***I can't agree with this either. Many *people* don't give a rattz azz about the environment - it has nothing to do with their faith - they are just selfish and or ignorant - weather or not they are Christian.
From my Christian perspective, The Earth is God's creation; and we are to treasure and protect it and appreciate the wonder of it.***
The most political, out-spoken ?Christians? absolutely are not in favor of protecting Earth.
http://www.alternet.org/story/15814Why Ecocide Is 'Good News' for the GOP
Excerpts:
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.
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!
Some true believers, interpreting biblical prophecy, are sure they will be saved from the horrific destruction brought by ecosystem collapse. They'll be raptured: rescued from Earth by God, who will then rain down seven ghastly years of misery on unbelieving humanity. Jesus' return will mark the Millennium, when the Lord restores the Earth to its green pristine condition, and the faithful enjoy a thousand years of peace and prosperity.
The Republican Party platform in Bush's home state warns of what to expect from a federal government guided by religious right radicalism. The Texas platform "reaffirms the United States of America as a Christian Nation," and seeks to nullify the separation between church and state. It would abolish the EPA, and the Departments of Energy and Education. It dismisses global warming as "myth." And it promotes public school education "based upon Biblical principles," not upon secular humanism, which teaches Darwinian evolutionary theory and a scientific worldview.
Texans have paid the price for their leaders' anti-environmental stance. During George W. Bush's time as governor, the state gained the honor of having the dirtiest air in America. It also ranks 47th in water quality, and has the seventh-highest rate of release of toxic industrial byproducts.
The anti-science movement has also extended itself into the classroom. Last fall, the Texas Board of Education rejected several environmental science textbooks, including one entitled "Environmental Science: Creating a Sustainable Environment." Critics forced the book ban primarily on ideological grounds, calling the text "vitriol against Western civilization and its primary belief systems." Another science book was approved only after the publisher agreed to remove entire sections on climate change.
Should efforts to de-emphasize the teaching of evolutionary theory actually succeed, one wonders how we could hope to confront tough environmental problems. How, for instance, could we train scientists to fight the virulent new strains of bacteria that have evolved resistance to potent antibiotics? Or, another example: In his book "The Beak of the Finch," science journalist Jonathan Weiner tells how the U.S. cotton industry is threatened with collapse because of Heliothis virescens, a moth that has evolved total resistance to all pesticides.
Frustrated entomologist Martin Taylor notes the irony of the equivalence between the Southern Cotton Belt and Bible Belt. "It's amazing," Taylor notes, "that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the very states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution. Because it is evolution itself they are struggling against in their fields every season. These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a creationist farmer anymore?"
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.
