Her real name was Linda Boreman. The daughter of a New York City cop, she was raised in Yonkers and attended Catholic school where she was known as "Miss Holy Holy" because of her noli me tangere attitude. She died in April of 2002. Read her sad story here.
Her case and that of others, Kerouac for one, point us to what I will call the problem of the inefficacy of religion for moral improvement. Linda Boreman attended Catholic school and ended up a porno star. Kerouac, for all his Catholicism and Buddhism, two ascetic religions, ended up most unascetically destroying his body, the temple of the Holy Spirit, with sex and drugs and booze.
Of course, the counter-question can and must be asked: How much worse would we be if not for the moral teachings we have received from religion? And even if you yourself got no such instruction in your impressionable years, you were buoyed up by a society in which those teachings were partially, if inadequately and often hypocritically, embodied. (The hypocrite at least pays lip service to high standards, lip service being better than no service at all.) The boneheads of the New Atheism cannot of course understand this. They would sweep religion aside without considering what good it has done, and how the genuine problems it addresses will be solved without it.
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