"many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future. They 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"
It could make me weap. This is why theology matters: a dubious and novel interpretation of apocalyptic passages, driven by a mindset over-influenced in ill-conceived ways by rationalist methodologies and we have several tens of millions of people who think that it is okay to mar God's good Earth and that they can kind of predict when Christ will come again -despite explicit words of Christ that no-one can.
It's no good simply decrying it: the urgent task for theologians is to deal with this and come up with arguments that will work and that will work against this kind of thinking in terms that most of the people involved in it can understand. Then there's the difficulty of dealing with the leadership/followership groupthink dimension of the thing ... And there is a certain difficulty also in that these people have the money to continue to air their views [almost] literally over the broadcast media.
How do we persuade such people in such embedded plausibility structures that not only is their approach dodgy but it is damaging and that even the precautionary principle might be a better guide ['if you're wrong ...'].
It's scary, that's what it is. I'm fairly in favour of a degree of lassitude in interpretation [partly because our fallibility needs factoring in and therefore a degree of humility and partly because I suspect the whole council of God is more likely to be perceived by a wider body] but sometimes I think that some views need vigourous opposition. This is one of them.
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