Monday, October 16, 2006

Kneeling Minnesota.

As if on cue, Al Gore’s miraculous invention, the World Wide Web, has supplied me with an embodiment of everything I was talking about in my last post. Here’s an article about Michele Bachmann, a congressional candidate in Minnesota who says God told her to run. Here’s the video footage of her making this claim. Meanwhile, here’s Bachmann on global warming, there she goes on Terry Shiavo, here’s a pack of lies about ”intelligent design,” and here, finally, are her thoughts on using nuclear weapons against Iran. The most recent poll I can find (mid-September) shows her with a 50%-41% lead over Democrat Patty Wetterling.
Posted by Tom at 22:05:05 | Permalink | No Comments »

What God wants.

Among the many disturbing statistics on religious belief cited by Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation, the most frightening, drawn from a recent Gallup poll, says that 44 percent of Americans believe “Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead”–bringing about the rapture and the end of human history–”sometime in the next fifty years.” So, allowing for a reasonable margin of error, something between one-third and one-half of everyone you’ll see today believes that there will be no planet Earth after the year 2056. These people must therefore also believe, at a minimum, that there’s no reason to worry about global warming, overpopulation, or indeed any environmental problem, since not even the most frantic tree-hugger expects environmental calamity within the next half-century. In fact such people would be obliged to consider any serious attempt to preserve the environment as a perverse waste of time and treasure. And they’d be disposed to regard nationalist, ethnic, and above all confessional strife leading to global conflict, including nuclear warfare, as an unavoidable and indeed welcome fulfillment of biblical prophecy. It would scare the bejesus out of me to learn that even a quarter of the population holds such a conspicuously dangerous belief–but 44 percent! And these people aren’t, by and large, thought of as America’s lunatic fringe (not when we have a president who believes Jesus told him to invade Iraq). These are the people, as Harris put it in an interview recently, “who can get Karl Rove on the phone.”
Posted by Tom at 21:42:20 | Permalink | No Comments »

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Enough!

Watching this clip made my day. Your turn.

(Thanks again, Dave!)

Posted by Tom at 23:20:08 | Permalink | Comments (1) »

Monday, August 28, 2006

Edward O. Wilson.

The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, who devotes 16 hair-raising pages near the end of his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge to the dire prospects for the environment (pp. 303-319 of the Vintage paperback if you want to terrify yourself quickly), appears in the current New Republic with an “open letter” to an imaginary pastor, proposing an alliance between secular humanists and religious believers in an effort to reverse the course of environmental destruction. The letter is excerpted from Wilson’s next book, which is due out in a week or so. 
Posted by Tom at 17:13:04 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Climate change.

I’m thinking of opening up a string–right here at UniBrow, Jack!–on the environment. Among its other blessings it will do me no harm with my girlfriend. Here is a sharp editorial from The New Republic on the corporate-sponsored right-wing attacks on Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth.
Posted by Tom at 16:53:27 | Permalink | No Comments »