[LINK] What Do Steve Jobs' Obituaries Leave Out? His Appreciation for LSD

[Craig Sanders]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 07:08:04PM +1100, Ivan Trundle wrote:

> Mother Teresa 

sorry to shatter your illusions, but she was far from the tireless
do-gooding saint that popular opinion paints her as.

in fact, you wouldn't have to work too hard to come up with a good
case that she was a barbarically cruel, sadistic, self-promoting,
mean-spirited lunatic. her "hospices", for instance, didn't go in for
sissy painkillers or palliative care or anything like that because she
believed that suffering brings you closer to jesus.

from the "Criticism" section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa

    She has also been criticized for her view on suffering. She felt
    that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus.[81] Sanal
    Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International, criticised
    the failure to give painkillers, writing that in her Homes for
    the Dying, one could "hear the screams of people having maggots
    tweezered from their open wounds without pain relief. On principle,
    strong painkillers are even in hard cases not given. According
    to Mother Teresa's bizarre philosophy, it is 'the most beautiful
    gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of
    Christ'."[82]

    The quality of care offered to terminally ill patients in the
    Homes for the Dying has been criticised in the medical press. The
    Lancet and the British Medical Journal reported the reuse of
    hypodermic needles, poor living conditions, including the use
    of cold baths for all patients, and an approach to illness and
    suffering that precluded the use of many elements of modern medical
    care, such as systematic diagnosis.[68] Dr. Robin Fox, editor of The
    Lancet, described the medical care as "haphazard", as volunteers
    without medical knowledge had to take decisions about patient
    care, because of the lack of doctors. He observed that her order
    did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so
    that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying
    from infections and lack of treatment. Dr. Fox makes it a point
    to contrast hospice, on the one hand, with what he calls "Mother
    Teresa's Care for the Dying" on the other hand; noting that, while
    hospice emphasizes minimizing suffering with professional medical
    care and attention to expressed needs and wishes of the patient, her
    approach does not.[83]

    Colette Livermore, a former Missionary of Charity, describes her
    reasons for leaving the order in her book Hope Endures: Leaving
    Mother Teresa, Losing Faith, and Searching for Meaning.  Livermore
    found what she called Mother Teresa's "theology of suffering" to be
    flawed, despite being a good and courageous person. Though Mother
    Teresa instructed her followers on the importance of spreading
    the Gospel through actions rather than theological lessons,
    Livermore could not reconcile this with some of the practices of
    the organization. Examples she gives include unnecessarily refusing
    to help the needy when they approached the nuns at the wrong time
    according to the prescribed schedule, discouraging nuns from seeking
    medical training to deal with the illnesses they encountered (with
    the justification that God empowers the weak and ignorant), and
    imposition of "unjust" punishments, such as being transferred away
    from friends. Livermore says that the Missionaries of Charity
    "infantilized" its nuns by prohibiting the reading of secular books
    and newspapers, and emphasizing obedience over independent thinking
    and problem-solving.[84]

    Christopher Hitchens and the German magazine Stern have said
    Mother Teresa did not focus donated money on alleviating poverty
    or improving the conditions of her hospices, but on opening new
    convents and increasing missionary work.[85] Mother Teresa accepted
    donations from the autocratic and corrupt Duvalier family in Haiti
    and openly praised them. She also accepted 1.4 million dollars from
    Charles Keating, involved in the fraud and corruption scheme known
    as the Keating Five scandal and supported him before and after his
    arrest. The Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles, Paul Turley,
    wrote to Mother Teresa asking her to return the donated money
    to the people Keating had stolen from, one of whom was "a poor
    carpenter". The donated money was not accounted for, and Turley did
    not receive a reply.[86]


Christopher Hitchens wrote about her in some detail in _The Missionary
Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice_

http://books.google.com/books?id=PTgJIjK67rEC

    "Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by politicians, the Church
    and the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta appears to be on
    the fast track to sainthood. But what, asks Christopher Hitchens,
    makes Mother Teresa so divine? In a frank expose of the Teresa cult,
    Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to the
    world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed
    upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish is to serve God. He
    asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answer any higher purpose
    than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere,
    doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles,
    questions Mother Teresa's fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex
    and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity
    which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and
    convicted frauds."

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

BOFH excuse #361:

Communist revolutionaries taking over the server room and demanding all the computers in the building or they shoot the sysadmin. Poor misguided fools.