What did you ... how did you get TAR on the ceiling?
Oh, you are so not getting your deposit back.
Of course:
Research by David C. Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David H. Bearce of the University of Colorado uncovered that belief in the biblical end-times was a motivating factor behind resistance to curbing climate change.
“[T]he fact that such an overwhelming percentage of Republican citizens profess a belief in the Second Coming (76 percent in 2006, according to our sample) suggests that governmental attempts to curb greenhouse emissions would encounter stiff resistance even if every Democrat in the country wanted to curb them,” Barker and Bearce wrote in their study, which will be published in the June issue of Political Science Quarterly.
There's nothing terribly surprising or unusual about Second Coming believers thinking that the world will be ending any minute now,
and on their watch. Doomsaying has been a staple of history. It is difficult for people to truly comprehend just how much of human existence happened before they, personally, ever made it to the scene, or how many eons might unfold afterwards, and there has always been comfort in the notion that the world, all of time and space, all of the plants and animals and stars and prophesies revolve around oneself, and have planned themselves out just for this one, shining moment of historic
Me, and will probably all fall apart again now that the historic
Me has finally graced the universal stage. Expecting the end of the world to happen soon, as in any day or month or year now, is a rather gruesome form of self-flattery, but not an entirely uncommon one.
You want to make it even grimmer, add the further religious presumption that God doesn't mind if His true believers leave the place a wreck, no skin off anybody's nose, not like anybody or anything is going to be using the place after he picks his chosen us up on his holy charter bus to the big casino in the sky. Now that's narcissism. (And nothing says "I love Jesus" quite like killing his pets and puking on his furniture, I would think, and I don't know why any all-powerful celestial being would rent another place to you afterwards, but I am not known for my firm grasp on the mind of the American religious zealot. Thankfully.)
The study, based on data from the 2007 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, uncovered that belief in the “Second Coming” of Jesus reduced the probability of strongly supporting government action on climate change by 12 percent when controlling for a number of demographic and cultural factors. When the effects of party affiliation, political ideology, and media distrust were removed from the analysis, the belief in the “Second Coming” increased this effect by almost 20 percent.
“[I]t stands to reason that most nonbelievers would support preserving the Earth for future generations, but that end-times believers would rationally perceive such efforts to be ultimately futile, and hence ill-advised,” Barker and Bearce explained.
So it's a holy bar bet, then.
You say Jesus is coming for you pretty soon now and so you can wreck the place, and
I say the opposite. If you're right then yay! The Earth is destroyed, or at least messed up a fair bit. And if you're wrong, the Earth is still destroyed, or at least messed up a fair bit.
Ah, crap.