A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on January 26th, 2010 in World News

The Washington Post asked several people to respond to Pat Robertson’s contention that the people of Haiti are being punished by God for making a pact with the devil. Jim Wallis chooses to sidestep the issue and simply says he is heartbroken. James Standish has a meatier answer, but he eventually shrugs and says, “People can’t judge God.” But, of course, people not only judge God, but also the people who claim to be God’s people.

Richard Dawkins, the Worlds Most Militant Atheist, has a different answer – anyone who believes in God and is appalled at Robertson is hypocritical. And Dawkins answer shows the shallowness of both answers given by Wallis and Standish. But Dawkins fails to see that there are different types of faith within the Christian tradition, including some that do not look for supernatural explanations for natural events.

There are actually two tragedies in Haiti. One is the natural tragedy caused by people being at the epicenter of an earthquake. So long as our planet moves, such things will happen. It doesn’t take the will of God for the earth to move. The forces of science explain it quite well.

While the 7.0 quake was strong, it wasn’t devastatingly strong. In 1999, Turkey was struck by two earthquakes, both of which were even stronger than the Haiti quake. But the death toll for the two quakes combined are less than that for the single quake in Haiti. The reason why is the second tragedy in Haiti.

A month ago, no one cared about Haiti. A month ago, Haiti had the highest poverty rate in the western hemisphere with 80% of its population living in poverty. No one really cared that two-thirds of Haiti’s exports are in the apparel industry, with workers making less than five bucks per day. No one really cared that nearly half of all Haitians are illiterate and the only real resource the island nation has is unskilled labor. Even before the quake, nearly 90% of Haitian children suffered from waterborne diseases and intestinal parasites.

In the absence of anyone actually pushing Haitian governments to improve the lives of their people – and the lack of any real ability to do so – Haiti has long been a sort of living hell for the people stuck there.

The question about Robertson is easily answered: Pat Robertson believes in a whimsically vengeful God. To my mind, he isn’t worth noticing. The problem is that you then have to deal with the underlying question: Why did God let this happen? Then answer is that God didn’t let this happen. We did. We should ask, not why God let an earthquake happen; but why did we turn away from such suffering for so long?

And, as I’ve pointed out already – are we really going to change it or are we just going to do enough to say that we did “something?”

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