him around the Calcutta orphanage. And it seems to me that the existence of such doubts makes her enterprise all the more breathtakingly presumptuous: Shein fact was not one of “those who know they are right.” She felt no certainty that the poverty she was barely palliating would lead its sufferers toward an eternal reward. It is one thing to take Pascal’s wager and bet on the existence of God, no matter what one’s doubts may be. But to lead thousands of others to the gaming table, insisting that they double down with their one paltry handful of chips?
After his cancer diagnosis, I often prayed, on my knees and through all my own doubts, for Hitch. Not for his soul; just for his earthly continuation. Nothing bothered me more during the long months of his illness (and suffering) than having to watch interviewers ask him if he might now not be ready to change his mind on matters cosmic. He met such inquiries with a sort of Christian forbearance, treated them as one more teachable moment in which he could explain his position. And throughout this grim period, by his conduct and example, he provided me with one specific religious certainty, the only one I’ve had in a very long time: If God does exist, He would have been deeply disappointed in any renunciation of nonbelief by Christopher Hitchens, that spectacular piece of His handicraft, the worthiest foe among all His brilliant, wayward sons of the morning.
Thomas Mallon
February 2012
One may safely affirm that all popular theology has a kind of appetite for absurdity and contradiction.… While their gloomy apprehensions make them ascribe to Him measures of conduct which in human creatures would be blamed, they must still affect to praise and admire that conduct in the object of their devotional addresses. Thus it may safely be affirmed that popular religions are really, in the conception of their more vulgar votaries, a species of daemonism.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion
Nothing to fear in God. Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured.
Diogenes of Oenoanda
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Acknowledgments
Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries—“without counting India”? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale.
Once the decision is taken to do without awe and reverence, if only for a moment, the Mother Teresa phenomenon assumes the proportions of the ordinary and even the political. It is part of the combat of ideas and the clash of interpretations, and can make no serious claims to having invisible means of support. The first step, as so often, is the crucial one. It still seems astonishing to me that nobody had ever before decided to look at the saint of Calcutta as if, possibly, the supernatural had nothing to do with it.
I was very much discouraged—as I asked the most obvious questions and initiated what were, at the outset, the most perfunctory investigations—by almost everybody to whom I spoke. So I must mention several people who gave me heart, and who answered the implied question—Is nothing sacred?—with a stoical “No.” Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation , and Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair , both allowed me to write early polemics against Mother Teresa even though they had every reason to expect a hostile reader response (which, interestingly, failed to materialize). In making the Channel Four documentary Hell’s Angel , which aired
After his cancer diagnosis, I often prayed, on my knees and through all my own doubts, for Hitch. Not for his soul; just for his earthly continuation. Nothing bothered me more during the long months of his illness (and suffering) than having to watch interviewers ask him if he might now not be ready to change his mind on matters cosmic. He met such inquiries with a sort of Christian forbearance, treated them as one more teachable moment in which he could explain his position. And throughout this grim period, by his conduct and example, he provided me with one specific religious certainty, the only one I’ve had in a very long time: If God does exist, He would have been deeply disappointed in any renunciation of nonbelief by Christopher Hitchens, that spectacular piece of His handicraft, the worthiest foe among all His brilliant, wayward sons of the morning.
Thomas Mallon
February 2012
One may safely affirm that all popular theology has a kind of appetite for absurdity and contradiction.… While their gloomy apprehensions make them ascribe to Him measures of conduct which in human creatures would be blamed, they must still affect to praise and admire that conduct in the object of their devotional addresses. Thus it may safely be affirmed that popular religions are really, in the conception of their more vulgar votaries, a species of daemonism.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion
Nothing to fear in God. Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured.
Diogenes of Oenoanda
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Acknowledgments
Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries—“without counting India”? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale.
Once the decision is taken to do without awe and reverence, if only for a moment, the Mother Teresa phenomenon assumes the proportions of the ordinary and even the political. It is part of the combat of ideas and the clash of interpretations, and can make no serious claims to having invisible means of support. The first step, as so often, is the crucial one. It still seems astonishing to me that nobody had ever before decided to look at the saint of Calcutta as if, possibly, the supernatural had nothing to do with it.
I was very much discouraged—as I asked the most obvious questions and initiated what were, at the outset, the most perfunctory investigations—by almost everybody to whom I spoke. So I must mention several people who gave me heart, and who answered the implied question—Is nothing sacred?—with a stoical “No.” Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation , and Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair , both allowed me to write early polemics against Mother Teresa even though they had every reason to expect a hostile reader response (which, interestingly, failed to materialize). In making the Channel Four documentary Hell’s Angel , which aired
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