How my loathing of Mother Teresa turned to admiration

[rug]

I’m not enamoured with the idea of sainthood, but despite her faults Mother Teresa took dying people off the Kolkata streets. No one else does that.

Mari Marcel Thekaekara
Sunday 4 September 2016 10.24 EDT

I grew up in a Kolkata flat across the road from Mother Teresa’s convent. This was in the 1960s, before she was famous. I was one of many Catholic children who volunteered at Shishu Bhavan, her orphanage for abandoned children, feeding and bathing babies during the school holidays. It upset everyone greatly that the nuns were forbidden even a chilled juice on a sweltering summer’s day. Absolutely nothing happened without Mother Teresa’s permission. Young sisters walked miles in the scorching sun, often barefoot, on burning hot pavements, because Mother Teresa decreed it had to be done. A precocious 12-year-old, I hated this unfair, petty autocrat.

Indian children were taught to respect their elders and revere the religious. In my teens, however, I met Marxist teachers who forced us to think critically about society and religion. So by the time I reached university I was in iconoclastic mode. I shunned the hypocrisy of many “pillars” of the church. Mother Teresa definitely helped the poor but her sisters were allowed to write home only twice a year, their personal letters scrutinised, sometimes by Mother Teresa herself. What a control freak, I raged.

Mother Teresa didn’t deserve Christopher Hitchen’s unadulterated, poisonous vitriol. But her vintage, “There’s something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion,” left me fuming too. How dare she trivialise poverty? But she could. She did. And the world lapped it up. She once comforted a sufferer, with the line: “You are suffering, that means Jesus is kissing you.” The infuriated man screamed, “Then tell your Jesus to stop kissing me.” As a Christian in a Hindu majority country, such Teresa-isms often left me squirming with embarrassment.

At 19, filled with youthful arrogance and self-righteous indignation, I questioned how she could ethically take money from the world’s most obnoxious dictators. Why was she silent about unjust wars and oppression?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/04/mother-teresa-admiration-sainthood-dying-kolkata

[chillfactor]

1. and I had just the opposite reaction..

from admiration to disgust after watching the video yesterday about her...wish I could remember who posted and narrated that video. Then today I saw a post on DU that the teresa orphanages were closing their adoptions because they did not want children being adopted by single people or people who were divorced.....I guess living in an orphanage seems better than living in a warm, loving home.

[chillfactor]

2. ah yes Christopher.....hate to tell you but his video was right on the money.

[struggle4progress]

4. What did he ever do for the homeless dying on the streets of India?

[Brettongarcia]

25. He championed reason, logic, science

And the technologies that have already saved billions from sickness and death. And that will increasingly, finally, save even an India crippled by religion, religious castes.

[Igel]

12. It helps to remember that we have time.

Time is what we use to keep everything from happening at once. And we have different people to keep everything from being done by the same person.

You get millions in donations. You reuse needles and leave some to die. You stop providing adoption services. You get canonized.

Thing is, those things are distributed over time and people. The person who reused needles wasn't Teresa, but staff. When? All that ends with is a "?" but the claims are old, very old. Quite possibly dating to the times before her outreach was famous and before she was getting hundreds of millions in pledges. (Let the Palestinian Authority tell you how pledges go. They get many hundreds of millions in pledges, too, but not all of those pledges are bankable.)

Were people turned away? I'm sure. You have a smallish staff and a large population, you do this. Maybe it's triage, maybe it's some other way of limiting your use of resources to the resources you have. Food banks do this, homeless shelters do this, military hospitals do this, even regular hospitals do this. They're all evil. I guess. Shut them down because they're not perfect, and we can't let imperfect things exist. (Of course, Hitchens gets to be among the first things to be shut down because he's not perfect. Oh. Crap.)

Which goes to reusing needles. "I'm sorry, but we can't give you this drug because we don't have any clean needles." Oh. That would mean the proper thing to do would be to send away somebody without helping them. Gee. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Well, as long as justice is served as she's damned.

Mostly the complaints are, "I was involved and I think I was mistreated" or "I've done nothing to help these people but am royally pissed off by the fact that some religious figure is getting credit for doing something good." In some cases people don't like heroes--all heroes except their own must be crushed. In other cases they don't like that something religious isn't being outed for the horrible thing it "really" is, because the underlying belief is that it must always do only bad.

As for blaming Teresa for what her organization did 18 years after her death, that's a bit of a tough call. Perhaps she'd agree with it. Perhaps she wouldn't. She's dead and the dead (at least in my opinion) know nothing, see nothing, experience nothing. They're dead.

Then again, some think that only the perfect can be saints. That's their belief, though, not that of the Catholic Church. (Not their organization, so they don't get to call the shots, much less make up the definitions. Some people just can't handle diversity of thought and opinion, they're all superficial and skin-deep.)

Silly argument, though. Rather like debating how many angels can be put in a concentration camp on the head of a pin.

[struggle4progress]

3. About 3000 people die each year on the streets of New Delhi

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/33000-homeless-people-died-on-Delhi-streets-since-2004-Government-report/articleshow/49442688.cms

[Cartoonist]

5. What does that say about Hinduism?

It must be capitalism, or something else to blame.
I know, it's all Hitchens fault.

[rug]

6. It says nothing about Hinduism.

What, precisely, do yoiu think is causing these deaths?

[Cartoonist]

7. A lack of human compassion

I guess Krishna is like Jesus' dad, a cold blooded killer.

[rug]

8. Your title is the complete answer.

If you don't believe in a god, it's pointless to blame one for this suffering.

[Cartoonist]

9. You miss the point

I'm not surprised. So much for religion being a force for good.

[rug]

10. So, you're left to blaming humans again.

To be precise, human ideologies.

Do you consume as much thought criticizing capitalism?

[Cartoonist]

11. Deflecting again

Is that all you do?

[rug]

13. Not in the least.

You say there is no god, so that's out.

Therefore it's humans causing this

You say religion is a human construct, but it's also an ideology.

I asked you about capitalism, which is also a human construct and an ideology.

You refuse to answer.

Who's ducking the argument here?

[Cartoonist]

14. You

I was talking religion

[rug]

15. I was talking about reality.

[Brettongarcia]

26. If humans invent the gods?

Then the distinction between God and human ideas is false.

[rug]

34. Then humans must look at themselves for blame.

If humans invent the gods.

[struggle4progress]

16. You're free to provide a detailed explanation of your theories

I should hope for an explanation (say) of the following disparities:

India's per capita GDP is around $1500 and median income around $600, while US per capita GDP is around $53000 and median income around $24000

Issues to consider might include:

India's literacy rate is around 75%, while the US rate is around 85%

Although 40% of Indians are native Hindi speakers, over 5% of the population are native speakers of Bengali, over 5% native speakers of Telugu, over 5% native speakers of Marathi, over 5% native speakers of Tamil, and over 5% native speakers of Urdu. In the US, about 80% of the population are native English speakers and over 10% native Spanish speakers

It might also be noteworthy that:

India remained a colony during the industrial revolution in the Western World, while the US shed colonial status before the industrial revolution began. The mechanization of textile manufacturing in the British Isles largely destroyed India's significant textile production, by providing a large export market for raw cotton and saturating India with bulk mill textiles

[Cartoonist]

17. I had a question, not a theory

You're the one who believes in God and his mercy. How's that working out on the street?

[struggle4progress]

18. My religious faith does not hold that humans are necessarily loving and merciful

but rather: that we do have this capability and that love and mercy are the only real signs of true religion

Exactly how this world became what it is today, and exactly how I became who I am in it, are questions of interest only insofar as they might suggest to me better ideas for moving forward: as Schweitzer wrote, over a century ago, in his "Quest for the Historical Jesus," History can destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to contribute to the making of the present is not given unto it

"The making of the present" is a genuine task: as the young Marx wrote, Philosophers so far have only understood the world in various ways, but the real object is to change it

The doctrine, that we humans are made in the image of a loving and merciful G-d, who by The Word created the world from some helter-skelter chaos, cannot be and was never intended to be a scientific theory of our origins, nor can it be established from material facts by mere logic. It is a teaching about who we should be and how we should live

[Cartoonist]

19. How we should live

Stone those we hate.

[struggle4progress]

20. I've never to my knowledge met anyone who thinks that

[Cartoonist]

21. You've never met a republican?

Or a racist?

[struggle4progress]

22. Nobody I've ever met has told me we should stone anyone

[Cartoonist]

23. Meet Pastor James David Manning

An anti-gay church in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood greeted passersby with a horrifying, homophobic message: “Jesus would stone homos.”

ATLAH Worldwide Missionary, led by Pastor James David Manning, posted the message on a sign outside its 123rd Street location. “Jesus would stone homos,” the message read, along with “Stoning is still the law” and Bible verses Matthew 5:17-19, Deuteronomy 17:5-7, Leviticus 20:13 and John 8:1-11.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4979653

[struggle4progress]

24. I've never met him but there's no law against being stark raving mad

Apparently, he also believes that his church cannot be required to pay its city water bill, that Starbucks flavors their beverages with semen, and that Obama is somehow like Hitler

[Brettongarcia]

27. There are few stonings, but many murders

That's one problem with many folks: they take things too literally.

Believers often try to avoid looking at their sins. By looking st the small picture, not the larger one.

[struggle4progress]

32. There is also often little content, but many grandiose (if somewhat vague) claims

[Skittles]

28. you don't need religion for love and mercy

you don't really need it for anything

[struggle4progress]

29. Abou Ben Adhem

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

Leigh Hunt

[Skittles]

30. alrighty then

[struggle4progress]

31. If I say that the only true religion is to seek love and mercy, and to learn to practice it,

and you retort that religion is unnecessary for that, then I think you have entirely missed my point

But if I say it again, and you respond that the view is simply silly, then I begin to suspect that you do not want love and mercy exalted the way I think they should be exalted

One ought not need explain it here, but Hunt was a political dissident, imprisoned a while for his political attack on a member of the British Royal family, and a close friend of the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was reviled during his lifetime for his seditious views: Shelley's expulsion from Oxford (for example) was based on his authorship of a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism

[struggle4progress]

33. Perhaps you will like this sonnet better, though that it came from the same pen might confuse you

To Percy Shelley, on the degrading notions of deity

What wonder, Percy, that with jealous rage
Men should defame the kindly and the wise,
When in the midst of the all-beauteous skies,
And all this lovely world, that should engage
Their mutual search for the old golden age,
They seat a phantom, swelled into grim size
Out of their own passions and bigotries,
And then, for fear, proclaim it meek and sage!
And this they call a light and a revealing!
Wise as the clown, who plodding home at night
In autumn, turns at call of fancied elf,
And sees upon the fog, with ghastly feeling,
A giant shadow in its imminent might,
Which his own lanthorn throws up from himself.

- Leigh Hunt

[MisterP]

35. since independence India's plan was to increase the population, prune the forests, dam the rivers,

and pour pesticides and herbicides into every square inch of the soil: this was repeated in Mexico, Turkey, Africa, etc.
this was under the secularist Congress party and, in West Bengal, the orthodox Marxist party (also natalist) ruled for decades

One summer in the village, the people gathered for a picnic. As they shared food and conversation, someone noticed a baby in the river, struggling and crying. The baby was going to drown!

Someone rushed to save the baby. Then, they noticed another screaming baby in the river, and they pulled that baby out. Soon, more babies were seen drowning in the river, and the townspeople were pulling them out as fast as they could. It took great effort, and they began to organize their activities in order to save the babies as they came down the river. As everyone else was busy in the rescue efforts to save the babies, two of the townspeople started to run away along the shore of the river.

“Where are you going?” shouted one of the rescuers. “We need you here to help us save these babies!”

“We are going upstream to stop whoever is throwing them in!”

http://www.laurapierceconsulting.com/babies-river