Some of the things Robertson said:
NEW YORK (CBS) Pat Robertson, the American Christian televangelist and host of “The 700 Club,” said that Haitians need to have a “great turning to god” while he was reporting on the devastating 7.0 earthquake that shook the island nation — the most powerful to hit the country in a century.
As Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said “well over” 100,000 people may have died in the natural disaster, Robertson took to the airwaves Wednesday on his show and said that the country has been “cursed by one thing after another” since they “swore a pact to the devil.”
“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about,” Robertson said Tuesday.
“They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another,” Robertson said.
This is not the first time the former Republican presidential candidate has made controversial comments in the wake of disasters.
He has linked Hurricane Katrina and terrorist attacks to legalized abortion.
“I was reading, yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood…But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way?” Robertson said in a September 12, 2005 broadcast of “The 700 Club,” soon after Hurricane Katrina.
Now read Eliphaz, from Job4:
“Remember now, who ever perished being innocent? Or where were the upright destroyed?
See any difference? Neither do I.
Robertson has a Biblical foundation for his words. But it’s not one where I will stand.
January 17th, 2010 | 8:39 pm | #1
Of course, Eliphaz missed the point, rather dramatically, of Job. He DID suffer horribly, and he was a righteous man.
It seems you might be too, Mr. Brendenmuehl? Or am I misunderstanding point?
Besides, haven’t we exhausted this topic rather thorougly?
January 17th, 2010 | 8:52 pm | #2
Reverend,
I think Collin’s point was that Eliphaz and Pat Robertson are cut from the same cloth.
Both are/were quite wrong.
January 17th, 2010 | 8:54 pm | #3
Daryl is correct. Tx.
January 22nd, 2010 | 10:03 am | #4
The problem here is that there’s no distinction between absolute goodness and relative goodness. Of course there are people who are more righteous than others, relatively speaking. But no one is perfectly righteous, not even Job, according to other scriptural statements.
What matters is whether Robertson is speaking in the first sense or the second sense. If he were speaking in the absolute sense, he’d actually be right. Eliphaz wasn’t, in my view, and I don’t think Robertson was either. The evidence for it with Eliphaz is that he wanted Job to confess some particular sin that this was about rather than admitting to some kind of sinful nature that separates from God independently of the sins that it brings us to commit.
For Robertson, we see the same thing, only in his case he purports to know what that particular sin is — voodoo. Just as he purported to know what sins led God to cause 9-11 (homosexuality and abortion), we see the continuation of a pattern for Robertson, who seems to think he knows God’s motivations behind every allowance of a disaster, and it’s always in terms of other people’s sins, sins of a sort that Robertson doesn’t happen to be tempted toward those sins. That, I think, is the real problem with his comments. There’s no sense of identification with other sinners because of his own sin, as you find in the prayers of repentance in Daniel 9 and Ezra 9, even though in both cases the person praying wasn’t tempted toward the sins in question.
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