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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.

Atheism, History, Politics, Religion, Science asshole, belief, disaster, earthquake, faith, haiti, skeptic

I have been looking for a simple reference to cover the basic ideas of God’s existence and found this handy reference.

http://www.400monkeys.com/God/

Use it frequently and try to commit as much as you can to memory.  It should be helpful as you continue to pursue truth and good in life.

Best of luck!

Agnostic, Atheism, Religion, Science belief, existentialism, faith, god, reason

The Naked Pastor posted these random thoughts the other day…

1. People don’t change their minds. Only rarely. Transformation is not a desirable option to our brains. It seems to require trauma, the threat of imminent death, to provoke real change of mind and bring about true transformation. Is it possible to enter death and be transformed while we are alive?

2. The greatest enemy of community is fantasy… visionary and wishful thinking. The lack of gratitude for what is, the unwillingness to appreciate what is, or the disdain for what is, erodes the fabric of community. Can we love unconditionally without coercion?

3. Our gross naiveté about the principalities and powers and their persistent desire and ability to enslave groups and individuals perpetuates the abuses institutions, including the church, are notorious for. Can all people be free?

4. Avoid naysayers as well as yes-men. You can always find complainers to agree with you. You can always find encouragers to agree with you. Can we find the courage to form our own minds independently, wisely, and compassionately?

I thought, hey… I like him.  He’s is talking about deconversion in #1, because that’s what it was like for me to step away from faith.  Constant bombardment with strange teachings in the Baptist church forced me to reevaluate the world we live in.

THEN, in #2 he nails it with typical religious thinking about the fantasy of a higher power vs. just appreciating this temporal gift of life on Earth, not just mine, but the whole human experience.  We just got here (relatively speaking), and the Earth will be here long after we have faded to extinction. I already love unconditionally without coercion and don’t know how else you could.

#3… tell me about it.

And, regarding #4, don’t “seek approval” for your point of view.  Establish it intellectually, with reason, and knowledge of the world and your fellow man. You don’t need other people to tell you what you should believe.

Holy crap, this dude’s batting 1000 in my book so far… but then came #5:

5. Listen to what the atheists are saying about the unprovability of God; discern the Christ-Principle in all things; have compassion for all beings. Is it possible to see all things as being reconciled?

Wha?! I rarely discuss the “unprovability of god”, but since you brought it up, what exactly is the evidence for God?  If you look at the sum total of the things the Christian God gets credit for in the Bible, why would you WANT to believe in him?  He wasn’t a good or just god. Jesus tried to correct all that, but please… look at the “miracles” he performed.  His teachings were in line with to Mohammad, Confucius, Buddha, Plato, etc. (borrowed, ex post facto, by reasonable men writing down “history” many years later). Other than these writings, what evidence is there for god?  For everyone good work, “divine” occurrence, or saved soul you can conjure, I can cite a dozen horrific, sad, disgusting things about the world that a good and just god would not allow… even a passive creator (with any “heart”) would not have created such a chaotic place.

Also, how would I find the “Christ-Principles in all things”?” As I understand it, the Principles of Christ are roughly, first, Faith in the Jesus Christ; second, Repentance… it really doesn’t matter after that because I get hung up on the FIRST one. I have faith that the human race has been duped for several millenia, for sure.  With regard to “sin”, seriously, Catholics (et al), get a grip and just be good people… forget about all the EXTRA rules and regulations that the church has piled on. It’s not a “sin” to eat meat… ever. Weird.

How about we all just skip ahead to “have compassion for all beings”? I can get on board with that… why make it sound like I need belief as a crutch.  See “The Golden Rule“.

The last sentence is stupid… no, we can’t reconcile all things, particularly mystical belief with intellectual reason.  They are incompatible.  Even less likely, reconcile your Christian mythology with a Islamic stranger an ocean away. Good luck.

However, abandon your fantastical beliefs, and then living with your fellow man, particularly the ones not like you, becomes much easier.  I guess his thoughts were pretty random after all.

History, Love, Religion, Science Baptist, belief, bible, Catholic, Christian, church, death, doubt, faith, god, inspiration, jesus

Someday I hope that this point of view dawns on us all…  Seen on Verbal Razors:

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.

— Gore Vidal

Wow… color me stunned and awed.  Clearly I need to brush up on my Gore Vidal.  I think I’ll start with Creation: A Novel.

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