-Pat Robertson-
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Beside the fact that this contemptible idiot is low enough to compare Washington DC to Jerusalem and medieval enough to insinuate that every shake rattle and roll this planet has experienced in the four billion years it's been around indicates the anger of God, besides the fact that this worm thinks his hate is God's hate, he presumes to speak for me and for America in general and that's unforgivable.
No sir, and I use that title in a contemptuous way, I don't think of a nation under God when I look at that monument and I'm certainly old enough to remember when the Knights of Columbus inter alia twisted Eisenhower's arm into bastardizing the children's pledge in 1954. I think of a victorious general and of the first president of the first secular democracy in Western history -- a man who asserted that this is not a nation under Pat Robertson's God or anyone else's.
Like some prehistoric shaman, squinting at goat entrails and attributing every meteor and comet and eclipse to angry but invisible entities for his own detestable profit, Pat Robertson always has a list of grievances to air when any natural process is noticed. Those grievances seem to have little to do with evil even on a gigantic scale, as God never shook his finger at Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Tomas de Torquemada for that matter, but only at the failure of our secular government to assume the aspect of God's enforcers in private matters - like love - that this black-hearted abomination can make a career out of raging about.
It's not of course that this tin-horn prophet is alone, nor is it restricted to pseudo-Christian pretenders like Robertson who have decided that tolerance for love's many forms is God's main obsession rather than injustice and oppression and exploitation or even murder. Yahweh, the Hammer of Homosexuals.
It's an insult to God, an insult to America; to freedom, to Democracy, to secularism and religious tolerance and all the other things our country actually is "under." This of course is the Worm who told us that God had no power over plate tectonics when the tsunami hit the eastern Pacific not long ago, but yes, I'll judge and I'll judge you viciously. I can't shake the ground or crack monuments and I'm too furious to crack jokes but because God is always silent and never says the same thing to different people: because divine retribution is indistinguishable from random natural events, I will judge you myself, weigh your words and find you wanting.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteIndeed! I'd say Robertson leads the pack for sheer primitivism of this sort, and it's not a race a body ought to be proud to win. You'd think the absolute idiocy and contradictoriness of such a proposition would rule it out, but its appeal is obviously perpetual. And they always trot it out at the cruelest possible time: "See, all you dumb, godless bastards grieving over the loss of someone you love thanks to that tsunami or earthquake or plague? -- it's all YOUR fault! I TOLD you so. Nah, nah, nah NAH nah!"
They don't seem to realize that if this were the sort of deity that actually existed -- a continually menacing, abusive sky-father -- it would by no means be worth worshiping or even acknowledging. At least the Greeks figured their lighting-bolt-hurling and arrow-wafting Olympian Lords took a damn rest once in a while. But Robertson's Omniscient Almighty, it would appear, never tires of fanatically eavesdropping on you or obsessing and raging about just where and how you spill your seed, or whatever it is that you're getting up to in that department. If so, humanity's prayer ought to be, "O Lord, Get a Life!"
If I hear that God is angry with us one more time, I'll scream. If He is, it's because of guys like Robertson and his toadies and buddies perverting his message.
ReplyDeleteDino,
ReplyDelete"O Lord, Get a Life!"
Yes, and I think old Job suggested the same with his bit about mocking at the trial of the innocent, but Robertson proves that there is no God that gets directly involved in human affairs - sufficiently for me anyway.
"the gods are angry" was probably the first thing our ancestors said when they learned to speak and making a buck out of it is the real oldest profession, not prostitution. There was no need for than until some shaman decided God hated sex unless the shaman approved of it first.
Well, anyway, it's up to old Sky Father to show he's more than just a name for random chance - maybe the spontaneous combustion of Pat Robertson during one of his sulphurous rants.
Oh, and by the way, Patsy doesn't seem to think that ripping off the charitable contributions of poor people to get involved in illegal diamond mining scams in Africa is nearly as heinous as having consensual sex with someone not approved of by the bearded Pat Robertsons of the late bronze age.
Hey, are you listening God?
It was a very good article. I know because it inspired several thoughts, or more specifically, thus:
ReplyDeleteThose grievances seem to have little to do with evil even on a gigantic scale, as God never shook his finger at Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Tomas de Torquemada for that matter, but only at the failure of our secular government to assume the aspect of God's enforcers in private matters - like love - that this black-hearted abomination can make a career out of raging about.
God shook his finger at all of those people, sir.
Like some prehistoric shaman, squinting at goat entrails
You don’t know what was going on and are just making assumptions in the absence of real training. They weren’t squinting. They were responding to the smell, which you would know if you had ever read an entrail.
Nor is it restricted to pseudo-Christian pretenders like Robertson
Robertson is a real Christian, and not unlike a great many of them. He is neither pretending nor pseudonymous.
Yahweh, the Hammer of Homosexuals.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my homosexual brothers. In fact, my last post at Mysterious Things was about this very issue. However, I cannot abide such statements as these. Can we say “Yahweh?” I think it’s too sacred to say. You are supposed to say “Adonai,” or Yahweh gets pissed off. If you use the most sacred words, something bad happens. I am not sure what the problem is. Yahweh never finished explaining it. Of course, Yahweh never really explained to Eve why she shouldn’t eat an apple. He may have threated to kill her, but that really didn’t work because she had no experience with death and had never seen anything die. “You shall surely die,” sounded like Peanuts utterances to her. The moral of the story: Eve is dead and don’t say “Yahweh.”
… because God is always silent and never says the same thing to different people
I hate to point this out when you are already too furious to crack jokes, but if God is silent, obviously He never says the same thing to two different people, or even one, which reminds me of Star Trek: “We must anticipate and not make the same mistake once.”
I submit to you that one person hears God and the other thinks He does. The reverse is also true. It is a paradox, and every bit as real as the Trinity, the New Covenant, and God Himself.
because divine retribution is indistinguishable from random natural events
And therein lies its genius! God ain’t no stupid!
And finally,
God Bless men like Pat Robertson.
Robertson deserves all the mockery and disdain we can manage to serve up, and then some.
ReplyDeleteWhen his time comes, as it will for all of us, he too will be able to be buried in a matchbox, after having had the pre-burial enema.*
*If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox. Christopher Hitchens, on Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colmes on the death of Jerry Falwell (16 May 2007)
Um. . .ah -- define "bless." Might it have something to do with tar and feathers or at least a column of salt? The Yahster once had the earth open up and swallow some poor sod who got incense too near the Ark -- and you want to bless that POS?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I'm never furious - that's why I write polemics. Ammunition is so expensive these days. Let younger people handle the revolutioning and I'll just be revolting. Better a tongue in cheek than an AK in hand.
Adolph Mengele lived into old age as a free man. Joshua was a murderer, but Joe and Mary named their kid after him. Job had his ass kicked and his family murdered because of a drunken bet. God just doesn't come out well in this movie. There can be no serious talk of divine retribution in this world unless we descend into mystery and magic and hand waving and other forms of disingenuous delusion. If God cares more about Adam and Steve's sleeping arrangements than 2 million years of human suffering than fuck him - that's if God has any actual orifices, otherwise fuck him metaphorically.
"If the scourge slay suddenly, he will mock at the trial of the innocent --- if not he, then who?" It's da Bible innit? Job 9:23 It's the Holy Word, right? so I take that as a confession from God. And God never lies. And God never changes his mind - except when he does. Well hell, he always does - won't even tell us his real name.
But really, those unwashed entrail interpreters probably smelled as bad as the goatshit itself and never noticed, but at my age, and as a bearded prophet myself, I have to squint at close up things too. You know, they didn't have glasses -- or soap for that matter.
Cannot a god communicate silently, by the way? -- fingers upon the wall, perhaps? A bearded face on a taco? God only actually talked to Abraham, his wife Sarai and to Moses - or so he says in his divine, unambiguous but self-contradictory WORD. Oh, and to Adam and Eve too and to Abel, I guess, but what the hell, you know what I mean.
Actually 'Adonai' is not the choice of the ultra-orthodox, since it's actually from the Greek occupation and a Greek word. They tend to say "Ha Shem" which simply means "the name." I like Shazzam better but I always call him Yahweh or sometimes Ya or the Yahster, depending on his mood. 2/3 of a century of milk and honey and money so far, so I'm not sold on the sacred thing.
In my opinion, the whole thing is a smokescreen to distract from the two different names for God used in what the editors and redactors left us in writing. Two names, two narratives, two dialects, two sets of 'facts.' But don't look behind the curtain - nuthin' to see here folks, just one God, only sometimes three, but still -- don't ask. But sacred? Vide Supra under goatshit. Sacred is just a way of avoiding reasoned discourse.
"I submit to you that one person hears God and the other thinks He does. The reverse is also true. It is a paradox, and every bit as real as the Trinity, the New Covenant, and God Himself."
And those being a flight of fancy no more real than the resurrected Osirus, the feathered serpent or Refafu. Or are you saying anything we can decide to believe in is ispso facto real? Like tinkerbell or the ghost under the bed or the intelligence of Sarah Palin? Paradox? Pair of Ducks. Is paradox just another smokescreen word to block any honest conversation?
No, sorry, Pat Robertson is a thief, who stole from the poor, both when he told them God needs money and again when he took the money and bought into a mining deal with Mobutu Sese Seko the African monster and the only blessing he deserves is to be hanged. He's a parasite, a disease, a curse and a plague.
Oh Jesus, Falwell. As though we needed more proof that the wrath of God means no more than the laugh of Fogg.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I should have remarked upon the formula so often used for these crackpot conjectures: "I'm just bringing this to your attention -- you judge."
ReplyDeleteRight -- I'm not claiming that bad things happen because God is angry with the gays, or the Democrats, or some other insufficiently crazy group; no, I'm asking YOU to see the obvious. Go on -- I know you can do it. You've got it in you, people! It's the most sanctimonious tone of false empowerment imaginable, and just about all right-wing hucksters use it copiously. I'm guessing that's because nothing appeals more to the gullible simpletons who listen to them than being told that they can think for themselves.
I believe it was Tommy Smothers who used to do a really funny commercial for a bean manufacturer that went in part like this: "S & W Beans. Immortality. You make the connection." Same m/o, except that beans are a lot better than bogus and bias.
'We report, you decide' and 'I'm just sayin' Popular phrases from organized crime. Plant the meme and run away. "maybe the Jews didn't all kill Jesus, but the ones who killed him were Jews" I'm just sayin.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I was of a certain age before I knew just what a Christian was. I remember being very confused by the obsession with sex and Jews. I soon became even more confused by original sin and why we all have it and I remember being told the sin in question was sex, not disobedience as I had been taught. I still don't understand it and I had to smile when I read Nietzsche's words about the Christian conclusion that the world is an ugly and nasty place having made the world an ugly, nasty place.
The idea that the earth is beautiful and bounteous and made just for us, is just as annoyingly puzzling a delusion to me, but less destructive, in my opinion.
But yeah, Obama had terrorist friends and people are saying he wasn't born here, isn't a true believer in the true truth that everyone has his ordained place and you know, Haley's comet back in the 80's may have been a warning of doom - but I'm just sayin', you decide.
BTW, I'm fully aware that what these folks give us as a "Christian thing" isn't. At least if you think Christianity ought to have something to do with Jesus as he was before it was all Romanized. Like Osirus was to the Egyptians, he's about survival as an individual and by extension as a people and through being worthy of divine assistance, peace on earth through unification with the divine. Again, I don't agree, but it's benign and not antagonistic toward what I do believe. The "do as thou wilt and still get out of hell free" came from somewhere else at a lower altitude.
I still don't know if the articulate Mr. Myste is joking here, but I'm assuming he'll let us know. I like a good joke better than I like being a scourge.
"Pat Robertson is a thief, who stole from the poor ..."
ReplyDeleteCaptain,
Did you hear about Pat Robertson's latest miracle? He took a blind man ... and made him penniless. Shazzam!