Friday, April 07, 2006

Why the Religious Right Should Embrace Eric Pianka

Ok, as expected there is still no reason to believe that Eric Pianka actually advocated the death of 90% of humanity as Forrest Mims, Texas Governor Rick Perry, and the intellectually vacuous at Uncommon Descent have all hysterically claimed. In fact, Panda's Thumb reports that the wingnuts are in full retreat on the issue. They lied about what Pianka had to say and got caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

But I was wondering why all the hysteria over Pianka suggesting an ecological collapse and humanity's destruction? I would have thought all the Revelation believers would be ecstatic over Pianka's predictions. They seem to be looking forward to humanity's downfall with the same glee as Mims claims for Pianka (I sense another irony coming on)....

A plethora of End-Time preachers, tracts, films, and websites hawk environmental cataclysm as Good News -- a harbinger of the imminent Second Coming....Likewise, dispensationalist author Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" novels -- at one point selling 1.5 million copies per month -- weave ecological disaster into an action-adventure account of prophesy.

So, sounding the clarion of imminent ecological disaster is OK, so long as it is coming from a 2000 year old fairytale but not an evolutionary ecologist? What, precisely, is the difference between buying into Revelations theology and listening to a Pianka speech?

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