Perhaps America’s most aggressively obnoxious atheist organization is the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Under the guise of being a church-state separation watchdog, it pursues a Soviet-style agenda of trying to drive religion from the public sphere altogether. Their latest crusade is directed at the U.S. Postal Service, according to Fox News:
An atheist organization is blasting the U.S. Postal Service for its plan to honor Mother Teresa with a commemorative stamp, saying it violates postal regulations against honoring “individuals whose principal achievements are associated with religious undertakings.”
I wonder why the Postal Service has that regulation at all–I mean, why is acknowledging the contribution of religious people doing religious stuff that benefits humanity out of bounds, as opposed to literally any other field of human endeavor? Mother Teresa, after all, didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize because she was a nun or prayed a lot. But leave that aside, and note what the real objection is:
The Freedom from Religion Foundation is urging its supporters to boycott the stamp — and also to engage in a letter-writing campaign to spread the word about what it calls the “darker side” of Mother Teresa.
This is straight out of Christopher Hitchens’ bizarre campaign against Mother Teresa embodied in his book The Missionary Position. So it’s not really about USPS regulations, or church-state separation–it’s really about the hate directed at one of the towering religious and humanitarian figures of the last century.
Freedom from Religion Foundation spokeswoman Annie Laurie Gaylor says issuing the stamp runs against Postal Service regulations.
“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,” Gaylor told FoxNews.com.
As far as people like Gaylor are concerned, it doesn’t matter what a person such as Mother Teresa did, or how many people benefited from her work–if she committed the cardinal sin of being identified with religion, America must act as though she never existed. Heaven forfend we give anyone the idea that people with religious motivations and associations ever do any good that others might want to emulate. Of course, Gaylor would probably also dispute that Mother Teresa did good, because she adhered to Catholic positions on birth control and abortion, which cancels out everything else. But it gets worse:
Postal Service spokesman Roy Betts expressed surprise at the protest, given the long list of previous honorees with strong religious backgrounds, including Malcolm X, the former chief spokesman for the Nation of Islam, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Gaylor said the atheist group opposed Father Flanagan’s stamp but not those for King and Malcolm X, because she said they were known for their civil rights activities, not for their religion.
Martin Luther King “just happened to be a minister,” and “Malcolm X was not principally known for being a religious figure,” she said.
“And he’s not called Father Malcolm X like Mother Teresa. I mean, even her name is a Roman Catholic honorific.”
Yeah, and King was the Rev. Martin Luther King, a man who pastored churches and preached countless sermons, whose Ph.D dissertation was “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” and whose civil rights work was inspired and informed by his Christian faith. But he “just happened to be a minister.” That calls out for a Captain Picard moment:
This nonsense wouldn’t be complete without a big dollop of anti-Catholic bigotry:
Gaylor said the foundation’s only concern is the “other things that deserve to be commemorated but are not because the people behind it didn’t have the power of the Catholic church.”
“It’s enormously difficult to get them,” she said, referring to commemorative stamps, “and people have huge campaigns, and to me this speaks of the power of the Roman Catholic Church in hierarchy.
“They want to make her a saint and this is part of the PR machine.”
Fortunately, there are atheists who recognize this for the idiocy it is:
Some atheists, too, spoke out against the group’s objections, including Bruce Sheiman, author of “An Atheist Defends Religion.” He said the Freedom from Religion Foundation is being “hypocritical” and really “stepping over the line.”
“Clearly there are a number of things that you can point to and say it’s religious and a number of things you can point to and say that it’s areligious,” Sheiman told FoxNews.com. “So it really doesn’t make sense to protest it.”
He said the Foundation’s campaign stems from concern that the abundance of humanitarian work done by believers will overshadow that done by atheists.
“Like billboards and bus ads, this is just part of the whole campaign that they’re doing to make non-belief more visible,” he said.
Good for you, Bruce.
January 29, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Just waiting for a few hyper Protestants to justify this bull pucky because they hate the Catholic Church too …
January 30, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I would like to start my comment by saying that “I am an atheist.” With that said, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am NOT one of the so-called “new atheists.” Although I do agree with some of the things said in recent books by Hitchens, Dawkins, etc.; I find these gentlemen to be confrontational, rude, and they all show a lack of respect concerning other people’s religious world-views. I do not like to be preached to by fundamentalists who want to ram their doom and gloom down my throat and I am sure that religious people, fundamentalist and mainstream alike, do not appreciate the lack of tolerance from the other side either. Our country is SO polarized over both politics and religion (I don’t think I have seen the situation this bad since the Viet Nam War); therefore, it seems to me that we need to work hard for a civil, respectful dialogue to find any common ground. I grow weary of intolerance and a lack of basic human respect.
January 30, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Louis: Thank you very much for that. Please know that you are always welcome here!
January 30, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Thank you for the warm welcome, David. It restores my faith in humanity. Usually us unchurched folks are treated as pariahs.
Thank you!!!!
February 7, 2010 at 7:56 pm
Louis, you remind me of the atheist Theodore Dalrymple, who also takes a dim view of the New Atheists. (That’s a compliment, that’s a compliment!)
Rev. Fischler, I just want to say belatedly thank you, and I like your blog, too.
I had never seen the Facepalm poster before. Hilarious.
February 8, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Hello Chillingworth,
I had never heard of Theodore Dalrymple before but enjoyed reading the article to which you linked. My doubts didn’t start as early as his. I was raised in a Christian family – mostly attending base chapels as my father was career Air Force. These chapels by nature are interdenominational Protestant services – I would call it fairly mainstream – not fundamentalist or evangelical. However, in my mid- teens, circa 1965, I started taking my grandmother to church, as she could no longer drive, and I was thus exposed to the Southern Baptists. I saw so much hypocrisy there. It seemed, at least at this church, that the folks were very pious on Sundays but the same people were seen by me on Saturday nights drinking, dancing, gambling, etc., which was very frowned upon by the Southern Baptists as you probably know. Then in Sunday School class I started asking probing questions – the Virgin Birth, miracles, etc., and was treated badly just for asking and I never received answers that satisfied my curiosity. At this point in my life, I considered myself to be agnostic. It was probably in the 80s, when I was in my forties, before I started considering myself to be an atheist, coming to these conclusions by my own personal study into science, reason, and secular humanist views. Since about 1968, when I was 18, I simply stopped attending church with the exception of weddings and funerals. I guess I probably was also very influenced by those heady times when I first started to college as well. As they say, I must have had a really good time in the 60s because I don’t remember much of it . My religious and political views have not changed much over the last 40+ years as I remain one of those “bleeding-heart,” secular humanist liberals.
February 9, 2010 at 8:29 am
I’m interested by your story. Have you ever tried C.S. Lewis?
February 9, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Thank you for your interest in “my story” but no, I have never tried any C. S. Lewis. By trying, I am assuming that you must mean reading his works, lol. However, one would have to be living under a rock to not know of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” having been a recent movie blockbuster. I do know from reading the reviews that Lewis used a lot of Christian imagery – at least in this work. I did go over to wikipedia.org and read his biography. It seems that we did start losing our faith at about the same age.
“In September 1913, Lewis enrolled at Malvern College, where he would remain until the following June. It was during this time that 15-year-old Lewis abandoned his childhood Christian faith and became an atheist, becoming interested in mythology and the occult.”
Major difference here as I never became interested in the occult; in fact, I can say the exact opposite in that I do not believe in ANYTHING supernatural – ghosts, goblins, leprechauns, monsters or god(s), for instance. As I mentioned above in a previous post, my world view is guided by science and reason.
If your purpose in mentioning Lewis is to start a discussion of literature, I think we should take that offline as it is getting a bit off topic here. Just a quick shout out, however, for one of his American contemporaries of the same surname – I absolutely love Sinclair Lewis – “Babbit” and “Main Street” being my favorites. If you want to continue this dialogue just mention your email address (if you are that brave online).
Chillingworth, at the risk of sounding paranoid – I do not know how to say this delicately so I will simply blurt it out – if you are attempting to “save my soul,” then do not even try as I guarantee you that it will not work. I do not mean to be rude – just stating the facts. I guess you can say that staring at 60, I am very set in my ways. Actually, I am absolutely content with the direction my life has gone – NO REGRETS whatsoever and I am not in any way an unhappy person! In fact, my wife (who is also secular) and I just celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary. Life is good!
February 9, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Louis’ story, in a nutshell, is why a Christian should never discourage honest questions.
February 10, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Thank you for your input, Kate. However, stories such as mine are fairly commonplace amongst us so-called “military brats.” I forgot to mention in my previous post that my wife is also the daughter of a retired Air Force Colonel. I have a theory (no, better make that an hypothesis) that people such as us have spent a lot of time living in different places. For me, I lived in Bangkok, Thailand when I was 15 – 16 in the mid-sixties. As you may know, Thailand is primarily Buddhist. It was quite an experience – and one that opened my eyes to the fact that just because one has a different religion doesn’t make one wrong.
February 12, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Do feel free to e-mail me, at chillingworth at live.com, if you would prefer. I’m not much of a literature guy, though, and I’m afraid I wouldn’t have much to contribute in a discussion of literature.
Before a certain point, I had only heard of the Chronicles of Narnia, too, but now I actually think of Lewis as primarily a nonfiction writer. (Maybe I should think of him as primarily an academic and a professor and only a writer on the side, whether of fiction or nonfiction, but whatever.)
Your story is fairly different from mine (although I was atheist at a certain point, too), but one similarity I see between us is an interest in investigating what is true through reason. I recommend Lewis’s nonfiction, such as Mere Christianity (and Miracles, and The Problem of Pain, and maybe even The Four Loves), because he won’t try to trick you into Christianity, or scare you into it, or anything like that (and he certainly won’t try to make you feel bad for having questions); having come to believe that Christianity is true, he tries to show others, rationally, through logic, that Christianity is true.
Your relationship with God isn’t a decision I can make; it’s terribly important, but ultimately, it’s between you and God. In fact, properly speaking, I don’t even know the current status of your relationship with God, even though I know that you don’t believe that He exists (because you said that you consider yourself to be an atheist). So no, I realize that I can’t “save your soul”.
I’m glad to hear that you and your wife are generally happy, too–that’s a great gift, and the fact that the two of you are still together is a pretty rare gift these days, from what I hear.
I am Christian, though, if that’s part of what you’re asking, and that does mean that I wish everyone else were Christian, too. (A Christian friend of mine likes to say, What’s the worst sin in the desert? It’s finding an oasis of water and not telling anyone about it.) I don’t just run around telling everyone to convert, though, if that doesn’t go without saying. If possible, I’d like to share a particular author (or just one book, Mere Christianity), one that I personally found very helpful, with a particular person, you, who I think might find it interesting.