The Inquiring Manatee

Oh, Shut Up, Pat Robertson

      Televangelist Pat Robertson, who came damn close (profanity intended) to being the Republican presidential nominee in 1988, has put his well-polished loafer in his mouth again.

     This time, Wednesday on his Christian Broadcasting Network show popular in every double-wide trailer park in the U.S., he attributed the suffering of millions of Haitians in this terrible earthquake to a "pact with the devil" supposedly made in 1791 by Haitian revolutionaries desperate to escape from "under the heel of the French."

   "They got together and swore a pact to the devil," Robertson said. "They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' True story. And the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another."

    Oh, Pat. You jerk.

    First of all, you show as much compassion for the bereaved, injured and homeless Haitians as George W. Bush showed for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Some preacher of God you are. To the extent that you appear to be smugly enjoying the suffering in Haiti, a nation of black people, you run the risk of being characterized as a racist.

    Second, it's doubtful that anybody heard the devil say, "OK, it's a deal."

    Third, way before 1791, Haiti was a cursed, miserable place. The French planters were incredibly cruel to their imported African slaves, used as labor after the native Indians were worked to death. It was God who put Haiti's location smack in the way of hurricanes. Port-au-Prince, the capital, sits right on an earthquake-prone fault. The island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, has few natural resources. Overpopulation has resulted in burning of the forests for fuel. Haiti, with its record of dictators and military coups, has nothing going for it except the saintly forbearance and resilience of its people -- people whom Robertson dismisses out of hand because of some superstitious nonsense about 1791.

    All right, let's just say that a few downtrodden slaves in the 18th Century thought they were making a pact with the devil. It still took the devil more than 12 years and the deaths of thousands of Haitians and French to get rid of the colonials and achieve Haitian independence. And as for whether any curse continues today, Robertson ignores the power of the Bible, which preaches: "Let not the sins of the fathers be visited upon the children."

How Godly to Blow Up a Mosque Full of People

    

In the latest move by the Allah-fearing terrorists of northwest Pakistan, they have sent a suicide bomber to blow himself up in a mosque crowded with hundreds of Friday worshipers, killing 48 innocent Muslims and wounding many others. The mosque was obliterated.
     OK, plotters. Call yourself killers. Call yourself eye-for-an-eye revanchists, if you must. But don't call yourself Muslims. You can't even call yourself religious.
      Is there any religion on Earth that sanctions blowing up a house of God full of worshipers?
      And these people have the nerve to denounce Zionists? 
      This latest egregious incident is yet more proof that the last refuge of scoundrels is not patriotism. It is religion, when used as a cover for nothing more than politics.

The Pope's Unguided Missal*

* That's missal as in prayerbook. I know how to spell "missile."

    Pope Benedict XV was acting to heal a rift in the Roman Catholic Church when he revoked the excommunications of four extremely right-wing bishops associated with French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, reinstating these members of the 38-year-old Society of St. Pius X although they reject the modern reforms of Pope John XXIII's Vatican Council II.
    While understandable, the conservative pope's move is being viewed with dismay by Jews. One of the bishops has views on the Holocaust that differ little from those of neo-Nazis and those of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. British-born Bishop Richard Williamson said in a recently broadcast interview on Swedish television that the "historical evidence" was strongly against the conclusion that millions of Jews had been "deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler."

           So what were all those deaths -- accidents?
     Williamson has also said in interviews that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for invading Afghanistan.
     It's no surprise, then, that Williamson, who headed a seminary in Connecticut in the 1990s, later moved to a seminary in friendly Argentina. That's where Nazis including Adolf Eichmann, Martin Bormann and Josef Mengele slithered off to after World War II.
     What twist of mind would make somebody such a noxious fascist? And why would the pope legitimize a sick guy like Williamson?
     Benedict can be allowed the three other fundamentalist bishops. In a basically conservative church, there should be room for views on the far right. But Williamson's views go too far. He should stay excommunicated as a strong message to the Holocaust deniers that their blind irrationality will not be tolerated by intelligent religious leaders.