The Chilean Earthquake and God’s Wrath

* By Jeff Schweitzer The Huffington Post *

As the world reacts to the monstrous earthquake off the coast of Chile, one voice remains curiously quiet. Without Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson to guide us, we are unable to decipher why god has caused this particular calamity.

According to religious prognosticators, sinners will suffer the wrath of god in the form of earthquakes as biblical punishment for their errant ways. The declarations and explanations of such divine calamities always come after the fact, but let us not have such annoying details get in our way. Nobody is more out front in decoding god’s will than Robertson; he declared that the devastating earthquake in Haiti was a consequence of Haitians making a pact with the devil. Robertson also believed that Hurricane Katrina was god’s punishment for legalized abortion; and that Florida’s weather woes are due to the state’s support for Gay Days at Disneyland.

So we must therefore ask the great “broadcaster, humanitarian, author, Christian, businessman, statesman” from Lexington, Virginia, for what sins did the citizens of Anchorage, Alaska, suffer for the quake of 1964? I remember not any declaration of god’s intent from that event. And now of course we must query Robertson on the divine meaning of the massive earthquake in Chile. Perhaps their sin is naming a country after a pepper, and then misspelling it.

These most recent efforts to interpret god’s intent based on man’s experience raises the question of how well we have done historically in predicting or deducing the divine plan. A favorite is to claim knowledge of the End of Days as a consequence of natural events. Predictions of the Apocalypse or its equivalent have in fact been a common theme throughout history. But the record for accuracy is not particularly pretty. An error rate of 100% (after all, we are still here) should call into question the legitimacy of the enterprise, but alas, that is not the case. The likes of Pat Robertson never tire of pretending to know the mind of the infinite being conjured from their imagination. Let’s see how we’ve fared over the past 150 years.

Read more at  The Huffington Post