Arianna joined The Nation's Ari Melber and former evangelist Frank Schaeffer on The Joy Behar Show Thursday. The panel weighed in on evangelist Pat Robertson's claims that the earthquake in Haiti is the result of that country's "pact with the devil."
Arianna thinks Robertson is giving religion a bad name. "For anybody of faith, even if you're not God, Pat Robertson is giving religion a terribly bad name, again and again. Remember, this is not the first time. Remember after 9/11, when he blamed 9/11 on the ACLU, and People For The American Way, and gay people. So there's a pattern here of blaming every disaster on something other than what actually happened."
Robertson has not apologized for his remarks, though Haiti's ambassador to the U.S. has attempted to shame the famous Christian broadcaster.
Joy asked if the Republican party would ever be able to shake the religious right and "get back to where it was." Arianna pointed to Rush Limbaugh, and explained that the party's troubles go much deeper than the religious right.
After debating Robertson's remarks, Arianna stuck around to talk about NBC's Conan-Leno war. She didn't take sides, but did say that there's too much testosterone on late night TV--Joy should get a late-night show.
Jim Wallis: God Suffers With the Suffering
As I reflected on Pat Robertson's Haiti remark, I was reminded of how many times he has embarrassed so many fellow Christians. In reality, he is more irrelevant now than ever.
Kerry Trueman: Haiti: The Aid Masquerade
How many thousands of Haitians could have survived the earthquake if the country weren't crippled by chronic poverty, shoddy infrastructure, and environmental degradation?
Andy Borowitz: Pat Robertson 'A Public Relations Nightmare,' Says God
In the wake of his comments about the earthquake in Haiti, televangelist Pat Robertson has become a "public relations nightmare" and a "gynormous embarrassment to me, personally," God said today.
Farai Chideya: Haiti Is Cursed -- By Our Ignorance
We have to realize that the meme of the "curse" has its own racial baggage. It's a way of disengaging Western history from the literal rubble of Haiti.
Tuesday and Wednesday's Updates on Haiti's Earthquake - The Lede ...
Think Progress » Pat Robertson Cites Haiti's Earthquake As What ...
Pat Robertson Blames Haiti Earthquake on 'Pact With the Devil ...
Pat Robertson Explains The Haiti Earthquake - Swampland - TIME.com
Pat Robertson On Haiti: Earthquake Punishment For Pact With Devil ...
Robertson’s compassion for the people of Haiti is clear.
I think CBN confuses the word hate for compassion.
The Christian world view believes that there is a supernatural battle going on in the heavenly realm between good and evil over the souls of mankind. We have the choice to believe in God or Satan, who according to the bible, is the god of this world. Bob Dylan expressed it well in his song, "You're gonna have to serve somebody". It may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you're gonna have to serve somebody".
Personally I don't agree with Pat Robertson's timing or appropriateness of his statement at the time, but one thing is true. Most of the people of Haiti, including the government leaders, believe in voodoo and witch doctors and this has kept them from progressing from a third world country into a prosperous modern one.
For religious persons, whatever occurs, no matter how much suffering it brings on to millions, cannot be condemned because God is infallible. People must therefore resign to the whims of the Almighty and accept everything with resignation. That ultimately translates into a state of mental passivity and under those circumstances science cannot make any progress.
Religions not only indoctrinate people into passivity. They impose a harsh repression on those who dare think scientifically, suppressing most of the remaining inventing inclinations of a population. The amount of intellectuals and scientists who through history were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered is almost as numerous as the stars in the Milky Way.
Since progress cannot be attained without science and technology, religions ineluctably condemn nations to poverty and when nations are poor they always turn violent. Poverty's so atrocious and painful, that when a country endures it people inevitably resort to violence as an instinctive mechanism of survival.
Countless wars through history were the result of territorial disputes, ethnic differences or some other non-religious factor. However, it was the poverty of the parties involved what really pushed them into confrontation, and that was the result of religion. When people are indigent, minor things such as linguistic, ethnic, or cultural differences drive them to war.
As the biggest hindrance of progress, religion is without the slightest of doubts, the cause of all wars. History shows there's nothing more pernicious for the well-being of society than religion.
By Charles Sabillon
How have you found out that one of gods "created all that there is"?
You do realize that clergy have been using religion outside the boundaries of a moral code for 2 millenia right?
And if you dont know that science and religion are polar opposites just go ask Galileo. The relationship between the church and early "scientists" was a brutal one. Science has been at war with the church since the time when all scientific breakthroughs had to be reviewed and approved by the church before they could be released. Were talking about torture and life imprisonment for daring to say the sun did not revolve around "Gods" earth or an excommunication over the law of gravity for crying out loud.
History shows that religions are intrinsically violent and ineluctably push nations into war.
Religion-The Cause Of All Wars
The belief in God has persistently led to war throughout the whole history of humanity. From the earliest of times in the Paleolithic period up to the very present, mankind has experienced countless armed conflicts that took place in the name of God. There have been more than a million wars over the last 100,000 years and practically all of them were directly or indirectly the result of religion.
There are two reasons for this situation.
Whether it is the most primitive religions of the Paleolithic period or the large ones of today, all creeds have always claimed that their particular God is omnipotent. Another common denominator of all religions is the claim that their God is the only true one.
With such a vision of things, a clash is inevitable. When two persons or two nations that venerate a different God come in contact, both are inevitably driven to try to impose their God on the other. The end result is conflict, which frequently escalates into bloodshed.
In the absolutist and irrational vision of the world of religious people, there is no room for compromise.
The second reason explaining the inherent violence of religions is what resides at their very core. Everything that happens in the world, according to them, is due to the will of God.
My advice would be to look a little deeper into the "cause" of wars.
It isn't religion. Religion has been used for aeons as one of the ways to manipulate the general populace into fighting by the leaders and elite of the society. The "cause" of war is economics. Plain and simple. Every time......every war.
Leaders use religion (often in tandem) along with fear, patriotism and nationalism. Then there are divide and conquer tactics like promoting the fear of the "other". You know the other with the different skin color or language or different shaped eyes or culture or foods or 'funny sounding' names or accent.
This argument has been brought up again and again and my answer is always the same......look past pre-conceived ideas and try to see the answer.
My last thing for you to ponder is why areligious societies (like Communist China or N. Korea or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge) have wars? If religion is the 'cause' of war it could not happen......however if greed, power, and economics were the reasons.......?
- I completely agree. Religions are extremely good tools for this.
"On today’s The 700 Club, during a segment about the devastation, suffering and humanitarian effort that is needed in Haiti, Dr. Robertson also spoke about Haiti’s history. Dr. Robertson never stated that the earthquake was God’s wrath. If you watch the entire video segment, Dr. Robertson’s compassion for the people of Haiti is clear. He called for prayer for them. His humanitarian arm has been working to help thousands of people in Haiti over the last year, and they are currently launching a major relief and recovery effort to help the victims of this disaster. They have sent a shipment of millions of dollars worth of medications that is now in Haiti, and their disaster team leaders are expected to arrive tomorrow and begin operations to ease the suffering.
PACT WITH THE DEVIL! Where does one go after that? That says it all.
Fear, particularly the "fear of a wrathful god " is a powerful tool for controlling people.
This is why "Christian" televangelists like Robertson effectively ignore the New Testament's "Good News", the revelatory message of Jesus, that God is Love....only Love.
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Overstock has not advertised on "The Drugster's" show since he made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Disease. Above is a link which leads to a statement from Overstock.
This list of sponsors contains some broken links, and a number of the organizations listed no longer sponsor Limbaugh. Basically, it's an outdated list. I forwarded the same list to several friends and family members without investigating it's accuracy. I got some responses back from them, which led me to start investigating which companies currently sponsor his program.
I went to Limbaugh's website (after which I needed to take a really hot shower, eeeeww) to see which companies were listed there. It's a start. We need to put our heads together and compile a complete and current list. We know that the boycott of sponsors works. It worked in getting Imus fired and it can work in Limbaugh's case as well.
granted conservatives are rewriting the bible to take out liberal passages, but are you blinded by your bias enough to not see the compassion in your book? dumb, dumb, dumb.......ad nauseum
Balickistan, I'm afraid I riled you up unnecessarily. Boy, when you get riled up, you really get riled up. In a way, it was rewarding to get your goat like this. I'm tempted to say something crazier, but I don't want to get you expelled for HuffPo. But I hear you on the plate tectonics.
They are rewriting American history. They are reinterpreting the Constitution of the US. They are dominating the media. New textbooks produced in Texas for the nation's schools will include a paragraph about the "Red scare" artist, Senator Joe McCarthy calling him an American hero .... Bill Moyers' program goes off public TV to be replaced by George W. Bush foundation programming. And the NRA is making us swallow their version of the 2nd Amendment so more guns will be sold and paraded at public meetings while "suggesting" insurrection if we don't gulp it down.
Who's dumb, dumb, dumb? Well, we have all been dumbed-down, and dumped on, don't ya think? Because all this is going on right in front of our faces and yet here we sit blogging as if we are changing the world ... as America crumbles into continuing psychological malaise resembling something like the shambles of Haiti's earthquake.
Only Haiti's crumbling is not their fault.
Good luck to all us.
Hmmm.
I guess we can thank Pat Robertson for letting us know that God holds a grudge for centuries.
Why doesn't God see the fact they were slaves trying to break their chains somewhat mitigating? And why did God wait so long to lay on a super earthquake, There's a possibility that the Devil dealers might have passed by now -- unless, of course, they also bargained with the Devil for eternal life.
I'm tempted to ask God for his side of the story.
Maybe he'll answer me this time.
Because man is quite capable of unnatural acts.
What is natural and what is unnatural?
The innocence of a child is the natural perspective regardless of its birth. Bastardizing a child born outside of wedlock is the unnatural perspective.
Compassion for others in times of disaster is natural. Using a disaster and the plight of others to strengthen or corroborate a bias is unnatural.
Each of my points of what i consider to be an unnatural human response is a means of escaping guilt and responsibility by transferring the impetus or cause of the action.
i don't know if i am clearly explaining what I feel but I hope it's a beginning.
on plantations "making a pact with the devil." I think it is past time for him to retire.
I won't make anyone 'apologize' for the horrors of these wars. I do realize that people are capable of horrors with or without any religion.
Robertson does give followers of Jesus a bad name.
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Instead, let's look at the 90+ Christian organizations arranging aid and relief to the Hatians
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http://www.ecfa.org/ServantMatch.aspx?Type=Haiti
You wrote: "Robertson does give followers of Jesus a bad name."
No! Robertson gives followers of fundamentalist Christianity a bad name.
Followers of Jesus do not remotely resemble fundamentalist Christians.
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Mohandas Gandhi