Why Affluent Atheists Slam Religious Charity

On the radio program, On Being, last month, the host, Krista Tippett had this exchange with Richard Rodriguez:

MR. RODRIGUEZ: Well, the deepest, I mean, the most radical Catholic spirituality I know of, is Spanish. And it’s a mystical tradition of the dark night of the soul.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.

MR. RODRIGUEZ: Um, we often, you know, I end this book with Mother Teresa, who was, um, hounded by Christopher Hitchens, our great American atheist going from cable channel to cable channel to tell us God was dead. Um, at a time in which — I live part of the year in London. And I assure you, God is not dead in London. Muslims are plentiful, as are Hindus. Uh, but nonetheless, Mother Teresa, after her death, these letters, uh, to confessors and bishops were revealed. For 40 years of her life, Mother Teresa describes her life as a darkness. And there she is, more and more famous in the world, uh, mocked by Christopher Hitchens in the pages of Vanity Fair magazine. I mean, In Vanity Fair magazine, Christopher Hitchens tells us that Mother Teresa is ugly.

MS. TIPPETT: Right.

MR. RODRIGUEZ: And I think to myself, what is that? What is he playing on in America that you can say about a pious old woman who is bathing the dying in Calcutta. What is that?

Adding information to the issue of the members of the scribbling elite's utter pigishness when writing about related activities of religious folk is this piece by Brian Palmer on Slate magazine.   At this point in the developing Ebola catastrophe, Mr. Palmer, a magazine scribbler who obviously believes he is a member of the scientific enlightenment, an atheist, of course, pauses to snipe and Hitchens (to make a verb of it) over the fact that many, if not most, of the Westerners who were on the ground attempting to provide medical care to those in West Africa who can't access the most advanced available for-pay medicine, are, and there is no delicate way to put this horrific fact, religiously motivated to do what they are doing.

I say that he pauses to condemn these faith heads who are dying of the very disease they are treating, which many of them realized they were at risk of even before these living Fr. Damians realized they were confronting this dreadful disease.  But as being roused to notice something on the news out of West Africa and casually following it in order to find a hook to scribble on,  Brian Palmer's activity has been, it was very minor level pausing.  He shares that with so much of the western educated class, those who elevate science into an actual religion.   He begins the piece, this way.

I recently sat in on a course for infectious disease specialists in Austria. Around 40 young doctors and academics were discussing infection control in hospitals and communities in the developing world, and the talk inevitably turned to Ebola. Controlling the spread of the disease continues to challenge the medical world, but there is consensus on one issue. “MSF is the only group on the ground,” said one doctor, using the French acronym for Doctors Without Borders. “They are the only ones making any difference.” The congregation nodded in agreement.

The statement was probably intended as a jibe at the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it slighted another group by omission: missionaries. Missionary doctors and nurses are stationed throughout Africa, in rural outposts and urban slums. Rather than parachuting in during crises, like some international medicine specialists, a large number of them have undertaken long-term commitments to address the health problems of poor Africans.

And yet, for secular Americans—or religious Americans who prefer their medicine to be focused more on science than faith—it may be difficult to shake a bit of discomfort with the situation. Our historic ambivalence toward missionary medicine has crystallized into suspicion over the past several decades. It’s great that these people are doing God’s work, but do they have to talk about Him so much?

So much arrogance, not to mention predictable arrogance, so little time to address it.  I will summarize what he says,  Yeah, me and a bunch of my fellow sciency types hanging in Austria are going to use this threatening pandemic to say that all those faith heads who were there, on the ground years before this should just STFU about what they think about religion and keep washing wounds and delivering babies with little to no resources because..... well, what's there you don't get about the word "SECULAR!", you stupid faith heads?

One of the things that came to me is that they seem to believe that all of the people who work at Doctors Without Borders are  atheists or at least Palmer's kind of non-religious people, an idea whose truth I'd seriously wonder at.  I did have an online atheist claim to me that DWB was an "atheist organization" a couple of months ago.  I looked at their online sites in English and French and could find not the first thing that would support that contention.  Perhaps Brian Palmer is merely tapping into a commonly held superstition of American atheists.  I've noticed lots of atheists try to claim organizations which aren't explicitly religious, even those who were begun by and led by quite religious people.

Palmer keeps asking in his article why he doesn't like that so many of those who are putting their lives at risk to try to provide treatment for those ill with and at risk for Ebola are missionaries motivated by religion, an odd question to keep asking because he keeps betraying his motives, hatred of religion and, surprise, especially Christianity - through the piece, even as he presents reasons to not have those motives.   There are some pretty bizarre things in his article, for example.

There are a few legitimate reasons to question the missionary model, starting with the troubling lack of data in missionary medicine. When I write about medical issues, I usually spend hours scouring PubMed, a research publications database from the National Institutes of Health, for data to support my story. You can’t do that with missionary work, because few organizations produce the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed data that is required in the age of evidence-based medicine. A few years ago in the Lancet, Samuel Loewenberg wrote that there is “no way to calculate the number of missionaries currently operating in Tanzania,” the country he was reporting on. How can we know if they’re effective, or how to improve the health care systems they participate in, if we don’t even know how many missionary doctors there are?

Apparently it's the fault of religious medical missionaries to not spend enormous amounts of their often nonexistent resources on record keeping and reporting to the very bureaucrats from governments and para-national organizations who have not provided adequate resources to medical care in a secular context.  I, on the other hand, suspect that if they did spend the money and person-hours on documenting what they did, Palmer would dismiss it as self-serving and unreliable propaganda and demand the "objective" oversight which is not going to happen.   He would speculate on religious motives polluting the purity of data.

The ebola disaster provides western atheists with just another opportunity to take shots at one of the most popular and admirable features of some, though not all religions, active and real and risky generosity, even unto the death of the provider.   Such atheists are compelled to make such jerks of themselves, in this their ideological war against religion confront one of its greatest hurdles.  In this activity we see religion at its most admirable and desirable.  It's pretty hard to argue with that aspect of religion, going up against the most real of all real facts, they are knowingly willing to risk their lives for the benefit of people they don't even know BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE GOD WANTS THEM TO.   Perhaps, finding ourselves in the tightest of pinches, we might rise to the occasion but none of us seems to have done so in the unimmediate and rather abstract, in which medical missionaries decide to do what they do.  Their planning and training to put themselves at risk for others can take a long time, even years of sustained and dedicated planning.  And as they plan and, even more so as they begin to confront the often horrific reality their vocation addresses, they continue.   Becoming a medical missionary clearly takes more advanced planning and personal sacrifice than going to a confab in Austria  so you can write about it on an online mag does.

The casual atheist creepiness that has become a common feature of English language magazine journalism is entirely out of hand.   On this issue it was clearly the late and swineish Christopher Hitchens who led the way with his star turn attacks on Mother Teresa, but it is more generally a sign that the most unattractive attributes of our eutrophic, decadent, so-called educated class have become a habit of thought.   That kind of thing comes with material affluence all too often.  Unsurprisingly, servicing materialism leads to different results from trying to follow the gospel and The Law.

You would think that by the time he reached his last paragraphs that Palmer would have realized he should have scrapped the piece which is not only riddled with self-contradictions but which consists of them.

Like it or not, though, we are deeply reliant on missionary doctors and nurses. The 2008 ARHAP report found that in some sub-Saharan African countries 30 percent of health care facilities are run by religious entities. That system is crumbling due to declining funding, possibly motivated in part by growing Western suspicion of missionary medicine. We have a choice: Swallow our objections and support these facilities, spend vast sums of money to build up Africa’s secular health care capacity immediately, or watch the continent drown in Ebola, HIV, and countless other disease outbreaks.

As an atheist, I try to make choices based on evidence and reason. So until we’re finally ready to invest heavily in secular medicine for Africa, I suggest we stand aside and let God do His work.

Well, as history shows what he begins with is not likely to start happening BECAUSE OF THE BASIS ON WHICH THOSE DECISIONS IN SECULAR INSTITUTIONS ARE MADE NOT LEADING THERE,  while the work of medical missionaries has a history longer than either modern science, the nation state or secular, international organizations.  The motivating force of religion, sorry Palmer, IS THE REASON THAT THOSE MISSIONARIES DO WHAT THEY DO.   For someone who claims to believe in the methods of science to demand that what causes lead to those effects is a forbidden topic of discussion is ridiculous.  There is no real reason for them to shut up about the very cause of the entirely admirable effect which their religious belief brings about.  And why should any rational person believe they should be coerced to shut up?

Those who serve Mammon produce the results they do, people who try to serve the will of God do what they do.  There is a real difference between the two,  It is as real a difference as anything science can demonstrate.  That atheists don't find that fact serves their ideology is evidence that there is something lacking in their ideology.   Atheism lacks what brings about self-sacrificing generosity even as religious missionaries often lack the resources to do more good than they can.  It is a failure of secular institutions that can raise and distribute those resources, not the religious motives of those who are actually trying to do it, even when the western media aren't looking.