Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa & the Mockery of Religion

Do you regret any of the targets you chose? I mean, who needs to attack Mother Teresa? It was very important to attack Mother Teresa. Why? Well, for the same reason that people admire her, which is you have to care about the millions of people who are stricken by millennial poverty. I mean, poverty of a sort that's almost impossible to escape from. That was her pretended concern. Now, as it happens... It wasn't her fault. No, by no means. Well, you say that, but... It wasn't her fault that people were in poverty. Not in the first place. But as it happens, I could go on in length about this, but summarise it in one statement, which I think is pretty hard to refute. The best known cure for poverty we've come up with is something called the empowerment of women. If you give women control over their cycle of reproduction, you don't keep them chained to an animal cycle of annual pregnancies, and you give them... If you can add to that by throwing in a handful of seeds or some credit, you've done very well. Nowhere where that's tried does it not work. You'll see, in an instant, Mother Teresa spent her entire life campaigning against that. She thought that contraception and abortion were morally equivalent and that abortion was murder. Now, that's not what Calcutta needs, and I think her teachings and preachings were actually counter to the cause that she's supposed to represent, so I thought it was very important to point that out. And to be clear about what you're talking about here, you're talking about the Bible and the Koran. Yeah, well, and the Torah. Yes. All of these are works of fiction. All of these are depraved works of man-made fiction. And in what way does saying that you find the Koran laughable... Not laughable. ..in places, in what way does that help the spread of reason? Oh, well, I think mockery of religion is one of the most essential things, because to demystify supposedly holy texts that are dictated by God and show that they are man-made, you have to show their internal inconsistencies and absurdities. And one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh with authority. It's an indispensable thing. People can call it blasphemy if they like, but if they call it that, they have to assume that there's something to be blasphemed, some divine work. Well, I don't accept the premise.