But what you’re overlooking here is that belief in this sort of theological anti-environmentalism is much more widespread among evangelicals/fundamentalists themselves than among Americans in general. As you could have seen from the additional information in my linked cite:
Emphasis added.
Although you may be right that few or no people “with actual power” genuinely believe Christian theological anti-environmentalist doctrines, research indicates that many conservative political figures feel it’s important to their careers to pretend to believe them:
Note that these forms of theological anti-environmentalism are more along the lines of “God’s got it all under control so it’s arrogant for humans to try to meddle” than “The end is nigh so the environment’s irrelevant”, though.
Well what fun is there in starving yourself? Live it up! Be a fucking glutton! Dont worry about those hardening arteries or them diabeetus. Healthy? The only “healthy” thing to worry about is having a healthy appetite to indulge. If you’re gonna die anyway, why not die having a heart attack while sucking down a giant-sized ice-cream float topped with fudge! God would want that for you. Its called the Indulgence Gospel. If
your selfish indulgences result in your death, that just means God has blessed you and you are on your way to heaven!
Well yeah, but there sure seem to be a lot of conservative Christians who think the Rapture and all aren’t all that far off, on the scale of a human lifetime, and that the Rapture could come tomorrow AFATK. And if evangelical preachers in their 50s and 60s and older are throwing cold water on this notion, I sure never hear about it.
Again, sure, but that isn’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about people who believe the Rapture is probably no more than a decade or two off, and could even happen tomorrow.
And yeah, when they tell me the Bible says it’s happening ‘soon,’ I enjoy pointing out the fact that ‘soon’ is a pretty loose term, given the vintage of the source. But they still mean it’s happening ‘soon’ on a human scale, not a divine one.
You know, for anyone with a relatively short period of time left to live (a decade or 2 at most), for them the entire universe is ending. Everything they know could be destroyed a second after they die and they won’t know the difference.
This, by the way, is an argument in favor of developing a method of real life extension : if there’s a decent chance you personally will be around in the year 3000, you have a lot more incentive to both care about the distance future and a lot more to gain if you make decisions that increase your chances of living that long.
Most conservatives tend to be older. For them, it literally doesn’t matter that the climate is getting worse, they will be dead long before it gets really bad. Well, probably, if these hurricanes are due to climate change this is a much earlier and more severe problem than sea level rise.
So, that 10% of Americans of which 26% are evangelicals. So about 2% of evangelicals believe this.
Jeez, 2% of any group believes in anything.
And of course the Pope coming out and clearly and openly stating that GW happens are we are mostly at fault- but somehow the fact we still have GW is the fault of the Christians?
As Kimstu clarified too: “Note that these forms of theological anti-environmentalism are more along the lines of “God’s got it all under control so it’s arrogant for humans to try to meddle” than “The end is nigh so the environment’s irrelevant”, though.”
On that note, if 2% is what they are, then one wonders why more than 2% does get elected into office. And that number increases when one does take into account that more than 2% in power are pandering to people of faith that are being misled by powerful interests.
It’'s hard to tell what you mean by “this”, but you seem to be assuming that religious beliefs are randomly distributed between evangelicals and non-evangelicals. That is not true, and become even more significant when those beliefs are more extreme (like the end is near). We can be guaranteed that non-religious Americans don’t attribute anything at all to God, and are not part of that 10%. If, for example, 5% of that 10% are evangelicals, that would mean that about 20% of evangelicals believe “this”. Again, whatever “this” is. At any rate, we can be guaranteed that the number is > 2%.
I don’t claim to have the math/statistics chops to articulate why, but I’m pretty sure that multiplying those particular percentages smells of shenanigans. Surely there are some demographics who are simply ineligible for inclusion in the group of Americans who hold that Divine Promises make enviromental considerations a nothingburger.
Personally, I’m inclined to suppose that of that 10% who espouse those beliefs, virtually ALL of them are some flavor of evangelical.
So, closer to 40% of evangelicals than 2%.
I would welcome instruction that shows why I’m mistaken on this point.
Would anybody who is still suffering from this or similar confusion about the math kindly reread post #41.
It would be idiotic enough to try to argue that only, say, 10% of evangelicals/fundamentalists believe some particular view on the mistaken assumption (as John Mace noted) that the prevalence of such views is no different among evangelicals/fundamentalists than among Americans overall. Obviously (and if it’s not obvious to you, check the quoted evidence in post #41 again), conservative Christian religious beliefs are going to be more prevalent among conservative Christians than among the general population.
But DrDeth’s completely ballsed-up approach to the numbers is even more ludicrous than that. He’s trying to argue that if, say, 10% of all Americans hold a particular view, and if, say, evangelicals/fundamentalists are about 26% of all Americans, then only 10% of that 26%, i.e., about 2.6% of those evangelicals/fundamentalists, will hold that view.
In other words, he has inadvertently faffed up the statistics to suggest that these characteristically evangelical/fundamentalist beliefs are far less prevalent among evangelicals/fundamentalists than among the general population of Americans. Does that make sense to you?
A simple analogy for DrDeth and anybody else who’s really struggling with this:
If you have a beer after work on an average of 50% (i.e. half) of the weekdays Monday through Friday…
and if Wednesdays make up 20% (i.e., one-fifth) of those weekdays…
does that mean that on average you have a beer on only one-fifth of one-half (i.e., one-tenth) of Wednesdays?
If you think that it might, try substituting any other weekday for Wednesday in the calculation and you’ll get the same number.
And you will find that although it was originally stipulated that you have a beer after work on an average of half of the occurrences of all the five weekdays, by your calculations you end up having a beer on only one-tenth of the occurrences of any given weekday. How the hell are you going to explain that in a mathematically consistent way, Dr. Einstein?
I’m willing to attribute it to just a massive brain fart, but it is mathematically indefensible even if humanly excusable.
To recap the pertinent statistics I quoted from the linked study:
30% of evangelical and born-again Christians think it is definitely or probably true that “God controls the climate, therefore people can’t be causing global warming.”
24% of evangelical and born-again Christians think it is definitely or probably true that global warming is a sign of the end times.
26% of evangelical and born-again Christians think it is definitely or probably true that the end times are coming, therefore we don’t need to worry about global warming.
19% of evangelical and born-again Christians think it is definitely or probably true that the apocalypse will happen within their lifetime.
So these theology-based anti-environmentalist views are held by anywhere from nearly one-fifth to nearly one-third of evangelical/born-again Christians, significantly higher than the corresponding percentages for Americans as a whole. As you plausibly inferred, it’s the comparatively high incidence of these beliefs among these Christians that’s making the biggest contribution to their prevalence in the general population.
(For comparison, according to the linked study the corresponding percentages of atheists/agnostics who hold these same four beliefs are 1%, 4%, 2%, and 1%. respectively.)
I hope you didnt hurt yourself with all that eyerolling.
My reading of the cite was that of those 10% of Americans saying they hold that view, 26% were Evangelicals.
Only 10% of Americans hold that view. Of that 10%, 26% are Evangelicals (or identify as such, of course, maybe none are or all are and they are lying, who knows?) thus, 26% of 10% = 2.6% .
Not that 26% of Americans were Evangelicals, i have no freaken clue where you got that idea, maybe all that eye rolling made you read it that way.
You cant get that from that poll. That poll didnt poll evangelicals.
You have no idea of what % of evangelicals hold those beliefs.
You know what % of Americans who were polled hold those beliefs, and *of those *what % identify as evangelicals, but you can’t draw the conclusion you made.
Even if that were a correct interpretation (and it’s pretty clear from my linked cite that it’s not), your math is still completely borked.
Let’s step through it slowly. If 10% of Americans hold View A, and if 26% of that 10% identify as Evangelicals, then that implies that 2.6% of all Americans are Evangelicals who hold that view.
Not that only 2.6% of all American Evangelicals hold that view, which is what you claimed:
But again, you are mistakenly using that number as equivalent to the percentage of Evangelicals who hold that belief. Your calculation is meaningless without knowing how many Evangelicals do not hold that belief.