On putting Pat Robertson to death

Dear Hannah,

We hear a lot of talk about God judging the nations, but isn't it strange the Evangelicals know the way He's going to do it?  The truth is that they don't; and I know this because I've tried to get God's judgment down to a science, and the only thing I've ever been able to figure out is that if we're going by Biblical standards, God would have already drowned all the Evangelicals.

There are two reasons I say this.  First of all, the Evangelicals are better than anyone else at supporting our false prophets.  Pat Robertson aside -- Pat Robertson, a man I personally saw on television saying Jesus Christ said Mitt Romney would beat Obama to the presidency -- aside from this professional over-paid carnival psychic, we have hordes of pastors predicting that gay marriage will lead to an ecological disaster.

This statement is what an Evangelical might call sinful for several reasons, the first of which being that we have bigger fish to fry.  It's true we no longer kill our gays like the Jews did and the Muslims still do; but we let them off the hook like we let off our false prophets -- men the Jews were also commanded to kill just as dead as the fruitcakes.  It was Deuteronomy 18:20-22, and I quote

But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in My name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’ 21 And if you say in your heart, ‘How shall we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?’— 22 when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him

The folks at TBN are not only not angry with Pat -- they continue to worship him.  They continue to pay him.  They continue to follow him, broadcast him and a bunch of other pants-on-fire liars all over the globe, where their bad prophecies can embarrass even the Christian bushmen in front of their relatives; and where Christ can get a bad name, not for saying what Christ said, but for saying what Christ absolutely didn't.  It's my opinion beside this that false prophets are more dangerous than sodomites anyway.  A man who has sex with another man is only having sex with another man; and probably then with a Godless man.  A man who goes on television and lies about speaking for God is screwing the church.

What the Baptists conveniently forget when assailing the dandies is that the purpose of the Law, according to Paul, was not to get us to be perfect but to get us to ask for forgiveness; and beyond this, perhaps more importantly on a national level than this, is that little forgotten statement of "God's" -- 

If you do not carefully observe all the words of this law that are written in this book, [underlining mine]

right before going on to pronounce a series of curses involving your wife being raped and your donkey being stolen and your friends being murdered.  The donkey part's outdated but the rest of it sticks.

The key to the passage is the word all -- the recognition that even if someone was to do absolutely everything he possibly could, and then suddenly found his neighbor sleeping with another married neighbor (which happens all the time in America), the adulterer wouldn't only cause death and destruction to himself, but bring it on his entire country.   

The method of judgment varied wildly.  Sometimes God waited a second and other times He waited a century.  Sometimes the offense was legally prohibited, and other times not even implied.  Sometimes the offense was small, and other times it was heinous.  Sometimes the offense was committed by a single person, and other times it was committed by "the nation."  Sometimes the sinner got the judgment, and sometimes judgment was poured out on innocents.  And to make this whole situation even stranger, sometimes judgement was poured out on innocents, and the guilty men held on to their kingdoms.  It's almost enough to make you wonder whether anyone was actually behind the "judgments" at all.  So maybe the Evangelicals will get everything right.  And maybe they get killed because some nutcase makes love to a chicken.

Now, I don't believe like many Evangelicals that America is the new Israel; but if anyone's going to take that route, he ought to consider the story of Achan -- a man who hid some plunder under his tent, and immediately caused his brethren to be massacred by God.  He ought also to consider the story about Zimri and Cozbi, who brought a plague on all of Israel by sleeping together; and he ought also to read the story about Saul, who didn't wait for a priest to make a sacrifice and ended his dynasty in bloodshed.  And after these we come to the story of David, who counted his army (which wasn't even prohibited by Law) and brought a plague on the nation that killed hundreds of thousands.  And then he committed adultery (like Newt Gingrich) and murdered Uriah the Hittite (like hundreds of Chicagoans do perennially) which caused God to ruin the entire country in a civil war.

What I'm getting to here is obvious.  If a Christian nation was ever to be held accountable to Biblical Law the way God directly stated about Israel, we would never have even stood a chance.  The Indians would have conquered us.  If God had been holding Christian nations accountable for their behaviors in any kind of Mosaic sense, all Europe would have been conquered centuries ago by Muslims like Israel was conquered by Babylonians, and nobody would have ever heard of names like England, Italy, or France, except in the historical records of their conquerors.  We have almost four-hundred million people in the USA, and some of them happen to be rascals.  If our survival seems a miracle, it's only because we believe we have God figured out when we obviously don't.

I, for one, am a skeptic -- probably better described as an apostate.  I believe in God because the existence of our incredibly complex universe leads me to believe it was designed; and my battered conscience leads me to consider the possibility of an afterlife.  Some men, correctly saying this falls short of Christianity, would be quick to call me unGodly.  But there are different meanings of the word Godless.  And if I had to choose between being the man who doesn't have a God because he doesn't believe in Him, and being the man who believes in Him and doesn't do what He says and then puts false words in His mouth, I would much rather be the first than the second.  I think it's safer, but what do I know?  I don't speak for God.

Your father,
-J