Religions > Atheism > The rapture index is one point below the critical threshold
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03 Feb 2005 11:42:26 AM |
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The rapture index is one point below the critical threshold |
From: "Robert Nordlander" [delete]
To: <gartland1@ [delete]
Subject: The rapture index is one point below the critical threshold
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 11:39:22 -0600
----- Original Message -----
From: John P. Stoltenberg, P.E.
----- Original Message -----
From: Bruce La Plante
There Is No Tomorrow
By Bill Moyers
The Star Tribune
Sunday 30 January 2005
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 worldview 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
danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of
the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging
Grist, reminded us recently of how James 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 index.
That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find
that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the
"Left Behind" series 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 (the British writer
George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted
to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the
rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it,
triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.
As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, 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.
I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, 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
how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental
destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even
hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
As Grist makes clear, 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 and 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 Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick
Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker
Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100
percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. 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. 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, as 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?"
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,
"[t]he 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 hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the
foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a
powerful driving force in modern American politics.
It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with
any credibility. So let me put it 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 you think 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 am 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. Environmental
Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on
the environment. This for an administration:
a.. That 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, which
requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage
natural resources.
b.. That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate
vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars,
sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
c.. That wants a new international audit law to allow
corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems
secret from the public.
d.. That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against
polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached
earlier with coal companies.
e.. That wants to open the Arctic [National] 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 the news just this week and learned how the Environmental
Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million - $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. These
pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but 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.
I read all this in the news.
I read the news just last night and learned that the
administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is
supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report
that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists
who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."
I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent
appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene)
riders attached to
it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from
pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a
waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider
pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in
California.
I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to
the computer - pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back
at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know
not what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not
right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future.
Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."
And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we
are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to
sustain indignation at injustice?
What has happened to our moral imagination?
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?"
And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"
I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as
a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be
the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future
we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for
cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those
photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called
hochma - the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel and then
to act as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
-------
Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs
series "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is adapted from
AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks
upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for
Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
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| User: "Curly Surmudgeon" |
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| Title: Re: The rapture index is one point below the critical threshold |
03 Feb 2005 07:33:22 PM |
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On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 06:42:26 -0500, buckeye-ELO wrote:
--------------snip---------------
Frighteningly accurate article, thanks for sharing it.
However I don't expect the religionists to even read it. Any evidence
contrary to their belief strucuture will be attacked and denied even when
they refuse to understand.
-- Regards, Curly
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http://www.curlysurmudgeon.com http://www.curlysurmudgeon.com/blog/
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