He was a homophobe who used his public platform to spread his disciminatory views.
Guy
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And racist. The Haiti quote is still some of the most infuriating garbage Iâve heard.
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By that logic, isnât shilling for this, that, or the other thing just expressing oneâs opinion in public?
Weâve been over this before actually. Not necessarily you and I, but the regulars. âFree speech and punchingâ iirc. The youtube link I posted then to make a point is probably dead, but hereâs a fresh one:
He didnât kill the guy. He merely uttered a few words! 
It was just the first three evil things that popped into my head. My point was merely that he was not in the same general class of people as e.g., Ted Kaczynski.
We could have great fun debating who out of Kaczynski and Schwab is more evil in your mind and why, but I think we can save that for a rainy day. 
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I am curious about this though:
It stands to reason that at some point in his career he preached both thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself and thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Do you see any hypocrisy in preaching those on the one hand and also preaching if thy neighbor is smitten with earthquakes and plagues and so forth, it is because thy neighborâs ancestors made a pact with Satan, no matter what historians say on the other, or is that a completely morally consistent way of preaching?
To be fair, he did go on to preach more or less thou shalt send money for earthquake relief in spite of all the Satan stuff. But if you read through these I bet you can find something that even you would consider not quite morally consistent.
Good golly! I hope you were able to turn the channel off when he was on!
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Itâs pretty bad when you have an entire Wikipidia page dedicated to what an un-Christian asshole you are⊠
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Heâs no Cotton Mather.
Fair enough, thereâs some definite assholery in there. Most of it strikes me as just foolishness (e.g., his comment about Scotland being crap and gay) but the stuff about Charles Taylor, if true, puts him in actual Ted Kaczynski territory.
Iâll answer this in general terms because the Wiki page about PR has some stuff on it that I wasnât aware of. All Iâd ever heard about him previously was his Sodom-and-Gomorrah the-end-is-nigh rants.
The pact-with-Satan stuff is a bit problematic because, basically, how would you about proving or refuting that? However implausible the claim, how do you know he was âbearing false witnessâ? You might take the view that âthereâs no such thing as making a pact with Satanâ, but I once met someone who did it, and she was in terrible state as a result. PR was almost certainly talking bollocks, but Iâm just pointing out that itâs a thing. People do it, and he may well have believed that what he was saying was true. Frankly, in this particular instance, I think people ought to just take it for what it is - a guy whoâs a bit nuts saying nutty things, and not get too worked up about it.
As for the more general theological question - and bear in mind that PR stood more on the overlap between Judaism and Christianity, which are two different but related religions - I donât see any conflict between saying âyou brought this on yourselfâ and âIâm sorry this happened to youâ. There are plenty of Christians who believe that homosexual acts are wrong, but would be genuinely upset about (say) homosexual people being persecuted. If you consider the recent outbreak of monkeypox, there were plenty of religious and secular commentators musing on the possibility of gay people just keeping it in their pants, which was (of course) instantly branded as hate speech. But the point is that they were (a) correct and (b) not being hateful, just pointing out that certain things are brought upon oneself - not necessarily as âjudgement from Godâ, but simply because of the way Nature works. You could take roughly the same view with natural disasters - for example, people in the Philippines quite commonly invoke âjudgement from Godâ as the reason for such things, but the more usual problem was they they thought it was a good idea to build a house on the side of an active volcano, or cut down all the trees that would otherwise have prevented a mudslide. The US is not dissimilar in this blasĂ© attitude to towards natural forces.
There is this âdoctrineâ or teaching pushed in churches ranging from the Catholic church âblack people have no soul, are damnedâ and Protestant " the black people are descendants of the disobedient son of Noah so they are cursed for eternity and deserve/have to be slaves". Robertsonâs comments reinforced this idea.
As one of the first televangelists, they used that media to push non Christian prejudice such as that, plus the âgive us money to show your faith and God will solve your problems. If you still have problems it is because you do not have enough faith/havenât given enough moneyâ.
In our side of the world, they use their financial power to manipulate reproductive policies -banning abortion and contraception - and recently also lead caravans to âmigrateâ to the US.
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Huh?
Where you get this?
Been to probably 100 or more Catholic churches for mass in my lifetime and never heard of this, including my siblings and I having 12-16 years of Catholic education at 10 different schools from elementary to college and never heard this. 
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Well, it is harassment now I guess, but was commonplace in schools and churches in Latin America.
Coincidentally, in our Caribbean, most black folks are Protestant. Nevertheless, I recall watching a certain famous televangelist advising his flock not to marry other races. Sigh.
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The Morgue thread is just to mark the passing of people, not to wade into never ending political/religious debates. Thereâs pawleeenty of threads for that garbage. When someone passes and I donât care for them (like Pat Robertson), I usually just donât say anything.
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Agreed. Just answering a question and noting more sins in the name of God. Mods, clean up if so required.
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That wasnât directed at you, just a general statement.
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Even those (or especially those?) can be defined as hypocrisy from a Christian perspective, given the biblical warnings against false prophets (cf. Robertson saying âthe Lord told meâ that Romney would win the 2012 election).
Advocating assassination of politicians can obviously be described as hypocrisy given the sixth commandment (cf. Robertsonâs âI think that we really ought to go ahead and do itâ re assassinating Chavez, plus a similar statement for Maduro). Picture an imam saying things like that and how westerners would take it.
Why do you suppose defamation laws generally allow truth as a defense? One effect is that defamatory statements which canât be refuted canât be defended on that ground. I suspect he did believe the statement, but not because he found it in the Bible or did any serious research into it (i.e. he wouldnât be able to defend it), and if thatâs the case, it means he was recklessly spreading a rumor which was prima facie defamatory. That may not meet the technical definition of bearing false witness against oneâs neighbor as understood by ancient rabbinical councils, but Iâm not sure how interested he was in technicalities like that.
That raises another question: is it hypocritical to preach on the one hand, God hates Haitians enough to smite them with earthquakes and plagues and so on, but we should love them anyway because theyâre our neighbors and on the other hand God hates gays enough to smite them with plagues, and we should blame all our terrorist attacks and natural disasters on them? (I donât see a line from him explicitly saying thou shalt gay thy gay neighbor, but itâs hard not to get the impression that thatâs what he wanted.)
And then thereâs that, the prosperity gospel. Itâs hard to argue he wasnât at least dabbling in it when he said prayers = money.
His stance on divorce is easy to criticize from a Christian perspective (ironically not so much from a secular one).
And so onâŠ
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HmmmmâŠ
Fair point.
Yeah, Iâd completely forgotten about that. Consider my mind changed on the subject of Pat Robinson. As I said Iâm just pondering in more general terms here.
Yes, that was sort of my point - the guy was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Although I was also alluding to the fact that some people (and societies) behave in such a way that they might as well have sold their souls to Satan, even if they donât have a contract signed in blood. To the extent that there is a âChristian communityâ (given the number of sects and variants), if the phrase is ever used at all itâs generally in the metaphorical sense.
FWIW I do think itâs technically possible to âsell your soulâ in exchange for material goods. Whether there is an actual entity who calls himself Satan I do not know, but Iâve met people who appear to have done whatâs required and have reaped the rewards. Again you can view this in a metaphorical sense: people who have certain self-imposed limits on their behaviour can never achieve certain things. They cannot, for instance, ever find themselves with an offshore account containing a few hundred million $. Itâs physically impossible. To even get close to that goal, you do have to give up your humanity to the void.
Iâll point out that thatâs a big difference between attribution of blame and identification of cause. The aim of the latter is to say âlook, hereâs a thing you can fix, and if you fix it, bad things might happen less oftenâ. The aim of the former is to simply say âyouâre a bad personâ.
Itâs my personal opinion and other Christians might disagree, but what I was alluding to earlier is that God doesnât often go around smiting people because theyâre perfectly capable of smiting themselves, and do so with depressing regularity. There is no reason why Haiti couldnât be prosperous enough to mitigate the effect of earthquakes (the Dominican Republic, AFAIK, is a bit better in that regard). But they arenât and they donât. One of the reasons, as Iâve suggested in numerous other discussions, is that some societies have a set of shared values and beliefs that cannot produce prosperity
As is fairly well-known, Voodoo is an actual thing in Haiti and it does have several features in common with - what do we call them? - Satan-oriented religions. My personal observation is that thereâs an actual, causative connection between religious beliefs and outcomes.
Iâm not entirely sure what PR thought should be done with gays, but most Christians wouldnât suggest locking them up or doing away with them. âLove thy neighbour as thyselfâ is supposed to apply to Haitians, gays, and anyone else you happen not to like. Itâs one of the things that makes Christianity quite unique (and difficult to follow - pretty much anyone who claims to be a Christian can be accused of being a flawed human).
His dad was a Democrat senator that liked hairy birds! 
A. Willis Robertson - Wikipedia
Absalom Willis Robertson (May 27, 1887 â November 1, 1971) was an American politician from Virginia who served in public office for over 50 years. A member of the Democratic Party and lukewarm ally of the Byrd Organization led by fellow U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd,[1]