Comes word that some atheists are in a snit because the U.S. Postal Service is going to put Mother Teresa on a stamp:
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."
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.
The stamp - set to be released on Aug. 26, which would have been Mother Teresa's 100th birthday - will recognize the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her humanitarian work, the Postal Service announced last month.
But 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.
Well, that's true enough. What one does with one's life is often inseparable from what one most deeply believes, which is, I suppose, why there are no atheist charitable organizations to speak of. Nonetheless, it's asinine to think, as Ms. Gaylor evidently does, that because one is inspired by religious beliefs to live a life of altruism that that life should not be recognized simply because of the motives which inspired it.
Indeed, when Ms. Gaylor was asked why her organization didn't oppose stamps honoring Malcolm X and Martin Luther King she gave a very puzzling reply:
Gaylor said the atheist group did not oppose stamps 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."
Perhaps the most gracious thing to do here would be to politely avert one's eyes from such a towering display of embarrassing fatuity. Surely Ms Gaylor doesn't intend to be taken seriously. Has she never read the Biography of Malcolm X and how his conversion to Islam shaped his subsequent life? Has she never read the writings of Martin Luther King, who, be it noted, was almost always referred to as "Reverend" King (not to mention that he carried the name of the great protestant reformer)? Is she oblivious to how both his sense of justice and his courage were rooted in his faith in God? If she hasn't, I urge her to pick up a copy of his I Have a Dream speech or his Letter From a Birmingham Jail.
But the deeper question is this: Since when do church/state considerations make it somehow illicit for the government to honor people who do great things from religious motivation? Would Ms. Gaylor have opposed the issuance of the stamp in 1948 which honored the four chaplains aboard the torpedoed USAT Dorchester - one of whom was a priest and presumably bore the honorific of "Father" - who, motivated by their mutual love for God, gave their life vests to others as the boat sank?
Here's the irony in Ms. Gaylor's position, however: In a world in which people acted consistently with their assumptions about ultimate reality there's absolutely no reason an atheist would have for acting altruistically. On atheism acts of great personal sacrifice are utterly inexplicable. People may engage in them, as does Dr. Rieux in Camus' The Plague, but the choice to do so is non-rational. Atheism leads to an egoistic ethic. Great sacrifices for others are incomprehensible in a world without God. People like Mother Teresa, on the other hand, and the four chaplains were motivated by their love for, and gratitude to, God and the conviction that God wanted them to give of themselves for others whom He loves. Grant Ms. Gaylor her Godless world and all we're left with is a life in which no one has any reason to do anything other than look out for his own self-interest - a Hobbesian war of every man against every man.
The Postal Service would struggle in such a world, the world Ms Gaylor would have us live in, to find anyone worth honoring with a stamp.
RLC
