Christ is coming, so fuck the environment

This is by Bill Moyers, the current host of NOW With Bill Moyers on PBS. I so much want to believe that he's not right.

The whole text should be read, but at least read the excerpts below. My sincere thanks (I think) to Mousemusings for pointing me to this scary piece.

AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Battlefield Earth
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 danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President 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.
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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.
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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 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?
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Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the lord will provide.
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Reference is made in this piece to the Rapture Index. I dare you to click on that link and not be more scared than before you clicked on it.

Here's the 8000 page Google search results for "Rapture Index."

Here's what religioustolerance.org says:

"Rapture Ready" is the second most popular Web sites on the Internet, as listed by Web side Story. 4 They receive almost 1,000 visitors a day. 5,6 They feature a "Nearing Midnight" section which lists news items that point as signs to the immanence of the second coming. It is updated many times a week. Their "Rapture Index" is a number which attempts to predict the closeness of the date. It has varied from 50 in 1993-DEC to an all-time high of 168 in 1997-OCT. The Millennium Watch Institute attempts to track all social and religious developments associated with the year 2000. 7 Their web site had a countdown clock that showed the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the end of the Millennium, which occured at midnight on the evening of 2000-DEC-31.

Of course, my favorite thing that religoustolerance.org says about rapture theory is, "Each of these theories has significant problems and can only be accepted if one ignores certain Biblical passages or twists them totally out of shape."