For Whom The Bell Tolls

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Mother Nancy

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H1N1 Flu Shots: How To Move To The Head Of The Line

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Why they love to hate Mother Teresa

Reason:

You know how some cowardly muggers target little old ladies because they’re usually slow, frail and unlikely to fight back? Well, the exact same dynamic, though in intellectual rather than bag-grabbing terms, can be seen in the radical-atheist assaults on Mother Teresa. Attacking the wrinkled, hunched-over sister of Calcutta, accusing her of being a goggle-eyed fanatic and a mad and disgusting celebrator of poverty, is the atheistic equivalent of mugging an old woman. And a dead one, to boot. These anti-Teresa tirades reveal far more about the bluster of contemporary atheism than they do anything surprising about the antics of old Catholic women.

Hating Mother Teresa has become a de rigueur dinner-party prejudice. As the Vatican speeds up its canonisation of Teresa, having already beatified her in 2003, feminists, atheists and liberal commentators are engaging in games of Teresa-denouncing one-upmanship, to see who can slate her in the shrillest, most outrageous terms. She was a ‘charlatan’ and a ‘master of her own mythology’, said Ian O’Doherty in the Irish Independent last week. No, she was a ‘wicked fundamentalist’, said a feminist contributor to a BBC TV debate last weekend. In fact she was a ‘disgusting fraud and a hypocrite’, says a columnist for the UK Independent, and ‘if there is a hell, Mother Teresa is already there’.

Much of this Teresa-baiting springs from the work of arch atheist Christopher Hitchens. In his 1995 book The Missionary Position, Hitchens described Mother Teresa as a ‘religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermoniser and an accomplice of worldly secular powers’. He exposed her backward beliefs on poverty – it is ‘beautiful’, she said, and the poor should embrace it – and her shoulder-rubbing with dictators and other dodgy individuals. She should never have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Hitchens said, or granted audiences with US presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, because she is little more than an ‘untouchable in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous’…

No, the reason Teresa has been elevated by radical atheists above everyone else in the League Of Evil Religious Crackpots is because she’s an easy target. Today’s New Atheists, more interested in getting their religion-hating rocks off than in actually Enlightening anyone, love crusading against Teresa because she indulged in a so-unsophisticated and foreign form of Christianity. Religion in the Third World, with its old-fashioned figureheads and its sometimes desperate adherents, makes for a far easier, and far more fun, target than the subtle religious practices of modern Western society. For today’s campaigning atheists, the sight of a little old woman in an off-white habit providing hammocks for poor, wide-eyed Indians is too bizarre and backward to let pass by. And lacking the intellectual faculties and old-style atheistic humanity to explain such practices, they merely mock them, denounce them, laugh at them over their $6 lattes…

The lack of Enlightened thinking in the mugging of Mother Teresa can be seen in the way campaigning atheists seek to replace Teresa’s backward beliefs with their own…

Read it all.

BH Obama Action Figure

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Mixed News

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