The Big Issues: Anyone up for a Game of End-Times Bingo?

I'm an avowed atheist, but apart from occasional lapses, I try to limit my anti-supernatualist "preaching" to light-hearted piss-taking of thick-skinned religious friends.

Wherever we sit within the many spectra of faith systems though, a conscious concern for Sustainable Human Flourishing forces reflection on the positives and negatives of religion… For me this is especially true at times like this when such madness is again on display in places like Cairo and Benghazi - insanity that has reached my adopted home of Belgium and even as far away as my erstwhile secular homeland of Australia. At times like this, I must pause to reflect on the potential for religious extremism to affect those that I love.

I have to say though, that while I consider religiously motivated terrorism to be a real danger, it seems a massively over-hyped threat when compared with two elephants that quietly share a room with today's most popular religions, specifically:

• The preoccupation with an afterlife in a non-earthly domain.
• The eschatological obsession with (imminent?) "end-times".

As widely accepted tenets of many major religions, these ideas influence the worldviews of a majority of the world's population - Mostly unconsciously, these ideas help to shape human politics and human societies - they affect us all, whether we believe in them or not.

Aside: Most people probably think I'm being a bit sensitive, but most people probably don't read reports like this from Pew Research which suggest that as many as 41% of Americans believe Christ will return to renew the earth by 2050. (Edit: Or this from Gallup which claims that 46% of Americans are hardcore creationists and only 15% believe in evolution! These numbers have hardly changed in 30 years...)

Here is the fascinating Gallup report that I stole this graph from

Although such ideas may bring comfort to the religiously inclined, they are by definition, deeply antagonistic to any plans for sustainability here and now, in this world.

In this context, I often find myself reflecting upon the fact that anthropogenic climate change looks almost exactly like most religious end-times prophecies. Ancient historians have written about "holy wrath" brought upon societies great and small in the form of famines, plagues, pestilences, extinctions, resource wars, earthquakes, floods, … 

I find this similarity entirely unsurprising because these awful things surely did happen quite regularly throughout human pre/history. Although inexplicable at the time by anything other than "holy wrath", in many cases, extreme weather or changing climate patterns appear to have contributed. In all past cases though, these were local events. Entire societies may have been wiped off the face of the earth by such "Armageddons", but human civilizations flourished elsewhere. 

Unfortunately, this is not the situation that we face today… Anthropogenic climate change is a global problem. It is slowly but surely bringing its "holy wrath" upon the whole planet, and I am increasingly suspicious that the two aspects of religion above are at the heart of our collective inability to address climate change rationally.

Even the universally present calls in scriptures to protect "creation" are persistently ignored by far too many believers. Otherwise good and earnest religious people, instead of taking up the fight to save creation, sit idly by (eyes and ears closed in denial, or hands clasped in prayer) as creation falls apart around them. Even when the problem is correctly identified, instead of fighting to reverse the problem of climate change, the religious response is more likely to deploy more missionaries to "save" those already starving and dying from its horrific effects.

Thank you so much! Mmm, this bible looks just delicious!

Much has been written about the psychology of climate change denial, and I am quite convinced that religion contributes to this psychology - a mind that has been subjected to religious training must find it easier to accept the false notion that humans are too insignificant to harm "creation". Or to believe, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, that a changing climate is all part of some grand cycle that we have no control over.

Conversely, it is no surprise to me that so many climate activists reject the notion of an afterlife, and instead believe that this life, in this world is all that we have... A position that Caitlin Moran has summed this up nicely in this great quote...

I won't dwell further on the first point though, because my concerns about eschatology run even deeper than my concerns about denial and afterlife. Eschatology concerns me greatly because here I often see religious fanaticism turn from the passive to the active. Here, I fear that a similarity between anthropogenic climate change and end-times prophecies actually inspires some eschatological fanatics to pray for climate change, and perhaps even to actively work to speed it up.

There are countless examples of eschatological nutjobs who make it their life's work to help bring about the end-times. Some of you may have heard of pathetic but mostly harmless individuals like Clyde Lott who wants to breed the perfect red heifer, or more invidious groups like the Temple Institute. As you go further up the chains of power though, we start to find more powerful and secretive cabals such as "The Family" described by researchers like Jeff Sharlet. 

Following the thread still further, one is left to consider the tiny numbers of individuals and cartels who control the economic, political, and propaganda levers that keep us all hooked on increasingly dirty carbon fuel sources - many of these individuals and governments openly subscribe to eschatological religious doctrines. Others choose to keep their religious beliefs private, but to me at least, far too many act like extreme "end-timers". 

Try a thought exercise - Try to imagine a world where powerful eschatological fanatics made it their lives' work to speed climate change? Mightn't it look a lot like the world we live in today? A world in which we know that we already have our hands on five times more fossil fuel than we need to kill all life on earth. A world in which, instead of doing the sane (and economically responsible) thing by moving quickly to clean, sustainable energy sources, we'd see a mad rush to exploit increasingly dangerous and dirty fossil fuels - we'd see tarsands mined, we'd see mountaintop removal, we'd see natural gas fracking, we'd see insane doubling-down by drilling for more fossil fuels in places that are only now becoming accessible because we've burned so many fossil fuels, like the Arctic Sea and Greenland!

Not even the most sociopathic criminal or the most disinterested corporation would act this way - This is suicide bomber mentality - the situation that we are in today might actually be better explained as the result of a deliberate, conscious, and active drive to bring the world towards prophesied end-times.

I know that this post has gone a bit Illuminati conspiracy on you (and me), and I'm sorry... I can't help but think though that if they were so inclined, then there would be little to stop the richest and most powerful from using their carbon-heavy influence to tick off the "signs" in an insane game of end-times bingo.

How could we innocent passengers on Spaceship Earth even know if the controls had been overtaken by "jihadists", determined to sacrifice themselves and the rest of us in their quest for other-worldly paradise?

What could we do about it if that were the case?


Edit: Wow - that was a depressing but cathartic post! Now that it's out of the way, please stick with me and check out the next post for a far more positive and helpful angle on religion and sustainability.