Chicago Tribune/ Can Pat Robertson overcome the "Wacko Factor"?
Tim Maroney
election coverage. A candidate's stands on the issues can't be fairly
squeezed into fifteen seconds, and so they are almost always omitted
altogether. All we get to hear is how much of what demographic block a
particular candidate is currently supported by.
So far, I have yet to hear any coverage of Robertson's explicitly theocratic
statements, which I have frequently heard on the 700 Club, or any coverage
of his position that the end of the world is immanent, greatly to be
desired, and intimately tied up with American activity in the Middle East.
Nor his open advocacy of censorship and of laws against occult religions.
Nor of his acceptance of the idea that non-Christians are mentally ill.
I believe that the American people, as stupid as we are, still would turn
against Robertson if more of us knew of his positions on these issues. As
it is, if all we hear continue to about is faith healing, which most
Americans believe in, then we are in serious trouble.
--
Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot and Self-Assigner of Pretentious Titles
{ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)
Engineers gleefully note the inability of artists to solve technical
problems, but angrily deny the atrophy of their own aesthetic sense.
Tim Maroney
election coverage. A candidate's stands on the issues can't be fairly
squeezed into fifteen seconds, and so they are almost always omitted
altogether. All we get to hear is how much of what demographic block a
particular candidate is currently supported by.
So far, I have yet to hear any coverage of Robertson's explicitly theocratic
statements, which I have frequently heard on the 700 Club, or any coverage
of his position that the end of the world is immanent, greatly to be
desired, and intimately tied up with American activity in the Middle East.
Nor his open advocacy of censorship and of laws against occult religions.
Nor of his acceptance of the idea that non-Christians are mentally ill.
I believe that the American people, as stupid as we are, still would turn
against Robertson if more of us knew of his positions on these issues. As
Stuart D. Gathman
> not keep my sanity long if I knew that a guy who thinks he can "rebuke
> a storm" was running the country. It is a question to be put to Mr.
> Robertson whether or not this same technique would work with incoming
> ICBM's and exactly what form a defense strategy would take. Would Mr.
> Robertson move our men out of the missle silos and into the pews to pray
> to gain some advantage (from the deity) in the event of a nuclear war ?
This is a misconception of the viewpoint. Look at II Chronicles 20
for a description of a successful war waged with prayer. Notice that
full natural preparations were made (muster the army, etc.). Notice
also that their confidence was in God, not in the army. If ICBM were
headed this way and the only thing I had to trust was more missles, I
would prefer quick death to the slow lingering horrors of nuclear aftermath.
(A man questioned about the reliability of our missles in newsweek was
quoted as saying: "If we have to use them, it doesn't make a whole lot
of difference whether they work or not. The important thing is that the
Soviets think they *might* work.")
I certainly support full military preparedness (including SDI), but
I also know that we need all the prayer we can get. (And some
repentance would help.)
--
Stuart D. Gathman <..!seismo!{vrdxhq|dgis}!BMS-AT!stuart>
Paul M. Dubuc
>
> "...much of recent Protestant theology may be regarded as a series
> of salvage operations, that is, attempts to reconcile the ethic of
> of critical historical inquiry with the apparent demands of Christian
> faith. They are efforts to turn aside the criticism that one can be
> a believer only at the price of sacrificing the standards of truth
> and honesty which have dominated the scholarly community since the
> Enlightenment. ...there is considerable pathos in these apologetic
> efforts. It was, after all, Christianity that tutored the Western
> mind to believe that it should know the truth and the truth would
> make it free. But now that the student has learned to prize the
> truth, he has discovered, with pain ...that it can only be gained at the
> cost of rejecting the one who first instilled in him the love of it."
>
> --The Historian and the Believer
> Van Harvey p 246
This is a rather self-serving claim to possess the truth by adherents
of Enlightenment Religion. Still, it *is* ironic. The one who
said that we should know the truth and it would set us free also
said, "I am the way, the *truth* and the life...".
Seems to me that an equally likely possibility is that the sons of
the Enlightenment are thowing the term "truth" around in a manner not
unlike the sons of fundamentalism. They have modified the concept of
truth to meet the apparent demands of intellectual integrity and it is
that concept they follow in their desire to know the truth while thinking
that they must reject the One who is the truth in order to do so.
If much of Protestant theology is to be likened to a "salvage operation"
(performing surgery on the Tree of Knowledge, you might say),
I would also suggest that the activities of Enlightenment theologians
can, with equal clarity, be seen as an attempt to escape the "salvage
operations" by sawing off the branch on which they stand.
--
Paul Dubuc cbdkc1!pmd