Evangelicals and the Environment
In an essay in Grist Magazine, The Godly Must Be Crazy: Christian-right views are swaying politicians and threatening the environment, Glenn Scherer proves that the Left cannot understand alternate views on the environment any better than it can understand alternate views on morality.
Sherer details how the politicians who get the most conservative voting scores on abortion and gay marriage also get the lowest scores on various environmentalist voting scales. He explains it thusly:
[Christians] believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. They may also believe, along with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming Apocalypse.
I have never met a Christian, fundamentalist or otherwise, who welcomed environmental destruction ... but let's move on for now, as the article looks into End Time prophesy in detail and relates it to anti-environmentalism. A typical passage is this:
Natural-resource depletion and overpopulation, then, are not concerns for End-Timers -- and nor are other ecological catastrophes, which are viewed by dispensationalists as presaging the Great Tribulation. Support for this view comes from an 11-word passage in Matthew 24:7: "[T]here shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places." Other End-Timers see suggestions of ecological meltdown in Revelation's four horsemen of the Apocalypse -- War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death -- and they cite a verse mentioning costly wheat, barley, and oil as foretelling food and fossil-fuel shortages.
I spend most of my working hours trying to bring some reasonableness to environmental regulation. Do I do this because I want to destroy the earth in order to hasten Christ's return? To be honest, I never thought about it. My strategy for hastening Christ's return is to do what I can to support the reaching of the unreached, because of Matthew 24:14 -- And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come. It is hard to imagine that we can reach the unreached by strip-mining their villages into oblivion, or destroying their tropical island paradises by dumping radioactive waste into their lagoons, as the secular Japanese did.
I do the environmental policy work I to to promote stewardship, and deter the pagan practice of placing the created, nature, above the Creator. In fact, I don't know a Christian who doesn't believe in stewardship of God's creation because the concepts of protecting and of handing down are interwoven throughout the Bible.
Why, then, do conservative members of Congress vote "anti-environment?" The answer is simple: They don't.
Environmental regulations today have nothing to do with protecting the environment. They have everything to do with over-protecting the environment in the name of expanding the mission of various bureaucracies and limiting the free market society that is anethma to the big environmental organizations, whose leadership is dominated by leftists and socialists.
MSM fully buys into the environmentalist mantra, although the End Time theory is probably a little too far out for most of them. They do not see that there is justification for making an adjustment after the wretched excess of the Clinton years, when standards were pushed far beyond anything Congress ever willed in drafting the big three environmental laws: the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. The foolishness of spending billions on immeasurably tiny incremental gains, when that money could be used better elsewhere ... say building a sewage treatment plant in Tijuana ... is not even on the table.
Besides, those horses the Four Horsemen ride in on will need some grass left to eat.
Sherer details how the politicians who get the most conservative voting scores on abortion and gay marriage also get the lowest scores on various environmentalist voting scales. He explains it thusly:
[Christians] believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. They may also believe, along with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming Apocalypse.
I have never met a Christian, fundamentalist or otherwise, who welcomed environmental destruction ... but let's move on for now, as the article looks into End Time prophesy in detail and relates it to anti-environmentalism. A typical passage is this:
Natural-resource depletion and overpopulation, then, are not concerns for End-Timers -- and nor are other ecological catastrophes, which are viewed by dispensationalists as presaging the Great Tribulation. Support for this view comes from an 11-word passage in Matthew 24:7: "[T]here shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places." Other End-Timers see suggestions of ecological meltdown in Revelation's four horsemen of the Apocalypse -- War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death -- and they cite a verse mentioning costly wheat, barley, and oil as foretelling food and fossil-fuel shortages.
I spend most of my working hours trying to bring some reasonableness to environmental regulation. Do I do this because I want to destroy the earth in order to hasten Christ's return? To be honest, I never thought about it. My strategy for hastening Christ's return is to do what I can to support the reaching of the unreached, because of Matthew 24:14 -- And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come. It is hard to imagine that we can reach the unreached by strip-mining their villages into oblivion, or destroying their tropical island paradises by dumping radioactive waste into their lagoons, as the secular Japanese did.
I do the environmental policy work I to to promote stewardship, and deter the pagan practice of placing the created, nature, above the Creator. In fact, I don't know a Christian who doesn't believe in stewardship of God's creation because the concepts of protecting and of handing down are interwoven throughout the Bible.
Why, then, do conservative members of Congress vote "anti-environment?" The answer is simple: They don't.
Environmental regulations today have nothing to do with protecting the environment. They have everything to do with over-protecting the environment in the name of expanding the mission of various bureaucracies and limiting the free market society that is anethma to the big environmental organizations, whose leadership is dominated by leftists and socialists.
MSM fully buys into the environmentalist mantra, although the End Time theory is probably a little too far out for most of them. They do not see that there is justification for making an adjustment after the wretched excess of the Clinton years, when standards were pushed far beyond anything Congress ever willed in drafting the big three environmental laws: the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. The foolishness of spending billions on immeasurably tiny incremental gains, when that money could be used better elsewhere ... say building a sewage treatment plant in Tijuana ... is not even on the table.
Besides, those horses the Four Horsemen ride in on will need some grass left to eat.
posted by Laer at 9:58 PM
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