Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

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What's so chilling about you and Mother Teresa is that you're arguing that the poor should suffer to help the world and the environment, when they're not the ones flying around in private airplanes, like Mother Teresa was.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55229725

>Climate change: Global 'elite' will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles

>The world's wealthiest 1% account for more than twice the combined carbon emissions of the poorest 50%, according to the UN.

Mother Teresa even killed five innocent people (including two children) with her airplane and jet-set self-promoting high-carbon lifestyle!

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-10-12-mn-2986-s...

>DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — A small plane carrying Nobel laureate Mother Teresa skidded into the crowd seeing her off Saturday and killed five people, Radio Tanzania said. No one on the plane was hurt. [...]

>Sister Celina, speaking by telephone from the hospital at Dodoma, the nearest town, identified the dead as Sister Clarapia of India, two boys ages 12 and 14, and two men, one of whom ran a center for lepers at the Hombolo mission.

https://www.tzaffairs.org/1987/01/tanzania-in-the-internatio...

>Mother Teresa, aged 76, escaped unhurt when a light aircraft she was travelling in slewed off the rough airstrip at Hombolo near Dodoma on October 12th, 1986. Five people in the crowd lining the airstrip were killed. According to the Times, “The dead were two boys aged 8 and 12, sister Serena, an Indian missionary nun, the director of a leprosy centre, and another Tanzanian man. The pilot, Mr Rolf Klemenson, a Norwegian, said the plane slewed off the runway as it was gathering speed for take-off and he was unable to lift it over the crowd. Two were injured by the propellers of the plane and at least one of the dead was decapitated. Mother Theresa subsequently attended the funeral of sister Serena. She was deeply affected by the tragedy, saying: “My coming is behind this accident.” She at first said that she would abandon the rest of her tour, but later decided to continue and flew to Tabora, where she attended a ceremony at which seven members of her Missionary Sisters of Charity took their first vows.”

It's hard to pick a side when headstrong interpretations win out over likely truth. The jesus-like dream of truth died before I was born and now we're left with people choosing their own interpretations.

The article you linked under the shocking line 'Mother Teresa killed five with her plane', describes an incident where a plane was crowded around and unable to get airborn. Five people took the brunt of the propellers. No part of that is directly Mother Teresa's fault and you have to work hard to ignore the pilot's actions and everybody on the ground.

It isn't hard to find the truth for what it likely is, through research and a charitable view. Society has determined that using headstrong fear to ram your own interpretation through is better than the past and I weep everyday for what we have lost. This used to be a good planet, now every single marginally positive outcome must be torn from history and context to be presented as the evil "it is". Shame on you. I'm so tired of the politics du-jour shitting on 2k years of successful history. You can lie about the present, and the past won't go away.

Everybody who thinks they have a modicum of intelligence and still accepts balongia like these hellish recasts of the past deserves their inability to tell truth from fiction.

Mother Teresa chose to fly to Dar es Salaam not to help the poor, but to "attended the consecretion Monday of seven nuns of her Missionaries of Charity order".

https://apnews.com/article/56dc5fdab8fcf949ee6dc4a4f4e9947b

You are as quick to forgive her of any responsibility for her voluntary actions of self-promotion and religious indoctrination, as wolfretcrap was to condemn the poor for the responsibility of their mere existence on the environment.

https://apnews.com/article/56dc5fdab8fcf949ee6dc4a4f4e9947b

She even had the nerve to make the self-aggrandizing claim that it was a miracle of God that she survived (another notch in her campaign for sainthood), but failed to mention that God decided to kill those five people (horribly decapitating some of them with the propellers), including two children, while sparing her. Thanks, God!

All this proves my point in this discussion that Mother Teresa is a textbook example of someone with an extremely dark personality, who was so good at and focused on self promotion, that she managed to conceal that fact that she's a sociopath, and fool people into thinking she was a saint, and literally bending the rules to grant her sainthood after her death.

The fact that she wasn't personally piloting the private plane she chartered (and that wouldn't have been there otherwise) which killed five people, or that one particular person like Christopher Hitchens who justifiably and correctly criticized her was an anti-theist, or alcoholic, or gay, or a jerk, doesn't detract from the uncontested proven facts, man.

God is an absolute, the source of all. The concept includes being responsible for the death of people in unfortunate circumstances. I don't see the idea that you are somehow above God because you identified that some people died in unfortunate circumstances.

I don't "forgive her". I say there is a truth you have thrown under a bus. She didn't self promote, she was serving a purpose under a larger story. People suffering and someone being unable to fix it, doesn't make them a sociopath for trying to give some meaning to inevitable deaths.

You and Hitchens are just grand-standing off the back of religion.

You haven't refuted even one of Hitchens' claims. All you're doing is trying to redirect and distract from them. Reciting a Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap label at me doesn't prove your point, it just shows you're irrational. And now you're making straw man arguments falsely accusing me of having the idea that I'm somehow above God. That's a non-sequitur. Where did you get that from??! Why do you have to just make shit up, instead of arguing the facts? Tell me what Hitchens said that isn't true, and prove it.

This is a discussion about psychopathic people being able to conceal it, and fool gullible people into literally believing they're saints. Of course she relentlessly self promoted and grandstanded -- that's what she was doing when she attended a nun consecration ceremony (which she didn't need to do, and didn't help the poor) and decapitated innocent people with the propellers of her private charter airplane, killing two children, and a man who ran a home for lepers, then she arrogantly claimed it was a Miracle from God that SHE survived. How narcissistic can you possibly get?

Do you or don't you agree that Mother Teresa is a psychopath, and if you disagree, how do you square it with the facts that Hitchens and others raise? (Without attacking the messenger, address the FACTS.)

The spectacle of you trying to defend her with mumbo-jumbo, without contesting any of the widely know and documented facts about her, simply proves my point that she fooled a lot of gullible people who refuse to be swayed by the facts, including you.

I don't know what to say. Your post doesn't make sense. She didn't fly the plane into people by her own hands. She didn't order her pilot to murder people in a failed bid to take-off.

You reject the very concept of the religion you criticize. If you have a problem with magic soap labels then I can agree, I don't believe magic soap labes matter too. That's not what religion is.

I fail to see how attending a religious appointment is a crime. Did she skip out on handing out food? Did she miss her chance to pass out medicine? What concrete thing could she have done to save her people?

Your post is way over the line of sanity. Being angry that religion exists in the face of suffering isn't a valid criticism of theresa. Criticize the lack of solutions to the problem, by the people who were responsible. The rest is insane bleatings.

You obviously haven't listened to any of Hitchens' or anyone else's criticisms of Mother Teresa, since you refuse to address or refute any of them. Funny how somebody who believes in invisible ghosts and resurrection and chants magic soap labels but doesn't believe in science or cause and effect will accuse somebody else who does of insanity. You're the deranged one arguing that the poor should suffer to help the world and the environment. That makes your personality very dark, indeed.

We're having a discussion about psychopaths with dark personality traits who deceive people into thinking they're saints, and Mother Teresa is the archetypical textbook example of that. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? Can you prove Christopher Hitchens' criticisms are wrong? All you've contributed so far is serving as an example of somebody who refuses to look at the evidence and was gullibly fooled into believing a terrible person is actually a saint. Which was my point. Thank you!

I've listened to hundreds of hours of Hitchens. I liked him. I asked you for concrete refutations, which are implicitly based in science.

Tilting at windmills here..

Yet again, you still haven't refuted anything Hitchens claimed, even though you claim to be familiar with it. Obviously you can't refute them, because if you could, you would have already, after I originally asked you to refute what he said that you don't agree with. Now you're asking me for a refutation (but of what??!), just like Trump incoherently projecting his own lies onto other people, after you refused to refute anything that Hitchens said, or even state what he said that you disagree with. So why should I answer your vague demand to refute some unspecified claim, after you failed to answer the specific question I asked first? You're the one who's denying reality and dodging questions. The ball's in your court to refute what Hitchens said, before demanding I refute some hypothetical claims you won't even identify.

1. What concrete and specific thing did Mother Theresa fail to do for the suffering people when she visited the nun convention?

2. What specific and concrete thing did Mother Theresa do, to be called a murderer in the plane crash?

Most of Hitchens arguments are against the character of god, how he's so totalitarian and capable of causing suffering. There is little to respond to because it isn't based on arguing concrete realities. The game is based on arguing interpretations of events in the most negative light and using that as a reason to distrust the character of god.

God is a necessary concept and arguing how terrible is his 'character', is beside the point. We can endlessly rework history with a nominalist historicism completely devoid of the context that god occupies, to show how terrible god's ethos is and how his adherents are evil, but it is a pointless game in the end.

God isn't going away and this endless attempt by UK atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, et al to have all the benefits of 2k years of Christanity without the theism is a tiring waste of time.

Hitchens is a christian athiest. He is a product of his context and all the secular humanism and gaping at the awe of space won't save you from the fact that the past 2k years were successfully led by christians in the west.

He was in a limo with dawkins and once said even if he had the most complete and destructive argument against god, that would end all arguments about god, he wouldn't do it. He was man who built his career on arguing the endless topic, religion. In his own words he chose this topic because it doesn't run out.

So yeah, preach to me about magic soap labels, if you think that's what god is, then you are welcome to it. I won't join you in nominalist hell and I won't lift you out of a well.

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