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PhDreamer
SFN Regular
USA
925 Posts |
 Posted - 09/07/2001 : 07:05:41
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 09/07/2001 : 11:16:22 [Permalink]
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Teresa was one of the world's greatest fundraisers. The fact that she would fall into despair shows that she had something of a grip on the reality that is Kolkata.
I find it interesting how people's views of an after life are influenced by the present life. In the arid Near East the afterlife was a beautiful garden (The Elysian Fields, Paradise, Eden) while your enemies were being tortured (Tartarus, Avernus, Hell).
In the cold bleak North you got to drink and feast with the gods while waiting for their, and your, total destruction by giants.
But in Kolkata you came back to Kolkata lifetime after lifetime after lifetime. The greatest hope that a person could have was to escape the eternal cycle of rebirth and simply cease to exist. In a place that spawned a philosophy like that you can't blame Teresa for suffering from depression. Her faltering faith shows how inappropriate her belief system was in this context.
There is another place, though, that I visited in my callow beardless youth. It's an island to the North West of Tahiti called Bora Bora. Jagged lush mountains surrounded by a lagoon that is every shade of blue you can imagine and some you can't. It is always warm; the breeze is always blowing through the palms. The people there are not a bunch of rocket scientists, but they are happy. Someone is constantly bursting into song, no matter where you are. And if something the least bit good happens (Hey, that's where I left my sunglasses. They aren't lost at all) a spontaneous hula breaks out.
Before the French came the Bora Borains had an afterlife in which when they died here they were born in the "next world" on an island* exactly like Bora Bora. Then, when they died there, they were born on Bora Bora itself again. Heaven and Earth were the same place to them.
Interesting that the Xians thought that the Bora Borains needed to be "saved" from this.
* Wai'i means "land" (island) and the word for "spirit" was Ha. Heaven was called Ha'wai'i. They just might have been on to something there.
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The brain that was stolen from my laboratory was a criminal brain. Only evil will come from it. |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
Posted - 09/07/2001 : 21:57:28 [Permalink]
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quote:
It's more difficult now to make a case that God was directly inspiring her, so perhaps she was acting with a humanist bent? Nah, according to believers, this makes a better case for sainthood because she had to "struggle with her own spirituality."
As I understand it Mother Teresa's ministry served only the dying. She offered comfort for conversion to Catholicism. With all the money she raised she never built a hospital or offered any medicines to the poor and suffering. All she offered was her religion. (When she was sick she saw a doctor.) Her goal was to send brand new Catholics to God. Not much of a humanitarian, really. If I was a missionary and chose to send people who might have been helped in this world to their deaths because I believed a dead Catholic was better than a live Hindu, I might just have to struggle a bit with my spirituality too.
Seems to me if she is made a saint, and she probably will be, she should be made the Patron Saint of Great Public Relations.
The Evil Skeptic
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous. |
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theweirdirishman
New Member
8 Posts |
Posted - 09/30/2001 : 19:08:51 [Permalink]
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My mom is catholic, and i know all the rules about sainthood, but I mean...Its mother teresa-heck, athiests like her! Give her the sainthood, i think that after a life of devotion to something pretty unknown, she deserves it.
-The Weird Irishman
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PhDreamer
SFN Regular
USA
925 Posts |
Posted - 09/30/2001 : 20:01:15 [Permalink]
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quote:
My mom is catholic, and i know all the rules about sainthood, but I mean...Its mother teresa-heck, athiests like her! Give her the sainthood, i think that after a life of devotion to something pretty unknown, she deserves it.
I don't really care what they do for her posthumously. Saint, no saint, doesn't affect me. Though I'm not sure why blind devotion is a quality so worthy of praise.
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2001 : 04:17:16 [Permalink]
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She was a fraud. If they make her a saint, that probably only shows that maybe all the saints were frauds.
quote:
I don't really care what they do for her posthumously. Saint, no saint, doesn't affect me. Though I'm not sure why blind devotion is a quality so worthy of praise.
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Stop the murder of the Iraqi people.
http://www.endthewar.org |
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PhDreamer
SFN Regular
USA
925 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2001 : 06:32:52 [Permalink]
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quote:
She was a fraud. If they make her a saint, that probably only shows that maybe all the saints were frauds.
Well, I don't know about that logic but I think labeling MT a fraud greatly diminishes the complexity of a belief system that values such a warped form of self-sacrifice. I don't think MT was wilfully misleading anyone for personal profit (arugable, perhaps, now that I think about it) and I suspect she was fleeced (or fleeced herself) as much or more than she fleeced anyone else.
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2001 : 06:54:06 [Permalink]
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You're right. Fraud implies willful intent. There is no evidence that she did anything other than what she said she did, which amounts to nothing after having collected millions. If she didn't know, however, she was incredibly stupid.
quote:
quote:
She was a fraud. If they make her a saint, that probably only shows that maybe all the saints were frauds.
Well, I don't know about that logic but I think labeling MT a fraud greatly diminishes the complexity of a belief system that values such a warped form of self-sacrifice. I don't think MT was wilfully misleading anyone for personal profit (arugable, perhaps, now that I think about it) and I suspect she was fleeced (or fleeced herself) as much or more than she fleeced anyone else.
This signature does not exist.
Stop the murder of the Iraqi people.
http://www.endthewar.org |
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