On January 13, only one day after the earthquake in Haiti that has probably killed 200,000, and the moron Pat Robertson was already at it. “They made a pact with the devil,” were more less his words because “they wanted to free themselves from the French.” As if God is now punishing these people 200 years later.
It is this kind of tripe that needs to be dealt a blow. Why Pat Robertson has any kind of authority is beyond me but the comments on YouTube seem to suggest that there are numerous like-minded people who pretend divine intervention as an explain-all. This has an appeal to a certain segment of our society; notably the racists, the bigots, the ignorant and some religious fundamentalists.
In 1755, another catastrophic earthquake destroyed most of Portugal’s capital of Lisbon. The soothsayers and clergy were out in droves shouting divine intervention. As if something someone did or said made God reach out and shake apart the foundations – killing women and children in the process.
However, given the lack of science at the time, divine intervention as an explanation came as little surprise. But at the very least it also spurred the beginnings of Enlightenment and modern seismology. And soon, scientists discovered that the earth has fault lines and that massive plates push and pull, until finally something snaps.
Haiti lies on the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden Fault line that divides the country in two and stretches into Jamaica. Geologists have known about this fault line for years and so the earthquake that hit was not a complete surprise.
“Even though large earthquakes of this size aren’t common there, the fact that there’s a fault system that runs through there makes it not surprising,” said John Bellini, a geophysicist with the US Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.
Mr. Robertson’s complete lack of understanding, pseudo-sympathy, odd-ball explanations and excuses are at best laughable if it wasn’t all so tragic.
