Incoherent rage re: El Salvador and abortion

[AFAIKnow]

@jsgoddess

No, but she did deny some pretty basic care to helpless, hopeless people, all in the name of her religion.

Hey, I said she was evil, what more do you people want?

[wonky]

@AFAIKnow

Hey, I said she was evil, what more do you people want?

Honesty.

[AFAIKnow]

@jsgoddess

Honesty.

No, really, I did.

[John_Mace]

@jsgoddess

No, but she did deny some pretty basic care to helpless, hopeless people, all in the name of her religion.

What did she do, shoot doctors who were trying to help them?

[Der_Trihs]

@John Mace

What did she do, shoot doctors who were trying to help them?

IIRC she just left them to die in bed without trying to save them, so she could have a captive audience to preach at.

[GIGObuster]

@Guinastasia

To be fair, a lot of priests in Latin America risked their lives for the people and were truly good individuals, who were persecuted by the right wing death squads. Like Oscar Romero. (I believe GIGObuster once mentioned that his father was friends with the latter).

Yes, he and my family was. (This thread is scary on how many connections I have with the points mentioned)

@Der Trihs

Weren’t they systematically removed or suppressed by the Vatican ? How many like that are left, if any ?

As **Guin ** mentioned, the most important ones were killed during the civil war, and one should not forget hat the new bishops are selected now because they are extremely conservative.

http://www.odan.org/media_hand_of_od.htm

Yet the hostility to liberation theology on the part of the church hierarchy in the last six years has been out of all proportion to these limitations. Under Archbishop Sáenz Lacalle, an Opus Dei man, the strategy has not been to reform liberation theology, but to undo and remove all traces of it. There are frequent denunciations of it by church leaders in the national press; bishops have withdrawn funding and support from key programmes; priests have been strategically shifted, and nuns expelled. Drastic changes have been made to the seminary curriculum, with books containing liberationist teachings banned, conservative rectors put in charge, and seminarians pulled in from pastoral outposts in poor areas. For the visitor, who inevitably has in mind Archbishop Romero’s brave pronouncements from the pulpit in the Metropolitan Cathedral, it is the sermons that most register the change. When you hear them, it is hard to realise you are in El Salvador at all.

This purge of liberation theology and all its works has gone hand in hand with the Church repositioning itself in relation to social and political actors. In light of the recent Florida trial – when two former generals admitted the army’s systematic use of torture and massacre – Archbishop Sáenz’s 1997 acceptance from the military of the title of Brigadier General says much.

That was so scandalous that even the conservative media complained a little and the Bishop dropped the military title, it is a sad legacy from Pope John Paul II that he appointed guys like this in Central America, the holy see really does not want to see any whiff of liberal ideas in the area, never mind that a good number of priests and nuns still do the right thing with the poor, when one of the features of the Opus Dei is to justify and approve of the well to do Catholics (don’t think about the camel and the needle) the only thing I see is just the seeds for more unrest in a generation.

On a hopeful note, Romero is popularly now referred to as “San” (a saint). The present Opus Dei Archbishop has a problem with that! Good, we will make sure he never forgets it.

[GIGObuster]

Regarding Mother Teresa, here is the wikipedia take on the controversy (even Wikipedia mentions some more cites are needed, but it is a good source to see where her critics are coming from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa

Controversy

An Indian-born writer living in Britain, Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, who had briefly worked in one of Mother Teresa’s homes, began investigations into the finances and other practices of her order. In November 1992, a British journalist, Christopher Hitchens, published an article in The Nation entitled “The Ghoul of Calcutta” criticizing Mother Teresa. In 1994, Hitchens and British journalist Tariq Ali produced a critical TV documentary for the UK’s Channel 4 called Hell’s Angel, which was based on Chatterjee’s work. Although he has never disputed the documentary’s conclusions, Chatterjee criticized what he called the “sensationalist” approach of the film.

The next year, Hitchens published The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, which repeated many of the accusations levied in the documentary. Chatterjee himself published The Final Verdict in 2003, a less polemic work than those of Hitchens and Ali, but equally critical of Teresa’s operations.

Neither Mother Teresa nor the Vatican has ever revealed how much money her order received, nor what it was spent on; estimates range into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Hitchens further alleged that Mother Teresa lied to donors about what the money was going to be used for. Donors, he says, were told that the money went to aid and the construction of healthcare facilities in India and elsewhere. Evidence points to it instead being spent largely on missionary work and that Mother Teresa was actually the controller of the funds. No hospitals were ever built.

Hitchens also appeared prominently in a second season episode of Penn & Teller’s Showtime series Bullshit! called Holier Than Thou, which targeted Mother Teresa’s religious hypocrisy (Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama were also featured). Hitchens reiterated his claims about her during his interview: “she was a fraud, a fanatic, and a fundamentalist… corrupt, cynical, nasty and cruel.” Hitchens further alleged that while she and her order had the money to help save lives, culled mostly by donations from the wealthy, victims of disease got no medical care and that if you went to Calcutta, you’d have perhaps a fifteen percent chance of seeing her because she was in the company of the powerful and wealthy. He stated similar allegations in a 2002 interview for the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley. [1]

In addition to Hitchens and Chatterjee, a former nun-turned-comedienne named Kelli Dunham, who worked with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity under the name Sister Mercy, likewise debunked Mother Teresa’s public image as a living saint. In one scene, Dunham is lighting candles in a Catholic church joking that she was “covering my soul for talking shit about Mother Teresa.”

Baptisms of the dying
Mother Teresa encouraged members of her order to baptize dying patients, without regard to the individual’s religion. In a speech at the Scripps Clinic in California in January 1992, she said: “Something very beautiful… not one has died without receiving the special ticket for St. Peter, as we call it. We call baptism ‘a ticket for St. Peter.’ We ask the person, do you want a blessing by which your sins will be forgiven and you receive God? They have never refused. So 29,000 have died in that one house [in Kalighat] from the time we began in 1952.”

Critics have argued that patients were not provided sufficient information to make an informed decision about whether they wanted to be baptized and the theological significance of a Catholic baptism. Since her patients were predominantly Hindus and Muslims, the baptisms would have been directly counter to their own religious beliefs; since their idea of God is vastly different from the Catholic God, the question “do you want to receive a blessing…” would be misleading without the qualifier that the God in question was the Christian God. [citation needed]

Simon Leys, one of Mother Teresa’s defenders, has argued that baptisms are either soul-saving or harmless. Simon Leys, in a letter to the New York Review of Books, wrote: “Either you believe in the supernatural effect of this gesture — and then you should dearly wish for it. Or you do not believe in it, and the gesture is as innocent and well-meaningly innocuous as chasing a fly away with a wave of the hand.” This view, however, does not take into account the possibility that one could believe that participating in a baptism - a religious ceremony from a faith other than one’s own - is a sin.

Motivation of charitable activities
Christopher Hitchens described Mother Teresa’s organization as a cult which promoted suffering and did not help those in need. In Hitchens’ interpretation, Teresa’s own words on poverty proved that “her intention was not to help people.” He quoted Teresa’s words at a 1981 press conference in which she was asked: “Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?” She replied: “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”

Chatterjee added that the public image of Mother Teresa as a “helper of the poor” was misleading, and that only a few hundred people are served by even the largest of the homes. According to a Stern magazine report about Mother Teresa, the (Protestant) Assembly of God charity serves 18,000 meals daily in Calcutta (now called Kolkata), many more than all the Mission of Charity homes together.

Chatterjee alleged that many operations of the order engage in no charitable activity at all but instead use their funds for missionary work. He stated, for example, that none of the eight facilities that the Missionaries of Charity run in Papua New Guinea have any residents in them, being purely for the purpose of converting local people to Catholicism. Some defenders of the order argue that missionary activity — already declared in the name of the order — was a central part of Teresa’s calling.

Quality of medical care
Many of Teresa’s donors were evidently under the impression that their money was being used to build hospitals[citation needed]. In 1991, Dr. Robin Fox, then editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, visited the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and described the medical care the patients received as “haphazard”. He observed that sisters and volunteers, some of whom had no medical knowledge, had to make decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors in the hospice. Dr. Fox specifically held Teresa responsible for conditions in this home, and 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.

Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and kindness, but he noted that the sisters’ approach to managing pain was “disturbingly lacking”. The formulary at the facility Fox visited lacked strong analgesics which he felt clearly separated Mother Teresa’s approach from the hospice movement. Fox also wrote that needles were rinsed with warm water, which left them inadequately sterilised, and the facility did not isolate patients with tuberculosis. There have been a series of other reports documenting inattention to medical care in the order’s facilities. Similar points of view have also been expressed by some former volunteers who worked for Teresa’s order. Mother Teresa herself referred to the facilities as “Houses of the Dying”.

In contrast to the conditions at her homes, Mother Teresa sought medical treatment for herself at renowned medical clinics in the United States, Europe, and India, drawing charges of hypocrisy from Hitchens.

Destination of donations
Susan Shields, a former nun of Mother Teresa’s order, alleged that Teresa refused to authorize the purchase of medical equipment, and that donated money was instead transferred to the Vatican Bank for general use, even if it was specifically earmarked for charitable purposes[citation needed]. See Missionaries of Charity for a detailed discussion of these allegations. According to Chatterjee, other charitable organizations in India publish their accounts, but Mother Teresa always refused to do so except where she was required to by law.

Attitude toward repressive political leaders
Teresa made some public statements regarding political leaders that have produced controversy. After Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties in 1975, Mother Teresa said: “People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes.” These approving comments were seen as a result of the friendship between Teresa and the Congress Party. Mother Teresa’s comments were even criticized outside India within Catholic media. (Chatterjee, p. 276). In 1981 she made a trip to Haiti to accept an honor from Jean-Claude Duvalier, who was notorious as a repressive kleptocrat, and praised the Duvalier family as friends of Haiti’s poor. In 1989 she travelled to Albania and laid a wreath at the grave of Enver Hoxha, its Cold War era leader who had outlawed religion.

[AFAIKnow]

@GIGObuster

Regarding Mother Teresa, here is the wikipedia take on the controversy (even Wikipedia mentions some more cites are needed, but it is a good source to see where her critics are coming from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa

Read it, but you know the old saying. “Even Mother Teresa has critics.” ;j

[Bricker]

@Der Trihs

Perhaps she got lucky, or isn’t as attractive as the others.

I always suspected that the canard about “rape isn’t about sex” was just that. Thank you for confirming that attractiveness is a dangerous thing. I wouldn’t have believed it, but you speak for the Left with confident authority, so I guess it must be true!

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Bricker

I always suspected that the canard about “rape isn’t about sex” was just that. Thank you for confirming that attractiveness is a dangerous thing. I wouldn’t have believed it, but you speak for the Left with confident authority, so I guess it must be true!

Hijack–there’s some pretty interesting stuff coming out of evolutionary psychology that undermines the “rape isn’t about sex” theory pretty well: essentially, it suggests that in certain circumstances, it’s adaptive for males to engage in rape, just as it’s adaptive for females to strongly avoid rape in all circumstances. It’s not just about sex: it’s about the drive to procreate.

Which doesn’t at all mean that it’s acceptable or anything but loathsome. It’s just something we need to take into consideration when trying to figure out how to end, or at least minimize, rape.

Der Trihs is being a first-rate asshole; none of this should be taken as an agreement with him.

Daniel

[Mtgman]

@Left Hand of Dorkness

Hijack–there’s some pretty interesting stuff coming out of evolutionary psychology that undermines the “rape isn’t about sex” theory pretty well: essentially, it suggests that in certain circumstances, it’s adaptive for males to engage in rape, just as it’s adaptive for females to strongly avoid rape in all circumstances. It’s not just about sex: it’s about the drive to procreate.

Which doesn’t at all mean that it’s acceptable or anything but loathsome. It’s just something we need to take into consideration when trying to figure out how to end, or at least minimize, rape.

In a pure “survival of the fittest” context it makes perfect sense, and actually cuts both ways gender-wise. Each individual has a vested interest, biologically speaking, in finding the person who best fits their mate selection criteria and then extracting the necessary participation in the reproductive process from that person.

Many species, including humans, practice mate selection rituals intended to weed out some suitors and encourage others. A member of the species wanting to reproduce as successfully as possible finds a person who is as close to their ideal mate as is realistically possible. The object of this search would obviously pass the seeker’s mate selection criteria, but the seeker may not pass the criteria of the sought. How then is the seeker to capture the participation of the sought? Should they just shrug their shoulders and select some lesser candidate?

The idea of mutual consent for the act of reproduction is virtually unknown in the animal world. If you’re fast enough, strong enough, and fertile then you’ve got your pick of the available mate pool. If a male wants to mate with a female who doesn’t want him she better be strong enough, or fast enough, to repulse his advances. If a female wants to mate with a male and is stronger she can deny him opportunities to mate with other females by attacking and driving them off(or in the case of humans, simply rape him). This is rarely ever necessary because any female strong enough to impose her will on a male is almost certain to pass the male mate selection criteria in the non-human animal world. So all she has to do is hang around until the male is ready to copulate and she’ll probably get what she wants.

The general “spread the seed far and wide” approach to reproduction which is built into the reproductive strategies of the male of most species makes female rape unnecessary in the vast majority of cases. Still the biological reproductive reasoning which makes it an adaptive trait to obtain the best mate possible, willing or not, applies across genders.

I’ve got to admit the idea of, say, a female lion raping a male lion seems pretty far out there. I’m wondering how to research the topic of non-human females raping males. I may open a GQ thread about this because now I’m curious.

Enjoy,
Steven

[saoirse]

@Der Trihs

Perhaps she got lucky, or isn’t as attractive as the others.

Ah, it’s about attractiveness. I understand now. You’re getting this information from your DVD collection.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Mtgman

In a pure “survival of the fittest” context it makes perfect sense, and actually cuts both ways gender-wise. Each individual has a vested interest, biologically speaking, in finding the person who best fits their mate selection criteria and then extracting the necessary participation in the reproductive process from that person

This is true, but there’s a slight difference here. If a male makes a “mistake” (i.e., chooses a partner whose genes aren’t particularly good), he’s wasted, at minimum, a few tablespoons of matter and a few minutes of time. If a female makes a mistake, she’s wasted, at minimum, nine months and a lot of biological energy, and exposed herself to a serious risk of death. Therefore, it makes sense for females to have much more discriminating instincts when it comes to sex, for them to choose sexual partners much more carefully, and for them to regard the denial of this choice with a great deal of horror.

Daniel

[Mtgman]

And, in species where anatomical arrangements allow it, to refuse to accept their rejection graciously and attempt to force the male to copulate. Primarially this applies to humans.

I also found an interesting paper which discusses many of these topics. Your mini-hijack above is supported by the paper under the topics of “Rape as Reproductive Strategy” and “Is Rape an Act of Violence?”

The researchers are split on if a human male’s ability to maintain an errection and sexual function during a non-consenusal coupling is a result of rapist males being reproductively successful in the past. It is this very trait which allows human females to rape a non-consensual male. Irony?

Enjoy,
Steven

[Der_Trihs]

@Bricker

I always suspected that the canard about “rape isn’t about sex” was just that. Thank you for confirming that attractiveness is a dangerous thing.

“Rape isn’t about sex” is a political statement, not a rational one.

@Bricker

I wouldn’t have believed it, but you speak for the Left with confident authority, so I guess it must be true!

Did I ever claim that ?

@saoirse

Ah, it’s about attractiveness. I understand now. You’re getting this information from your DVD collection.

LOTR doesn’t have much to say on this I’m afraid.

[Bricker]

@Der Trihs

Did I ever claim that ?

Not precisely, but why should you be the only one of us to spout illogical horseshit? I wanted to play, too.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Der Trihs

LOTR doesn’t have much to say on this I’m afraid.

TMI! TMI! TMI!

Daniel

[Pazu]

Hi, Bricker?

I know this thread has drifted in all directions, but I’m still really interested in the distinction between “evil” actions and “neutral actions with inevitable evil outcome(s)”. Could you please address the questions in post #222?

Thanks.

[gigi]

@Pazu

Hi, Bricker?

I know this thread has drifted in all directions, but I’m still really interested in the distinction between “evil” actions and “neutral actions with inevitable evil outcome(s)”. Could you please address the questions in post #222?

I don’t think you would characterize the outcomes as evil if the intent is to act in the neutral way. It’s an unintended “bad” outcome, but not evil. You were describing the fetal death as the action and that’s not the case.

In your example of an intruder, the action you are taking is to save your wife, not to kill the person. Once you have them subdued and tied up, there’s no need to kill them because the action you have undertaken has been completed with no “evil” outcome.

Turn the desert island example around; maybe the moral thing to do is kill yourself to allow the other person to have a chance at life. Then is suicide immoral?

[Syntropy]

Wow, this went all over the place last night, didn’t it?

@gigi

I don’t think you would characterize the outcomes as evil if the intent is to act in the neutral way. It’s an unintended “bad” outcome, but not evil. You were describing the fetal death as the action and that’s not the case.

ExACTly. Unfortunately, there is no possibility of saving the fetus. Once you accept that, it’s clear that forcing the pregnant woman to wait for either the fetus to die or for her fallopian tube to burst is not only unnecessary, it’s torture.