Author: Ophelia Benson

Okay good Bunglawala thinks Muslims should avoid going the “intelligent design” route lest they end up throwing off “their burqas as soon as they set foot on a plane to go overseas” and wrongly blaming Islam rather than the ill-informed interpretation of the Qur’an by some Muslims. Whatever. Of course interpretation of the Qur’an whether informed or ill-informed is beside the point, since the Qur’an isn’t a book about biology or even evolution – but whatever. But I do take issue with this (all too predictable, all too familiar) bit:

Dawkins’ work was forcefully argued and took no prisoners from the creationist camp; however, I did find his militant atheism quite off-putting…Gould on the other hand…gently chided those scientists who made similarly unsupported atheistic claims about what evolution had to say regarding questions of meaning and purpose – questions that have traditionally been the domain of religion.

Yeah, he did, and boy do I wish he hadn’t. Because he was wrong.

It’s not true that questions of meaning and purpose have traditionally been the domain of religion; religion has had much bigger fish to fry for most of its history. But more to the point, questions of meaning and purpose are not and have never been “the domain of religion” in the sense of being a monopoly of religion’s, which is what that claim looks like. Religion does not (whatever it might like to think) get to put up “Keep Out” signs on questions of meaning and purpose. Anybody can address those questions, anybody at all, and that emphatically includes atheists. In fact, of course, atheists are better people to turn to for such discussions, since their versions of purpose and meaning don’t rely on belief in a fictitious being who watches the sparrow and makes babies and animals suffer torments of pain because it’s good for them. I am getting very tired of these grandiose claims by religionists to expertise on questions of meaning and purpose when in fact what they have to say is not merely useless, it’s often monstrous.

Now really. That’s just silly. And yes I know he’s being jokey, but I bet he also means it, and he ought not to.

Would we even remember Little Nell if she hadn’t died in such spectacularly mawkish fashion? Would we prefer that Emma Bovary didn’t swallow the poison and instead became a clochard, cadging francs at the agricultural fair? And do we really want to contemplate Harry, now bald and grizzled, the lightning-shaped scar faded into an age spot, retired from magic and, pint in hand, prattling on about old quidditch matches? Surely it makes more sense to employ the other kind of magic, and go back to Volume 1 and start over.

Little Nell is welcome to die in childhood, I’m with dear Oscar when it comes to Nell, and with Emma B it’s fifty-fifty. The whole novel heads for her clumsy futile death, but on the other hand, it’s not self-evident that she would have been a duller character at fifty or seventy. But what I really take issue with is the look at Harry’s future. Why is that how he would end up? Bald and grizzled, fine, because that’s how it goes, but why would he be retired, and above all why would he be a pub bore prattling on about his childhood? Eh? Eh? Whence the dreary view of old age, eh? Why couldn’t and wouldn’t Harry go on doing magic all his life, why wouldn’t he become more interesting and wise as he got older? Some people do after all. Not everyone turns into a prattling bore in old age. Some people are prattling bores in old age, to be sure; I know some people like that myself; but they were prattling bores before they got old. Some people go on being interesting and curious and mentally active and thoughtful, even into old age. Imagine that! Charles McGrath might be one of those people himself.

One or two items from Christopher Hitchens’s The Missionary Position.

When Malcolm Muggeridge did his 1969 BBC documentary about Ma Teresa, one day they were taken to what MT called ‘the House of the Dying.’ It was badly lit, and the director was doubtful they could film inside, but they had just received some new film made by Kodak, and the cameraman, Ken Macmillan, a very distinguished cameraman, Hitchens says, known for his work on Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, said let’s try it, and they did. Then when they got back to London and were watching the rushes they were surprised when the shots came up: they could see every detail. And Macmillan said ‘That’s amazing, that’s extraordinary,’ and was about to go on to say ‘three cheers for Kodak’ but he didn’t get a chance to say that. Muggeridge, in Macmillan’s words (page 27), “sitting in the front row, spun round and said: ‘It’s divine light! It’s Mother Teresa. You’ll find that it’s divine light, old boy.’” In a few days journalists started calling him saying they’d heard he’d witnessed a miracle. That’s good, isn’t it? Kodak comes up with a new film that works brilliantly in bad light – and Muggeridge declares it’s divine light. That’s like that all-too-typical incident Chris Whiley mentioned in a comment the other day, where doctors save a guy who was critically ill or injured by, you know, using their skill and knowledge and technology, and when the guy wakes up he thanks – the people who prayed for him. You’ll find it’s divine light, old boy.

Then there is what Dr Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, said about his visit to the MT operation in Calcutta in 1994 (pp 38-9). He went, remember, expecting to be favourably impressed. But doctors were there only occasionally…

I saw a young man who had been admitted in poor shape with high fever, and the drugs prescribed had been tetracycline and paracetamol. Later a visiting doctor diagnosed probably malaria and substituted chloroquine. Could not someone have looked at a blood film? Investigations, I was told, are seldom permissible…Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning: her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards materialism.

Emphasis added, by Hitchens. But that’s quite something, isn’t it. And there’s more.

Finally, how competent are the sisters at managing pain?…I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics. Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Teresa’s approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I prefer.

She had tons of money; money poured in in an avalanche; it wasn’t poverty that caused this kind of primitive treatment; it was principle. And this is saintly? What would devilish be then?