Lay Theism

Pat Robertson: Is God punishing Haiti?

The Week – Talking Points
Friday, January 22, 2010

As news broke of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Pat Robertson said on his TV show that Haitians themselves were to blame because of a pact Haiti’s founders made with the devil.

“It’s no secret that the Rev. Pat Robertson is a yammering fool,” said Carl Hiaasen in The Miami Herald, “but last week he hit a new low.” As news broke of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Robertson explained to the million-strong audience of his syndicated TV show, The 700 Club, that Haitians themselves were to blame. In the late 18th century, he said, Haiti’s founders “swore a pact to the devil” in return for being freed from their French colonial masters. Robertson’s remark was not only heartless, said Peter Wehner in National Review Online. It failed to “correspond with any serious understanding of Christianity.” The Christian faith, at its heart, is about mercy in this world and redemption in the next. Only in Robertson’s distorted imagination would an angry Christian God dish out misery to an island full of innocents, to punish them for the supposed heresy of their great-great-great-grandfathers.

Or, maybe, religion is the imagined myths of our ancestors and is just as absurd as the voodoo believed by the Haitians.  Wouldn’t this all be so much simpler without weird superstitions polluting the issue?

Robertson’s interpretation of events was admittedly “obnoxious,” said Elizabeth McAlister in Forbes.com, but interpreting the unfathomable is a preacher’s job. The purpose of religion is “to make sense out of chaos,” to discern and reveal “the unseen forces that cause things to be the way they are.”

What a shame. Science, not religion, has been explaining the majority of the “unseen forces” that were formerly the purview of religion exclusively… say about 400 years ago.  Science and reason have been steadily capturing ground ever since.  It goes even farther back if we consider some of the great thinkers of Greece, Rome, China, India, Iran, etc.

The great irony here is that while Robertson’s remarks have outraged people here in the States, many Haitians have long suspected that there are supernatural underpinnings to the island’s horrible run of bad luck. And according to mainstream Haitian lore, said Eric Metaxas in FoxNews.com, the country’s founders really did hold a voodoo ceremony at which they slaughtered a pig and “made a pact with the devil.” No one knows whether or not the myth is true, of course, but is it so outrageous of Pat Robertson to suggest that “starting a nation this way might not be the best approach?”

No one knows if the myth about the voodoo myth is true???  And then a jackass preacher comes along with his own Christian myths to explain why the earthquake happened in the first place??  Really???  Is this how collectively enlightened we are in 2010?  Holy fuck.

That we are even “having this conversation is ridiculous,” said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. We long ago learned that earthquakes are caused not by vengeful deities but by the shifting of Earth’s tectonic plates, and they bear no “malice toward any particular man, woman, or child.”

Thank you, Kathleen!

Don’t tell that to Robertson, who said 9/11 was God’s punishment of a sinful America, said Michael Rowe in HuffingtonPost.com. Through such bile, Robertson solicits millions in donations from his spellbound flock, and shelters those ill-gotten gains behind his religious tax exemption. Who is it really, Rev. Robertson, “who’s made a pact with the devil”?

And thank you, The Week, for telling it like it is.

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Abortion…  wait, really?!  This is old news revived by the new Mother Teresa stamp.

Friend to the Poor?

It’s so interesting how two groups can see an issue in two radically different ways.

I think it’s sad that with all the suffering, disease, and famine that Mother Teresa saw, that she thought abortion was the issue.

Catholics are all up in arms about the atheist viewpoint on this too:

Atheist group urges boycott of Mother Teresa stamp

I swear…

Mother Teresa: The Greatest Destroyer of Peace is Abortion

For the other perspective, check here:

Sam Harris on Mother Teresa

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But not without creating some serious confusion among humans already present on Earth:

Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”

“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”

Article continues at The Onion.

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I have recently been enjoying a complimentary subscription to ‘The Week’ – (”All you need to know about everything that matters.”) It’s very well done. Similar to ‘The Economist’ but not so dry and boring. Anyway, the most recent issue had this piece:

Ireland: Our priests teach us how to lie

Such hairsplitting is repugnant even if the liar weren’t a priest, said Vincent Browne in The Sunday Business Post.

Vincent Browne

The Sunday Business Post

It’s official: We now have Catholic doctrine on how to lie, said Vincent Browne. A damning government report on sexual abuse by the clergy shows that Archbishop Desmond Connell covered up for the abusive priests under his authority, even lying to investigators. But Connell claims that these lies were not really lies because he had a “mental reservation” about what he was saying.

As he put it, “You can use an ambiguous expression, realizing that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be.” So, for example, when asked whether he had paid off a victim of one of his abusive priests, Connell answered that diocese funds “are not used” for that purpose. By using the present tense, he reasons, he wasn’t excluding the possibility that diocesan funds had been used for such a purpose in the past. It’s the same defense Bill Clinton used when he invoked the definition of “is.” Similarly, when a female victim complained that Connell was lying when he said he had cooperated in the investigation of her case, he countered that he never stipulated that he had cooperated “fully.”

Such hairsplitting is repugnant even if the liar weren’t a priest. “And these guys presume to lecture the rest of us on morality?”

A longer version of his column is here:

Vatican cannot escape blame in abuse scandal

06 December 2009

By Vincent Browne

The cynical indifference by Irish Catholic bishops to the sexual abuse of children perpetrated by their brother priests is not the full story, by any means. The culpability of the leadership of the Catholic Church at the Vatican is part of that fuller story, as I hope to demonstrate.

Clerical child sex abuse is only a small part of the scarifying phenomenon of child sex abuse in Ireland.

However, let’s examine the culpability of the Vatican authorities and its indifference to the welfare of children. Desmond Connell became Catholic archbishop of Dublin in 1988. Twelve years later he was singled out to hold the second-most prestigious position in the Catholic Church, that of cardinal.

It is not believable that, from 1988 to 2000, when Connell was appointed cardinal, the Church authorities in Rome had no idea how he handled (or rather, mishandled) clerical sex abuses cases here, and how he had lied about at least one of these cases.

The case in which clearly he lied concerned the courageous victim Andrew Madden, and the priest, Ivan Payne.

Payne was a serial child abuser who abused at least 31 people.

Madden made a complaint about Payne in 1981, claiming that Payne had sexually abused him for five years. The Church authorities knew of the abuse from 1981 onwards but, essentially, nothing was done.

In 1989, Madden repeated his complaint, this time to an auxiliary bishop, and asked why Payne had been moved to another parish where he might well abuse again.

Neither this auxiliary bishop nor Connell made any effort to enquire into the grounds of the complaint to determine whether Payne remained a danger to children.

Madden threatened legal proceedings against Payne in March 1992. Madden wrote to Connell in April 1993 complaining about the delay in settling the case. Connell instructed the diocesan solicitors to offer Payne financial assistance to settle the case. A settlement was reached the following month.

In 1994, Madden went to the media, first on the Gay Byrne radio programme. The case got widespread publicity.

Connell went on radio in May 1995 and said, in relation to the handling of clerical child sex abuse cases: ‘‘I have compensated nobody, I have paid nobody.” He went onto say that the finances of the diocese ‘‘are not used in any way’’ to make settlements in civil actions concerning clerical child abuse. Madden exposed this claim as a lie.

On October 4, 1995, I wrote in a newspaper column, in reference to Connell’s statements quoted above: ‘‘We now know that each of these statements is essentially misleading. Archbishop Connell provided £27,000 to compensate a clerical child abuser victim and, in doing so, the finances of the diocese were used in a particular way to make a settlement.

‘‘But not just that. We also know that Archbishop Connell failed to report the commission of a crime to the Garda, in spite of a legal obligation to do so. Connell knew that a crime had been committed because he had made £27,000 available to the priest to make a settlement for the crime.

‘‘We also know that the priest in question was given some form of therapeutic assistance, after which he was proclaimed fit to resume pastoral work.

‘‘If no crime had been committed, then what was this therapy for and, if it was for something unconnected with the crime, why was it mentioned in this connection?”

I do not claim any special insight.

My purpose in quoting myself is simply to show how there was widespread appreciation at the time that Connell had failed to report a crime to the Garda and had lied about making funds available to compensate a victim of clerical abuse and had failed quickly to move a priest from a parish, who he had every reason to believe was a child sex abuser.

If I and several others, including the dogs in the street, knew about this at the time, is it believable that the Vatican did not know about it?

Neither is it believable that they knew nothing about any of the other cases which he mishandled during that period from 1988 to 2000.

When the proposal arose – I assume some time in early 2000 – of appointing Connell to the College of Cardinals, one assumes rudimentary checks were made to determine the suitability of the appointment.

One assumes the Papal Nuncio – and perhaps some other bishops in Ireland – would have been consulted.

Is it plausible that none of them would have mentioned to the Vatican anything about the Payne case and the lie which Connell told in that connection?

Assuming that such mention was made, isn’t it likely that further enquiries would have been made into how Connell had handled other clerical sex abuses cases since his appointment as archbishop in 1988?

If the Papal Nuncio made no such report and not a single bishop did so, doesn’t that in itself say something about the institutional Catholic Church?

More likely, the Vatican was aware all along about the ‘‘mental reservation’’ and the cover-ups, and saw absolutely no reason why that should disbar Connell from the College of Cardinals, because the sexual abuse of a few children is a trifling matter in the panoply of power and importance of the church.

One final reflection. This quite proper outrage over the bishops and the cover-ups and the lies disguises a larger phenomenon.

The incidence of child sex abuse in Ireland is enormous.

According to that Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report of 2002, around 320,000 people were raped in childhood, and there is little reason to believe the incidence of child rape has diminished.

The incidence of child rape among the clergy is certainly greater than among the population at large, but only about 4 per cent of child rapes have been perpetrated by the clergy.

The government shows no interest at all, aside from the odd photo opportunity.

sbpost@iol.ie

I would guess this is about par for the last couple of thousand years.

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I have always liked Jeff Atwood’s blog.  I really appreciated his latest post.  I have seen the Project Xanadu list many times, but it’s always nice to see a refresher… it’s that important and that thought provoking.

Most importantly are Ted Nelson’s four maxims:

1. most people are fools
2. most authority is malignant
3. God does not exist
4. everything is wrong

Here is a very cool screenshot of Project Xanadu showing the Bible cross referenced with myriad other sources:

Thanks for the post, Jeff.  Keep up the excellent work.

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