majority of conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, have long hooked their view to the account in the first book of the Bible:

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.'"

...

What does this mean for public policy and the environment? Listen to John Hagee, pastor of the 17,000- member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who is quoted in Rossing's book as saying: "Mark it down, take it to heart, and comfort one another with these words. Doomsday is coming for the earth, for the nations, and for individuals, but those who have trusted in Jesus will not be present on earth to witness the dire time of tribulation." Rossing sums up the message in five words that she says are basic Rapture credo: "The world cannot be saved." It leads to "appalling ethics," she reasons, because the faithful are relieved of concern for the environment, violence, and everything else except their personal salvation. The earth suffers the same fate as the unsaved. All are destroyed.

continued at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17852

[DBoon]

1. The bolded sentence

is why these folks work so well with the free-enterprise "drown government programs" types.

Its all about me me me me

[woodsprite]

2. That's OK. We'll get the last laugh because those people are

not going where they *THINK* they're going!

Sometimes, that's the only light at the end of the tunnel I can find. They better love smirky a whole bunch, cause they're gonna roast with him for all eternity.

[enki23]

3. they aren't "going" anywhere.

they'll just hasten our, and their full reentry into the carbon cycle, in an uglier, less hospitable world.

[Ezlivin]

4. I used to believe this shit

And I have an acquaintance who still does. He believes the Rapture is just around the corner and doesn't give a damn about the environment. He drives a big SUV and does everything you'd expect a non-conservationist to do.

The sad truth is that no matter what happens, these people will not stop believing. If they think the Rapture will happen next week and it doesn't, they will claim that it's "God's will".

If conflict in the Middle East blossoms into a worldwide conflagration, the believers will see it as confirmation of Armageddon. Once the subsequent events prove them wrong (made most visible by Christ NOT appearing), they will simply reset their Rapture clocks and will tweak their predictions to suit the new reality.

What they will not do is to give up the belief.

That is what makes them so dangerous.

[EstimatedProphet]

6. Question: what turned you around?

Could what happened to you to make you wake up work on others? There must be some way of getting these people out of their delusions.

[Ezlivin]

7. 3 years of seminary, a Master's degree and a church position

I studied apologetics and philosophy in seminary. As a result, I was exposed to a lot of literature from humanists/atheists. Much of what they said made logical sense, but I deferred rational thought for a while.

After I worked in a church for two years and saw empirically how Christianity worked (or rather didn't work) I allowed myself to think rationally. At that moment it all crumbled for me and I left, never to return.

Basically I put in a hard 14 years to plumb the depths of Christianity. Many others have taken much less time to come to the same conclusion. I found my way into Christianity (no one "converted" me) and eventually I found my way out.

I can only hope that for others the process is greatly abbreviated. And cheaper.

[EstimatedProphet]

5. Powerful article

It's good to see Moyers hasn't fully retired yet. We still need him, as is clearly shown in thias article. The people listed in this article are delusional and need psychiatric treatment, every bit as much as a schizophrenic would. Their worldview isn't even consistent within itself anymore. They've given themselves a way to be immoral and Christians at the same time, so that they can have all the good aspects of Christianity (go to heaven) without having to do anything like live up to Christ's ideals to get there.
It's exactly the same thing as someone who tries to enforce laws on everyone around them while breaking them at the same time-wait, that's the entire Bush administration...

[Bill McBlueState]

8. kick