#1Jan 17th, 2010
And Rex does have a way with words -
Rex Murphy: God's unappointed spokesman
And then there is the chattering, more insolent, moron who presumes to speak in His name. That would be Pat Robertson.—
Absolutely Unauthorized Verision
Theodicy is a technical term, a survivor from the days when philosophers and religionists argued the (seeming) paradox of a benign God who created a fallen world. If God is good, why does he permit evil?Over the centuries, the question has absorbed great minds. Milton’s Paradise Lost, written to “justify the ways of God to men,” is the example nonpareil: theodicy in 12 books and (glorious) iambic pentameter.It’s an almost archaic inquiry these days, but if anything could revive the subject it might be the puzzling existence, in a putatively benign creation, of Pat Robertson, the egregious televangelist and sometime politico south of the border.
I never thought we’d get a new Paradise Lost out of the paradox of an omniscient Being who tolerates/allows the founder of The 700 Club opening his mouth on a regular basis — Robertson being a scant peg even for the trim matter of a haiku. But after hearing his demented mewling the day after Haiti experienced its earthquake, the world may be ripe for a seminar on this question: Can a merciful Creator co-abide with the mental ejecta of Pat Robertson?
Here was poor Haiti in rack and ruin, with countless thousands dead, the entire country forlorn and in shocked despair, and, with the camera rolling, the “Christian” Robertson rattled on in full high ignorant babble mode about the country “being under a curse” from some ancient “pact with the devil” in the days of Haiti’s founding.
Rex Murphy: God's unappointed spokesman - Full Comment
