What's your poison?

Here's an application of Karl Popper by Michael Skapinker:

[T]he problem with Hitchens' thesis that religion poisons everything is how to explain those who use it to do good. How does Hitchens account for Martin Luther King? Here's how: King was not really a Christian. Really? Well, at no point did King suggest that those who reviled him would be punished in this world or the next. "In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian." Let's leave aside the possibility that King's lack of interest in revenge came from the Gospels; instead, let's use the tools of a thinker Hitchens himself commends: Karl Popper.

Popper said that for any theory to be scientific, it had to be falsifiable. Is "religion poisons everything" falsifiable? Potentially - all we have to find is something that religion did not poison, and see how the theory stands up. Martin Luther King didn't poison everything. Ah, says Hitchens, he wasn't religious. Any student of Popper recognises this dodge: it is an ad hoc hypothesis, designed to explain away uncomfortable facts that refute the theory. (I notice that Hitchens doesn't try the King trick on Desmond Tutu. But then Tutu is still alive and we can imagine his response to any suggestion that he is not a real Christian.)

One could also ask about the 'poisoning' effects of religion in the case of the many Christian rescuers of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe - people who, when asked why they took the risks they did to help Jews in danger, said things like this:

'I hope God will know I did the best I could to help people'; 'My faith... commands... me to love my fellow man, without exclusions'.

And like this:

'I ache for them in my whole being, I ache for my Jewish brothers and sisters... Humanity is the body of Christ. One part of that humanity is being tortured...'; 'Christ stands behind every human being... He stretches His hand to us through a runaway Jew from the ghetto the same way as He does through our brothers'; 'When I saw people being molested, my religious heart whispered to me, "Don't kill. Love others as you love yourself"'.

And this:

'[N]o matter what a person's colour, race, religion, or language, we are created by one God.'

And this:

'Every wasted life is another nail in Christ's body. When a child is destroyed, all of us become orphans.'

A uniformly poisonous influence? Possibly not. (Clive Davis relays an interesting anecdote about Christopher Hitchens.)