On the Wednesday edition of his Christian Broadcasting Network program "The 700 Club," evangelical pastor Pat Robertson -- famous for his dubious pronouncements on world affairs -- did it again. Going back to the 1790s, when Haiti was a French colony, Robertson cited an ill-fated agreement.

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti," Robertson said. "People might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon the third and whatever . . . and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, 'We will serve you, if you get us free from the Prince.' True story. And so the Devil said, 'Okay, it's a deal.' . . . Ever since they have been cursed."

Robertson was referring to the Bois Caïman ceremony that purportedly took place in 1791 and, it is widely believed, sparked the Haitian Revolution. Scholars disagree on whether the ceremony, supposedly led by the voodoo priest and revolutionary Dutty Boukman, actually took place, but it is ingrained in Haiti's national memory. Some evangelical groups have connected this event with a "curse" on Haiti, and still call Boïs Caiman a "high place of the Devil."

Andrew Apter, a history professor at UCLA, called Robertson's statement "hate speech" because it presumes that Haitians are damned and contributes to the belief -- among Christians in Haiti or elsewhere -- that God is punishing them for their sin. That would be "tragic," Aptner says, when the real reason for Haiti's poverty is a "horrible cycle of plundering and autocracy within Haitian leadership."

While publicly associating natural disasters with divine motives is unseemly no matter who is doing it, it seems off-point to label it hate speech. Hate speech is a serious issue, and you might say that calling Pat Robertson's loony spiritualism hateful -- especially when he's asking viewers to pray for Haiti and donate to relief efforts -- cheapens real hate speech. When Robertson is talking about world events, he's sometimes hilariously wrong, but is he hateful?

Which brings up the question: Does seeing the world through the reductionist lens of fundamentalist spiritualism make one inherently hateful? Is it hateful to say the Antichrist is "probably a Jew alive in Israel today," or that feminism "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians"? Those statements are so far off kilter they could be called crazy, but are they hateful?

It's difficult to defend spiritual views -- Christian or any other kind -- that see human failings like racism and corruption as the punishment of God for voodoo ceremony that may have never happened. They are ignorant and unhelpful, and they undervalue the earthly political work that could improve the situation in a poor nation like Haiti. But many of the people who hold those views also spend thousands of their own dollars to take trips to Haiti building houses, sponsor children in orphanages, and even adopt Haitian children as their own. Pat Robertson devoted an entire program to raising money for the relief effort. It's difficult to call that hateful.