Oh Pat, You've Done It Again!

Pat Robertson, host of TV's The 700 Club, professional religious authority and font of comedy material, is at it again! This week, in a startling and landmark declaration, Pat aimed his sights at video games yet again, stating that murdering a character in a game is the same as murdering someone in real life (!).

A concerned gamer called in to The 700 Club and asked the beloved spiritual leader if God considers "virtual killing" a sin.

Robertson confirmed the gamer's worst fears by quoting Jesus: "If you look upon a woman with lust in your heart, you've committed adultery." Robertson then somehow applied that old saw to the activity of playing a video game, declaring it a "virtual sin."

Robertson, who has never actually seen a video game, added, "I think mayhem, killing, Grand Theft Auto, they get pretty bizarre. So if you're murdering somebody in cyberspace in a sense you're performing the act, whether you like it or not."

Well that's that then! I'd better high-tail it to my local police station and turn myself in immediately, because I'm one of the biggest mass murderers and serial killers in the history of our country. In my time playing the various GTA games I've wracked up literally tens of thousands of murders. Maybe hundreds of thousands. I wouldn't be surprised if I got life without parole plus one million years. I'm deeply sorry I've put my family through all this and hope some day they can find it in their hearts to forgive me.

Jesus wept.

Pat Robertson has become the PETA of the religious world. I have no doubt that normal religious folk cringe every time he opens his noise hole, just as rational animal lovers do whenever PETA makes one of their insane, attention-getting cry-for-help press releases.

Say Pat, regarding this whole, "thinking it's the same as doing it" thing in the bible... do you suppose maybe, just maybe that passage wasn't meant to be taken literally? Could it be possible it just means something like "if you want to be a good person, don't sit around thinking about murdering that guy that cut you off on the way to work this morning." Interpreting it in absolute terms just seems like taking the off ramp to crazy town. A god who gives his children imaginations but then punishes them for using it isn't worthy of being worshiped.

And you do realize that before the invention of the printing press the only way to create copies of the bible was for monks to transcribe it by hand, right? Did you ever play the "Telephone" game? The one where you whisper "bath towel" to the first person, and they pass it on to the next person and so on around the room until the last person hears it as "pee pants Hitler gravel." Is it slightly possible that the word of god may have gotten mangled by the monks over the long centuries? 

Not to mention the fact that words change meaning over the milllennia, and the bible's been translated, added to and revised several thousand times since it was written.

While you think about that, Mr. Robertson, I'll be sitting on the floor in front of my TV murdering away.