mother teresa is a cunt here is why

[TheRealJoeFish]

It is easy to read up on what an evil person Mother Teresa was.  Since Hitchens was brought up, I will include a link relevant to him first:

[hide]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missionary_Position

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...arest.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worl...-no-saint/

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iv-d...21363.html

Basically, anyone who likes Mother Teresa has either been conned by good PR and has false beliefs about her, or is an immoral bastard for approving of the things she has done.  Read the articles at the links for some details on this.

THANK YOU, Pyrrho, for providing sources for me to read rather than just invective . As I guessed might happen, my view of Mother Teresa is becoming bleaker by the minute. I'm still thinking this through, because I both 1) don't want anything good to say about her to be because, as Hitchens says, I "do not like to admit that I have been gulled or conned", and 2) don't want to immediately dismiss her because of the people around me who I like and respect have a very negative opinion of her.  I do not want to be a victim of either stubbornness or groupthink.

So, what I'm going to do is think this through, right here, in this post.  I'll note my considerations, my thoughts, and let you know what I come up with.  I don't exactly know why, but perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I've been in a real literary mood as of late (been writing like mad up in herre).

So, here's what I thought Mother Teresa did, and what I based my statement of "respect" of her on (do note, I didn't say I liked her, although I understand if that just looks like hindsighted quibbling):

- Mother Teresa was an ethnic Albanian who went to Calcutta, India.  Here she founded an order of catholic nuns, whose missions were to 1) spread the catholic gospel (come on, you can't be a nun without wanting to do this) and 2) provide medical care for the poor.

- Mother Teresa's movement gained traction and began to be a popular charity in India.  The order grew very swiftly, and opened multiple medical and hospice centers around India and, eventually, the world.

- Mother Teresa's charity grew into an international operation taking in many millions of dollars annually and distributing a large portion (though it would be ridiculous to suggest all) of these funds to provide medical care for the poor.  In 1979 Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

- Mother Teresa would frequently travel to places devastated by wars or disasters, such as earthquake zones and, memorably, Chernobyl.

- Mother Teresa was an outspoken pro-life, anti-divorce activist who espoused a hardline, conservative interpretation of Catholic values.

Based on the above narrative, I certainly respected Mother Teresa.  The significant negatives in points 1.2 and 5 were not egregious enough that I could not value her contributions as outlined in 1.1, 2, 3 and 4.

Now, here are additional things I've learned in the last 24 to 48 hours:

- A large portion of money that went to her organization seems to have disappeared.

- Mother Teresa accepted large amounts of likely stolen or otherwise ill-gotten money from disreputable sources, and did not respond to issues regarding that.

- Mother Teresa believed that "the poor should accept their lot," and "the suffering of the poor helps the world."

- Building on the above, Mother Teresa seems to have reveled in the suffering of others, including possibly not providing pain medications due to a belief that suffering was holy (this is contradicted somewhat by sources indicating that her organization was decades ahead of its time in importing opioids to India).

- Mother Teresa herself sought advanced medical care at American surgical centers when her health failed.

- Mother Teresa and her organization seem to have constantly tried to convert the ill unbelievers and even baptized terminal patients against their will.

- Many of Teresa's hospice centers were substandard and provided very poor medical care.

- Teresa cared for the poor while not trying even a little bit to make people not poor.

- It has additionally been suggested that Mother Teresa cultivated an image of poverty, rather than actually lived in poverty (see personal medical care above).

- Politically, she has backed powerful oppressive regimes rather than the people.

If I've missed anything important, let me know.

---

Here are my initial reactions to the above:
1. A few important questions to ask are as follows:

- Given that Mother Teresa's hospices were generally (I assume usually but not uniformly) "substandard", would the medical and emotion care received in them be better or worse than the alternative? I would be willing to forgive a lot of faults with a medical facility if the alternative was literally dying alone in a house or a ditch. The matter would be extremely different if I had been persuaded or deceived into choosing this facility over a better realistic alternative.  I have seen no evidence that one or the other of possibilities is the case.

- A completely separate question: how much worse was the care than it could have been, had a very large portion of the money given to the organization gone to their care and upkeep and it been managed optimally?  If the care was considerably (or even slightly) worse, why is important.  Was Teresa taking a great deal of money for her own personal use?  I have seen no evidence that she was, and I doubt this.  I do not mean whether she relied on the organization's money to provide her own medical care, or even if she spent money on airplanes flying from disaster zone to disaster zone; I believe these things are legitimate expenses for the (figure)head of a charitable organization.  What I mean is: Teresa never appears to have retired to a mansion in the Seychelles.  She continued to wear that same old ugly blue and white shawl thing until her body, wrinkled and hunched, stopped working.

- Did Teresa fail to provide painkillers or otherwise alleviate physical suffering?  It appears that she certainly did, at least in some places.  Again, we need to ask why.  If she did this due to a choice to open 100 very basic hospitals rather than 10 deluxe ones, well, that's a decision that I can't take issue with.  But that does not appear to be the case.  What appears to be the case is that, effectively, those who submitted themselves into her care, and who informed her they were physically suffering, were told that their suffering was 1) good for them and 2) good for the world.  This is nigh-on unforgivable.

- Did Teresa try very hard to convert the vulnerable?  Certainly.  When I said I respected her, I already assumed she did.  From a catholic standpoint, you're a crap priest or nun if you don't try.  This was one considerable negative factor that I already entertained, and which caused me to dislike her, and to hate the religious aspect of what she did, even as I respected her aid to the poor.  Did she forcibly "convert" people who were unable or unwilling to give consent?  This appears to be so.  This, though, pushes past religious enthusiasm to religious zealotry/hypocrisy.  Disregarding personal autonomy to foist religion on people is another great wrong.

- Did Teresa ignore the reasons why people were poor in the first place? Yes. She appears to have completely disregarded the factors that caused people to be poor, and focused instead on people only once they were poor. I don't have a problem with this. Different charities address different problems/goals.  This is the least of my worries.

---

The Final Conclusion

I stand by my earlier post inasmuch as it was reasonable based on my understanding at the time. Of course, my understanding at the time was crap.

I think the reason I didn't want to let go of my initially proffered stance regarding Teresa was that I understood the criticism of her to be this: "Teresa was a con artist." I know some of you think that, but I didn't, and I still don't.

What I didn't understand was that not all of those who said I was being conned were saying that Teresa was the one doing the conning.  No, what I'm finally coming to see as the reality is this: Teresa was a perfectly straightforward, honest person whose number one goal was to make everyone in this world catholic, and who only saw helping people as worthwhile if it helped them find jesus. Because of that, she did not help people well, and chose to help some people and not others even though she was capable of helping all.  The first of these things (not helping people well) I can look past to "respect" someone.  The latter I can't.

The conning, of course, was done by the media (pushing a christian narrative... damn that totally liberal socialist atheist media), the church, and the people around me who were indoctrinated into that system.  Some of this conning was to make money, some of it was wishful thinking, a hope that someone could be perfect, and the lion's share of it was to promote the brand of christianity.

Considering all the facts, I do not respect Mother Teresa.  I don't not respect her because her religion made her help ineffective; I don't respect her because she chose to let her religion make her help ineffective.

---

Epilogue:

Well, I've spent the entire afternoon at work reading this thread, learning about Mother Teresa, thinking, and typing.  I'll admit I'm a little annoyed at how this thread started out, and it would have been nice to have had facts presented to me a little more directly.  But I'm on the freaking internet, where 1) I shouldn't demand people to provide encyclopedia-level citations whenever they're trying to persuade me, and 2) I'm about 4 seconds away from googling everything, so, mea culpa, mea culpa...

So, I may have not done any work this afternoon, but I think I'm a better, more complete person for it.

Yeah, let's go with that.

Thanks for indulging my novella here. I   you all

[Minimalist]

I'm just gonna go lay down,this is too much to absorb.. :/

It was for me also. Mother Teresa had been a hero of my childhood so it hurt to see that she didn't just have human faults but might have hurt a lot of people.

Never fall for any bullshit the church puts out and you'll never be disappointed.

[Aoi Magi]

@TRJF: Wow you really did some studying.
But on one point I'd say, initially the alternative was not better. While under the British rule, the poor were quite oppressed, not only by the foreigners but by their own "upper-class" countrymen who tried to please the rulers by oppressing them. And the best and possibly only way to get help was through westerners like Mother Teresa and Sister Nivedita. So her help did indeed change some lives for the better, but that was only in the early days.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Given the times if Teresa was on the up and up she could have devoted her energies to improving conditions in her own mudhole of Albania instead of trudging off to India. How much money did she get her grubby hands on in India? Who knows but it was more than she could have gotten if she had stayed in Albania doing the same thing. The suspicion is that a lot of the money was unaccounted for. So did she funnel it back to her buddies in Albania? Remember, it's all about the money.

[pgrimes15]

She died a week after princess diana so her passing went almost unnoticed and we were spared the usual endless round of unctuous eulogies.

[CapnAwesome]

Mother Teresa isn't alive. She isn't anything anymore. Therefore the title of this thread should be:

Mother Teresa was a cunt.

[dyresand]

Dafaq?
I was always told that she was a sweet person that helped a lot of people.Maybe she had a twisted view of the world and a lot of crazy religious views but she did help people right?I mean,that has to count for something..

Well no, she raised millions of pounds, donated to help the needy but the plight of the people in her care did not improve, and this in a land where everything was cheap.

What she did with the money was open more and more nunneries to produce catholic indian girls.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This.
She could have actually done some real help but no she didn't.