Biblethumpers come a knockin'

I thought I was in Poltergiest this morning, when I was playing with my kids and went to open the front door to let some light in the living room. When I opened the door a pasty and stringy-looking old man was waiting at the door in a black suite with a look of severe concentration on his face. All that was missing was a black hat. Startled,my nerves pushed me back a pace.
He asked me what I thought of hurricane Katrina, the earthquakes in Pakistan and other natural disasters. I told him much of that is man-made. Of course earth quakes are not, but global climate change may produce such erratic weather patterns. I told him to look around. Two hundred years ago this neighborhood was not here, neither was the metal heat-treating plant that poisons my air across the street. I told him that this land was healthier before we got here.
The stoic man told me that biblical prophecies predict the global destruction we are seeing right now.
I said I do not goto church, but my wife is religious and attends church and that I don't have any need for religion in my life right now. He started a sentence about the bible and my mind went to the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I wrote a book that proclaimed a theology predicting the end of the world, and I got enough people to latch onto my theology and live it and proclaim to die for it, eventually, if it developed large enough, it may fulfill its ow prophecy through the actions en masse.
I told the man that Depak Chopra predicts that the chaotic period we are moving into will eventually pan out into something more peaceful and fulfilling where we actually care about each other and the land we live on. I told him there were others that don't abide by a catastrophic and violent end to civilization. Paulo Solero, the Italian architect who developed Arcosanti in the Arizona desert, although a bit too New Agey to take serious, wrote a book called "The Omega Seed" where he talks of an eschatologic worldview. This view maintains that civilization evolves into a utopian peacefulness by making use of technology to fulfill peacefulness and end human violence against the earth and its living inhabitants.
The man then pulled the Bible brochure quietly out of my reach and said "those communal ideas never seem to work," which lead me to believe that he was familiar with Soleri and his ideas.
We then said our peace quite politely and respectfully and turned around in unison, probably with mirrored thoughts of "what a nut."