So, turns out President George W. Bush tried to invoke apocalyptic biblical prophecy while attempting to gather support for the Iraq invasion.
Does it frighten anyone else that the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world (and presumably at least some of his senior leadership) believed we are living in the end times? No wonder they don’t care about the environment, global climate change, or the deficit, they don’t think anyone will be around to deal with it!
Let me put on my Christian hat here:
It doesn’t frighten me so much if he simply believed that we were living in the end times (if this is indeed true). What bothers me is that he tried to act on it, to do stuff that would hasten the end times. One of the things you get when reading about the end times in the Bible is that you are supposed to live your life normally – that you can’t know when it is going to happen, and that you can’t do anything to speed it along anyway. Trying to usher in the end times is, at best, a horrible misreading of what the Bible is telling us to do. Christians are SUPPOSED to care about the environment, because it is part of their mandate.
I’d alway thought the Bush administration’s critics were exaggerating when they talked about Bush not caring about the environment because he thought the end times were at hand – as I said, that’s a horrible conclusion to come to out of what you read in the Bible. However, it seems that he indeed came to that conclusion, which is totally wrong headed and dangerous.