Is God Ready To See The Planet Destroyed-- In His Name?

Normal Americans aren't excited that Scott Pruitt is moving rapidly top destroy decades of progress at the EPA. But last week, the Christian Broadcasting Network, a right-wing outlet, looked at it from from the perspective of the lunatic fringe. We're talking about a lunatic fringe that spits in Jesus' face and worship mammon in the form of a fat self-glorifying orange orangutan. Forget Biblical injunctions like - Ezekial 34:2-4: "Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves!

Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally."

Or Isaiah 24:4-6: "The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers, the exalted of the earth languish. The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt. Therefore earth's inhabitants are burned up, and very few are left."

Or Jeremiah 2:7: "I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce. But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable."

The fake Christians in Trump World are turning the Bible on its head to further their own of greed and avarice. No one is worse than Scott Pruitt, a full-fledged servant of the anti-Christ in the Oval Office.

The growing attention to environmental issues and the question of climate change makes Scott Pruitt's job more important by the day.

President Trump chose him to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and Pruitt hopes to unravel what he calls the "weaponization" of the EPA by the Obama administration.

Pruitt hopes to pursue that mission with a servant's heart. After all, he's the kind of guy you might meet in Bible study. The former Sunday school teacher and church deacon wants to use that faith background in his role as EPA administrator.

"As I serve, and as we seek to make decisions, I want to do so based upon an attitude that we're here to minister to people, serve people and have a light and a cheerfulness as we do it," Pruitt told CBN News.

Some of his moves have definitely put smiles on the faces of conservatives. Pruitt believes the Obama administration meddled in Americans' livelihoods and went too far with unnecessary regulations and executive orders.

"Actions taken by the executive branch were really actions that the legislative branch should have been taking or addressing and it impacted liberty," said Pruitt. "When you declare a 'war on coal' from a regulatory perspective, the question has to be asked: where's that in the statute? Where did Congress empower the EPA to declare a war on coal? … There's a role for the EPA. There's a very important role for the agency. The problem is in the last several years that role has been morphed into something it's not," he added.

Pruitt is clearly making his mark at the agency. He played major roles in the United States leaving the Paris Climate Agreement and ending President Obama's "clean power" plan. It sought to curb emissions from coal-fired plants and Pruitt says that unfairly attempted to pick winners and losers on electricity.

He also wants to cut bureaucratic red tape. One stated victory: more timely action on nuclear waste sites near people's homes.

"How do you have some of these sites take 30 to 40 years to get re-mediated, cleaned up or in some cases, just a decision made on how to clean up? That's unacceptable," Pruitt said.

Not everyone's cheering. Environmental activists see Pruitt as an administrator who's not a good steward of nature. Pruitt pushes back against that notion.

"The 'environmental left' tells us that, though we have natural resources like natural gas and oil and coal, and though we can feed the world, we should keep those things in the ground, put up fences and be about prohibition," Pruitt said. "That's wrongheaded and I think it's counter to what we should be about." 

Pruitt believes God commands us to take care of the environment and that also means to use what He has provided. "The biblical world view with respect to these issues is that we have a responsibility to manage and cultivate, harvest the natural resources that we've been blessed with to truly bless our fellow mankind."

As for climate change or global warming, the 'environmental left' labels Pruitt a science denier. "Truly and clearly, the climate changes," Pruitt acknowledges.

"For someone to say that someone's a skeptic or a climate denier about the climate changing, that's just nonsensical. We see that throughout history. We impact the climate by our activity," Priuitt observed. "How much so is very difficult to determine with respect to our CO2 or carbon footprint, but we obviously do. But here's the key: we as a country have reduced our carbon footprint by almost twenty percent from the year 2000 to 2014. You know how? Through innovation and technology: not government mandate."

Pruitt has also been under criticism for flying around the country in first class or business class rather than coach. The EPA says Pruitt needs the privacy because of people who are angrily confronting him at airports. Recently Pruitt cancelled a trip to Israel over the controversy.

Meanwhile, the president is sticking by him. In Pruitt, he gets a man who says his overall philosophy is less government control. It's why Pruitt went into politics a while back and God was at the center of the conversation.

"I spent a couple years just earnestly praying, asking the question that I don't think we ask enough, 'God what do you want to do with me?'" Pruitt said. "Really getting into our prayer closet, seeking His heart, asking what He wants to do in our lives."

"It was actually Isaiah chapter one that I was reading through at that time that really spoke to my heart," he continued. "Specifically, in the latter part of chapter one where God says to Israel, 'I will restore your leaders as in the days of old, your judges as at the beginning.' And there was just a desire that welled up in me to say, 'I want to be like those leaders that we had at our founding, at the inception of our country.'"

For Pruitt, the need to pursue what the founding fathers intended is more important than ever.

"There's never been more of a threat to liberty, to what we know as the protections that are inherent in our constitution than what we live today," he said.

The post was the work of the clownish David Brody, author of the entirely preposterous book The Faith of Donald Trump: A Spiritual Journey and an even more preposterous OpEd in the NY Times yesterday: "This president’s effect on our cultural norms has been shocking. His critics would call it appalling; evangelicals say it’s immensely satisfying: They’ve seen a culture deteriorate quickly in the past decade, and they’re looking for a bold culture warrior to fight for them. Showing that God does indeed have a sense of humor, He gave them Mr. Trump. Yet in God’s perfection, it’s a match made in heaven. Mr. Trump and evangelicals share a disdain for political correctness, a world seen through absolutes and a desire to see an America that embraces Judeo-Christian values again rather than rejecting them."

I went to someone even more learned about this scene that Brody, author and film-maker Frank Schaeffer, woke son of one of the founders of the Religious Right, Francis Schaeffer. "Evangelicals," he told me this morning, "bought into the GOP/Koch Brothers/Trump world view long before Scott Pruitt came along as a kind of cartoon character embodying everything insane about the religious right’s views." Schaeffer explained the dynamics of this betrayal of the Bible injunctions by the American religious right:

Following the embattled anti-federal government view out to the end, evangelical voters seem to now believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations aren’t the evil government. The Evangelical Right decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies—even for military operations (“contractors”), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favors private “facts,” too. They long since claimed that global warming wasn’t real. Anyway, Jesus is coming back soon so who care? They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

“Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!”

“Amtrak must make a profit!”

Even the word “infrastructure” lost its respectability when government had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges, and trains.

In denial of the West’s civic-minded, government-supporting heritage Christians not only once subscribed to but helped build in the Bay State Colony, today’s Evangelicals (and the rest of the Right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God’s creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals.

The price for the Religious Right’s wholesale idolatry of private everything was that Christ’s reputation was tied to a cynical political party “owned” by billionaires. No wonder these folks were ready for Trump and now embrace Scott Pruitt as one of their own!

The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their “stand” against government had played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold products. By the twenty first century, Ma and Pa No-name were still out in the rain holding an “Abortion is Murder!” sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in some godforsaken mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corporation, Exxon, and Halliburton, the Kochs and now Trump/Pruitt, who were laughing all the way to the bank.