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According to the Reverend Pat Robertson, Haiti’s devastating earthquake resulted from a curse placed on that Caribbean country when, as Robertson asserted, its people made a pact with the Devil to gain their independence from France.
Let’s see why Reverend Robertson, founder of a Christian university and celebrated host on CBN, said such a thing. Before it gets covered up and revised by religious gobbledygook, aided by a cooperating and neglectful press, that is. After all, Robertson is presumed to be intelligent and educated. Why would say such a thing on his TV show, knowing, as he should have known, that 80% of Haitians are practicing Christians? Robertson certainly would not lie and—since I don’t think he would lie (but is often wrong)—the question is:
What did cause Haiti’s earthquake?
I believe geologists who say that moving tectonic plates of the Earth’s crust caused it. I also think the plates did not care what religious beliefs humans living on top of them held. Others strongly disagree. They think supernatural forces, unleashed by human sorcerers, the Devil, or God himself deliberately shook the ground in Haiti to punish those practicing “forbidden” religions. Good grief!
Have an opinion? Know what tectonic plates are?
The science (that seems to be “Settled” at the moment) tells us that around five billion years ago a massive star that had been shining for a million years in the vicinity of our sun burst, releasing all of its stored chemical elements into the space surrounding it. The gravitational pull of our sun captured much of the cooling debris causing it to coalesce into various sized spheres that are now the planets in our solar system.
The third planet from the sun—Earth—was molten at first but eventually cooled allowing the heavier elements like iron and nickel to sink and the lighter elements formed Earth’s outer crust. Over time, geologic forces broke the crust into moving tectonic plates. They move to relieve built up stress forces, not to punish humans.
The idea that supernatural “beings” cause natural disasters is as old as man himself. Soon after our two earliest ancestors evolved or were "blessed", depending on your point of view, with a conscious brain they and their descendants began to attribute everything they didn’t understand to unseen “beings.” They assigned a “being” for earthquakes and a different one for volcanoes. Likewise for tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis, avalanches and fires. In time, each of their emotions were also thought to be controlled by these “beings.”
A hundred thousand years of human experience eventually led man to meld all the “beings” into one all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God that many think is still active in each of our daily lives. Violent arguments and sometimes wars erupt when people disagree about the basic nature of God and their different interpretations of how to please Him.
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