The vultures gather
Cristina Odone is there, announcing to a breathless world that She is Praying for Christopher Hitchens. Well good, because that is the first thing that leapt to my mind, of course – will Cristina Odone be praying for him?
While condemning the intolerance of religious organisations, he shows zero tolerance for believers: a person of faith must be a fanatic, or a fraud. (Mother Teresa, according to his book The Missionary Position, was both.) He refuses to consider the evidence of religious do-gooding, found in the Catholic Church’s AIDS clinics in Africa, Anglican schools in Asia, and Jewish charities around the globe. He is determined to persecute Pope Benedict XVI, and would like to see him arrested on his forthcoming visit to Britain.
Mother Teresa was both. It’s not that she must have been, it’s that she was. Hitchens didn’t say “persons of faith” must be fanatics or frauds and therefore “Mother Teresa” was both; he investigated “Mother Teresa” in an effort to find out if her actions matched her reputation, and found out that they did not.
And Hitchens is not determined to “persecute” the pope, unless by “persecute” Odone means “tell the truth about.” It would be stupid for Hitchens to be determined to persecute the pope in any other sense, because it’s stupid to be determined to do the impossible, and Hitchens is about as unstupid as anyone alive. It’s impossible to persecute the pope, because we can’t get at him. He’s protected by layer upon layer upon layer of immunity and holiness and specialness and law and guards and bubble cars. We can’t get at him to tell him to his face that he’s doing bad things. (Yes there was that woman last Xmas, but all she managed to do was tip him over for a second. That’s not great for an elderly fella, but it’s not persecution.)
Hitchens is of course determined to see the pope prosecuted – and so he should be. The pope has real temporal power, and he uses it; he uses it to protect criminals and keep crimes out of the hands of secular law enforcement and rebuke countries that take law enforcement into their own hands. The pope should be subject to prosecution for, at least, heading an organization that abets criminals.
As for Hitchens – I hope medical science can keep him around until he reaches the pope’s current age, at least.
What’s with this refrain about denial of good deeds? Hitchens is happy to grant that many religious organizations do good deeds. The point is that whenever religious organizations deviate from humanistic action understandable from a secular perspective, i.e., undertake an action which requires religious belief to perform — has she forgotten the challenge? * — it is usually a bad thing indeed. If my memory is correct, he devotes a chapter to good things done in the name of religion, discussing Martin Luther King in particular.
If she bothered to read his book or see his documentary about Mother Teresa, she would also understand why he criticizes her. He does not just call her a fanatic and a fraud; he carefully supports the charges, and he is not the only one to depart from the eager credulity for Teresa’s saintly image.
The idea that she even mentions Catholicism and AIDS together in Africa as she does… I hear of clinics, but what of condoms? Does the Catholic Church really operate as a humanistic charity in Africa?
Again, the charge is not and never was that all religious organizations do wicked things all of the time. Far from it. The crime of Hitchens is in demanding what is apparently absurd and impossible: a considerate weighing of the positive and negatives of the varieties of faith.
We’ll be seeing a lot worse than this in the future, which was not nearly as bad as it could have been. But of course, the idea that people treat critics of religion nastily is a false martyr complex, right?
*Roughly: Name me a good action performed or good thing said that could not have been said by an unbeliever. Now, as a corollary, name me a wicked action or wicked thing said that could not have been done or uttered by an unbeliever. I’ve yet to hear a good answer to the first, but even if you finally come up with one, think of how easily you can answer the second.
Yeah, this is going to be the saddest part of the whole affair–the godhavers coming out of the woodwork to passive-aggressively prove themselves the “better person” by condescending to a man with a serious disease.
Well, that or the inevitable manufactured “deathbed conversion” story if the worst should come to pass.
Ah, but you see Mother Teresa was a saint, which makes her above reproach, bear in mind the original meaning of hagiography was cataloguing the lives of saints.
It’s that pesky religious anti-epistemology thing, certain forms of inquiry are flatly unacceptable, and that includes inquires about holy people, unless their conclusions are determined in advance of course. And this is why the catholic church was able to shelter child abusers for so long, it may be why child abusers gravitated to the church.
When people say religion per se doesn’t have bad effects on society, they fail to realise that it leads you to not question certain things, and not just abstruse metaphysical things either. And failing to question something that needs to be questioned is a bad thing, that’s harm.
She dares link ” Catholic Church” and “AIDS in Africa” approvingly? The sheer nerve. Great, they take care of people when they have AIDS. They also lie about condoms, exacerbating the epidemic. Millions of infections can be laid at the feet of the pope and his lies. It fits perfectly in with the example of Mother Teresa though, I suppose. Let the people suffer so that they can feel the touch of Jesus.
It was only a matter of time.
The Missionaries of Charity By Hemley Gonzalez, June 21, 2010
The mantra of the operation rests on the belief that suffering and poverty are ways of loving god.
Have a look at this in the Articles section of B&W. It is mind-boggling.
The Missionaries of Charity By Hemley Gonzalez, June 21, 2010
Have a look at this in the Articles section of B&W. It is mind-boggling.
I won’t say “Amen” to that, but I would like to get on my knees and say the “Our Father” for someone for whom I have a sneaking admiration. But is it right to pray for someone who claims to find prayer hateful?
Does Christina Odone only like to get down on her knees for those she has a sneaking admiration? What about those of whom she doesn’t have a regard? I wonder, do they go to hell, where she is concerned? Selective status bending of the flesh rules.
I think Odone was being deliberately provocative in this article. Knowing full well how vulnerable the man now is, it was her chance to get a ‘dig-in’ – exacting retribution for his ‘evil deeds’, so to speak. The sanctimonious way she says that she will pray for him is enough to make you want to throw up. And will she actually get down on bended knee and offer a prayer for him? I very much doubt it. But that’s the last thing he’d want, anyway.
The only thing to have faith in is medical knowledge.
When I was a small child, I often confused the words “prosecute” and “persecute”, and my father used to laugh at me. Maybe Ms. Odone’s father should have laughed at her more.
First, I’ll quote myself at #1 and smugly smile at my own predicting of the obvious: “We’ll be seeing a lot worse than this in the future…”
Then I’ll link this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/jerk_of_the_day.php
The vultures gather, indeed. Many the “religion is nice” folks are missing something here, but there’s a reason that we can predict such behavior with such accuracy. I wonder why that is?
Religion poisons cancer. In my childhood, I might have never imagined such a thing.
Odone could have said that, as Hitchens thinks the only thing that could be of use to him now is good medical treatment and she is not qualified to administer it, there is nothing she can do for him. But that isn’t what she said. She said that she has chosen to do something, for him, with him in mind, that she knows he thinks is completely useless. If she really thought prayer could be of some help to Hitchens in spite of his dismissal of it, the least she could have done is pray privately, anonymously and without publicity. What I take away from the fact that she’s chosen to publicise it (which is certainly not going to bring a smile of gratitude to Hitchens if/when he hears about it) is that the alleged object of the prayers about which she cannot keep her trap shut is actually the last thing she might actually care about. Or maybe she thinks god only reads the Telegraph and won’t know she’s prayed if it’s not printed there.
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Odone’s article is incredibly selfish, nasty, opportunistic, self-righteous, and vile. She’s jaw-droppingly callous and self-obsessed.
It isn’t appropriate to jump on every theist wishing Christopher Hitchens well. In the states, Andrew Sullivan is catching shit for saying, “May the God he believes poisons everything be with him.” This is totally unwarranted. Starting with his beliefnet dialogue with Sam Harris, Sullivan has gone out of his way to provide a forum for atheists. He was trying to express some wit for a colleague he admires.
Odone’s piece, though, is of another category. She was obviously exploiting another’s misfortune to promote what she regards as her moral superiority. Fuck you, Cristina Odone.
H/t to Miranda for the Odone piece by the way.
True about Sullivan. I saw a comment about that on PZ’s post about Odone, so I found the Sullivan piece, and understood it very differently from the way the commenter did. The commenter seemed to have missed the “I’m devastated by the news” at the beginning, and perhaps doesn’t know that Sullivan and Hitchens are friends. The prayer partly because it will irritate him bit was not a jibe at all, it was an affectionate joke.
The article is headed ‘I’m praying for Christopher Hitchens’. No harm in that if Odone is sincere. It accords with the recommendations that Joshua bar-Joseph gave in his Sermon on the Mount.
However, her course of action may be worse than useless. I recall seeing somewhere on the Web that scientific studies reveal that if prayer brings about any effect at all, it is the opposite of that prayed for. Though the correlation is slight, and more research needs to be done, Odone would be best advised in the mean time to hold off on it.
Odone says:-
The short answer to that is if you thought your prayers would work, of course it’s right, just as it’s right for a doctor to give someone medicine even though they don’t like the taste or amputate their gangrenous leg while they objected. However, evidently Odone’s view of prayer is something you do to make yourself feel good, rather than for any results it brings to the afflicted person.
— Source: some wanker.