If you believe the followers, God is responsible for a lot: works of charity, terrorist attacks, game-winning field goals, and Academy Awards victories. But does He really deserve all this credit? Do the human beings involved really have so little to do with these acts?
Consider the case of Mother Teresa, whose name became synonymous with the concept of “God’s work” over her 50 years of ministering to the poor in Calcutta. The Vatican’s rushing to canonize the “Saint of the Gutters” faster than a choirboy late for practice, but new evidence has come to light that the world’s most famous nun lived for years in a deep crisis of faith, confessing in private documents that when she thought about God, she felt nothing but “silence and emptiness,” and even doubted the existence of the soul and Jesus Christ.
Her profound doubt doesn’t seem, outwardly at least, to have affected her ability to dedicate her life to the service of the poor, and much of the good she did was performed in spite of an absence of strong faith. It was her work, not her incredible faith, it turns out, that distinguished her life. Her good deeds didn’t stem from religious conviction, and maybe ours shouldn’t either.
The supposed logic behind religious charity is that the poor, destitute, and downtrodden should be helped in the name of Jesus, Allah, God, etc. But this is, at best, an indirect route to uplifting others. What about helping the poor not for the sake of a deity, but for the sake of the poor themselves? Surely their well-being is reason enough.
But what’s the harm, you might think, in doing a bit of good in the name of your faith? If you believe journalist Christopher Hitchens—you don’t have to, by all accounts he’s a bit of an ass—it may not be such a good idea. According to him, Mother Teresa’s attachment to Catholicism actually seems to have played a sinister role in her missionary work. Hitchens, who the Vatican has interviewed as part of Teresa’s beatification process, says that the soon-to-be saint told him that she was working in Calcutta not to help the poor, but to aid the church by creating converts.
Mother Teresa’s mission always refused to publish an audit, drawing criticism for not putting enough money into her clinic—which was run-down at the time of her death—and spending the funds on other endeavours promoting the Catholic church. Maybe the poor of Calcutta would have been better off if she turned up to help them wearing Birkenstocks and khaki shorts instead of her signature blue and white habit.
The idea that good can be done without religion may not seem to matter unless you consider all the harm that’s been done in its name. Homophobics, misogynists, and war-mongers can all be counted amongst the world’s current religious leaders.
These people’s bad deeds ultimately have as much to do with their religions as Mother Teresa’s good deeds had to do with hers. The war currently consuming much of the world, supposedly a struggle between Islam and the West, isn’t so much about the Qur’an and the Bible being antithetical as it is about the history and politics of the regions involved. By the same token, the deranged American zealots who murder abortion doctors would probably be shooting up post offices if they’d never heard of Christianity. It’s not the religion that commits the crime, but the human being.
The danger of invoking religion as the source of one’s actions is that it allows people to mask immorality in a cloak of virtue. Homophobia is nothing but straight-up hate, but if someone says “fag” with a Bible in their hand, their critics are forced to argue against a whole religion rather than just one person’s bigotry. And there’s something noble about a faithful man, isn’t there?
It’s individuals, not sacred texts, that are responsible for their own hateful views. The faithful are so clearly make choices about what they read into books like the Bible and the Qur’an. Those who point to the “Good Book” as evidence that God hates homosexuals and stem cell research rarely spread the word about His apparent lack of sympathy for rape victims. According to Deuteronomy 22, women who are raped in a city should be stoned to death, because if they were truly raped they would have cried out loudly enough for someone to hear. This is not an oft-quoted passage on the 700 Club.
There may be a lot of good to religions. Although an increasingly smaller number of people find religion appealing today, throughout history millions have been inspired by their faiths to ponder important questions, to seek out knowledge, and to better the world. Still, religion is at best a vessel for our good deeds, not the cause of them, as Mother Teresa’s life so curiously illustrates. At worst, faith can be a veil for our misdeeds, an excuse for hatred and violence.
The world may not be a better place without religion, but it might be a better place if we started attributing world events and people’s actions, good or bad, to themselves, not to a faith or a god. I just can’t believe Jesus has nothing better to do on Sundays than kick all those field goals.
