With a big hat tip to Hot Air, I learn that our post office is planning to put Mother Theresa on our stamps, and someone actually has a problem with that. Namely the “Freedom from Religion Foundation.” I have two big thoughts on this, which will be highlighted in bold. First:
So, um, all of that is Inconsistent with Atheism?
Now if we go to this story, we are able to read why the US Postal Service wants to put her on a stamp:
"Noted for her compassion toward the poor and suffering, Mother Teresa, a diminutive Roman Catholic nun and honorary U.S. citizen, served the sick and destitute of India and the world for nearly 50 years," the Postal Service said in a press release. "Her humility and compassion, as well as her respect for the innate worth and dignity of humankind, inspired people of all ages and backgrounds to work on behalf of the world’s poorest populations."
And there is this biography from the Nobel Prize website, which probably gives us an idea why she won that award. It includes this passage:
The Society of Missionaries has spread all over the world, including the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. They provide effective help to the poorest of the poor in a number of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and they undertake relief work in the wake of natural catastrophes such as floods, epidemics, and famine, and for refugees. The order also has houses in North America, Europe and Australia, where they take care of the shut-ins, alcoholics, homeless, and AIDS sufferers.
Of course she has done alot of good stuff, but you see according to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, this is all inherently religious conduct:
"Mother Teresa is principally known as a religious figure who ran a religious institution. You can't really separate her being a nun and being a Roman Catholic from everything she did," [Freedom From Religion spokesperson Annie Laurie] Gaylor told FoxNews.com.
You got that? Helping the poor, the shut-ins, the homeless, and AIDS sufferers is something only Roman Catholics do.
You know, if I was an atheist, I would be insulted. As a Presbyterian, I am merely amused.
If you actually go to their action alert on the subject, you would find out other horrors:
Here's another objection: Mother Teresa used almost every public occasion, including her acceptance speech for the Nobel prize, to promote Roman Catholic dogma, especially its antiabortion ideology.
Oh my God, she was anti-abortion! The fiend!
Take a moment to read her Nobel acceptance speech. It is a disturbing, befogged religious rant.
You know, I agree. Please read it, so you can see what a twisted bunch of hateful atheists these Freedom From Religion Foundation people really are. I have long said there are two kinds of people who call themselves atheists. There are atheists who just for one reason or another don’t believe in God and as a rule they are nice, non-pushy, decent people. They are a credit to atheism. And then there are people who believe in God, but are really mad at Him. They are the jerks who get all the attention. The commentary on this speech places the author of this release in the later category:
In talking about the supposed beauty of a god sacrificing his son to propitiate the "sins" of others she draws the lesson: "And so this is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt." She blamed moral decay on abortion, and minimized the suffering of starving children by comparison: "I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing—direct murder by the mother herself. . . . Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today."
I find it not disturbing or deluded, just pretty standard Christian/anti-abortion fare. But I encourage you to read her acceptance speech so you can make up your own mind.
They go on to list other horrors. For instance, the Lancet, which has gone from ridiculous politicized “studies” of Iraqi casualty counts to anti-semitic and anti-palestinian studies that blame palestinian wife abuse on Isreal, published a report that told us that her clinics engaged in horrors like the fact that “the curable and incurable were not distinguished in treatment[.]” Well yes, God forbid people never give up on the dying. There were also questions about the sufficiency of care, which is a funny complaint given that but for Ma Teresa, they would have gotten nothing. It seems ungrateful for them to give care as a charity and then bitch about the quality of it, doesn’t it? It’s like a teenager getting a Porsche for his 16th birthday and complaining it’s the wrong color.
And Chris Hitchens thinks this story reflects badly on her, telling of “a dying Indian moaning in pain and being told by the nun that ‘You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.’ He pathetically replied: ‘Then please tell him to stop kissing me.’” I mean seriously what a bitch, trying to comfort a man in pain! Doesn’t she know she should have told him that his suffering was going to be for nothing because he was about to blink out of existence?!
Hitchens also complains that “[p]romotion of religion and stealthy baptisms of the dying were always the deepest objects of her charity.” Well God forbid she try to open the gates of heaven to everyone?
And in the end pathetically the Freedom of Religion Foundation people suggest that instead of buying the Mother Teresa stamp you should buy a substitute...
...such as Katharine Hepburn, whose views are publicized in the Foundation's freethought bus campaign. Hepburn said: "I'm an atheist and that's it. I believe that there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people."
You got that? Instead of a woman who gave of herself selflessly to the poor and the sick, but committed the crime of being Catholic and disliking abortion, we should honor Katherine Hepburn because... um... she’s famous and an atheist. I mean I don’t have anything against Hepburn, but is she even in the same moral league as Mother Theresa? She’s a nice woman who made some nice movies, or so I am told. Could any comparison be more insipid?
And here is my favorite part, “If this choice of a polarizing Roman Catholic figurehead...”
First, the term “figurehead” is offensive. It suggests she was only the titular head, rather than someone who pulled up her sleeves and worked, and nothing could be further from the truth.
Second, polarizing? Well, when Gallop asked who was the person Americans admired, who came out first? That’s right, Ma. Teresa, following in this order by Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Helen Keller.
But then they were asked about how other religious figures were on the stamp, the hypocrisy gets deeper. I think the most flagrant example is of course the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Of him, Ms. Gaylor said Dr. King “just happened to be a minister.” Which leads me to another point:
Liberals Think Faith is Only for Black People
Seriously, how many politicians claim that their faith cannot guide their political views, etc., who denounced Bush Jr. for mentioning God now and then, but then are silent when people praise the Reverend Martin Luther King. Al Gore goes into a black church and suddenly he is “preacher Al.” Here is a report from the Telegraph in 2000:
Conventional wisdom labels the Vice-President as an uninspiring speaker who bores audiences with too many facts and a monotonous delivery. But when he steps up before a crowd with many black faces, or appears in a swing state where the African-American vote is seen as crucial, he puts on a cloak of fiery rhetoric that would not be out of place at a religious revival.
And then there is Hillary with that weird accent thing in black churches. Republicans are accused of being too much in bed with religious figures, but Democrats can count Rev. Jessie Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton among major leaders. Of course to be fair, if Sharpton believes in divine retribution, he sure doesn’t act like it.
And of course Bush was criticized with how often he invoked the name of the almighty. But Barrack Obama cites Jesus more often than Bush did, and somehow this isn’t a big problem.
And the Reverend Dr. Marthin Luther King, Jr.? His behavior was not defined as Christian? He was a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Counsel. And I challenge any person who has read his autobiography to tell me faith didn’t drive him. In fact, I cannot recommend highly enough that you listen to it on CD. It’s frankly beautiful. And as you listen, you will hear him tell you (with LeVar Burton as his voice most of the time) how he had a crisis of faith, where he considered pulling out of the civil rights movement early on and believed that Jesus actually, literally spoke to him, and told him to keep going. He will tell you how his faith is a bulwark against a moral relativism that would tell him to accept segregation. Or you can just read this passage from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, explaining that his entire philosophy of civil disobedience stemmed from his faith:
One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.
Just imagine for one moment how batshit everyone on the left would go if George W. Bush had said that. But Dr. King says that, and no one bats an eyelash.
Because faith is seen as something just for black people. Faith and politics can be freely mixed, if black people are involved.
And given what the anti-religious feel about faith, how it is the crutch of small minds, how it enslaves us, etc. given that they think so little of those of faith, what does it say about their attitudes on race that they are apparently okay with black people having faith?
It says everything.
