Freethought & Rationalism Archive

lpetrich · 10-29-2002, 08:18 PM

I wish to note that Mother Teresa's alleged miracles are absolutely pathetic compared to the miracles that medieval saints had allegedly worked:

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In 520 A.D.� an anonymous monk recorded the life of Saint Genevieve, who had died only ten years before that.� In his account of her life, he describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters sprang from it and breathed a fatal stench on many men for two hours; while she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously; she cast out demons, calmed storms, miraculously created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and lame, and several people who stole things from her actually went blind instead.� No one wrote anything to contradict or challenge these claims, and they were written very near the time the events supposedly happened--by a religious man whom we suppose regarded lying to be a sin.

From <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/lecture.html" target="_blank">his lecture on why he does not buy the story of Jesus Christ's resurrection</a>.

[ October 29, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]

Arrowman · 10-29-2002, 11:31 PM

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Originally posted by lpetrich:
I wish to note that Mother Teresa's alleged miracles are absolutely pathetic compared to the miracles that medieval saints had allegedly worked...

Yeah, apparently the whole Fall thing is working to degrade the powers of saints, too.

It's an interesting point, actually. I wonder how many Catholics, including priests, actually believe in the literal truth of medieval miracles. And I wonder how many would be able to adequately explain the quantum difference in the scale of the miracles between then and now. I suspect they wouldn't want to face up to that one. The only way out (as I see it) is to accept that the scale of medieval miracles was somewhat exaggerated (but they still happened, of course...)

Arrowman · 10-29-2002, 11:48 PM

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Originally posted by Amos:
Now you sound like an Englishman in who's mind pleasure can be conceived to exist without pain.

What do you have against Englishmen? Anyway - I'm an Australian - which is like, an Englishman with all the silly stuff removed.

Can pleasure exist without pain? I believe it can. I do accept that sometimes a pleasure can be heightened by the knowledge of the alternative (eg, a person might take more pleasure in a good bottle of wine, if they know what a bad wine tastes like), but pain is not a universal prerequisite for pleasure.

It's a meaningless hypothetical, however, because there will always be pain. So I will accept the presence of both in the world and deal with it.

Your position, on the other hand, seems to be that whether it is inevitably present in our world or not, pain is of some inherent value because without it, pleasure cannot exist. A rather dark and guilty view of the world. But that's the RCC (perhaps more than any other Christian denomination) for you.

I do not believe that if all poverty were eliminated from the world tomorrow, that would somehow suck all the fun out of being middle class. Even if I did, I would still want to see the end of poverty. Because I am human, not a Catholic fundamentalist.

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Originally posted by Amos:
Best thing for you to do would be to sell all your belongings and learn from the poor that happiness in not derrived from worldly richess or only the rich could be happy (Old English law was based on this). You may at that time learn that the true beauty of gold lies in our ability to walk away from it.

Stuff that for a game of soldiers! Money doesn't buy happiness. But it buys such a good facsimile of the real thing, that it's impossible to tell the difference.

More seriously - I do not believe that material possessions are the source of happiness. However - there are many different sources of pain in this world, and money insulates you from many of them. Money does not automatically remove all unhappiness - but it removes some of the reasons for unhappiness.

What does the poor person have, that I do not? Time, perhaps - the time I spend working, for example. (And of course my work may be a source of pleasure to me) Other than that, we are on an equal footing. And in fact I have an advantage; for my money allows me to experience many things about this world (through travel etc) that the poor cannot.

It's about opportunity and what you do with it. Poor people can be happy, poor people can be miserable. Rich people can be happy, rich people can be miserable.

And it is appallingly, utterly insensitive and patronising for Western Catholics, possessed of the resources to change the lives of poverty-stricken people, to decide for those people that "the true beauty of gold lies in our ability to walk away from it." Let the poor bastards try it for themselves!

They were 'appy because they were poor!'
- Monty Python

Arrowman · 10-30-2002, 12:00 AM

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Originally posted by Kama:Teresa is dead

So is Kama's capacity for following a rational argument.

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Did any one see her take some booty to purgatory

Did anyone see the point whizzing past Kama's thread?

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Not much solid facts

Is that a self-analysis?

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No one is taking the order to court, yet

The (probable) absence of a sound legal case against it, does not make an action morally acceptable.

Neither does speaking in terse sound bites conceal the vacuity of an argument.

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Disregard that money is going to a big Vatican family of crooks and saints naturally

Yeah - it's not the fault or choice of Catholic nuns that they're members of the corrupt Catholic church.
Oh, wait....

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No one named any flawless charity

Tell you what - I'll name a flawless charity, when you make a cohesive point.

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Next move-
Attack Sister Nirmala

Quite possibly, if she continues the same inhumane practices.

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Los Angeles Joint
<a href="http://www.becketfund.org/litigate/MissionariesOfCharity.html" target="_blank">http://www.becketfund.org/litigate/MissionariesOfCharity.html</a>
Teresa Cultster
<a href="http://sathyavaadi.tripod.com/truthisgod/papers/020507.htm" target="_blank">http://sathyavaadi.tripod.com/truthisgod/papers/020507.htm</a>

I'll follow your links when you follow my arguments.

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With growing fame, the founder of the order became somewhat conscious of the misconceptions on which the Mother Teresa phenomenon was based. She wrote a few words and hung them outside Mother House:
"Tell them we are not here for work, we are here for Jesus. We are religious above all else. We are not social workers, not teachers, not doctors. We are nuns."

And straight after making that worldwide communication (Mother House is like, a newspaper or something, right?)

Mother Teresa turned her attention to returning the money which she knew had been given with false expectations. Uh-huh.

10-30-2002, 11:25 AM

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Originally posted by Arrowman:

What do you have against Englishmen? Anyway - I'm an Australian - which is like, an Englishman with all the silly stuff removed.

Nothing except that in Brittish Analytic philospohy pleasure can be conceived to exist without pain and it was Dostoevski who first used this metaphor in Karamazov.

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And it is appallingly, utterly insensitive and patronising for Western Catholics, possessed of the resources to change the lives of poverty-stricken people, to decide for those people that "the true beauty of gold lies in our ability to walk away from it." Let the poor bastards try it for themselves!

The above is a value judgement and I am not about to argue that my values are better than yours. I actually think that we must bloom where we are planted and maybe that is why you see richess and poverty across the fence.

brighid · 10-30-2002, 12:14 PM

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In 520 A.D. an anonymous monk recorded the life of Saint Genevieve, who had died only ten years before that. In his account of her life, he describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters sprang from it and breathed a fatal stench on many men for two hours; while she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously; she cast out demons, calmed storms, miraculously created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and lame, and several people who stole things from her actually went blind instead. No one wrote anything to contradict or challenge these claims, and they were written very near the time the events supposedly happened--by a religious man whom we suppose regarded lying to be a sin.

Had she been born about 14 centuries later the same "saintly" woman would have been burned at the stake for being a witch!

Brighid

Arrowman · 10-30-2002, 06:31 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Amos:
The above is a value judgement and I am not about to argue that my values are better than yours. I actually think that we must bloom where we are planted and maybe that is why you see richess and poverty across the fence.

Even allowing for the sake of argument that this is a "value judgement", only one of us is advocating the imposition of their values on others.

The Sisters of Charity have at their disposal the resources to provide practical medical assistance as well as spiritual comfort. They choose to provide only the latter. They do not give the people in the care a choice. They allow people to die when it is possible that some might live, with adequate care. They impose their values on others - and, these "others" are people at the most vulnerable end of society.

If a secular hospice refused admittance to spiritual counsellors on the grounds that "medical care is all that is needed", I am sure you would oppose that. And so would I.

Bloop · 10-30-2002, 06:47 PM

This is an absolute monster of a post. Kama asked for sources and I try to provide some. Don�t read these uncritically. I also suggest to try reading some of the numerous �pro-MT� sites that are out there.

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Bloop
Charles Keating stole a LOT of money from people. Some of it he gave to MT. When Keating was on trial she wrote a letter on his behalf to the trial judge Ito (of OJ trial fame). A prosecutor wrote a letter back asking that she'd return the money she had gotten from Keating because it wasn't his money to spend. Nothing happened.

Kama:
You tell me what did she do with all that fraud money?
Buy a new sari perhaps ? When Mother Theresa died, the Congregation had 3,604 members with vows, along with 411 novices and 260 aspirants. The congregation operates in 119 countries (both developed and developing) and has 560 "tabernacles," as they call their houses.

You don�t understand do you ? The money wasn�t Keating�s to spend. The money wasn�t Mother Theresa�s to spend. The charitable thing to do when you receive stolen money and someone tells you about it is to give the money back to it�s rightful owners. The issue in the Keating/Mother T affair isn�t what she or her order did or did not do with the money. The issue is that of not returning stolen money.

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Kama:
And do you have any link to articles other than that grunt Hitchens book with solid facts and whereabouts of one Ms Shields?

Are you implying that Hitchens is lying and that Ms Shields is a fictional character or that Ms Shields is lying ? I haven�t found any sources on the Internet favourable to Mother Theresa and the MoC that goes this far.

<a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/shields_18_1.html" target="_blank"> Shields article: House of Illusion</a>

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Bloop:
The Missionary of Charity raised millions upon millions of dollars. How much of this money has been used in activities that served "the poorest of the poor" directly ? All information that is provided with reasonable detail points to very crude facilities with little or no medical help offered by people with little or no medical training.

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Kama:
Cite sources .

$50 million lasts for how many days with 560 homes worldwide and growing.
She and her little army of sisters were there to bring spiritual comfort to the suffering, a concept that apparently escapes her critics.

You keep mentioning all the homes and the cost to keep them up and running. I found some interesting passages here and there that can shed some light on this.

From <a href="http://members.lycos.co.uk/bajuu/" target="_blank"> Article in Stern Magazine 10/9 1998 </a>

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While the income is utter secret, the expenditures are equally mysterious. The order is hardly able to spend large amounts. The establishments supported by the nuns are so tiny (inconspicuous) that even the locals have difficulty tracing them. Often "Mother Teresa's Home" means just a living accomodation for the sisters, with no charitable funstion. Conspicuous or useful assistance cannot be provided there. The order often receives huge donations in kind, in addition to the monetary munificence. Boxes of medicines land at Indian airports. Donated foograins and powdered milk arrive in containers at Calcutta port. Clothing donations from Europe and the US arrive in unimaginable quantities. On Calcutta's pavement stalls, traders can be seen sellin used western labels for 25 rupees (DM1) apiece. Numerous traders call out, "Shirts from Mother, trousers from Mother."

Unlike with other charities, the Missionaries of Charity spend very little on their own management, since the organisation is run at practically no cost. The approximately 4000 sisters in 150 countries form the most treasured workforce of all global multi-million dollar operations. Having taken vows of poverty and obedience, they work for no pay, supported by 300,000 good citizen helpers.

By their own admission, Mother Teresa's organisation has about 500 locations worldwide. But for purchase or rent of property, the sisters do not need to touch their bank accounts. "Mother always said, we don't spend for that," remembers Sunita Kumar, one the richest women in Calcutta and supposedly Mother T's closest associate outside the order. "If Mother needed a house, she went straight to the owner, whether it was the State or a private person, and worked on him for so long that she eventually got it free."

Her method was also successful in Germany.In March the "Bethlehem House" was dedicated in Hamburg, a shelter for homeless women. Four sisters work there. The archtecturally conspicuous building cost DM2.5 million. The fortunes of the order have not spent a penny toward the amount. The money was collected by a Christian association in Hamburg. With Mother T as figure head it was naturally short work to collect the millions.

/�/

England is one of the few countries where the sisters allow the authorities at least a quick glance at their accounts. Here the order took in DM5.3 million in 1991. And expenses (including charitable expenses)? -- around DM360,000 or less than 7%. Whatever happened to the rest of the money? Sister Teresina, the head for England, defensively states, "Sorry we can't tell you that." Every year, according to the returns filed with the British authorities, a portion of the fortune is sent to accounts of the order in other countries. How much to which countries is not declared. One of the recipients is however, always Rome. The fortune of this famous charitable organistaion is controlled from Rome, -- from an account at the Vatican bank. And what happens with monies at the Vatican Bank is so secret that even God is not allowed to know about it. One thing is sure however -- Mother's outlets in poor countries do not benefit from largesse of the rich countries. The official biographer of Mother Teresa, Kathryn Spink, writes, "As soon as the sisters became established in a certain country, Mother normally withdrew all financial support." Branches in very needy countries therefore only receive start-up assistance. Most of the money remains in the Vatican Bank.

My emphasis. The next little piece of information is from a link on the official MT homepage:

From <a href="http://catholic.net/RCC/News/mtnuns.html" target="_blank"> An opening of a MoC Place </a>

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This appeared in a front page article in The Star-Ledger, Morris/Sussex/Warren edition, Tuesday, June 6, 1995

/---/

The order has other unique practices. Mass is celebrated in the pewless convent chapel -- while seated on the floor. No refrigerator is used in keeping with their reliance on daily food donations. And their attire is a simple white cotton sari with blue stripes at the edges. This last is especially useful in their neighborhood, as it is inoffensive to the sizeable Muslim population. They are also very strict regarding their no publicity policy.

Again my emphasis.

From <a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/shields_18_1.html" target="_blank"> Shields: House of Illusion</a>

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We begged for food and supplies from local merchants as though we had no resources. On one of the rare occasions when we ran out of donated bread, we went begging at the local store. When our request was turned down, our superior decreed that the soup kitchen could do without bread for the day.

It was not only merchants who were offered a chance to be generous. Airlines were requested to fly sisters and air cargo free of charge. Hospitals and doctors were expected to absorb the costs of medical treatment for the sisters or to draw on funds designated for the religious. Workmen were encouraged to labor without payment or at reduced rates. We relied heavily on volunteers who worked long hours in our soup kitchens, shelters, and day camps.

A hard-working farmer devoted many of his waking hours to collecting and delivering food for our soup kitchens and shelters. "If I didn't come, what would you eat?" he asked.

From these quotes it is clear that the cost of running the order is no-where near the magnitude you make it out to be. Sisters rely on donations for their daily food. They receive plenty of medicine and clothes from donors. They get houses for free. They are frequently given free travel. They expect not to pay for medical treatment Independent contractors are encouraged to work for free or at discount rates. The use of volunteers cuts a lot of costs and on and on.

Since the MoC do provide hospices and orphanages here and there it is necessary to see how these operations are run. Do they meet the standards of what it is reasonable to call �medical treatment�. Since you wanted sources it�s quoting time again :

From: <a href="http://members.lycos.co.uk/bajuu/" target="_blank">Article in Stern Magazine 10/9 1998</a>

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Because of the tightfistedness of the rich order, the "poorest of the poor" -- orphans in India -- suffer the most. The nuns run a home in Delhi, in which the orphans wait to be adopted by, in many cases, by foreigners. As usual, the costs of running the home are borne not by the order, but by the future adoptive parents. In Germany the organisation called Pro Infante has the monopoly of mediation role for these children. The head, Carla Wiedeking, a personal friend of Mother Teresa's, wrote a letter to Donors, Supporters and Friends which ran:

"On my September vist I had to witness 2 or 3 children lying in the same cot, in totally overcrowded rooms with not a square inch of playing space. The behavioural problems arising as a result cannot be overlooked." Mrs Wiedeking appeals to the generosity of supporters in view of her powerlessness in the face of the children's great needs. Powerlessness?! In an organisation with a billion-fortune, which has 3 times as much money available to it as UNICEF is able to spend in all of India? The Missionaries of Charity has have the means to buy cots and build orphanages, -- with playgrounds. And they have enoungh money not only for a handful orphans in Delhi but for many thousand orphans who struggle for survival in the streets of Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta.

Saving, in Mother Teresa's philosophy, was a central value in itself. All very well, but as her poor organisation quickly grew into a rich one, what did she do with her pictures, jewels, inherited houses, cheques or suitcases full of money? If she wished to she could now cater to people not by obsessively indulging in saving, but instead through well thought-out spending. But the Nobel Prize winner did not want an efficient organisation that helped people efficiently. Full of pride, she called the Missionaries of Charity the "most disorganised organisation in the world". Computers, typewriters, photocopiers are not allowed. Even when they are donated, they are not allowed to be installed. For book-keeping the sisters use school notebooks, in which they write in cramped pencilled figures. Until they are full. Then everything is erased and the notebook used again. All in order to save.

For a sustainable charitable system, it would have been sensible to train the nuns to become nurses, teachers or managers. But a Missionary of Charity nun is never trained for anything further.

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In 1994, Robin Fox, editor of the prestigious medical journal Lancet, in a commentary on the catastrophic conditions prevailing in Mother Teresa's homes, shocked the professional world by saying that any systematic operation was foreign to the running of the homes in India: TB patients were not isolated, and syringes were washed in lukewarm water before being used again. Even patients in unbearable pain were refused strong painkillers, not because the order did not have them, but on principle �The most beautiful gift for a person is that he can participate in the suffering of Christ," said Mother Teresa. Once she had tried to comfort a screaming sufferer, "You are suffering, that means Jesus is kissing you." The sufferer screamed back, furious, "Then tell your Jesus to stop kissing me."

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The English doctor Jack Preger once worked in the home for the dying. He says, "If one wants to give love, understanding and care, one uses sterile needles. This is probably the richest order in the world. Many of the dying there do not have to be dying in a strictly medical sense." The British newspaper Guardian described the hospice as an "organised form of neglectful assistance".

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It seems that the medical care of the orphans is hardly any better. In 1991 the head of Pro Infante in Germany sent a newsletter to adoptive parents:"Please check the validity of the vaccinations of your children. We assume that in some case they have been vaccinated with expired vaccines, or with vaccines that had been rendered useless by improper strotage conditions." All this points to one thing, something that Mother Teresa reiterated very frequently in her speeches and addresses -- that she far more concerened with life after death than the mortal life.

My emphasis.

From <a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html" target="_blank"> Christopher Hitchens Interview</a>

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HITCHENS: The care facilities are grotesquely simple: rudimentary, unscientific, miles behind any modern conception of what medical science is supposed to do. There have been a number of articles - I've collected some more since my book came out - about the failure and primitivism of her treatment of lepers and the dying, of her attitude towards medication and prophylaxis. Very rightly is it said that she tends to the dying, because if you were doing anything but dying she hasn't really got much to offer.

This is interesting because, first, she only proclaims to be providing people with a Catholic death, and, second, because of the enormous amounts of money mainly donated to rather than raised by her Order. We've been unable to audit this - no one has ever demanded an accounting of how much money has flowed in her direction. With that money she could have built at least one absolutely spanking new, modern teaching hospital in Calcutta without noticing the cost.

/�/

FI: But if people go to her clinics for the dying and they need medical care, does she send them on to the proper places?

HITCHENS: Not according to the testimony of a number of witnesses. I printed the accounts of several witnesses whose testimony I could verify and I've had many other communications from former volunteers in Calcutta and in other missions. All of them were very shocked to find when they got there that they had missed some very crucial point and that very often people who come under the false impression that they would receive medical care are either neglected or given no advice. In other words, anyone going in the hope of alleviation of a serious medical condition has made a huge mistake.

I've got so much testimony from former workers who contacted me after I wrote the book, that I almost have enough material to do a sequel.

From Stephen T-B in this thread (page 1):

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MT�s organisation runs a hospice in Lusaka, Zambia, for AIDS victims.
My daughter visited it, and was shocked, sickened and outraged by what she saw there.
Especially appaling were the conditions in which the children lived - lying all day on bare beds with nothing to play with and no-one to talk to and nothing to look at except the grey walls of the gloomy rooms they were kept in.

This is pictures taken from the official MT site:

People that sent money did so why ? :

From:<a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/shields_18_1.html" target="_blank"> Shields article: House of Illusion </a>

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We received touching letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. Most of the money sat in our bank accounts.

From: <a href="http://members.lycos.co.uk/bajuu/" target="_blank">Article in Stern Magazine 10/9 1998</a>

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Susan Shields (formerly Sr Virgin) says, "The money was not misused, but the largest part of it wasn't used at all. When there was a famine in Ethiopia, many cheques arrived marked 'for the hungry in Ethiopia'. Once I asked the sister who was in charge of accounts if I should add up all those very many cheques and send the total to Ethiopia. The sister answered, 'No, we don't send money to Africa.' But I continued to make receipts to the donors, 'For Ethiopia'.

It is clear that at least some people gave money under the pretense that they would be effectively used in various places around the world. Is there really a point in denying the way the western media portrayal of MT and her order differs from the real thing ?

A collection of MT quotes, some suggests that her goal was not to rid the world of poverty or suffering:

Tell them we are not here for work, we are here for Jesus. We are religious above all else. We are not social workers, not teachers, not doctors. We are nuns."
I ask you one thing: do not tire of giving, but do not give your leftovers. Give until it hurts, until you feel the pain
When we touch the sick and needy, we touch the suffering body of Christ.
The poor are Christ Himself

Finally:
Here is a site that features chapters of a book. To much quoting already but I insist that anyone interested in the matters at hand check them out:
<a href="http://website.lineone.net/~bajuu" target="_blank"> Aroup Chatterjee site:</a>

Bloop

[ October 30, 2002: Message edited by: Bloop ]

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Bloop · 10-30-2002, 07:10 PM

How about a nice little preview post function...

10-30-2002, 08:57 PM

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Originally posted by Bloop:
How about a nice little preview post function...

Edit once more and remove 8 edit notices.

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