"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."
This is troubling, coming from any Christian, let alone a spiritual leader with a national audience. It shows an abysmal lack of understanding of the nature of God, as revealed in the Old and New Testaments.
The underlying validity of Robertson's litmus test for Godliness aside, the entire history of God's people has been one of turning away from God, and being called back by God. God has put up with far more than this, and still calls us back into His presence, and to deny God's continuing love for all is to deny God.
Pat Robertson has a long and tragic history of intemperate remarks, and this is far tamer than, say, calling for the assassination of of a foreign head of state (no matter how objectionable that person may be) -- but such remarks only feed into the erroneous sterotypes that the media promote about evangelical Christianity.
2 comments:
Robertson is a mystery to me. I think his politics may always have been what drives his thinking, and his late-developing Christianity has never been enough to correct the underlying realpolitik.
I think you may be right. In fact, there are enough people out there who SHOULD know better, but ignore the poor, needy, downtrodden, etc., that the most likely explanation is that religion is merely a tool to further their ideology.
The frustrating thing is that the media eat this up with relish -- yet I don't see a lot of people rushing to Robertson's defense. But I suppose news is news...
Post a Comment