Mother Theresa: a Fraud?

[G Sharp]

Interesting article on the sincerity of Mother Theresa's charity. It echoes many of the criticism levelled against her when she died.

My take on this: as usual it can be shallow or somewhat deeper.
Shallower:
The author is Indian. Maybe this "expose" on Mother Theresa's sincerity is a way of deflecting the glaring poverty and failure that India's economic system inflicted on its inhabitants. This would be similar to postcolonial narratives of colonial "evil" when the colonials brought schools, health care, and roads when there were none prior.

Deeper:
sure, her intentions may not have been pure all the time but HOW MANY HUNGRY PEOPLE have the critics served today? And isn't the whole "hypocrisy" or "sincerity" angle a Straw Man argument? Wasn't Altruism debunked as an psychological evolutionary illusion? see, for example: http://www.brocku.ca/biology/research/Richards.html


Mother Theresa: Fraudster?


Link: http://www.meteorbooks.com/


Excerpt from Intro:
Many people tell me that Mother Teresa should be left alone because she did 'something' for the underprivileged. I do not deny that she did. However her reputation, which was to a good extent carefully built up by herself, was not on a 'something' scale. More importantly, that 'something', at least in Calcutta, was quite little, as my book will show. Even more importantly, she had turned away many many more than she had helped - although she had claimed throughout her life that she was doing everything for everybody. My brief against her is not that she did not address the root or causes of suffering and I am not for a moment suggesting that she ought to have done so, as I understand the particular religious tradition she came from - I am saying that there was a stupendous discrepancy between her image and her work, between her words and her deeds; that she, helped by others of course, engaged in a culture of deception.

On a superficial level, I need to tell the truth about Teresa because I feel humiliated to be associated with a place that is wrongly imagined to exist on Western charity. Perhaps the main reason why I want to tell this story is because, I believe, each of us has a duty to stand up and protest when history is in danger of being distorted. In a few years' time Mother Teresa will be up there, glittering in the same galaxy as Mozart and Leonardo.

[Davey911]

mmmmh...

[DarkJedi]

Mother Teresa died ?

hmm....