Bigotry on parade. This is the other barrell of the "religious freedom isn't worth protecting" shotgun, namely, although (Rule 1) "hate speech" laws trump religion, (Rule 2) "hate speech" against Catholicism isn't really "hate speech" under Rule 1. On the day that Mother Teresa is canonized, the Salt Lake Tribune publishes a New Atheist op-ed that hits all the tropes of anti-Catholicism. Thus we see: - Catholic priests raping altar boys? - Check. - God hates amputees? Check. - God could have stopped priests from committing sexual abuses? Check. - Mother Teresa didn't heal all the people who came to her in poverty? Check. This is just nasty ugliness on the part of Associate Professor Gregory Clark. In the face of comparable bigotry against Father Damien of Molokai, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote something that is worth considering in this context. After Father Damien died a Presbyterian Minister in Honolulu suggested that Damien caught leprosy by sleeping with the women lepers. Robert Louis Stevenson was outraged and published an open letter to that Minister: //But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men; and to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true. I will suppose—and God forgive me for supposing it—that Damien faltered and stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he, who was doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter of his priestly oath—he, who was so much a better man than either you or me, who did what we have never dreamed of daring—he too tasted of our common frailty. “O, Iago, the pity of it!” The least tender should be moved to tears; the most incredulous to prayer. And all that you could do was to pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage! Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your own heart? I will try yet once again to make it clearer. You had a father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? that you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the author of your days? and that the last thing you would do would be to publish it in the religious press? Well, the man who tried to do what Damien did, is my father, and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God had given you grace to see it.// : And, likewise, Mother Teresa was the mother of Associate Professor Gregory Clark, who besmears himself with filth in order to score a point or two.

Quoth the Progressive Secular Humanist, "Nevermind."

The canonization of the Most Evil Woman Who Has Ever Lived seems to have unhinged the forces of tolerance and goodness.

The blogger at Progressive Secular Humanists wax wroth and vents spleen because Mother Teresa allegedly cackled in a video that she took pleasure in watching the death of the poor in her custody.

Such an evil woman!

What's that, you ask?  What did she actually say....because that just doesn't sound correct?

Let's cut to the tape:

It seems that she didn't say "it's beautiful to see them die."

She actually said "It is beautiful to watch the people die with so much joy."

Because, obviously, dying can otherwise be a dismal process for the poor, the forgotten, the sick or pretty much anyone who has to do it.

And what is this bit about "apologize for the 'confusion'"?????

How about apologize for the defamation.

If you don't have the occasion to peak into the alternate reality which is Secularism/Humanism/Atheism, you wouldn't know that Mother Teresa was...

...simply the most evil woman who ever lived.

//However, Mother Teresa was no saint, she was instead a moral monster, a sadistic religious fanatic who took pleasure in the suffering of others, and denied appropriate medical care to the sick and dying.//

You might think that this is the position held by a few non-representative kooks on the internet, but the mantra that Mother Teresa was evil, evil, evil is actually mainstream among Humanists and Secularists.

Here is a response to this argument to perfection:

//As the Catholic Church canonizes Agnes Bojaxhlu, I find myself encountering a peculiar thing from the more radically left-fringe of my internet awareness.

Article after internet article, attacking the woman most of us knew as Mother Teresa.  If those articles are to be believed, she was a monster, a glazed-eye fanatic who abused the oppressed and cozied up to dictators for her own psychotic self-aggrandizement.  That way of understanding her life was first and most aggressively pitched by the late and much lamented atheist provocateur Christopher Hitchens, who at least had the advantage of wit, a mastery of the language, and his own peculiar dissolute charm.

The latest wave of condemnation has none of his talent.

She is, by the standards of her accusers, a psychopath.  The most evil woman who ever lived.

The charges against her seem to fall into several different categories.

First, that she was anti-abortion and believed that divorce was problematic.  She also opposed contraception.  I personally don't share what was likely her perspective on some of these issues.  Why?

Because I'm not Catholic.  I mean, she was Catholic, after all.  Right?  And she's being made a saint in the Catholic church, right?  That a Catholic saint would hold orthodox Catholic positions seems rather a silly thing to get one's knickers in a twist about.  What matters to me...what matters to anyone grounded in reality...is what a person actually believes and how their belief impacts what they do.

That gets us to attack point number two.  She believed that there was an inherent nobility in poverty, and that enduring suffering has redemptive power.  This is also a Catholic position, pretty radically so.  It's also a pretty basically Christian position, one that I share.  She insisted on telling the poor that they were worthy, that their suffering wasn't in vain, and that they had value as human beings no matter what their condition.

Why is this wrong?  Well, because it must be wrong.  Spun the way her prosecutors are spinning it, her care for the poor was abuse because it celebrated suffering and did not challenge systemic injustice.  Saying that the endurance of suffering is noble becomes the foundation of the charge that she was a sadist.

Again, this seems absurd.  Faced with someone dying in squalor, you can either affirm their life or not.  You can frame their suffering as meaningless, as something inflicted on them by a power beyond their control.  "Your life up until this point, all the hurts and losses?  A waste of time.  Being poor sucks. Oh, you're dying?  Pity.  Hope oblivion works for you." //

One thing I've noticed is the cramped, bitter hatred of the Teresa-haters. I then compare it to the magnanimity of her supporters.  The former comes out far, far behind.

That says a lot.

Syncretism in action.

Some Hindus have adopted Mother Teresa as a "goddess."

I'm not sure what "goddess" means in this context, since they seem to recognize her as a saint. The question would be whether they are asking for her intercession with God or believe that she is a power in her own right.

Mother Teresa.

Unless you spend time in the feverswamp of the internet, you have no idea how much internet atheists hate Mother Teresa.  I regularly get into arguments started by atheists who depict Mother Teresa as the Most Evil Women Ever!

Mother Teresa is "Banquo's Ghost at the Feast" - a reminder that, maybe, just maybe, there is something wrong with their atheism.

Atheist and Libertarian Brandan O'Neill observes:

//"To complain that this old woman who's been dead for 20 years conspired to keep Indians poor in the same month that every world leader, liberal hack and green twit in Christendom gathered in Paris to do the exact same thing.... is just surreal."// He offers this thought: //The ongoing war on Mother Teresa reveals what lies at the heart of the New Atheism. A million miles from the humanistic atheism of Marx, Darwin and others, today’s anti-God squad is more interested in hectoring the religious – those stupid believers in anything they are told – than it is in creating an Enlightened culture that might give people something else, something more profound, to think about and contribute to. Darwin, the hero of so many of today’s New Atheists, refused to partake in cheap Christianity-bashing, believing that ‘direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public – and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science’. Today, lacking any serious attachment to freedom of thought or any belief in their ability to illuminate men’s minds, gradually or otherwise, the New Atheists not only spend their whole time directly attacking Christianity, but take aim at its crudest forms.

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. So one critic attacks Teresa’s opposition to contraception and abortion on the basis that it inflamed one of the alleged great evils of our age: overpopulation. ‘Overpopulation is one of the factors that can lead to war, [and therefore] Mother Teresa’s opposition to any effective limitation on the growth of population [implicated] her in war rather than peace.’ This is a battle of misanthropies. Where Teresa held to the misanthropic belief that women should be forced to take every conception to term, the Teresa-bashers believe that unchecked population growth – whisper it: too many black and brown babies – gives rise to madness and mayhem. One side seeks to limit poor people’s choices, the other demonises poor people’s breeding habits as the harbinger of doom.//