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Atheists Don’t Fear Divine Punishment
Pat Robertson believed in divine punishment. Atheists are free of this fear.
Pat Robertson, who died a couple weeks ago, hosted the 700 Club television show for years and was a major organizer of the Religious Right.
In a 1992 fundraising letter, he called feminism an “anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” He “repeatedly called non-Christians ‘termites’ akin to ‘a virus,’ attacked Hindus as ‘demonic’ and claimed Islam is inherently violent and not a real religion” and could be heard “comparing gay people to murderers and rapists and suggesting that LGBTQ orientation was a result of ‘demonic possession’” (HuffPost). He “raised funds for Contra death squads in Nicaragua,” and after fundraising “to fly relief supplies to Rwandan refugees,” his planes instead “mostly transported equipment for a diamond mining operation” (Democracy Now!).
I’ll review some examples of the individual and collective punishment in which he believed.
Atheism is one way to avoid believing in this sort of stuff. Of course, many people believe in God, or in multiple gods, and don’t believe in this. There are many kinds of religious beliefs. Yet atheism seems to me the most straightforward way to cut through these sorts of claims.
Some of Robertson’s Theology
God decommissions individual lives
In 2015, a caller to his show asked what she could say to a coworker whose three-year-old died of an illness. The grieving mother had asked her, “Why did God allow my baby to die?” Robertson answered: “that little baby could grow up to be Adolf Hitler, he could grow up to be Joseph Stalin, he could grow up to be some serial killer…God sees all that,” in which case, he said, the child’s death “isn’t a bad thing.”
God withdraws individual support
In a 2019 episode, Robertson objected to Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw from Syria, thereby abandoning the Kurds as hostile Turkish forces entered Syria. Robertson said he was “appalled” by Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds…
