Christopher Hitchens - Mother Teresa: Hell's Angel

[Major Nikon]

[Laffy Kat]

1. I miss Hitch, greatly.

[Missn-Hitch]

28. Not as much as I do. Cheers.

[Laffy Kat]

36. Obviously.

There is, indeed, a great void now. We needed him.

[Lordquinton]

37. Jesus Christ

I didn't realize we were in the Hitch-olympics!

[chillfactor]

2. before I watched this video I had great respect for Mother Teresa.....

after watching the video.....that respect took a serious nose dive.

[The_Casual_Observer]

3. I don't recall that Hitchens ever had anything good to say about anyone. So this comes as no surprise

He was a Gore Vidal wannabe, and not a very good one.

And Oh how he hated the Clintons!

[Major Nikon]

7. Mother Teresa thought abortion was the "greatest threat to peace"

She also thought suffering was a gift from god and she was baptizing those within the care of her charity without any regard to their chosen religion. Those who want to focus on Hitchens rather than Mother Teresa or the facts presented appear to embrace ad hominem because that seems to be all they have to impeach the work.

[The_Casual_Observer]

8. You expected Mother Teresa to be pro-abortion???

Hitchens was a miserable drunken sot that didn't do anything but write nasty shit about everybody and everything. He wasn't worthy to clean Mother Teresa's toilet.

[Warren Stupidity]

9. The lack of toilets and the general lack of sanitation in the missions is independently documented.

You might want to pick a different metaphor.

[struggle4progress]

24. "I'm proud to blame Teresa for the lack of toilets in India!"

... Some 70 percent of households in India don’t have access to toilets, whether in rural areas or urban slums. Roughly 60 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people still defecate in the open ...

[Warren Stupidity]

25. It was a medical facility

As extensively documented her hospices were literally shitholes.

[struggle4progress]

31. India's 900 largest cities generate at least 29 thousand million liters of sewage daily

About 85% of these cities have no sewage treatment facilities, so about 80% of the sewage remains untreated

http://cpcb.nic.in/newitems/12.pdf

[struggle4progress]

33. ... Calcutta's sewage system was created under the British around the turn of the century

to serve a city of 600,000. The system has had little added to it and the original structure has significantly deriorated yet it is supposed to serve a city of now about 14 millions ...
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/calcutta.htm


Collapses of old brick sewers in Kolkata have become more frequent in the last years
http://www.bi-constructionnews.com/en_article_sewer_rehabilitation_in_Kolkata.news

[Warren Stupidity]

35. I see a sewer has broken and a flood of Google Gish has poured out.

[struggle4progress]

44. The actual facts might interest anyone who is really concerned about sanitation in India,

where about 875 million people do not have access to toilets and about 750 million people simply defecate openly

[Major Nikon]

11. I don't expect anyone other than misogynist shitbags to be anti-abortion

So for someone to use their undeserved claim to fame to promote that shitbag position so vehemently is rather telling.

[The_Casual_Observer]

12. Thats a pretty brave stand. Spent a lot of time in places like Calcutta have you?

You are you to judge anybody?

[Warren Stupidity]

13. Kolkata

[rug]

17. "Of course, more politically correct visitors tripped all the time,

trying to carefully enunciate Kolkata and putting the stress in all the wrong places."

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/09/02/492447039/tk

How do you pronounce it, warren? There's an audio at the link if you want to correct it.

[Lordquinton]

38. Do you agree with her on abortion?

Simple question.

[rug]

39. How do you pronounce Kolkata, quinton?

Simple question.

Do stay on track.

[Lordquinton]

40. Do you agree with her stance on abortion?

Why is this a question you can't answer rug? It's a very simple, yet very important question.

[rug]

41. Start a thread on abortion if you want my opinion on it.

[Lordquinton]

42. Do you agree with her on abortion?

Your refusal to answer speaks volumes to what the answer is.

[rug]

43. It speaks volumes about you.

[Lordquinton]

45. That makes no sense

Stop the deflection and answer, do you agree with her stance on abortion?

[Major Nikon]

14. You mean like you've judged Hitchens?

Meanwhile people are still quoting him after his death while you are still throwing rotten tomatoes anonymously on the interwebs.

Did you even bother considering statements like that work both ways?

And I've been to India and several other 3rd world areas, not that it has anything to do with the subject at hand and just seems like another lame lob on your part rather than dealing with the actual facts of matter.

[rug]

16. I'll judge Hitchens.

He was a war-mongering cheerleader of George Bush and his wars, and a failed trotskyite.

[The_Casual_Observer]

19. The day that you or Hitchens are awarded a Nobel Prize or become saints

will be the day that I would buy any of that nonsense. Forget it.

[Major Nikon]

20. Those that have no substance to offer are easily forgotten

No worries there.

[Act_of_Reparation]

23. Henry Kissinger has a Nobel Prize.

I'm fairly certain I'm a better person than he is.

[trotsky]

34. Agnes Bojaxhiu collected hundreds of millions of dollars in donations.

Where did all that money go?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html

...This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/a-new-expose-on-mother-teresa-shows-that-she-and-the-vatican-were-even-worse-than-we-thought/

“At the time of her death, Mother Teresa had opened 517 missions welcoming the poor and sick in more than 100 countries. The missions have been described as “homes for the dying” by doctors visiting several of these establishments in Calcutta. Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving appropriate care. The doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care, inadequate food, and no painkillers. The problem is not a lack of money—the Foundation created by Mother Teresa has raised hundreds of millions of dollars—but rather a particular conception of suffering and death: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” was her reply to criticism, cites the journalist Christopher Hitchens. Nevertheless, when Mother Teresa required palliative care, she received it in a modern American hospital.”

Why didn't she choose to honor god with her suffering, as she forced others to?

[Mariana]

15. She thought OTHER people's suffering was a gift from God.

She wasn't terribly interested in experiencing that particular gift from God herself, was she?

[The_Casual_Observer]

21. I guess you would know the details of her death.

An expert.

[Mariana]

22. Don't need to be an expert to read the news.

She died of a massive heart attack, is what was reported.

Another poster has already linked to reports about the appalling conditions and lack of treatment the inmates of her facilities endured. But when she sought medical attention, she went to modern hospitals to obtain it.

[longship]

4. When we lost Hitch, we lost a gem. nt

[guillaumeb]

27. Hitch was not a gem.

He was a piece of coal waiting to become a diamond. With enough pressure, and thousands of years, who knows.

[longship]

29. I don't agree with everything he said.

But I don't have to in order to love the guy. He was one of the greatest orators of our age. His religious oratory was splendid. god is not Great is an extraordinary read.

I don't throw people under the bus just because of a disagreement. That would be a stupid thing to do. And regrettably, all too common here on DU.

Hitchens was awesome.

[guillaumeb]

30. Did you at least appreciate the humor in my response?

[longship]

32. I am not sure.

But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

No point in pointless argument.

[jonno99]

5. As I stated on the other thread, this video may as well have been titled:

Hitchens Disagrees with Catholic Church Doctrine

Big surprise there - not...

[Major Nikon]

6. The problem those who make such observations have is Hitchens wasn't the only one calling bullshit

The editor of the Lancet investigated and verified the same conditions as did others.

[Warren Stupidity]

10. It really isn't RCC doctrine that the dying poor should be denied palliative care.

[Mariana]

18. Exactly.

Denial of pain relieving treatment to people who are dying was Mother Teresa's doctrine, not that of the RCC.

[Warren Stupidity]

26. I'm also pretty sure the RCC is in favor of sanitation.