The bumper sticker on the Hummer in front of me at the traffic light got me thinking. It read:

“Don’t let the car fool you. My treasure is in heaven.”

I was stuck in traffic in Las Vegas, which heightened the effect a bit. I’d been hiking in the foothills of the Spring Mountains around Red Rock Canyon, drinking in the relatively cool air in the shade of piñon pines and white firs — white firs in the Mojave! — and there was part of me that couldn’t relax on that hike. The current prognosis is what? A five-degree increase in temperature world-wide? And while you never know what a global temperature increase will mean for any specific location, what with changing weather patterns likely bringing more storms to some previously arid locales and thus dropping local temperatures some, I couldn’t help but wonder if the white firs would still thrive in that canyon after a five-degree temperature increase. The nearby mountains, running up to just under 12,000 feet, could provide a refuge for the trees’ descendants if the climate shift isn’t horribly abrupt. Which it might be. But the walls of the canyon along whose bottom I was hiking were only a few hundred feet high, and there isn’t a whole lot of room there for sharply cooler microclimates. Not a whole lot of Merriam Altitudinal Zone difference there.

It sucks, the hiking through a sense of foreboding doom in the woods. I’ve done it way too often, and while some of that is purely due to my own abundant personal reserves of black bile, much of it stems from simply paying attention.

The walk was wonderful nonetheless, but that sense of foreboding stayed with me as I headed through Vegas’ traffic on my way home. And then a traffic light, and it turned red, and I was behind the Hummer and being told, passively, that the Hummer owner’s conspicuous consumption was a mere appetizer to whet his appetite for the banquet of sanctified bling awaiting him in the beyond.

“Holy Hubris, Batman!” I thought to myself, possibly aloud. (I get a little talkative when I’ve been by myself for a few days.)

Then I started the usual leftist, usedtabee Christian unpacking of the worlds of wrongness in that little sticker. There’s an implied “I’m saved” in that sticker, which I’ve long considered a self-negating phrase. As is true of words like “maverick” and “edgy,” if you apply the adjective “saved” to yourself, it’s almost certainly not true. I spent some time vainly trying to remember precisely which verse in Matthew talks about praying on street-corners and how it makes the Baby Jebus cry. I thought about the difference in sizes between an adult Camelus dromedarius and your typical sewing needle’s eye. Would that be three orders of magnitude, or four? I did the math. It’s three.

Then I remembered the similar line in the Song of Songs with an elephant instead of a camel, and that reminded me of Christ’s having famously said that one cannot serve both God and mammoth, and then the light turned green and then the climate-trashing Hummer took way too long to get going and belched black smoke into my vents when it actually did get going and I got even more annoyed.

The depressing thing is, I don’t know for sure the Hummer driver was just a smug, self-satisfied and sanctimonious god-twit. As we’ve seen in the last years — not to be confused with the Last Days — there is a growing crowd of people who call themselves Christians who might actually choose to drive a Hummer because it trashes the climate and belches black smoke. These are the people who voted for the execrable George W. Bush twice, not in spite of his needlessly starting murderous rampages in the Middle East and destabilizing both the political and economic world, but actually because he’d do just that.

These are not just people who actually believe that Jesus is going to rescue them all from this inconveniently material world, where they face indignity and aching joints and traffic lights and people pointing at them and laughing, by taking them and only them to heaven and throwing all of the rest of us into a lake of fire. They are not just those people who further believe that anti-Roman activists from 2,000 years ago meant, in their thinly disguised political screeds, to prophesy this “Jesus II” sequel, and that those same zealots also prophesied that His return would be portended by a bunch of earthly suffering.

No, there are plenty of people who believe both those things, as palpably ridiculous on their face as they may be, and who yet go on to live decent, kind and enjoyable lives as pleasant people who are not any more sociopathic than the next guy.

But as a glimpse at the news will inform you, there are members of the GOP fundamentalist base who actually think, despite reasoning that would get you an F in your grade-school logic class, that since the Rapture will be preceded by turmoil, they can hasten the Rapture by causing that turmoil.

This is approximately the same logic as would be needed to decide that since killer tornadoes in Kansas are statistically linked to appearance of top mainstream media news anchors in the zone of destruction, one need only gather the big names from Fox News in Salina and they’ll be hit by a massive tornado. As good as that idea may sound, it just won’t work.

But they believe it anyway, and so they vote in maniacs and drive planet-destroying vehicles around and encourage the use of nuclear weapons on Muslim people on the theory that they can party hard and destructive but then live in eternal bliss because they’re the elect. Even though the authorities locked up Charles Manson for having roughly the same worldview, these people are allowed to drive around freely, own weapons, and vote.

I’m a tolerant man. But when they start driving Hummers around and shooting wolves from helicopters and otherwise despoiling the planet to hasten the Rapture, that’s when it gets personal for me.

And so, fundamentalist Christians of the US, I’m calling your bluff. I don’t think you really believe that Jesus stuff. If you did, and if you really hated this world that much, you wouldn’t be waiting around all passive-aggressive-like for Jesus to come rapture you all into heaven. The guy already suffered an agonizing death for you. Does he have to do everything? If you loved him you’d return the favor.

In short, I think it’s time you were on your way.

If you really believed what you say you believe, you wouldn’t be wasting your time here. You’d be heading for the Kingdom of Heaven as fast as you possibly could, without even waiting for your landlord to get your security deposit back to you.

Oh, I know what you’ll tell me. Suicide is a sin. I know you hold that it follows inevitably from that Commandment about not murdering — that’d be number six, unless you’re an Opus Dei Catholic, in which case it’s number seven — in much the same way that a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy follows inevitably from Constitutional Amendments One, Four, and Fourteen.

(Again, that’s unless you’re am Opus Dei Catholic, in which case the right to prevent termination of pregnancy follows from the Church’s right to an uninterrupted supply of nine-year-old boys. But I digress.)

Honestly though, given the foreign policy y’all have been supporting, a lot of us have been thinking that Commandment 6 (or 7) has pretty much been ruled obsolete, a quaint historical doctrine, like not wearing mixed fabric garments, or rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s without whining about wanting tax cuts. I think you’ll speed on past that little technicality and right into Heaven.

In fact, I will guarantee to you, on my word of honor, that God will not punish you for killing yourself. It’s a scientific fact.

As for any notion you may have that your sticking around may persuade us to Come to Christ, lemme reassure you: We’re good. You know, us atheists, Jews, Buddhists, Coyote-based pantheists, Episcopalians and Liberation Theologists and whatnot? It’s really time to cut your losses as far as we’re concerned. It’s unlikely we’ll be persuaded. Aside, you know, from a few tenths of a percent of depressed, troubled individuals facing the most uncertain moments of their lives — the unstable, the recently divorced, the insane and the pathologically uncertain. And think about it. Look at your demographics as they stand. Do you really need to add more losers to your ranks?

There are plenty of routes you can take to heaven, I might add. I could show you a bunch of fool-proof high cliffs out here in the Mojave or just drop you off with no water in snake country. I also know that most of you have loaded weapons you could use right now. And there are painless methods too, for you more delicate types. Not all drugs are bad. You could get to the land of milk and honey by putting barbiturates in your coffee!

Mmmmm, honey.

Because really, you know, it’s evil here. It’s ugly and bad and Satanic, with all this blue sky and clean water and ominous birdsong. It’s just a way-station, and you know who hangs out in way-stations, right? Perverts and drunkards and socialists and panhandlers. You don’t want to be one of us now, do you?

So fare thee well, dear fundamentalist friends, and we will miss you as we suffer our torment here with the biodiversity and the evolution and the freethinking and the nasty, nasty sex. Say a prayer for us from your Eternal Reward if you like.

Just please don’t let the Pearly Gates hit you on your asses on your way off-planet.

Unless, that is, you don’t really believe what you’ve been selling. But how likely is that?