Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – Pat Robertson’s excuses on why he got it wrong

Unsuprisingly, Pat Robertson is now creating excuses for why he lied about his god telling him who was going to win the presidential election.  Poor Pat, I knew this would happen.  

“So many of us miss God. I won’t get into great detail about elections but I sure did miss it. I thought I heard from God; I thought I had heard clearly from God. What happened? “You ask God, ‘How did I miss it?’ Well, we all do and I’ve had a lot of practice.”

Lots of practice getting things wrong?  I think Pat just had a Freudian slip there, how nice.  He has no idea of when he’s right or wrong about his religion. Of course, this admission does beg the question, why is this god, assuming its real, so inept?  Based on the claims of Pat, it can’t  or won’t get its message through to someone like him who claims to know what this god is wanting all of the time?  So, now we have several possibilities:

1. Pat’s god is not anything like advertised, not omnipotent, not omniscient and not benevolent at all.  The bible and the claims about it are wrong. There’s no way to know what, if any, parts of it have any truth behind them.
2. Pat Robertson willingly lies and cannot be trusted to get any thing right from his god.  All Pat says is what Pat wants, not what some god wants.   This also means any god that disagrees with Pat evidently can’t do anything about such vermin.
3. This god doesn’t exist at all. 

No pastor or priest, shaman or channeller, have ever been able to show any ability to speak to magical entities. Prophecies fail constantly.  here is no reason to believe anyone who wants to claim that some god supports his or her personal desires and hatreds.  It’s all based on wanting control and adoration by the masses. 

Now, I know that Christians will try to either excuse Pat or try to claim that he’s not a TrueChristian, so they can conveniently ignore his failures. The excuses will be the common ones:

God didn’t tell Pat since God wants free will.  Of course, when the Christians wants to claim that God did act in a “miracle”, that makes the free will argument a bit hard to swallow since *any* interference from this god abrogates free will.

God allowed a demon to tell Pat the wrong answer.  Which means that this god allows evil things to influence humans.  Again, free will suffers if this god allows anything to play with humans.

God wanted to “teach” Pat, and everyone else, some mysterious thing.  Hmmm, maybe that prayer doesn’t work since we know that there were Christians praying as hard as they could for Romney to win? Or maybe this god is saying to not listen to false prophets?  But that would only work if Pat would suffer great harm at the hands of this god as the bible claims all through it.  That seems not to be happening either.  People will still be idiots and send this man their hard earned money sure that he can’t possibly be telling them lies to fleece them but good.

Of course, it could be just like 2 Thessalonians 2 (to back up Romans 9) where this god is intentionally sending delusions to people to make them believe in bad things, and damning them at a whim.  Again, free will is not so much an interest of this god.  Good for the folks who like predestination, not so good for those who want to play pretend that this god saves those who willingly accept him or that this god will save everyone eventually.

Again, we see that Christianity is nothing special.  Prophets who fail, men who make excuses and contradiction after contradiction.  Religion makes no one a better person, but it sure gives the bad ones a lot to work with.