www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Pat Robertson opens his mouth about Haiti - I am offended

Just came across this via Google News, http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com...ames-haiti-quake-on-pact-with-devil.html, and it truly upset me to hear Rev. Robertson's explanation of the troubles of Haiti, including the horrible earthquake. It saddens me that such blather is spread via the American media during a time of such sorrow as if he spoke authoritatively for Christians or if his theology or world-view in any way is representative of Christianity in general and Orthodoxy and Catholicism in particular. Sorry if this is the wrong forum, but I fear that such headlines work to undermine the Church when the Church is most needed in this world. Please pray for the peaceful repose of the souls who perished in the Haitian earthquake, including the Archbishop of Haiti; pray for the comfort of those who are dying and injured and those who survive and pray for the selfless and valiant rescue workers and medical personnel coming to help the victims from all over the world.

Second Terrace sums up the Haitian situation for all Christians, Orthodox and Catholic alike - http://janotec.typepad.com/terrace/...-about-earthquake-in-port-au-prince.html

"What should Orthodox Christians do about the earthquake in Port au Prince?

Pray for mercy. repeatedly, profligately. Do not wait for detailed information to give to the Lord, as He knows it already. Do not wonder whether one should pray for non-Christians or non-Orthodox. Do not try to figure out how your prayers may make a difference. Now is not a good time to be deterministic or gnostic.

Give. Repeatedly. Profligately. Give through the IOCC, through the American Red Cross, through the MCC, Friends Disaster Service, World Vision. Do not wait for detailed information. Do not wonder whether one should give to secular or Christian or Orthodox organizations. Do not try to figure out how your gifts will make a difference. Now is not a good time to be an accountant.

Do not be philosophical and think decrepit thoughts like Voltaire upon Lisbon.

Wondering why an earthquake happened is a waste of time. For Christians it could be worse, as it takes away time from prayer.

Haiti is a sad land to begin with, with a tragic history of slavery, voodoo, poverty and deforestation. My brother and a number of friends have spent much time there in mission centers, and I always heard from them that the desperation and the need never go away. Ben told me that people in the market place in Port au Prince would get large SUV-sized crates packed with rejected clothing from Goodwill: once in a while, packed inside, there would be a prized toaster or radio, just needing a small repair.

And that state of affairs was before the earthquake.

The poor get poorer ... except for when the poor are blessed, in a higher state of affairs.

And that is what Orthodox Christians do"

I disagree with what Rev. Robertson said very strongly, but let us not forget that he is doing a lot to help the people of Haiti which is more than I can say for most people in the media who are condemning him.

I found his words offensive. I am glad he's helping the people of Haiti.

I suspect Rev. Robertson means well but it's ironic that so many of his pontifications make atheism look like an attractive alternative to faith.

I never knew natural disasters had moral meanings. But I know that our response to the victims of them certainly do.

I'd better get back to my daily task of pulling the beam out of my own eye rather than pointing out the speck in other people's eyes.

A friend directed me to this most Christian response to Pat Robertson [donmilleris.com].

Didn't spend much time reading the Book of Exodus, did you (remember all those afflictions God sent upon the Egyptians)? Would God sending a plague upon the children of Israel as punishment for David's adultery with Bathsheba count? Throughout the Old Testament, the misfortunes of Israel, both natural and man-made, are normally attributed to Israel's failure to abide by the Covenant.

The Gospels and the New Testament as a whole have a significantly different approach, but the concept is not absent there, nor in the Fathers, where plague, famine, earthquakes, storms and foreign invasion are all seen as divine retribution for the sins of the people, and as a call for metanoia.

You may not agree with Robertson's theology, you may find his modes of expression ham fisted, but let's not pretend that he's coming out of nowhere with this. Within the Reformed tradition (oxymoronic, I know), with its strong emphasis on the literal relevancy of the Old Testament, this type of reasoning and sermonizing is not unusual.

I know where he's coming from, but the flaw is with spiritual discernment and whether or not the confidence behind his claim rests in truth.

My priest said something similar about Hurricane Katrina, but that did not offend me because of the way he spoke. He conditioned it with a perhaps.

Terry

I am not a fan of Robertson or of his comments on Haiti. These misfortunate people needs our prayers not our condemnation. However, God does act through Natural Disaster according to Old Tesament and according to New Testament cannon.

There was a great earthquake that struck the city of Constantinople in 740 AD and the Church recognizes it as a result of the peoples sin. There are hymns chanted at matins during this week in the Orthodox church on the Eve of the feast of St. Demetruis the Great-Martyr. See the sermon below by my parish priest that was given two months ago.




http://orthodoxsermonsonline.blogspot.com/2009/11/does-sin-cause-earthquakes.html .

in Christ,
Michael L.

URGENT ACTION APPEAL: Relief for the Beleaguered People of Haiti

International Orthodox Christain Charitites [iocc.org]

I hope that clean water is brought to many people soon.

My family and I support a mission in Haiti. We send school supplies out twice ayear and the orginization provides two transport planes per year. We are still waiting for news of our people as we have no news on the school and childrens home.
So pray for those that are in Haiti and remember GOD loves us all Christian or non-christian.

Sorry Stuart, no. Most of the time I spent reading the Gospel in which the Lord Himself expressly condemns the idea of natural disasters having moral meanings, especially for the self-righteous distant spectators, such as Mr Robertson.

I am glad he is helping, but he will one day have to give account of his words as well.

If bad things happened only to bad people and good things happened only to good people, why would we need God's judgment?

Shalom,
Memo

I don't think that Pat Robertson meant to be offensive, I think that he was thinking about all the voodoo which is sadly embraced in Haiti...

I think that he was, as is his usual public way, just discussing things that come across his mind, things which many people, including great and holy saints, who have been officially canonized by the Church, also think about and sometimes address when talking about natural disasters of great magnitude in all places. While many think Mr. Robertson is judging, which I do not, I think we should also be careful not to judge what he is saying, whether we like him or not. In all things, we must be careful to discern *intention*, and I do not think that his *intention* was meant to be evil or hateful..(though definitely politically incorrect and ill timed)

Even during the black plague in Europe, we read how towns and cities repented of their sins and asked God's forgiveness if they had been sinful and that is why He allowed the great trial which they were suffering.

In Constantinople, before the fall, Our Lady's protective veil was seen to be removed from one of the Church's in a vision many saw.

Infact, isn't sin the reason for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible? Also, during the great flood, God said that if there had just been a few more holy people, the world would have been spared.

So we see that every malady that occurs everywhere is because of our fallen state, and God may not incur it (though the 'wrath of God' is a solid term in Christianity-food for thought and research--if anyone can clarify this term, I would appreciate it), but in every thing we go through in life, God *allows* it. God allowed Satan to do all that he did to St. Job as we read in the Bible. *Allowance* is the key word.

I agree that we cannot be God. We cannot know how God judges, nor should we judge anyone lest we not see the log in our own eyes and our own great sins, and yes indeed, I agree that God does love us all, Christian, non-Christian, even those who give themselves over to satanic rituals and religions..Mr. Robertson's thoughts were therefore ill timed and certainly misconstrued. I don't think he would ever say that God does not love everyone equally.

We are infact taught by the Church, that it is precisely God's Fatherly love which *allows* trials of all kinds (personal and collective) in order for people, the holy and not so holy, to get closer to Him and be purified for the sake of their eternal soul. We learn, through trials, to cling to God our Father, and to see His image in those who help us. We learn greater love and dependence, and through that humility and less faith in the security and promises of the world.

It has been said by a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church (which one escapes me now, but it may have been St. John Krondstadt) that if the Russian people had been holier, the great misery of the Revolution and Communism would probably not have come upon them.

As for poor Haiti, I have always been very saddened and equally scared at the same time of what goes on in Haiti in regard to the fascination with voodoo and the occult.

I pray with all my heart and soul for the suffering of the Haitian people, which is more than I can humanly fathom, and I pray with all my heart and soul that our Lord will have mercy on all of them and comfort them in their pain and suffering-- since but for the grace of God go any of us, living anywhere, in any country or part of the globe...

But I also pray with all my heart that after this horror, which I pray will be alleviated quickly, that they turn to Christ in a pure way and resist and rebuke the occult, and the voodoo which many there have embraced and which has dominated the lives of so many of them. Infact the Exorcist of the Vatican said that the witchcraft and possession of only two places, he has never been able to exorcise: that of African magic (as practiced in Haiti) and Brazil.

From the book by Father Gabriel Amorth, 'An Exorcist Tells His Story:
In voodoo, the androgynous snake Danbhalah and Aida Wedo guides its followers with a surety and precision that gives stunning results at any hour of the day and night. This snake claims to know all the secrets of the Creator Verb through the "magic language", whose power is increased by sacred music. This is Haitian magic, which together with the original African and the imorted South American magic (particularly from Brazil) called "macumbe" has great evil power. I have already mentioned that the toughest curses I have ever exorcised came either from Brazil or Africa.


May our Lord have mercy on us all.

In Christ our Lord,
Alice

P.S. Memo: 'good things' do not happen to good people. Infact, the holiest people I know suffer the most...just read the lives of the Saints for one.

That sounds vaguely Marcionite, don't you think? Is not the God of the Old Testament also the God of the New?

Very well put, Alice.

Here is a short article by Brendan O'Neill [spiked-online.com] that touches upon this issue:

Thursday 14 January 2010

How ‘Nature’s fury’ replaced God’s fury
Evangelist Pat Robertson’s real mistake was to describe the calamity in Haiti as God’s work rather than Gaia’s work.

Brendan O’Neill

Pat Robertson, the US Christian evangelist who seeks headlines the way missiles seek heat, has understandably caused outrage with his craven comments on the earthquake in Haiti. That calamity is payback from God, he says, for Haitians who made ‘a pact with the devil’ by allegedly embracing voodoo over Jesus Christ.

Yet the real reason Robertson’s comments are shocking is not because he has misanthropically moralised a natural disaster as punishment for people’s sinful behaviour, but because he has done so in the name of God rather than Gaia. These days it is not acceptable to present terrible acts of nature as manifestations of God’s divine fury, but it is de rigueur to depict them as some kind of climatic payback for our greed and addiction to consumerism.

In keeping with his Good Book – in which ‘The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth’ and so decided to send floods to punish us – Robertson says that Haiti has been ‘cursed’ for its rejection of Christian values, with poverty, political instability and now a calamitous earthquake (1). This follows his even wackier comments on Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, which he said was heavenly punishment for legal abortion in the US.

Many are slating his stupidity and backwardness. Yet his real mistake, it seems, was to deploy religious language, rather than pseudo-scientific language, to make his poisonous point. Because today, moralising natural disasters, personifying them, imbuing them with sentience and purpose and vengeance, is a popular pursuit amongst secularists, commentators and climate-change alarmists, for whom everything from flooding to almighty gusts of wind reveals the ‘connections between our unsustainable lifestyles and climate change’ (2).

In the environmentalist outlook, floods, fire and natural destruction have all been discussed as punishment for our eco-hubris. During flooding in England in June 2007, a leading British green declared: ‘The drumbeat of disaster that heralds global warming quickened its tempo this week.’ He said the floods were payback for our failure to instigate a ‘managed mass withdrawal from fossil fuels’ and our insistence on living unsustainably. He even evoked God, Robertson-style, arguing that ‘behind the gathering clouds the hand of God is busy’ (3). Others have claimed that floods offer us a ‘glimpse of a possible winter world that we’ll inhabit if we don’t sort ourselves out’ (4). In short, flooding is brought about by our stubborn desire to live comfortable lives rather than to eke out meek, eco-respectful existences.

Following those floods, a Guardian columnist declared: ‘The turbulent weather we’ve seen is a warning of what lies ahead for us.’ She said we need to be ‘cajoled, led, provoked into changing [our] ways’ and welcomed the ‘drumming of rain on the skylight’ as a kind of warning from on high (5). Mark Lynas, author of the eco-Bible Six Degrees, which makes the story of Noah’s Ark look like an episode of Balamory, has even evoked the God of the Sea, predicting that ‘Poseidon [will be] angered by arrogant affronts from mere mortals like us. We have woken him from a thousand-year slumber, and this time his wrath will know no bounds.’ (6) There is barely a cigarette paper’s difference between this mad idea that the sea will punish us for living it up and Robertson’s idea that Haitians are being punished for their fascination with voodoo.

Fire is another favourite form of vengeance for both the old Bible brigade and the new climate-alarmist lobby. The Australian bush fires of 2009, which killed 173 people and destroyed 2,000 homes and which were actually a product of both very hot weather and arson, were described by one green as ‘global warming made manifest in the daily lives of ordinary people’ (7). Jonathon Porritt, a green who has advised both the UK government and the royal family, linked the bush fires to Australia’s pursuit of ‘unbridled affluence, California-style’ (8). So Australians burned for their sins, for daring to try to generate wealth.

If anything, the idea of Gaia punishing us is even more backward than the idea of God punishing us. At least Robertson only leaps upon disasters once they have happened in order to spread his codswallop – leading greens, by contrast, call upon Mother Nature to punish us more and more in the future in order to wake us from our consumerism-induced stupour. Porritt says there will have to be more climatic ‘shocks to the system’, and ‘from the perspective of our long-term prospects, they need to come as rapidly as possible. And to be as traumatic as possible. Otherwise, politicians and their electorates will rapidly revert to the current mix of non-specific anxiety and inertia.’ (8)

The problem with the Australian bushfires, he says, is that they clearly weren’t ‘bad enough’, because Aussies straight away went back to pursuing their ‘dreams of unbridled affluence’, which ‘gives us some sense of just how bad future climate shocks are going to have to be to drive any serious transformation’ (9). This amounts to a backward, vindictive rain-dancing for further natural calamity, for more of Gaia’s fire and fury, as a way of shocking the masses from their eco-inertia. It expresses both a medieval-style moralisation of weather events and an utter lack of faith in debate and democracy, so that Porritt hopes flames and floodwaters will change the way we plebs think and live.

The usurping of disaster-embracing religious cranks by disaster-demanding climate change alarmists became clear during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Robertson and other minority Christians were attacked for describing that disaster as payback for abortion or for New Orleans’ sexy, sinful ways – yet greens everywhere interpreted it, not as a consequence of a freak weather event and insufficient flood defences, but as a symbol of what will happen if mankind doesn’t overcome his ‘addiction to fossil fuels’ (10). Robertson crankily says the Haiti earthquake was caused by Haitians’ ‘pact with the devil’ – is it really anymore sensible to describe other natural disasters as springing from mankind’s ‘pact with consumerism’?

Throughout human history mankind has had trouble accepting that there is such a thing as natural disaster, a sometimes unpredictable, sometimes unavoidable event, which causes hardship and horror. In earlier eras we described them as ‘acts of God’; later we believed they were brought about by demonic forces; now we say they are payback for our lust for wealth and affluence. The language changes, but the backward idea – that powerful, faceless forces are trying to correct us – remains strikingly similar. And the consequence, then as now, is that we spend more time pointing the finger of blame at greedy mankind than we do offering solidarity to the victims of natural disasters and devising ways to develop and industrialise societies everywhere so that they are better able to withstand nature’s alleged fury. And for that, these societies will need unbridled affluence.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. His satire on the green movement – Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas – is published by Hodder & Stoughton. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Hi again,


On the contrary. The God of the Old and New Testaments said:



So, I'm sorry, if you or Mr. Robertson or I believe any of us is any "better" than any the victims in Haiti, we'll have a LOT to explain before the awesome tribunal of Christ.

Personally, I choose not to place myself in that position. My sins already put me in total need of God's mercy, I don't need any help from self-righteousness in that department.

Shalom,
Memo

So, you object to the Fathers referring to natural disasters as God's judgment upon the wickedness of the people? You refuse to sing those hymns that ask God for forgiveness and protection from calamities? You reject the notion of man as microcosm, and the cosmic impact of human sin upon the entire fabric of the universe because. . . why?

How do you reconcile what the Fathers say with what the Lord says in the Gospel and with the fact that in almost every natural disaster innocent children perish alongside with adults of all ranges of moral stature?

I have never refused to sing any hymn that ask God for forgiveness and protection. I do not believe that I have to be sinless to sing them and I do not believe that they will go unheard because of my sins. The God I sing to is merciful.

I do not reject the impact of human sin in nature, however, not every natural disaster is a direct consequence of human action (certainly not earthquakes). And even if they were, wouldn't that rule out the notion of natural disasters as punishment?

You cannot have it both ways: If natural disasters are the natural consequence of human actions, then they cannot be supernatural divine punishment.

Shalom,
Memo

The Byzantine perspective sees man's sin as the ultimate cause of all evil in the world, because it was through our sin that the cosmos was broken in the first place. Every sin committed by each and every individual man causes further damage to creation.

That being the case, God alone preserves us from the consequences of our folly, and when disaster strike, one can view it anthropomorphically as an act of divine wrath--though God being impassible is incapable of an emotion such as wrath--or as a withdrawal of divine favor in response to our turning away from Him.

Thus, a natural disaster does have a moral dimension, or rather, two: sin is the ultimate cause of all natural ills, but God is fully capable of allowing us to suffer the consequences of our actions, rather than staying the evil with his protecting hand.

Memo,

Very good observations. I would point out a distinction between seeing disasters as punishment for sin, and seeing them as the consequences of sin.

If the first were true, then God's justice would necessitate that only the guilty should suffer. Thus, disasters are not to be understood as punishment for sin.

They are, however, still the consequences of sin, since--as Stuart pointed out--sin is the ultimate cause of all evil in the world.


This is an example of how the Western distinction between natural and "supernatural" causes confusion. It is assumed that sin is a supernatural category, and as such has only a limited cosmic dimension--certainly not beyond the realm of human affairs--when in fact, the effects of sin are felt throughout the cosmos.


Peace,
Deacon Richard

As a mother mourning her son's fall to atheism, I so agree with this!

Dear Fr. Deacon Richard,

Thank you for your post.

I agree with you, there is a difference between punishment for sin and consequences of sin.

However, I still firmly believe that a killer earthquake is neither.

Shalom,
Memo

Shlomo Lkhoolkhoon,

I would ask how many of us use what Rev. Robertson as a teaching moment or as a way to guild a person to this teaching moment?

I love Rev. Robertson because he gives me an opprotunity to show the difference between my Church and his in a loving and Christian way.

Fush BaShlomo Lkhoolkhoon,
Yuhannon

Good point, Yuhannon. I try to constantly point out to my son how the Church differs from Christian Fundamentalism.