The Earth is 6000 Years Old
DailyKos posted this video today, poking fun at Arizona State Sen. Sylvia Allen (R), as she speaks at the Senate Retirement and Rural Development Committee meeting.
First of all, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that she’s just a lazy Creationist, rounding up to 6,000. (We all know the earth is actually only 5,769-years old.)
But here’s the real concern:
This Earth’s been hear 6,000 years — and I know I’m going on and on and I’ll shut up — it’s been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.
She’s falling back on a still-lazy belief common amongst a certain subset of neo-con Christians: that because G!d created the earth, everything has been, and will be, provided for us. If those same Christians believe in the end times, they feel no pressure to protect the environment now, because the world’s supposed to end soon anyway. I’m glad Jews don’t have that same mentality. (Nor do all Christians; remember when the Vatican added polluting the environment as a sin?)
But here’s the real shortcoming of her statement. Allen claims that there weren’t any environmental laws for the last 6,000 years. I call foul. It doesn’t take too close a reading of the Bible to find many references to our responsibility to the earth, nature, and animals; heck, the land even gets its own sabbath. Yeesh.
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The comment section of dkos for this piece is ugly. Feygele, I think were you to post your last paragraph on dkos you’d be savaged for even reading the Bible and thus betraying “secular humanism”.
Whatever Allen’s personal religious beliefs (we can still have those, right?) the policy she was advocating – nuclear power generation and uranium mining is actually more ground in science and reality than the pure faith and fantasy surrounding wind and solar power. Nuclear power is one area where, as a matter of necessity, the progressive position is rapidly converging with conservatives. It looks like some loons on dkos are being left behind.
—PurpleMan · July 9th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Have an easy fast, everyone!
—PurpleMan · July 9th, 2009 at 12:01 pm