Half of Americans Believe Natural Disasters are Signs of "End Times"

If you are worried about the direction of America, a new survey has very frightening evidence of the nation's descent into idiocy.   The finding were that half of Americans  - and 77% of evangelicals Christians -  believe natural disasters are signs not of climate change but of the mythical "End Times."  Outside of Africa and the Middle East where ignorance embracing fundamentalist religion (both Christian and Muslim) is strong, the rest of the world outside of America is focused on science and knowledge.  No wonder America's relative rank in numerous categories is falling.  The Daily Beast has details of America's growing rejection of science and knowledge.  Here are highlights:

A shocking new report on American attitudes toward climate change reveals just how ignorant we are—and how rationality is withering on the vine. Yet even the framing of the report, produced by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the American Academy of Religion, raises questions about how rhetoric shapes reality.

First, the bad news. (Note: There is no good news.)

Fully 51 percent of Americans surveyed do not “believe”—more on this word later—that human actions are causing the Earth’s climate to warm. Yet this is an established fact, agreed upon by over 99 percent of climatologists, atmospheric scientists, and other experts.

Astonishingly, a quarter of Americans don’t believe the Earth’s temperature has been rising at all, also an established fact with measurements from around the world.

[W]hite evangelical Protestants are, by far, the most likely to be climate deniers. Only 27 percent accept the scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is real. What explains the recent spate of extreme weather events and other natural disasters? You guessed it: the “end times.” Fully 77 percent of white evangelical Protestants attributed the earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and droughts to the approaching End of the World.

[B]lack Protestants had similar views. . . . . Other religious groups hovered in the 30-40 percent range.

One other interesting fact is the racial disparity in climate-change belief. Seventy percent of Hispanic Americans reported being very or somewhat concerned about climate change, and 57 percent of blacks. The number among whites? 43 percent.

As a similar study reported a year ago, the new study shows that 65 percent of Democrats believe in anthropogenic climate change, and just 22 percent of Republicans.

Surely, for anyone with a vested interest in science, reason, and the idea of secular politics, this is deeply depressing news. Over 900 peer-reviewed scientific articles have adduced evidence that anthropogenic climate change is real. Zero—zero—have contradicted it. One may as well deny the existence of gravity. But what can be done, if climate denial is, in part, a religious belief?

To be clear, those who say that climate change is both an anthropogenically caused phenomenon and a sign of the end of the world are not ignorant; they are reading theology into facts, and that is indeed a matter of belief. But those who say that humans aren’t causing climate change at all—that is not disbelief, but ignorance.

[I]f this new data is to be believed, those who accept the reality of climate change and those who deny it are speaking past one another, while the Earth slowly smolders for us all.

As I have said before, religion is a pestilence that justifies all kinds of horrors, harms the earth and mankind.  It needs to be eradicated.