When, in 2005, a school board in Pennsylvania’s Dover city democratically voted to rid itself of all Fundamentalists, Pat Robertson charged that the school had “…voted God out…” Said he: “I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover, if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just ejected him from your city.”
If God can be ejected from a city, then even a child will question his ubiquitous omnipotence. If Robertson’s kind of divine retribution is our lot whenever we defeat Fundamentalists in democratic polls, it is quite in line with the recent return to Stone-Age thinking by a stratum of the world’s most developed society.
For, if Jehovah is the one responsible for Aids in Kenya, then he is equally to blame for bird’s flu in China and bubonic plague in Euro-America itself. Yet it is patent to him that “God” is none other than the American Ku Klax Klannist whom Dover evicted. That is why to vote a religious fanatic out of a committee – no matter how justifiably – is to “vote God out”.
On another occasion, Dawkins reports, “The Reverend Pat Robertson … was reported as blaming the hurricane [Katrina] on a lesbian comedian who happened to live in New Orleans.” Thus, despite Jehovah’s proclaimed omni-potential benevolence, he has no way of isolating innocents in order to punish only culprits.
We know this from the Fundamentalist’s own Old Testament, where he once indiscriminately pulverised Sodom and Gomorrah with what America’s neo-creationists now claim to have been “nuclear rain”. Even after Abraham had courageously remonstrated with him, God annihilated the valley of Siddim, sparing, of course, only a family in whom Jewry has a completely subjective historiographical interest.
Dawkins comments: “[The story] is widely believed … because it is entirely typical of utterances by the evangelical clergy, including Robertson, on disasters such as Katrina.” Dawkins points out: “Pat Robertson would be harmless comedy, were he less typical of those who today hold power in the United States.”
Here Dawkins is referring to the Right-wing gang around President George Bush, a confessed Fundamentalist. The danger is that eschatologists with minds as tiny as Reagan and Bush have held the only key to America’s nuclear hideout even when one of those minds was captive to Alzheimer’s disease.
Indeed, when a real “problem” did hit Dover, Robertson, the “man of God”, blamed it on the sexual habit of a certain individual. Dawkins reports: “The Reverend Pat Robertson … was reported as blaming the [Katrina] on a lesbian comedian who happened to live in New Orleans.”
“You’d think an omnipotent God will adopt a slightly more targeted approach to zapping sinners: A judicious heart attack, perhaps, rather than the … destruction of an entire city just because it happened to be the domicile of one lesbian comedian.” But Pat Robertson is typical of all priests of the Deuteronomist’s divine vindictiveness.
He is an evil man by all definitions. The question is: Do human beings have the power to throw an omnipotent God out of a city? Robertson tells us so. Yet it was good riddance to vote out a group of exceedingly narrow-minded self-seekers out that city. Neither Dover nor Mombasa needs any god of the kind that Robertson worships.
Indeed Dawkins’ reckons that Pat Robertson is just an extraordinarily brainless person. No wonder that his deity is simply incapable of doing anything about both the KATRINA and Dover’s vote. If a whole god cannot prevent people from voting him out, then how can he separate sinners from innocents in order to punish only the sinners?
It took Abraham to talk God into first considering the few good people before pulverising the valley of Siddim. Yahweh had demonstrated this indiscriminateness twice before. He had tried to annihilate humanity through a universal flood, sparing only a Noah in whom the patriarchs had a historiographical self-interest.
Then, with equally appalling indiscrimination, Yahweh sent ten “plagues” to kill African children – sparing only the children of you know whom — though it was the selfsame Yahweh who had “hardened” the pharaoh’s heart into recalcitrance. This evil is a direct result of the singularly theo-ideological ineptitude by the god’s “chosen people”.
Robertson’s statement on “Aids in Kenya” is thus typical of minds for ages so ravaged by racial megalomania as to forget that disease knows no race – that it was his own Euro-Caucasians who exported to the Americas certain deadly diseases which proceeded to consign the native Red Indians to the grave by the LAKH every year.