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This morning I was reading a repost on a blog of an article famed athiest Richard Dawkins wrote about Pat Roberton’s comments & Haiti.

The following is from Unreasonable Faith:

Richard Dawkins has a post on the On Faith blog of the Washington Post talking about Haiti and the Hypocrisy of Christian Theology:

Milder-mannered faith-heads are falling over themselves to disown Pat Robertson, just as they disowned those other pastors, evangelists, missionaries and mullahs at the time of the earlier disasters.

What hypocrisy.

Loathsome as Robertson’s views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonized theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable ‘mystery’, or who ’see God’ in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti , or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God ’suffering on the cross’ in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.

He uses Christian myths to back his point:

Where was God in Noah’s flood? He was systematically drowning the entire world, animal as well as human, as punishment for ’sin’. Where was God when Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed with fire and brimstone? He was deliberately barbecuing the citizenry, lock stock and barrel, as punishment for ’sin’. Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated Christian, your entire religion is founded on an obsession with ’sin’, with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed up to the obnoxious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus’ incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the ’sins’ of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the ’sin’ of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even existed? To quote the President of one theological seminary, writing in these very pages:

“The earthquake in Haiti, like every other earthly disaster, reminds us that creation groans under the weight of sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point on the globe.”

Dawkins hit a home run there. Read the whole thing.
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Sure, Dawkins hit a homerun. But he was playing tee-ball.

It’s sly of Dawkins to use one story from the Hebraic creation narrative in Genesis and another from the formative moments of the Jewish story to paint someone “squarely in the Christian tradition,” if not greedy and lazy. Though I believe in the deeply rooted relationship between the Christian tradition and it’s Jewish origins, I don’t know that I can agree that a religion which technically began in the years A.D. can be framed primarily through two specks on the narrative landscape of the Torah.

And the karmic belief in God’s retaliation for sin (you sin so I smite you!) is certainly not “the centrepiece” of Christian theology. Dawkins also uses a quick allusion to a specific Jewish view of atonement, the idea of a scapegoat, which again is only a portion of a multifaceted historical Christian view of the necessity of the cross of Christ.The Jewish use for a scapegoat was primarily a way to symbolize their reconciliation, as a entire people, back to the Abrahamic promise through which their nation was founded and propelled. It’s unfortunate that many portray anything to do with atonement as escapism, appeasement for near-disaster (remember people, this isn’t Zeus) and a special prize for the privileged  after death. The cross is about grace and reconciliation, and the propitiation for sins (the sacrifice) is about pulling people back into their created purpose.

I’m not saying that everything Dawkins says about Robertson, Haiti, and Christians is the most unfounded representation of Christian thought ever made, but I am saying that he could work a little harder and make his point by referencing something or someone that actually falls in the Christian theological tradition to say someone is “squarely” in the Christian tradition. If you read the entire post, he quickly references a few of Jesus’ interactions with “demons” as a way to cover his bases, but it doesn’t bolster his argument. The interactions Jesus had with casting out demons were about healing people…so Dawkins has a problem with possessed people being free, dying people living, and hurt people healed? How nice.

Come on Dawkins, at least step up and play Dad-pitch baseball.