It’s nice to know that we can count on Religious Right figures to say something grossly stupid at regular intervals. This time it’s Pat Robertson, talking about how Haitians are paying for a past pact with the devil.

I guess liberal believers and the nonreligious can use the sense of outrage this produces for a short while. Not a bad thing too—the fact is that people such as Pat Robertson are not just buffoons who are media-fodder. They enjoy real power and influence.

Still, outrages aside, what scares me is the suspicion that for quite a lot of ordinary people, the suggestion that real-world troubles may have roots in supernatural forces is not that implausible. For a lot of us, demons continue to haunt the world.