[Non-member submission]
Exactly! Mother Theresa benefitted from a great PR machine that places all
"people of the cloth" a cut above the rest of us. But she doesn't stand up
to close scrutiny. In her world, suffering was a requirement to enter
heaven. She placed a relatively low value on saving life. Some people even
feel she did harm because her efforts, not really oriented toward healing,
drew resources away from legitimate medical facilities. In the USA she ran
into trouble when she refused to bring her facilities up to minimal
standards required by law. In the final analysis she was just another
dogmatic religious nut that cared more for "souls" that real human welfare.
If it hasn't been mentioned before in this thread, let me point out the
excellent book which de-bunks the Mother Theresa myth, The Missionary
Position. There's a review of it at
http://www.softdisk.com/comp/shume/religion/missiony.html.
Regards,
Pat Inniss
inniss@sprynet.com
http://home.sprynet.com/~inniss/
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
<snip>
What impact? The idea that one should give up what might have been a
productive, valuable, society-enriching life to instead preach acceptance
of death, that most hideous of all evils, and justify it by belief in God,
that most dangerous of beliefs. I certainly don't hold her as any kind of
example except bad, and I'm surprized you're surprized one would say so.
If you want to show true compassion to the dying, /do something/ about
death itself. Preach defiance, not acceptance. Preach science and
medicine, not mystical nonsense. Use your talents to earn money to
build the economy to fund that science and find those cures.
In case you haven't noticed, we're /all/ dying. I, for one, don't want
sympathy--I want an alternative. Anyone who makes death seem any less
tragic and wasteful and evil than it is will get no respect from me.
<snip>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:12:13 MDT