Religious media mogul Pat Robertson told his audience on Monday that miracles occur less frequently for Americans compared to Christians overseas in part because of an education system which produces sophisticated individuals who think they've got everything figured out.
When asked by a viewer on his popular "700 Club" show, "Why do amazing miracles (people raised from the dead, blind eyes open, lame people walking) happen with great frequency in places like Africa, and not here in the USA?" Robertson put the blame squarely on the nation's education system.
"Those people overseas didn't go to Ivy League schools," said the 83-year-old former Southern Baptist minister and the chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network. "We're so sophisticated. We think we've got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real. We know about all this stuff."
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"In the more advanced schools, we've been inundated with skepticism and secularism," he said. "And overseas they're simple, humble. You tell them God loves them, and they say, 'Okay, he loves me.' You say, 'God'll do miracles' and they say, 'Okay, we believe him.' That's what God's looking for. That's why they have miracles."
Despite Robertson's suggestion that evolution is taught more freely in the U.S. than in other countries, Scientific American's Katherine Harmon pointed out that evolutionary curricula has been taught for decades around the world.
Robertson has long been a critic of America's public education system, which he argues promotes "liberal" ideals that in effect "indoctrinate" America's youth and "force them into a mindset that is contrary to what their parents believe."
Reacting to a report that
Chicago public schools were proposing an expansion of the sex education curriculum to include kindergarteners as young as five, Robertson told his viewers in early March: "Why don't you teach them about how to read and write and to count . . . instead of getting to sex education. Who needs it at that age?"
"You see we believe in America, in freedom, in free choice, free enterprise, freedom; but the liberals, the progressives so-called, they want to enforce their point of view and have people in lockstep accepting what they want," said Robertson.
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In response to critics, the Chicago school system said the curriculum will be specialized to conform to each age group, with kindergartners through third-graders learning about their anatomy, reproduction in all living creatures, and appropriate and inappropriate touching.
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