Pat Robertson

For the third time in the past few months, Pat Robertson has become a lightning rod of criticism over uttered words.

I've had mixed feeling about each of the controversies.

First, in August, Robertson opined that the US should dispose of Hugo Chavez of Venezuala. I whole heartedly agreed with the sentiment, but felt that Robertson shouldn't telegraph an assassination any more than a QB should telegraph a crossing route over the middle. Chavez is an evil man and will murder many thousands of people before his totalitarian, socialist utopia ultimately falls. Taking him out would provide lasting benefits for Venezuala as well as all of Latin America, though some plausible deniability would be prudent. To Robertson's credit, after the controversy, he did modify his comments and apoligized.

In November, Robertson said that the people of Dover, Pennsylvania shouldn't call on God if disaster strikes they (he felt) rejected God first and "voted God out of your city." I defended Robertson because I felt that he had poorly expressed a point that could be easily be made. Basically, what I thought Robertson was poorly trying to say (even though he didn't quite say it) was that people who aggressively drive God out of their lives should not lament God's absence in their lives in times of trouble.

Yesterday Robertson uttered something equally as controversial but even less defensible.

Robertson made his comments about Israel and Sharon on his TV program, “The 700 Club.” He said, “God considers this land to be his. You read the Bible and he says ‘This is my land,’ and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, ‘No, this is mine.”’

I cannot understand the reasoning here. First of all, we are mortal beings. We do get sick and we do die. Sharon is 77 and it appeared to me, even before this stroke, that he wasn't a model of adult health. It seems more likely that if God was punishing Sharon, the punishment was for his diet.

Secondly, God deals with evil by granting people either forgiveness or an uncomfortably warm afterlife experience, not by spanking our Earthly bodies with strokes, siezures, broken bones or acne depending upon the severity of our sin. If this were the case, then we truly do have a God that turned his back on the Earth's innocents such as the peasants of Stalin and Mao, the Jews of Hitler, the academics of Pol Pot, and the Shiites and Kurds of Saddam. You cannot believe one without believing the other. It is true that God can pick and choose his places of intervention (that is probably one of the coolest things about being God,) but for Robertson to be able to read the playbook over God's shoulder seems a bit of a reach to me. It is hard to believe that God would put the heavy on Sharon a few months after ceding land to the Palestians when he gave Chairman Mao a life-long pass to murder 50 million people.

It appears that my defense of Robertson in November was misguided. His recent comments indicate a more judgmental and cynical frame of mind than I was earlier willing to discredit him with.

Sad.