(no subject)

[feotakahari]

In the US, austerity economics is associated with the right. It’s the left who say you can spend your way out of having less money. The right says you need to conserve resources, or you’ll run out completely.

So why is the right allied with people who think it’s heresy to say that God won’t give us more oil when we run out?

Comments

[wingedcatgirl]

Cynical off-the-cuff answer: Because the people who say that are rich, and the right believes that being rich is correlated with also being X, for all desirable values of X. (In this case, "smarter than normal people, such that if they say things that sound weird I should believe them anyway".)

[feotakahari]

Now that I think about it, I have no idea whether and how anti-environmentalist Christianity intersects with Prosperity Gospel. It seems like “God wants you to be wealthy” could lead into “God wants you to use whatever resources you can take.”

[entanglingbriars]

Rhetoric and beliefs tend to form in response to your opposition. If the people you hate are saying that the resources will run out, you're going to naturally suspect that they're lying liars who lie and be inclined to believe the opposite. This is compounded with Christianity which has always been a bit skeptical of environmentalism because it sounds like idol worship.

I'm not joking here. I did my senior capstone on environmental theology and virtually every paper written by a Christian arguing that Christians should care about the environment started with a paragraph or two promising that they only loved the environment because God made it, not because they worshiped it.

[yvannairie]

Because it's never about "conserving" resources -- it's about the wrong people spending them. The RIGHT people can MOST DEFINITELY spend their way into more money.