I never thought in my lifetime that I would be scared so much by fanatical religious zealots, much less by ones who basically believe in the same God as most of my family members. (Christians by definition, but not fanatical).
I know that this is really long, but I suggest at least reading part of it, you will get the drift. It is not meant to be anti-Christian, since I am one, but if you believe what these people do, you scare me.
Check it out:
By Bill Moyers, AlterNet. Posted December 4, 2004.
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20666/
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the
delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe to sit in the seat
of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our
history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a
world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality.
When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but
they are always blind. And there is the da! nger: voters and politicians alike,
oblivious to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior?
Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant
in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he
said, after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was
talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across
the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true –
one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate.
In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls
believing in the rapture. Google the rapture and you will
find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes written by the
Christian fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye.
These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a
couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and
wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of
Americans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre: once Israel has occupied the
rest of its biblical lands," legions of the anti-Christ will
attack it,
triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not
beenconverted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture.
True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven.
There, 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.
I'm not making this up. I've read the literature. I've reported on these
people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are
sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the
rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared
solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their
support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a
warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are
bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of
man.
A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but
welcomed – an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The
last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 – just one point below the
critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of god will return,
the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal
hellfire. So what does this mean for public policy and the environment?
Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist, Glenn Scherer –the road to
environmental apocalypse." Read it and you will see h! ow
millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmenta l destruction is
not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed – even hastened – as a
sign of the coming apocalypse.
We're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are
beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the
recent election – 231 legislators in total – more since the election – are backed by
the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th
congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential
Christian right advocacy groups. They include:
Â_ Â_ Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Â_ Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
Â_ Â_ Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania
Â_ Â_ Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona
House Speaker Dennis Hastert
Â_ Â_ Majority Whip Roy Blunt.
The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was
Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical
book of Amos on the senate floor: the days will come, sayeth the Lord God,
that I will send a famine in the land." he seemed to be relishing the thought.
And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found
that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of
Revelations are going to come true. and nearly one-quarter think the
Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks.
Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600
Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250
Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will
come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot
be expected 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 r! escued 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?
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord
will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book,
America's Providential History. You'll find there 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.
No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant
rhymn, Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the
foot soldiers on November 2, including many who have! made the apocalypse a powerful
driving
force in modern American politics.
Let me put all of this on a personal level. I myself don't know how to
be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every
morning
to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist.
Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked:
What do youthink of the market? I'm optimistic, he answered.
Then why do you look so worried?
And he answered: Because I am not sure my optimism
is justified. I'm not, either.
Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the
Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the
natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the
health and lives of their children. Now I'm not so sure. It's not that I don't want
to believe that – it's just that I read the news and connect the dots:
I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmen! tal Protection
Agency has declared the election a mandate for Presiden t Bush on the
environment.
This administration wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water
Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and
their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act that requires
the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural
resources.
They want to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle
tailpipe inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports utility
vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
They wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep
certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.
They wants to drop all of the government's new-source review suits
against polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached
earlier with coal companies.
They want to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase
drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped
barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in
America.
I read just this week that the Environmental Protection Agency planned
to spend nine million dollars – $2 million of it from the
administration's friends at the American ! Chemistry Council – to pay poor families to continue
to use pesticides in their homes, pesticides that have been linked to
neurological damage in children. Instead of ordering an end to their use, the
government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a
camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.