Focus on the Fundies: Thumb-sucking edition

Faced with charges that he misused school funds for personal use, the president of Oral Roberts University, Richard Roberts, resigned from office last week. Today he told students that God had told him to resign, and in return would bless the school.

God told him on Thanksgiving that he should resign the next day, Roberts told students in the university's chapel. "Every ounce of my flesh said 'no'" to the idea, Roberts said, but he prayed over the decision with his wife and his father, Oral Roberts, and decided to step down.

Roberts said he wanted to "strike out" against the people who were persecuting him, and considered countersuing, but "the Lord said, 'don't do that,'" he said. ...

Roberts said God told him he would "do something supernatural for the university" if he stepped down from the job he held at the 5,700-student school since 1993.

This infantile view of God is so pathetic and ignorant that you have to wonder how these people ever heard of such a thing as a "university," much less how they were able to start and maintain one. The school -- if one can truly use that word -- is a branch of the Roberts "ministry," which is a word they use because they are afraid to call it a "church."

If this sort of "God told me" religion sounds familiar, that's because it's the same faith practiced by Pat Robertson, who has become a laughingstock for his "prophecies" that God will blast this or that city with a hurricane or earthquake if they vote the wrong way. (For example: "Mass killing" to strike U.S.; declares fatwa on Hugo Chavez; wants to drop nuke on State Department.)

technorati: Richard Roberts, charismatics, Pat Robertson