While the rest of the world is waking up to the horrors of the earthquake in Haiti and sending resources to help those unfortunate people, televangelist Pat Robertson is expressing the view that it’s really all their own fault because their ancestors made a ‘pact with the devil’. It really is amazing what contortions some people will go to so as to absolve themselves from any feeling of sympathy or responsibility to the suffering millions in today’s world. New agers have often been castigated for explaining such things as a consequence of people ‘choosing their own karma’, and including tragedy in that as a way of working through bad influences from previous lives. Now a so-called ‘Christian’ evangelist appears to be saying more or less the same thing – though he’s also on record as saying that the New Age is also a demonic conspiracy! Apart from that, though, it makes you wonder how Christians like Robertson who, in another time and place, would lay so much emphasis on everybody being personally responsible for their own wrongdoings, can at the same time hold the view that today’s people are also to blame for something that allegedly happened 300 years ago. And his interpretation of that history is by no means widely accepted anyway. It’s all a far cry from Jesus, who when he encountered suffering people showed compassion for them and resolutely refused to even countenance silly questions about whether they or their ancestors might be responsible for their own suffering. But then, Robertson is also a premillennial dispensationalist, so for him the teaching of Jesus will presumably be an irrelevance only suited to some hypothetical future millennial kingdom.
January 19, 2010 at 6:02 pm
Yes, Pat Robertson’s comment is the other side of the coin to Tony Blair’s apology for the slave trade — it is so much easier to confess other people’s sins, especially if they’ve been dead a couple of centiries and can’t answer back.