How Christianity is Destroying the Earth

The topic of why Christianity is wrong is of no mere academic interest. It is perhaps the most important topic in the world today. The majority of people in the United States adhere to a form of Christianity that leads, consciously and unconsciously, to the destruction of the Earth. And the United States is the leading consumer in the world; if we act destructively toward the Earth, it will be destroyed, and no bleeding-heart environmentalists in Norway can stop it.

I realized this as I began to read Bart Ehrman’s book from eight years ago—Lost Christianities. Ehrman is an excellent Biblical scholar, but I am an evolutionary scientist, so I read the first part of his book with different eyes than he used while writing it. I saw the evolution of Christianity as an example of cultural evolution—in particular, of one branch of Christianity that forced other branches into extinction, often violently, by decreeing them to be heretics. “Orthodox” Christianity suppressed the other branches, sometimes completely into extinction, but otherwise into such obscurity that only the luckiest of archaeological finds have revealed them. This is what happened when the church stopped being a haven for women and slaves and started turning into a political force with a hierarchy.

The “orthodox” Christianity that prevailed got to dictate which books would be in the Bible. There are lots of other gospels, epistles, acts, and apocalypses that they tried to destroy. But one of the books that they made sure was in the Bible was Revelation, written by somebody named John, whom most churchgoers assume was the Apostle John, though the author nowhere claims this to be the case.

It had been awhile since I had looked at Revelation, though I have read it carefully twice. Those previous times, however, I read it through the eyes of faith, assuming it to be divine revelation. This time I could see it for what it really was. Previously, I had tried my hardest to interpret it in a loving fashion. But now I could see the hatred that seethes from it. In a later entry, I will summarize it. But for now I just point out that it—presented in the form of a vision—is actually a nightmare of blood and gore and hatred. The author must have gotten some bad hash from Damascus.

First, you will not recognize the Jesus who is in Revelation. He is a conqueror, with a sword coming out of his mouth, and making the earth to apparently flow fathoms deep in human blood. Second, you will not recognize God the Creator of the Good Green Earth. Every few verses there is another disaster, both human and ecological—the Earth seems to get destroyed about fifteen times in that book. If one green sprig survives, it is sure to get pummeled and poisoned a few verses later. The disasters are concatenated: as soon as you think it is about over, another series erupts—within the Seventh Seal were seven trumpets, but within the seventh trumpet were three protracted woes, within which were crammed seven plagues. And so on. A cavalry of 200 million supernatural horses. People believe this stuff.

And at the end, when there is supposedly a heavenly city that takes over all of the universe, what do you have? A city consisting entirely of gold and jewels. The animals in that world are creepy monstrosities that look like Dr. Moreau invented them. And there is one tree—just one—left standing. This is the conservative Christian view of eternity—one in which everything that they claim God created has been destroyed and replaced with a total artificiality. You can bet your bottom ribosome that the “glassy sea” has no phytoplankton in it.

That is what conservative Christians want to have happen to the world—they look forward to God bringing plagues and destruction upon it, and then to have all of its biodiversity and greenness destroyed. Many Christians take a highly figurative interpretation of Revelation, and they are (as I was) frankly embarrassed by that book. But conservative Christians relish in the thought that environmental destruction will come upon Earth as part of a horrific suffering inflicted upon the human race. At least subconsciously, they will go along with and contribute to activities that will bring environmental destruction to pass.

And that is exactly why we need to discredit and disempower “Bible-believing Christians” in every way we can. If they actually believed in Jesus, the peaceful man who would go out on the hillsides and preach sermons about wildflowers, they might be a positive force. But they hate the Jesus of the Gospels. They revere only the Warlord of the Book of Revelation, and they want to do their part to make all of those ghastly images become reality.

I am developing these ideas into a book—Last Tree Standing: How Conservative Christianity is Destroying the Earth. Here is your chance to make comments that may help form the book, including comments that will prevent me from making errors that you may see in my ideas.

How to Deal with Fundamentalists: Two Insights from Edward O. Wilson

E. O. Wilson is perhaps the leading environmental and evolutionary scientist of modern times. Not only is he the leading defender of biodiversity, but he invented the term. He also invented the science of sociobiology. He is the world’s leading expert on ants and ant societies. He is a retired professor at Harvard, but continues very active in writing at age 82. His autobiography, Naturalist, describes a truly blessed life of significant contributions to the world, despite some severe attacks that have been made upon his views. He is a prominent scientist but is not too proud to get down on his knees to look at an ant.

When I met Wilson in 2004, he shared his view of religion with me. He considered Christianity to be merely the surviving remnant of an ancient tribal religion whose function was to give some tribes a justification for exterminating the others. In this, he was consistent with the views he expressed in his 1998 book Consilience, in which he unites all fields of knowledge into a coherent whole and in which religion plays no part.

I was therefore surprised when, just two years later, he published The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. He wrote it in the form of a letter to a fundamentalist minister, and he emphasized the numerous reasons that scientists and religious conservatives have for joining together to save the Creation. If God made all of the species, whether miraculously or through evolution, should not God’s followers want to save them from extinction?

I was surprised again when in 2010 Wilson published his novel Anthill, about an Alabama boy who grows up to be an environmentalist and a lawyer who successfully saves a biodiversity hotspot by working within, not against, the legal and economic system. At some points in the novel, Wilson reaffirms the common ground that scientists and religious conservatives have. But at the end of the novel, it is three religious conservatives who chase down and try to kill the environmental lawyer. They spew invectives that show just how much they hate God’s Creation.

So I have gotten two partly-contradictory insights from Wilson about the possibility, or not, of environmentalists finding common ground with religious conservatives. I regret to say that I agree more with Wilson’s 2010 ideas than his 2006 ideas. I have come to believe that religious conservatives really do want to destroy as much of God’s Creation (as they consider it to be) as possible. And I believe that some of them, just like the ones in Wilson’s novel, are ready to use violence to do so.

This comes partly from my own experiences with Oklahoma rednecks. You know the joke about rednecks parking their pickup trucks in their yards. Well, where I live, they park their trucks in your yard, without permission. Most of them look like they have been injecting steroids which have turned their brain tissue into cartilage. They look ready to beat to a pulp anyone who disagrees with them, and they boast about their guns. While they may pose no current threat, they could become very dangerous the moment we have societal collapse and chaos, which is not hard to imagine right at this moment when Republicans threaten to bring financial collapse on the United States unless they get tax breaks for billionaires. I have met people who are just like the ones in Wilson’s novel.

I am glad that there are some religious conservatives who love God’s Creation, but I believe that most religious conservatives will ignore them or consider them to be hateful apostates to the true religion of destroying the natural world. I think that Christian environmentalism has no hope of success, because their opponents within Christianity have two weapons that Christian environmentalists do not: hatred and guns.

I enjoyed Wilson’s novel, because I enjoy all of his insights. I have to admit, however, that it is not a well-written novel. He passes up many opportunities for interesting developments of plot and character. It gets exciting in the last few pages, but most readers other than devoted Wilson fans like myself will have given up by then. There are nice parts, especially the story of the wars between ant colonies, told from the ants’ viewpoint. If you love nature, and are willing to overlook structural defects of a novel, I recommend Anthill. It may leave you very disturbed about the danger posed by religious conservatism in the United States.