Televangelist Pat Robertson comforts grieving parents who have lost a baby, a toddler, or a young child with the jaw-dropping suggestion that God could have “terminated” the lives of the young children because he wanted to stop them from growing up to became mass murderers like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, or maybe President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in Cambodia.
According to Right Wing Watch , on his The 700 Club, aired Tuesday, Robertson, 85, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), shared with millions of grieving mothers his insight into the perplexing problem of why God allows babies to die.
Millions are appalled at Robertson’s suggestion that one could comfort a woman whose child has died by suggesting that the child could have grown up to become an Adolf Hitler, an Attila the Hun, or a mad Emperor Caligula.
A woman in need of good advice wrote to Robertson, asking how to comfort a co-worker grieving the death of her 3-year-old child. According to the woman, she found herself short of comforting words for a friend who could not understand why God had taken her child.
“I told her that I don’t know why her child died, but God sees the whole picture (while) we see only in part. What else can I say?”
Robertson began with the relatively innocuous argument that human errors were not God’s fault.
“People die in hospitals because of medical malpractice. It happens all the time. Are you going to blame that on God?” he said.
But being conscious of the fact that because God is supposed to be omnipotent, some would still blame God for allowing babies to die due to “medical malpractice,” the aged televangelist went on to share his knowledge of God’s secret program to keep the entire world safe from future evil dictators like Chairman Mao Zedong, Hitler, and Stalin.
According to Robertson, God aborts the lives of future mass murderers after they have been born but still very young to prevent them from growing up to implement their evil genius plans.
“As far as God’s concerned, He knows the end from the beginning and He sees a little baby and 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…”
And God makes the preemptive move because he wants to protect the world from experiencing again the horrors of the early twentieth century. God, unlike mortal humans, can see the big picture of things. He knows the world’s future Hitlers even before they were conceived in their mother’s womb but apparently sometimes waits until they are born before mercifully terminating their lives.
“God sees all of that, and for that life to be terminated while he’s a baby, he’s going to be with God forever in Heaven, so it isn’t a bad thing. So how could God do that? How could a good God let that happen? Well, the good God is going to take that baby to Heaven right now, and that isn’t a bad thing.”
Ignoring how pro-choice foes could construe his argument, the ardently pro-life preacher concluded, “It isn’t a bad thing when God takes children at a young age, because you never know who they could grow up to be.”
The notion that it is a good thing when sinless babies die because they going to heaven has had some tragic consequences in history. Spanish conquistadores reportedly dashed the heads of Native American children against rocks to dispatch them to heaven and save them from becoming corrupted hell-bound souls like their heathen parents.
Poor rural South American Catholic parents were reportedly often tardy about acting to save the lives of their babies by taking them to city hospitals because babies’ souls gain automatic tickets to heaven when they die.
Robertson’s statement sparked an immediate uproar in the liberal media.
Describing the preacher’s comments as “terrible,” Mediaite commented , “Pat Robertson can still surprise you with insanely horrible things that come out of his mouth.”
Some YouTube users wanted to know why God did not kill Hitler when he was born.
The debate that followed was dominated by sardonic irony.
Some suggested that maybe God had not yet commenced his program to keep the world safe from future mass murderers by killing them young at the time Hitler was born. Others suggested that God could have allowed children to be killed in the Holocaust because he knew they were all going to grow up to become Hitlers.
A YouTube viewer summed up the thoughts of Robertson’s critics by calling for his retirement from The 700 Club .
“The man has become a shell of what he was, an embarrassment to himself and to Christianity. That his handlers are still wheeling him out, at 85, to ramble on in a way that people actually listen to is unconscionable.”
[Image: YouTube; Reformation.org ]