Pat Robertson is Ghoulish

 

Pat Robertson came out of retirement to claim that Putin "is being compelled by God" to invade Ukraine in preparation for a massive End Times invasion of Israel. pic.twitter.com/Pmwybf57Ay

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 28, 2022

Claiming that Putin is being used as an instrument of God in what is looking more and more like a genocide (if he cannot take Ukraine with the people there, he will simply remove all the people) to ultimately lead to the End Times which for whatever reason is definitely in Israel is so, so...completely on brand? He's excited that there's misery on tap for humanity. His comforting message: the God we're supposed to worship wants this, so relax and accept all the death. It's almost as if death and misery give his conception of God shape and form. As if his concept of God requires blood and barely exists without the terror by night. As if ethnic genocide and horror were planned by God with the exacting detail of a Kommandant with the entire earth as his camp.

It takes away the human agency of Putin to not do horrific things, in the same way that John Hagee surrendered Hitler's human agency to God in declaring that he used Hitler to found Israel--again for the ultimate End Times purpose.  Will history's monsters face eternal judgment if they were just meat puppets God is operating through? It seems like an ethos that gives monsters a pass at the expense of so many bodies that are "fulfilling prophecy." 

And if God is good, then how is it He cannot achieve his ends without putting human lives through a meat grinder? Surely, a deity like that is to be feared, but how can one so monstrous be worshipped or loved? How can he be a comfort to the afflicted when he is the source of affliction? How can he be a savior when the model of his world is that his instruments are destroyers? 

In a moment of war and tumult, imagine thinking this is exactly the time to peer out from one's retirement and say "More of this, maranatha!" The Good News is--bad news until we all snuff it. 

It's folks like Robertson that are why Christianity and me aren't ever getting on. But it makes me wonder about people for whom this is their religion, the actual way they look at the world. There is a nihilism in it. Why do good at all? Why fight the good fight? The God who formed you in the womb also planned your eventual, necessary, and even potentially excruciating demise along with everyone you ever loved. How would you go through life? Would you be more inclined to do the right things, or find cosmic reasons why it wouldn't matter?  Would you decide that siding with horror had a purpose; that God was working through the evil you had done? 

I don't like the answers I see out there. But look at the old man. The specter of mass death livened his blood. 

Reality Seeps In

 

Nothing says "Time to end the grift, son" like televangelist Pat Robertson basically telling you, um, "Time to end the gr--"

Well, he put it a bit nicer: 

Robertson said that Trump has “done a marvelous job for the economy, but at the same time he is very erratic, and he’s fired people and he’s fought people and he’s insulted people and he keeps going down the line.” 

“And so, it’s a mixed bag,” he said. “And I think it would be well to say, ‘You’ve had your day and it’s time to move on.’ ”

"It's time to move on." The message sounds like it's for Trump, but really, it's to let his fans know they've gotten about as much out of Trump as they were going to get and it doesn't get better from here. (Trump would be smart to take the hint, though.)

They're striking a new tone at Newsmax, and at Fox, too. Sure they'd like to still play true believer, but the lawyers for Smartmatic apparently didn't come for play-time. And Trump's donors may very well start to wonder where the hell is their money even going?

And Senator Thune doesn't give Trump a dead dog's chance of overturning the vote at this point. (Trump is sending messages that the Senate GOP needs him, but he is a little confused about who won their elections. And McConnell, scoundrel though I think he is, forgets nothing.) 

It could just be reality is creeping in. But I'm still creeped out.

Needy

Franklin Graham says people are dying of the Coronavirus because man has sinned against god. He goes on to say the pandemic is happening because the world has turned its back on god. pic.twitter.com/Kejq9jzeLu

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) April 5, 2020

When pastors try this "God won't be ignored" line out, I guess they think it sounds like God is all-powerful and therefore, meager, suffering man should toe the line, but what I hear from it is that God is needy, and will wreck you if Attention is Not Paid. It says a lot more about the person (or parson) who has cast God in their own image. They want open ears and open wallets. They won't be ignored.

The deaths from COVID-19 are indiscriminate as to devotion or sinfulness. It doesn't matter to a virus how many times you pray, so much as how many times you wash your hands. But it always sets me seething a little when disasters (hurricanes, or earthquakes, or diseases) are blamed on the victims of them. Where is the comfort for the living in "Well, you all should have behaved yourselves, you damn fuckups!" It is the theodicy of a sadist. God kills people in horrible ways because he can, so love him for the lesson of pain. Love the abuse. Worship the vastness of his means of destroying the things you love. And thank the nice helpful men of god who explain so cheerfully why this is the proper way of the world. And make sure you tip them well.

Don't forget that part.

Here is scamvangelist Kenneth Copeland saying God told him his ministry's income this year "had to be $300 million." (HAD to be!)

Don't worry. His lawyer wrote up a contract and "it is on file in Heaven."

He explained all this to a couple of men in his empty church. pic.twitter.com/MQsfQtyZD3

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) April 4, 2020

Because after all, who is going to blow all this sin and disease away? (Or at least sell you something that will?)

Faith might fill a need. Bullying fills coffers. I believe in science. I'll give to people who need it, and ask anyone, who exactly needs a message that "God is Disappoint" right now?

Evangelist Billy Graham has Gone Home

HONORING ‘AMERICA’S PASTOR’: As tributes pour in for the Reverend Billy Graham, who died today at age 99, @SteveOsunsami looks back at his impact and influence in American culture and religion. https://t.co/t8A3yGIcDk pic.twitter.com/dC4zQTsCby

— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) February 22, 2018

I lack the grace to stay quiet about the passing of this influential and devout man. A lot of people would take care to note that Billy Graham, despite filling stadiums with worshippers who thrilled on his preaching, and being called to counsel with presidents about spiritual things, was never really a part of the Moral Majority movement of Jerry Falwell that really seemed to concretize what we mean when we talk about the evangelical movement. But he did sit with bigots and the princes of prosperity and failed to chide them. He did not counsel his brethren to look to any future but the day the Lord would come, even if we have no promise about what that day would be. And his history regarding gay people was a disgrace.

I can't help but see him as an enabler of the unnatural and indecent bedfellows some care to make of religion and politics.

He is survived by his son, Franklin Graham, a virulent Islamophobe and Trump-supporter.  The success of an evangelist like Billy Graham surely is not going to come again.  If I have no hope of a broader heaven, at least I have one of a more diverse, broad-minded world in the here and now.

Founder of Trinity Broadcast Network, Paul Crouch, Dead at 79

It's been awhile since I've kicked a dead televangelist, what with kicking live ones like Pat Robertson (who really should consider retiring) and Kenneth Copeland being so much more meaningful. But Paul Crouch Sr., who started TBN way back in the day with James and Tammy Faye Bakker before they scooted off to form PTL Ministries, was a one of a kind. He made about as much money off of the word of Iron Age scribes channeling a Bronze Age sun god and little old folks' pension checks as could be made without the IRS actually wading in and shutting the whole grift down. The Crouch family, under the tutelage of this partiarch, lived the words of the New Testament "In my father's house there are many mansions" by in fact having many, many mansions, and will continue to do so, even as they have raised theme parks and eyebrows.

One might call it macabre of me to mark the occasion by recounting what little we know of the man's sins on the occasion of his passing, but for what it is worth, I consider it a particularly shameful endeavor to pimp salvation to simple folks by threatening hell and promising heaven and magic powers through prayer, while vacuuming up their money. It appalls me that the prosperity gospel allows people like Paul Crouch to promote a system where he received handouts from people who themselves might need a hand-up, and he considered that his "reward".

As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife reward or punishment for anything. Maybe if the family would be so good as to hold his body up to a tv set, ol' Benny Hinn might get that spirit revived, like Jesus revived Lazarus back in the day. Maybe if they could only send their millions of money to the right people? Would a Rod Parsley holy snotrag possibly fill the bill?

Of course not. But if they only believed? If they only believed? (And did not execute the most awful grifter nouveaux riche tackiness with whatever money they plucked from the poor?)

That was the exact taunt made to living breathing people. Pay them and get saved from what was inevitable and natural. I try not to be quite the New Atheist I used to be when my settling into atheism was new to me, but damn. His was a life that should even shake out a little of the starch from the faithful, and make a bunch of people go looking again for the good in mankind. And they will find that good, but not in some whited and gold-encrusted sepulchre. In other words, don't bother looking into this grave. You'll only find another body.