By RICHARD DAWKINS - TIMESONLINE
Added: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 UTC

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7007065.ece

This is an expanded version of the article already published on the Washington Post's 'On Faith' blog under a different title.

We know what caused the catastrophe in Haiti. It was the bumping and grinding of the Caribbean Plate rubbing up against the North American Plate: a force of nature, sin-free and indifferent to sin, unpremeditated, unmotivated, supremely unconcerned with human affairs or human misery.

The religious mind, however, hubristically appropriates the blind happenings of physics for petty moralistic purposes. As with the Indonesian tsunami, which was blamed on loose sexual morals in tourist nightclubs; as with Hurricane Katrina, which was attributed to divine revenge on the entire city of New Orleans for organising a gay rally; and as with other disasters going back to the famous Lisbon earthquake and beyond, so Haiti’s tragedy must be payback for human “sin”.

The Rev Pat Robertson, infamous American televangelist, sees the hand of God in the earthquake, wreaking terrible retribution for a 1791 pact that the Haitians made with the Devil, to help to rid them of their French masters. 1791? Ah, but don’t forget “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me”.

Needless to say, milder-mannered faith-heads fell over themselves to disown Robertson, just as they disowned those other pastors, evangelists, missionaries and mullahs at the time of the earlier disasters.

What hypocrisy. Loathsome as Robertson’s views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonised theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable “mystery”, or who see God in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti, or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God “suffering on the cross” in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7007065.ece

TAGGED: MORALITY, RELIGION, RICHARD DAWKINS