Ethics

Pat Robertson the Prophet

By Ed Brayton

One of my favorite annual events is the release of Pat Robertson's predictions, based on his conversations with God, for the next year. Each year he has a prayer retreat with his staff and emerges with a set of prophecies for the next year and there are four things that inevitably turn out to be true:

A. The accurate predictions tend to be of the very obvious variety, predicting things that are already occurring and likely to get worse.

B. The surprising, out of left field predictions turn out to be false.

C. Robertson pretends that any misses are a result of his having warned his followers, causing them to pray to God and avert the result.

D. His credulous followers ignore all those misses and do not stone Robertson to death as a false prophet, as the Bible demands.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on January 06, 2009 (boomark / email).