Ask An Atheist

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I have to admit, when I write about Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan, I first have to check to make sure I have the right one.   Which professional television blowhard is selling ignorant fundamentalism as intelligence this week?

As it turns out, it is the sleepy-eyed host of the 700 Club, Robertson, who’s telling a midwesterner that God is not responsible for the tornadoes hitting the midwest.  But worry not, beloved, for the victims could have prevented their plight it if they had prayed hard enough for God’s intercession.

No, really:

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Is there anyone out there who still doubts that atheists, secularists and non-believers are targets of hate and discrimination?

(Take a breath, that’s rhetorical.)

One of the interesting side effects of Christopher Hitchens’ death has been the complete validation of his activism by the response to said death.  On one hand, you have the preachers and fundamentalist bloggers and media figures lining up with their condescending “I-told-you-so” statements. They simultaneously pretend to care about his fate, while barely being able to conceal their glee about the belief that he’s being tortured forever for disagreeing with them. Then, in the same breath, they turn their self-satisfaction on their audience and threaten them with the same hellfire ultimatum, proclaiming it to be an act of love.

While Sam, Libbie and I eulogized Hitch on our last episode, and joined the crew in raising a glass of Johnnie Walker Black to his memory at the post-show dinner, many others have been honoring his legacy on Twitter.

Until a couple of days ago, #GodIsNotGreat was trending on Twitter, as a tribute to Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 bestselling book. Not everyone was happy about this.

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Now Pat Robertson is no stranger to saying really offensive and insensitive things. If the Guinness people had a recognized world record for the number of genuinely stupid and prejudiced things one person could speak into a camera or make in a written statement, then the host of the 700 Club would be a hard man to beat.

After all, this is the man who credited the Haitian Earthquake to a pact with Satan.

He’s the man who said that he wanted to nuke State Department headquarters.

He’s the man who threatened Disney World’s annual “Gay Days” with divine retribution.

He’s the man who claimed that Scotland was a “dark land” overrun by homosexuals.

He’s the man who described feminism as “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

And finally, this is the man who “totally concurred” when Jerry Falwell blamed the attacks of September 11th on “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America.”

So, what has he done this time? Well, watch for yourself. After one of his Christian Broadcasting Network correspondents interviewed former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice about her favorite Thanksgiving dish, Robertson asks the interviewer if Mac and Cheese was “a black thing”

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It looks like somebody put Jesus in the corner!

When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer interviewed me for our “Countdown to Backpedaling” back in May, I mentioned to the article’s author, Amy Rolph that the belief in the eminent Second Coming wasn’t limited to groups like Family Radio. I cited a Pew Research survey conducted back in early 2010 that mentioned that 41% of Americans polled said that they “definitely” or probably” believed that Jesus Christ would return to Earth by the year 2050.

As Harold Camping’s second biannual failed end times prophecy rolled around, I decided that I needed to write one last piece on that hateful kook and put the whole thing to rest. So I revisited the website for the Pew Research report…

…only to find all mentions of Jesus’ return had been edited out of the page.

This was especially odd, since when I started citing this page back in April, the page was already nearly a year old. I can only speculate the reason why this was taken off of the page, but I know that the information was removed from the report sometime between Amy Rolph’s article in late May — which references and links to the survey  — and late October when I visited the site again so that I could re-link to it.

Even weirder is that Jesus’ return is still mention in the report’s online url: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1635/future-life-2050-computers-cancer-cure-space-travel-energy-world-war-terroist-jesus-return

(I’ll forgive the fact that Pew misspelled “terrorist.”)

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