Extreme Jesus: Apocalypse Edition

Well, as he does from time to time, Mark Morford says it better than I would have. In today's column Why Does God Hate Caribou?, he addresses the Master Plan to "destroy the Earth and smite our enemies and hasten the arrival of the Rapture." No, seriously:

"So then. The evangelicals are in power, having their bleak and apocalyptic moment in the white-hot sun. And Bush, by all accounts, is their leader, their spokesman, their crusader, smashing those damned gays and repressing them uppity women and attacking those gul-dang Muslims and -- here's the kicker -- doing his God-sanctioned duty to bring about a grand holy war that will hasten the arrival of, you guessed it, Armageddon.

"And baby, for any evangelical worth his secret homosexual fantasy, Armageddon is where it's at."

Therefore, he reasons, the environment doesn't matter, and we can just go the fuck ahead and trash it. It's ours until Jesus comes to get us. "Just like Santa. Only, you know, not."

He does link to the rather more cool and collected Bill Moyers -- who expresses no less alarm, really -- in his excellent essay running in Thursday's New York Review of Books (vol 52, no 5): Welcome to Doomsday: "...[T]he delusional is no longer marginal," he says, "but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power." It's a pretty scary thing:

"We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges."

I've read lots of this kind of stuff lately (see my previous post on premillenial dispensationalism for more links) and it all leaves me wondering something: Do the people who truly benefit from this wholesale disregard for the environment (you know who I mean - the ones who make the big money off of it) really give a shit about the Rapture or do they just exploit it because it's effective and they know they'll be dead by the time the planet starts to really suck? Or at least rich enough to compensate.

Am I being paranoid?