Pat Robertson reveals Bible cherry-picking hypocrisy

For some reason, people still seem to take note whenever The 700 Club’s Pat Robertson says something stupid or hypocritical, despite the fact that being blind to one’s own stupidity and hypocrisy (along with parting gullible old people with their money) is what makes a TV evangelical what they are in the first place. But here’s one recent nugget that’s so perfect in how it encapsulates all that is both wrong and dishonest about Christianity and its followers:

Transcript: (click the [+/-] to open/close →)

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TERRY MEEUWSEN: Christine sent this: “Over the holiday, I heard that America was founded as a Christian nation.” (Amazing.) “If that’s the case, why did we allow slavery?”

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I think there was a blind spot – Like it or not, if you read the Bible, in the Old Testament, slavery was permitted. You’d go into a nation – a country would go into another country and enslave the population, and those people were put to work. Use them as commodities. And so, we have moved in our conception of the value of human beings over the years until we realized slavery was terribly wrong.

So, even though the Bible says that slavery is totes cools, we don’t do it anymore because we’ve developed the moral belief that it’s wrong? But … what about the Inerrant & Immutable Word of God^TM? Was he trying to hoodwink us in describing what forms of slavery are acceptable? Or are we all just thumbing our noses at him in rejecting our Biblically derived right to force minorites onto our plantations?

Unless, of course, it turned out that a book cobbled together from selectively edited, endlessly translated manuscripts conjured up by half-literate Bronze Age goat-herders wasn’t actually a good source for modern moral thinking. But then, I’m sure that if that were true, then every Christian who opposes gay marriage, abortion rights and so on would immediately drop all religious objections and become turnabout supporters of social justice and equality, right?

Of course, there’s always the aforementioned possibility that God is just dicking with us and has already condemned the whole of Western civilization to Hell for the many years spent gleefully stuffing our faces full of shellfish and so on. (Hell, the amount of shrimp I’ve scarfed down alone has probably gotten me booked on the first flight to the Seventh Circle, anyway.)

(via Right Wing Watch)

Tags: Pat Robertson • The 700 Club • slavery • Bible • Christianity • Old Testament