Those that have read up on her would strongly disagree. She really was not a nice person by any stretch of the imagination.
Mandela would probably be a more accurate person to symbolise a “good” person.
Could someone please elaborate on how Mother Theresa was not a complete saint?
I would just google “Mother Teresa not a saint” and go from there, but basically she did very little to alleviate pain and suffering among the poor she received millions in donations to help. She actually encouraged suffering by withholding medical treatment as a way for the poor and sick to get closer to true belief and closer to her Catholic god.
Christopher Hitchens concluded that Mother Teresa was “less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs.”
So yeah, if you think shoving the RC church down the throat of people in misery is admirable, then sure, she is a saint. Otherwise, not so much.
this is a great place to start
It’s been ably documented in lots of places what a medieval, hateful cunt she was, but you can start here.
Hmm, I regretted that c-word soon after posting it, so consider it scratched. But I’m good with the adjectives.
Another vote for Mister Rogers. I can’t think of a single thing he ever did that was evil.
I recall a skit…Mad TV perhaps…where Mister Rogers was an asshole when it was only him and one other person without any witnesses.
And I recall a Simpsons episode…“Shindler est bueno…Burns est Diablo”
So, I am going with Shindler.
Jimmy Carter is a good person.
Mother Teresa did a tremendous amount of good for poor people, most famously in India but around the world as well. She received the Nobel Peace Prize and countless other awards. During her funeral, the poor people in Calcutta turned out by the hundreds of thousands to pay respects. The people who knew her well, in other words, believe that she was a saint.
She was thoroughly hated by a small number of people, mainly rich white men. The best known was Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens was a militant atheist, anti-Catholic hatemonger and pathological liar. The argument that Mother Teresa was evil, at least in every debate I’ve participated in, basically boils down to “Christopher Hitchens told me to hate Mother Teresa and I blindly believe whatever Christopher Hitchens says.” It should be noted that Hitchens also poured out hatred and lies against Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and pretty much anyone else who supported peace and human rights, so he was at least an equal-opportunity hatemonger.
Regarding this statement by leftfield6, “she did very little to alleviate pain and suffering among the poor she received millions in donations to help”, it’s dishonest. Mother Teresa helped build and run schools, soup kitchens, and hospices in Calcutta and other poor cities. She had finite resources to do so. The size of the poverty problem in Calcutta and elsewhere in India was basically infinite. With the resources available, obviously there was a choice between building top-notch first world institutions for a small number of people, or a much lower standard of care for a much larger number of people. The Missionaries of Charity generally pursued the later approach. Also, the socialist government of India put many barriers to proper medical care in India, which made it in some cases illegal to use the best medicines and limited the number of well-trained doctors available. Given the situation, the Missionaries of Charity provided an immense amount of good for the desperately poor in Calcutta and were widely praised for doing so. (Some discussion here.)
Outside of running the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa accomplished much good. For example, in 1982 she brokered a temporary cease-fire in the conflict in Lebanon so that she could rescue 37 disabled children from a hospital. I guess in Christopher Hitchens’ worldview, this is a bad thing.
I don’t think you know what a pathological liar is. Call Hitchens intellectually dishonest if it floats your boat, but a genuine “pathological liar” is another species altogether.
Neither of those articles offer any evidence of Hitchens being a “pathological liar”. Those two two authors don’t like what he says, don’t like his take on the evidence and don’t like the conclusions he comes to on religious, metaphysical and philosophical matters. Their main complaint seems to be that when he writes on the bad in religion, he ignores the good. A bizarre complaint indeed.
I’m sure there are errors in his work and elements of bias. No-one should claim a man-made work can be inerrant (and Hitchens would be the last to do so).
As for Mother Teresa? Hitchen’s take-down of her stands by itself but he was far from the only critic. Don’t like Hitchens? fine, ignore him totally and read up on Mother Teresa from other sources and decide for yourself.
And as for using the Nobel Peace prize as a yardstick? don’t make me laugh.
MLK, and I’m saying that as a misanthropic cynic who thinks that Black people can be a bunch of hypocrites who have a chip on their shoulders every bit as much as a target on their backs. So I should think that MLK was just a sop given by White America to Black: here’s your stupid holiday, and name a street in the city’s shittiest neighborhood after him, and hey, he’s a softie compared to Malcolm X or the Panthers.
But really, he goes up there with Lincoln. And because Lincoln was at least in part motivated to be a powerful leader of a powerful country instead of a half-assed leader of a split-up nation, MLK passes him too. MLK knew would have done just fine as part of Atlanta’s considerable Black elite, knew he was probably going to be killed, and laid everything on the line for a very good cause, while never using the righteousness of that cause to justify any evil means to that end. Gandhi with his hunger strikes crossed that line: the explicit message in every hunger strikes was that when he dies the subcontinent would go up in flames: not a lot of nonviolence in there.
MLK gets my admiration for being the last great rhetorician in American history. Really, who since? “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall?” Big whoop. MLK had a genius for putting idea together and then getting them out there, to the smart and stupid alike. And unlike Churchill, he didn’t have the same well of classical education to draw upon. Even in his own time, when the cult of intellectual snobbery was something we wouldn’t recognize today, he had credibility. Read some of his speeches beyond just the brief quotes they put on billboards in those shitty neighborhoods, and you’ll see that they really were well-crafted.
And also, as a misanthropic cynic, you’d think I’d be more in agreement with Hitler’s philosophy that we all are in conflict and only the strongest, most ruthless deserve to survive. But MLK was able to make it intellectually appealing to believe that human beings can better their condition through peaceful change, and that positive acceptance of each other is the only way we can coax our heads out of our asses to do it.
This is a curious interpretation. My understanding is that most of Gandhi’s fasts were undertaken as pleas to end violence already in progress.
I’ve already done so.
I think your quest is misguided. The real answer is paradoxical. You see, the engine of “evil” is power. The person that seeks power in order to do stuff is inevitably corrupted by that power. Even if what they do with it is generally perceived as “good”, that perception is never universal, because “good” and “evil” are not quite apposite and their interpretation is highly subjective. Hell, there are thousands of people in the world who do not view Hitler as evil but as a visionary. You can find them spread across the internets without to much effort.
Ultimately, the paradox is that notoriety represents a form of corrupting power. The paragons of virtue shrink away from it. The “x” you are looking for, by definition, is a person you will have never heard of. Only 17 or 18 people have, and I have no idea who they are.
Mothra!
Wait, wrong thread.
Carl Sagan. Gandhi, Mother Theresa, MLK, and Abraham Lincoln had a lot of faults although their overall legacies are certainly positive. But Sagan was an all around good man who no one ever had anything bad to say about who performed an amazing service that most scientists shun: he popularized science, tried to bring it to the masses, and succeeded in a way that no one else ever had. His sense of wonder was infectious. He even took time to try to teach us what science was, rather than just showing us the fruits of science, and tried to teach us how to avoid the BS that gets foisted on us by hucksters and people trying to make money off our ignorance.
But really, the people that we would consider to be as good as Hitler was evil would be people who never got famous. Eschereal has it exactly right. Notoriety and good do not mix well. There’s almost always moral compromises on the way to notoriety.
Nelson Mandela was immensely famous and was precisely the opposite of Hitler; where Hitler perceived the world as an endless conflict between peoples, Mandela perceived his role in the world as preventing such things.
In terms of being the opposite of Hitler, Mandela’s a much more logical choice than Carl Sagan, who was a great man but not really good in the fields Hitler was evil.