Well, those who understand our utterly dependence on the Earth that sustains our every need certainly do hold his religous beliefs against him. I don't want him making policies based on his interpretation of the bible. Excerpts from a very lengthy article.
For many leading Republicans, dying coral reefs and melting ice caps are welcomed as signs of the Rapture.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15814Why Ecocide Is 'Good News' for the GOP
The federal government -- with Republicans in control of the White House, Congress and the judiciary -- has launched the largest rollback of environmental laws and regulations ever. The Bush administration seems determined to undo much of the good done since Earth Day 1970, when 20 million Americans defended the planet in the biggest mass demonstration of U.S. history.
The reasons behind Republican anti-environmentalism have often been stated but deserve review: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are former oil men who believe in the efficiency of the marketplace. Market conservatives tend to see environmentalists as either frivolous tree-huggers or dangerous monkey-wrenching eco-terrorists. They dismiss good environmental science as the doomsaying of the loony left.
Almost by definition, they lack an understanding of such concepts as sustainability, carrying capacity, biodiversity or webs of interdependence. And of course, promoting any policies that go against immediate economic goals would put the administration up against strong corporate interests. The American auto industry, for example, remains a powerful economic engine in many states; if SUV sales are keeping domestic automakers afloat, the automakers will resist spending millions to impose tough new fuel efficiency standards on these vehicles.
Nevertheless, beyond all these more obvious anti-environmental motivations there lies a more deep-seated inspiration. Difficult as it may be to believe, many of the conservatives who have great influence in the Bush administration and now in Congress are governed by a Higher Power.
In his book "The Carbon Wars," Greenpeace activist Jeremy Leggett tells how he stumbled upon this otherworldly agenda. During the Kyoto climate change negotiations, Leggett candidly asked Ford Motor Company executive John Schiller how opponents of the pact could believe there is no problem with "a world of a billion cars intent on burning all the oil and gas available on the planet?" The executive asserted first that scientists get it wrong when they say fossil fuels have been sequestered underground for eons. The Earth, he said, is just 10,000, not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely accepted by scientists.
Then Schiller confidently declared, "You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible." The Book of Daniel, he told Leggett, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the "End Time" and return of Christ. Paradoxically, Leggett notes, many fundamentalists see dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and other environmental destruction not as an urgent call to action, but as God's will. In the religious right worldview, the wreck of the Earth can be seen as Good News!
Such misinformed viewpoints would be of little import except that, in the 1980s, they began permeating the Republican Party. That's when Republican strategists -- eager to broaden the party's narrow base of wealthy corporate supporters -- partnered with religious right leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who agreed to politicize their followers and bring them into the GOP, according to Bokaer.
As it turns out, politicians who ally themselves with the religious right are also rabidly anti-environmental. Those who score high with the Christian Coalition almost invariably score low with LCV.
For those who think the teaching of environmental science is safe in our schools, or that evolution vs. creationism is a dead issue, listen to this comment from Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful men in Congress. He suggested that the Columbine, Colorado school shootings occurred "because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud."
DeLay agrees with Ford executive Schiller that, despite the fossil evidence, the Earth is only thousands of years old. Such willful ignorance of science informs the religious right approach to the environment, and the embattled Earth will bear the consequences.
