EPA Chief Pruitt Personifies Christian Hatred of Mother Earth

His Policies Express the Terminal Arrogance of Patriarchal Misogyny: That Our Planet Is Just Another Woman to Be Beaten into Submission

"...indications are that the more ardently Christian an American becomes, the less he or she cares about the environment...Then there is the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency is currently headed by an evangelical, the now-infamous Scott Pruitt...unscrupulous, hypocritical, and dishonest—a walking caricature of the Trump era...But outside of the mainstream media and the coastal cities, Pruitt has supporters who like him so much that they’re willing to ignore his petty scandals and Napoleon complex. They like him because he thinks like them: He puts people before the environment, just like God does” (emphasis as in original).

See also: "As of 2014, it's estimated that nearly half of Americans—49 percent—say natural disasters are a sign of "the end times," as described in the Bible. That's up from an estimated 44 percent in 2011."

And this: "Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) is an anticipatory religion; a sect almost wholly fixated on the expectations (and apprehension) of a single and supposedly inescapable future event: the apocalypse detailed in John’s Revelation where all but “saved” Christians (perhaps as few as 144,000) will be butchered by the Middle Eastern Christian god…. and it’s a bloodbath many Christian captains have been (and still are today) simply giddy about."

Plus this: "In June 2012, Beisner penned a letter to the EPA opposing the agency’s classification of carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant as well as opposing any limits on carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. He did so on behalf of the Cornwall Alliance, the evangelical anti-environmentalism network that Beisner founded in 2005 to promote a “biblical” view of the environment...More than 100 evangelical theologians, pastors, scientists and economists endorsed Beisner’s letter, which featured signatories such as talk-radio host Bryan Fischer, Southern Baptist ethicist Daniel Heimbach, Calvinist theologian Wayne Grudem, former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and Christian Reconstructionist writer Gary North.

Also this: "Pruitt's profound harm to Americans is more due to his policies than his personal errant behavior. Take for example two recent developments in his capitulation to the chemical industry"

This too: "Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday used a Bible verse to defend his department’s policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border from Mexico, suggesting that God supports the government in separating immigrant parents from their children...the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”

And lastly this: "The idea that racial or ethnic groups should be persecuted is popular in the Bible. God himself was keen on exterminating whole peoples, such as the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:3). Believing that they had replaced the Jews as God's chosen people, Christians deduced that they were free to persecute and extirpate non-Christian peoples, and even that they were under a moral obligation to do so."

Comment: more than any other of the Trump/Pence Regime's appointees save perhaps the vice-president himself, Pruitt wears that utterly contemptuous, bottomlessly sadistic, oh-how-fun-it-is-to-watch-a-woman-burn-to-death smirk that so often identifies the white male Christian fanatic. It is our species' most malevolent smile, a triumphant, unmistakably ominous leer that -- as I learned during my boyhood years in Southern Appalachia and now witness again as an elder in the Pacific Northwest --  reveals the torture-chamber venom of fanatical Christianity's serial-rapist malice even before its adherents begin spewing their genocidal gospels of zero-tolerance tyranny, infinite misogyny and inescapable apocalypse.  

And now, finally, after a year and six months of watching the regime shove us ever more forcefully toward JesuNazi theocracy, Brian Palmer of Slate awakens to warn us of the neo-medieval mindset of those who serve our Capitalist overlords by tyrannizing us. 

Perhaps this time we the people will ourselves finally begin to awaken to the horrors of the abyss into which we are being herded. 

Exactly as Mr. Palmer concludes, Pruitt "isn't an anomaly. He's carrying forth a tradition" -- precisely as intended by those who rule in the name of "the secret fundamentalism  at the heart of  American power." 

Immediately below then is a foreshortened version of the response I posted on the comment-thread of Mr. Palmer's report, its relevance here is its recognition of Pruitt's war on the...

(To read the rest, go here.)