All Comments (420)

dats true gul

dats true gul

I am disgusted at this article! You tell God this when you see him next and see what he has to say on the matter! Narrow minded people! It was NEVER Mother Teresa's intention to irradicate poverty - she was merely called to help the poor and the sick get through it! Do Psychologists today - try to eradicate poverty? No! They try and help people live the best lives with what they have got.

To everyone insulting Jacoby - get a grip. She is offering her opinion - she is not proclaiming to know everything about christianity. (I'd guess she does not 'know' that "nuns are christs bride" - what the heck does that even mean????)

What she does 'know', is how to use reason and logic, rather than mysticism and false premises to make a point.

Also, abortion, to most of the WORLD has nothing to do with killing children. It has more to do with preserving the rights of the living, breathing adults who had created a zygote. Equating abortion (a medical procedure) with murder (clearly not medical) is a religious myth intended to galvanize the conservative base. Abortion, gay marriage, and other issues were not much of an issue until politics became so divisive.

Thanks again Susan.

What you really don't understand Susan is Christianity!!! You think all pain should be avoided. A Christian knows God accepts our pain for the reparation of the world's sins!!!And to view abortion as anything but a horror confirms my realization that you are against all the gifts God has given us. Human life is the greatest of all His gifts. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
May God help you!!!

What you really don't understand Susan is Christianity!!! You think all pain should be avoided. A Christian knows God accepts our pain for the reparation of the world's sins!!!And to view abortion as anything but a horror confirms my realization that you are against all the gifts God has given us. Human life is the greatest of all His gifts. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
May God help you!!!

What you really don't understand Susan is Christianity!!! You think all pain should be avoided. A Christian knows God accepts our pain for the reparation of the world's sins!!!And to view abortion as anything but a horror confirms my realization that you are against all the gifts God has given us. Human life is the greatest of all His gifts. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
May God help you!!!

Concerned the Christian Now Liberated,

I do not know how large the number of atheists is, or how well they thrive without a life in the Lord, or whether their outward appearances match the inner reality.

I do know that before I was miserable, and now I am happy. Before, all the anger in my family was in me, and now I am the only one in my family who keeps cool. Before, I used to do all sorts of things I regretted, and didn't even know why, whereas now I have some self-control. Before, my relationships were mostly strained and I had no close friends, whereas now I have brothers that are closer to me than my own siblings.

I was raised in a house that was superficially Catholic - we went to Mass each weekend, and on other obligatory holy days, where none of us paid much attention, and my parents brought us to CCD where I learned very little about much of anything. My parents stopped going, or making us go, by the time I could drive. In college, I started taking an interest in what the whole "Jesus thing" was about. A lot of people got beat over the head with Bibles as a kid, and I can see why they might have problems with what they think is inside it; I didn't. A lot of people had "Jesus" used in their house as a sort of Santa Claus and Boogeyman all rolled into one. I can see why they have issues with who they think Jesus is; I didn't. I'm lucky, because in my house "Jesus" was only a curseword, really.

There are big decisions in life, Concerned, that entail lots of smaller, supporting decisions - you know what I mean? Like the decision to get married entails the smaller decision to tend to one's wife when she is sick, to check with her before making plans, and so on.

The decision to give oneself to Jesus is the same sort of thing. You make the decision all at once, and it can be as simple as "Jesus, if you really exist, if you're out there, would you please help me?" Wherever you're at, whatever you're feeling or thinking, that's where you start with Jesus. Just by being honest - you don't even have to be sure. You can even ask for a sign - but then keep your eyes open, because he will give one, but it won't be in neon, probably (though, who knows?).

After that, the smaller, secondary decisions have to come into play. Over time, to make Jesus the center of my life, I have: stopped doing things that go against what he wants, changed my movie-viewing habits, changed who I hang out with, reduced the amount I drink to a negligible amount, simplified my lifestyle to get rid of distractions, given more of my income to the poor than I thought was possible, changed what I read and why, started getting up an hour and a half earlier so I could spend time at Mass and prayer each morning, even changed career paths because it seemed to be what he wanted.

But it all takes time, and the beautiful thing is that Jesus is patient. He's not going anywhere. He's never asked more of me than the next babystep. But the key is the same for everyone in a relationship with Him: He's God, and knows better, and so we have to let Him lead the way.

If we insist on doing things our way, then it's as if we let him into our life just to make us feel better. Like opium. But he's not opium - he's a real person and wants to have a real relationship with us. And we cannot cling to old, false images of Him that we may have gotten from our family ("Jesus is gonna get you!") as a defense against meeting the real, living Lord - not if we really want to meet him, we can't. How can we get rid of those old images? Ask HIM what He's REALLY like. There's a start, anyway.

If you ever want to email me more privately, my address is withouthavingseen at gmail. Feel free, Concerned. God bless.

Are all Atheist feminists so filled with hate? Just reading this article makes me wonder what happened in this womans past to make her so angry. I would not be surprised to learn that she ws abused.

I am far away from god (he is a man-made myth), and I never had the urge to kill myself, or anybody else. How is this possible?

Ryan,

Giving ourselves to Jesus? How does that work?

And there a large number of atheists that are thriving quite well without the Singlarity or Jeus? Why is that?

David,

Don't despair. Getting away from God is causing us to kill ourselves. But God has come to us - Jesus Christ CAN transform not only each individual and each family, but by transforming us each, he can transform us all - salvage our civilization.

We must each give ourselves to Him so He can do His work on us.

Dear Arminius, Paganplace, LEPIDOPTERYX, Campbellite, David, et al.:

Please drop in on Thomas J. Reese's blog. I would like to continue the discussions we have been having that are spread all over the map.

Moderate,

Very nice post. I felt compelled to let you know that.

I'm not much of an old timer. I'm quite young (depending on how old the rest of you are). I'm 29. But even in my days in school it was just a fist fight or two once in awhile. Just a couple of months ago I went to my son's middle school (6th grade) and the police had a presentation about school violence. He showed youtube videos of kids in my son's school and other schools in the district (6th and 7th graders) with oozies, pistols, car-jacking an old man and then spinning donuts in the car in the middle of an intersection. 6TH AND 7TH GRADERS!! This wasn't even happening in my time as a 6th grader. I still didn't even know how to wipe my butt right, much less know how to shoot a gun, carjack and do donuts!! All this is less than 2 decades. And its only getting worse.

I wonder if Nietzche was right. Was killing God in the 19th century gonna cause humanity to kill itself? Obviously after looking at the 20th century, it's not that good. And looking at today with a secularist society, maybe Nietzche was on to something. That's probably why he was insane the last 13 years of his life. Killing God meant we define ourselves. Kids are defining themselves by the music, videos, and materialism while schools are ranting that God is a bad word. Nietzche being an atheist knew that if the whole of society became atheists and compeletely killed God, then to define ourselves would be the worst thing humanity has seen. All this from an atheist. I'm not saying all atheists are bad people. I'm sure your very nice, but the point is proven with evidence in today's world. Especially the Western world. And now we see the Western World declining and it will continue to decline until we have killed ourselves.

I look forward to it. :(

It is quite clear who the mental, immoral and all other associtated adjectives are on this thread. The 'enlightened ones' who propose a society that will fall sure as Rome.

There is a way that seems right unto man, but the end thereof is death.

Arminius:

“First, I am also using 'Disneylander'.

Next, I take issue with the surveys. Paganplace has some valid points - one, the reporting samples must have been skewed; and two, the fact that 1958 sure as hell was no 'Golden Age'. I know this, for I was there, 15 years old, in the South.“

Thank you.

I didn't mean to suggest that that 1958 was anybody's golden age. It was constricted, prejudiced, and hypocritical. Only a small elite (not including me or mine) lived well.

But ask anyone at Va. Tech if the concern about violence in everyday life is misrepresented in that survey.

While I grew up in a gritty and dangerous industrial city that was an ethnic melting pot, and got into some pretty good fights when I got jumped on the means streets. But there was less cold blooded, killing. Sometimes a good fight would clear the air, in fact.

Also, the teenage pregnancy rate was much lower, the drugs were less powerful, the few guns on the streets were not automatics. I don't think that the inner city was anywhere near as violent as it is today.

When I came up was still possible to find upward mobility through modestly priced public higher education. That was true because there was a sense that a great nation had to educate its people, so even if you grew up poor you could reach higher.

Now higher education is out of sight for most kids whose parent's don't have deep pockets because the Reaganauts pillaged the budgets for it.

The President with his tax cuts for his pals is running up vast debt that will weight heavily on the kids who have diminished educational and economic prospects.

Popular culture sells exploitation of women on a vast scale.

Fiduciary responsibility in corporate officers is a thing of the past with CEO compensation growing beyond reasonable economic bounds or reason. So income becomes more unevenly distributed by the year.

I think that a great nation can and must do better, and that this is a moral issue, and the great religions can be engines of renewal. People need to take a breath and look around to see what needs to be done to maintain a great nation, find like minded neighbors and get to work. Fascists like Sam Harris who degrade the nation further by supporting torture in the name of the United States do not have the answers.

I read recently about a program for prison inmates that taught these men who were going to be released that their children needed them, and they should return and become fathers. The out come was very positive. Many of them did. This means that they could be reached, but no one tired before.

Clearly we can do better.

Clearly we must.

Norrie,

No thanks for the clematis, thank you.

But a good post, well done.

Pax tecum.

Arminius,

You died in 21 A.D. It's time now for you to stop clinging to your earthly home and to move on to the next world. Susan and I have spells to help you accomplish this, if you should wish to have them.

Alternatively, you might try Dr. Bach's flower remedy CLEMATIS. Clematis is for people who live in the past and are too attached to their memories.

Your Latin phrase may be correct, but I wasn't writing Latin, or trying to, I was quoting General Stillwell's famous faux-Latin phrase.

Anyway (or as they say in Yorkshire, "any road"):

Non sum culex.

Vale, lacerte!

Unitam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant! - Actually, it already has.

Regards, Ave atque vale.

Norrie,

The proper Latin is: Noli nothis permittere te terere.

So who is a mental gnat?

Susan,

You wrote a good column.

Don't let the feeble but noisome darts of the moral/mental gnats on this thread trouble you in the slightest.

In particular, heed the advice of the newly-restored Latin Mass:

ILLEGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM !

All the best to you.

And Kevin you have how many degrees in religious studies???? Or by chance are you one of those like many of us who were bred, born and brainwashed into your religion and were convinced by some "enlighted" nun, priest, rabbi or minister that you were now " a know it all"???

Kevin,

Can't resist.... Oh, sad and benighted person, despising green peppers! Alas! (LOL).

Actually, I feel the same way about Brussel sprouts. So I appreciate your analogy.

I do think you stretched things a bit. I think the vocal atheists who bash us believing folks are as much in the minority as those in the religious crowd who are quick to judge those who do not agree with their dogma.

Perhaps I'm wrong. I hope not.

What I find so wonderful, and most remarkable, about the high-minded, "reasoned" folks from the Atheist left, such as Susan Jacoby, is that they busy themselves, looking out for us "simpletons", to lecture the rest of us about the nonsense of religion when they themselves do not adhere to any faith at all. People who despise faith all of a sudden become "experts" on a topic they could care less about.

I, for example, am disgusted by the taste and smell of green peppers and could care less if they become extinct. Does that now make me an expert on green peppers? Can I now be taken seriously and credibly on all things green pepper? The answer is no, which is why I find it appalling that anyone would care what Ms. Jacoby thinks about religion...and even more appalling that a respected news outlet finds her views informative to the public.

There is a difference between "reason" and just plain being a "know-it-all". Atheists usually see themselves as "smarter" than everyone else because they seem to know something we don't. Ms. Jacoby's constant belittling and disparaging comments towards other people who think differently than her is a reminder of why we should pay so little attention to what the "reasoned" Atheist has to say in the first place.

As a person of faith and reason, since I know so little about green peppers, most notably b/c they take up so little space in my everyday life, one could hardly pin me as an expert. Maybe Ms. Jacoby could write about green peppers and leave religion to those of us who know something about it.

This is an article with one sole (soul-less) objective. The assassination of works of good to appease the authors own inadequate conscience.

Arminius, Speed123, and Brian Fish,
Thank you all for your kind words.

Arminius,
I agree with you about the failure of US diplomatic and military endeavors. A close friend of mine is a major in the US army at the Pentagon. He agrees too.

Speed123,
Thanks for the suggestion. I threw a Charles Taylor onto my Amazon wishlist so I won't forget. I've heard of him, knew he was Catholic, and never really thought to read him. I am a grad student working as a technical writer, taking a bit of time off from (and getting readier and readier by the minute to go back to) school. Might I recommend to you Dietrich von Hildebrand - very clear and systematic, and immensely intelligent. His book, "Transformation in Christ" is a theological treatment of the Christian discipleship that is heavy on philosophy (his formal discipline) but still very accessible. JPII called the text "the Imitation of Christ for the third milennium."

Brian Fish,
Thank you. Maybe I will issue Ms. Jacoby an invitation.

Paul C,

Read my text!!! Suffering, joy, goodness, "badness", etc. comes with being human. It is all about the "luck of the draw". You are complicating the issue with fictional characters like Job and no doubt were bred, born and brainwashed in some form of Christianity.

And some added important words to consider:

Two important observations from "Exclusivism to Convergence: How We Relate to the Religions of Others; Part 1: Diversity, Exclusivism, and Inclusivism" by James Somerville, retired Catholic philosophy professor (Xavier U, Cincinnati, Ohio):

1. "The faith of the vast majority of believers depends upon where they were born and when."

2. "Religion can bring us to the verge, to the brink, but like (the fictional) Moses, who led his people to the (fictional) Promised Land, but could not enter in, there is no place for religion in the world to come. Religion is our vehicle for the journey. Once arrived, it will be left at the door."

David says, “Congratulations [Susan], I think your hatefulness just converted about 100 secularists to Christianity.”

I say – don’t count on it. Disagreeing with a fellow secularist is not cause to start believing that ancient myths are facts to live one’s life by.

Besides, how often is it that annoying remarks by a religious spokesperson turns believers into atheists? If that happened, the percentage of atheists should be skyrocketing!

I wonder how many of Jacoby’s detractors really know much about Mother Teresa besides that she is a humble little Catholic nun who does good works for the poor in India? That’s all I ever knew until recently. Looking back on it, I wonder how we all got to know even that. Certainly she didn't do this single-handedly, did she? Who’s taken over since Mother Teresa died? Surely that "mother" deserves some credit, doesn’t she? There must be many humble little nuns spending their lives among the poor in a truly humble way, with no publicity, no prizes and no prospect of sainthood.

Hi, Moderate!

See my post on the "Christian Nation" of the best-forgotten '50s - I lived thru it too. I don't look back on it with any joy.

I've got two kids, both in college now. I assumed from the start of their educations that the public schools would give no moral training, and tried to do it at home. I am pretty sure I succeeded.

Pay attention to PaganPlace. She can be horribly frustrating at times, but her heart is definitely in the right place. Her different perspective is refreshing.

Dear Paganplace:

"We've always been here, the only difference is that increasingly, kids are offered only lies and despair and marketing.

Or the army."

Agreed. That would be part of the core of the problem. I lived through the "Christian Nation" of 1958, and didn't like it much. Still, the outcome of the changes since then have me wondering if we didn't somehow throw out the baby with the bath water. The bath water was really dirty and needed draining, IMO.

Having put two kids through the public schools recently I was struck that the received almost no moral training in school. The problems of drugs, violence, hyper competitiveness, and just plain cheating, were overwhelming. The stuff that they were given as literature did not teach young citizens about the need for virtue. I think we failed to keep the core literature when we went to make it more inclusive and diverse.

I thought this piece from Kreeft might stimulate some thought.

My son said that it was assumed that "everybody knows" about the classics on how our democracy works, so they skipped the whole thing.

Thanks for the response. More to come.

Testing does not imply a lack of love, nor does it demand premeditation. It simply is putting people in a position to choose. You can choose to do good or evil and you will be held responsible for those choices. This is true whether you believe in God or not. Beyond the common, everyday examples of this, there is also plenty of scriptural support for this, the most obvious perhaps is the story of Job.

I understand your difficulty in accepting that a good and gracious God would allow handicaps. In your perspective, perhaps being different or having less priviledges is a bad thing. I'm sure you think suffering is a bad thing and I'm sure that by definition, most people would agree. Allow for a second that your perspective and God's perspective are very different. Perhaps people are different because God values diversity and that different people are needed to do different things. A blind child may have purpose in life that you just don't understand. Perhaps also God allows suffering because it gives others an opportunity to show love and compassion. As for the individual who suffers, while not pleasant the suffering can at times focus you on what's important in life and certainly gives you an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of your character in ways that getting everything you want will not.

Paul C.,

The "Testing" God??? Give us a break!!!! Consider a child born blind!!! Do you actually believe a good and gracious God would test a child like this???

It is all about natural law and the subsets of stochastic principles. Did God start the "ball of fires"?? Maybe, or maybe it all about evolution and there is no God but stochastically there are other Earths out there in the cosmos???

Some words of wisdom by the famous contemporary theologian, Father Edward Schillebeeckx:

from his book, Church: The Human Story of God,
Crossroad, 1993, p.91 (softcover),

"Christians must give up a perverse, unhealthy and inhuman doctrine of predestination without in so doing making God the great scapegoat of history" .

"Nothing is determined in advance: in
nature there is chance and determinism; in the world of human activity there is possibility of free choices.

Therefore the historical future is not known even to God; otherwise we and our history would be merely a puppet show in which God holds the strings. For God, too, history is an adventure, an open history for and of men and women."

To get back to the original letter, may I provide a little insight :

God gave everyone two things: life and free will.

That life he gave is a series of tests to see how we will use that free will. Some are tested with fame and success, some with grinding poverty.

Passing "these tests" is done by loving God and Loving your neighbor as yourself. In Catholic theology, love and charity are often used interchangeably because to love someone is to do things for them without expecting anything in return.

In the end, these tests constitute a journey either to God and heaven or away from God to Hell.

God loves everyone and wants them to choose to be with him in Heaven. But he does not require it (free will). To that end, he applies a "carrot and stick" approach to help lead us to him. The "Carrot" is the feelings of joy and contentment we get when we do his will. The stick is the feelings of guilt from our conscience when we fail.

St. John of the Cross, a 16th century Spanish monk recognized as one of the Doctors of the Church, takes it one step further. He writes that the final test for the most saintly among us is the Dark Night of the Soul. At this point in the progress toward God and Heaven, God essentially removes the "carrot," so that the person no longer gets the feelings of gratification for doing good works. Instead, they need to carry on for the sake of doing good without getting the reward of the good feelings and communication with God that they formerly felt. This tests true love because as formerly described, to love is to do something for someone else without expecting anything in return. As St. John of the Cross wrote, very few people reach this level and it is essentially purgatory on earth, purging the final vestiges of sin from us and makng us perfect.

If you put Mother Teresa's actions and feelings in this context, you get a better idea of why she is being considered for Sainthood. It seems clear from her letters that she was in fact experiencing the Dark Night of the Soul and yet she seems to have passed that test, continuing to selflessly minister to the poorest of the poor simply because she recognized it as God's will for her.

As for the whole question of Sainthood in the Catholic church, Saints are simply people who have reached heaven. The church acknowledges these people because they provide examples of how to do God's will. Studying and understanding their lives and works is invaluable for each one of us to find our own way to heaven. There is not only one way, as demonstrated by the diversity of saintly experience. But in the end, they all did one thing in common: they followed God's will for them.

Moderate,

First, I am also using 'Disneylander'.

Next, I take issue with the surveys. Paganplace has some valid points - one, the reporting samples must have been skewed; and two, the fact that 1958 sure as hell was no 'Golden Age'. I know this, for I was there, 15 years old, in the South.

The school I was in approximates the problems listed, with the addition of pregnancies. Typical white Anglo-Saxon protestant. But there were many other schools that fit the problem list of 1988; they were, at the time, all inner-city schools. Substitute STD for AIDS, and you've got it. In 1958, drugs were concentrated in the big cities, and tightly controlled by organized crime. Drugs did not migrate to the suburbs and rural areas until the 1960's, where they became local industries. Guns the same way, at least the use of guns for violence. But our school was run in accordance with Southern conservative protestant Christianity, with prayers all the time. Most of us just endured it, complaining would got us expelled. And we had the hell of segregation to deal with. Not a pleasant time, unless you were white, middle class, and Christian. And could ignore the religious atmosphere and segregation.

Dear Victoria:

"moderate- excellent observations- if you have no objection, may i use your phrase fat disney landers in the future?"

Feel free, and thanks for the complement. "Fat, Dumb, and Happy Disney landers." was actually my turn of phrase.

All the best.

Anon,

The Pope is always against war. We would all be "goose stepping" now if we followed this "fallible fellow". Fortunately, most Catholics to include myself are not sheep.

Paganplace:

"Not that unlike 1988... All the kids knew we had a senile right-wing president all ready to get us all nuked for Jesus..."

O rly??

It just so happens that all of the top neo conservatives were liberal Jewish intellectuals: Kristol, Podhoretz, and Strauss

Not to mention the ones that carried out the Project for the New American Century: Kristol Jr., Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Abrhams etc.

PS - not all Christans are the same. Catholics were against the war from the start while the Evangelicals and other OTers were fully behind it

I mean... Terrorism? They were trying to sell us on *that* back then, all the while we were *sure* Reagan was gonna say something stupid while forgetting what country he was in and we'd *all* incinerate.

Sometimes I question if people older than myself can even *deal* with a world not-about-to-end-any-minute-now-for-no-good-reason.

Seems certain people sold us on voting for that. Maybe it's out of nostalgia, I dunno.

But if you're wondering about the kids today, maybe take a lesson from the kids of *then.*

a) Stop lying.

And

b) Offer a real future.

This ain't rocket science.

I know some got a problem with science these days.

If it isn't a rocket, that is.

I mean, hey, it's going on 2008...

Not that unlike 1988... All the kids knew we had a senile right-wing president all ready to get us all nuked for Jesus...

What's different now?

The rich kids and wannabe rich kids don't have an ever-expanding economy to expect to profit on by.

So it turns inside.

Oh, and there's no good reason to expect we might get nuked any given minute, so Apocalypse was substituted.

Kids are less jaded and cowed than we. If less cautious.

But they see.

Our government lies and denies and profits and calls it holy.

What do you expect, 'Moderate?'

*spritzing hair.* Remember?

Apart from reporting samples, The Moderate:

In 1958, abortion, (and all unwanted pregnancy) venereal disease, rape, and drugs were simply *not spoken about* ...and violence was a spectre of 'negro' schools.

How did we come to this?

We've always been here, the only difference is that increasingly, kids are offered only lies and despair and marketing.

Or the army.

Not actually so different.

Only difference now is, we have no excuse to not do better... Not through trying to impose more ignorance, but through actually *educating kids as we now can,* and also... Through living up to America's promises... That things improve, that life can become better, not worse...

And that this doesn't just mean more consumer crap to sell each other.

Cause that particular well ran dry.

But life *ain't that bad* if only we could live here.

The last Christian Right administration, when *I* was a high school kid, we could let off steam. Cause we had legal rights and we could get away with things, and guns only came in later...

Now everything's like lockdown and the lies are even more insistent, even more transparnt, the kids live under lockdown, and the adults.. (that's us, now, are willfully even stupider, and the economic expansion of the 80s isn't even going to happen.

No wonder kids are blowing corks.

What's happened since 1958?

Much better things than you'd think.

It's the romanticized *idea* of 1958 that's screwing us, now.

Even if you liked the segregated water fountains.

Dear Anti-Theists:

I was just reading Peter Kreeft's book “Making Choices”. It seemed that a funny thing happened at the point where we became a "post Christian" nation. He pointed out that a survey of high school principals in 1958 identified the main problems among their students to be:

1. not doing homework
2. not respecting property - e.g., throwing books
3. leaving lights on and doors and windows open
4. throwing spit balls in class
5. running through the halls

The same survey thirty years later identified a new top five:

1. abortion
2. AIDS
3. rape
4. drugs
5. fear of violent death, murder, guns and knives in school

Anyone think that this is progress?

How did we come from the one to the next?

What do you all think?

I am going to drop on over to Father Reese's topic for a while. If you want to talk about, it drop on over to chew on it.

Dear Ryan,

I wish you well in your volunteer work there.
You should make a good-will invitiation to Ms. Jacoby -- that is, a chance to see Mother Teresa's ongoing work right in our own backyard.

Best,
Brian

Hello Ryan,

I enjoyed your last posts and you sound like a Catholic intellectual so I will suggest the political philosopher Charles Taylor (any of his works - a new one is coming out in Sept.)

He deals with faith in modernity along with the major thinkers of our time and their influence on our development as a civilization.

He also just won the Templeton Prize and would blow Hitch out of the water in any debate.

Check Charles Taylor; mind blowing, yet accessible scholarship!

Ryan Haber:

First, thank you for your kind words.

I am a believer - practicing Episcopal, on the liberal side. I don't know about humble, but I try.

Man, your stuff about poverty was a powerful education that blew me away. I should see that somehow - but videos ain't gonna do it. I feel from your words that it must be viewed first hand. How blind and spoiled we Americans are. I have seen slums here, but that is not the same. Although it's bad enough.

It's not just our foreign aid that fails because of our ignorance of the situation in a given country, but also our diplomacy and our military efforts.

Meaningful discussions can happen here. Let's keep it up.

Arminius
(Nom de Guerre)

Danny B.,

Thanks for your insight. Talking to immigrants in our own neighborhood can teach us how much we don't know.

---

Brian Fish,

It's funny you say that. It's been growing on my mind for a while - some friends have even suggested it to me, independently of each other - to go help out the MC's at their hospice on Otis St NE. I used to help there weekly until life circumstances changed. Maybe it's time to give them a call.

Wow. I write some really, really long posts. I think it's because I'm used to jobs with a lot of interaction, and now am mostly in an office by myself. Lol.

Arminius,

That's cool.

It's funny, because I don't think I had read your post (maybe I had read part of it), and I am sure that I had not read Moderate's, in which he used the term Disneylander. It will enter my lexicon, as well as Victoria's - it expresses the point better than my previous "fat-and-happy".

At 20, I went with my university's "Project Mexico" program to Tijuana for 2 weeks on a service mission. We helped local neighborhood groups build their own schools and parish buildings. It was really eye opening to walk among those shantytowns made out of cardboard, corrugated tin, and old tires. It was like one of those physics challenges where you have to build a parachute for an egg, using only plastic straws, only this was life for these people.

It blew away a LOT of preconceptions. It's funny, because I went to a middle-of-the-road Jesuit university, and took some classes on economics, went to plenty of lectures and workshops on causes of poverty, etc. I am not sure if everything they said was true or false, but I know that when I got to Tijuana's shanty-suburbs, they just kinda fell away in front of the reality.

Just recently I went to Mexico on vacation with a friend of mine, a priest who is my age (we are both 30 or so). We started off a few hours south of Cancun, Mexico's Disneyworld-for-Americans, on a quiet relaxing beach. We traveled into Chiapas, where there is probably the worst poverty on the North American continent. I've been there before, but for my friend it was surreal. For me it was too, I guess.

My friend's dad is a farmer in South Dakota. Couple thousand acres of flat land, growing corn, wheat, soya, he's got. In a good year, he gets good rain (and other parts of the country don't) so prices are high, he has lots of produce, and gets it all to market with the right timing. In a good year, he makes enough to pay his bills, pay off the seed he bought, save a bit of money for a rainy day, and help his kids with college, etc.

In Chiapas, my friend was blown away to see a little indigenous man and a little indigenous woman and their little indigenous son positively HIKING up a 60* (that is not exaggerated... if anything, it is understated) to irrigate BY HAND with buckets corn growing on that slope. Their little plots - just a couple of acres - are supposed to yield them enough to live on, and to bring a bit to market so they can get some money and buy something luxurious, like a pair of shoes or a shirt. In a good year, it does.

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Another example of unexpected reality comes from a priest, formerly at my parish, and now serving as pastor of a parish in Togo. At a village in his parish there sits a number of cool, once-new-and-now-dated gadgets to make daily life better for villages that are very simple, poor, and relatively untouched by modernity. They were brought by Japanese corporate benefactors: solar powered hot-water heaters, solar powered stadium-style lights to make roads safer at night, and a drinking well with pump powered by nice, big batteries. It's tropical Africa, and always hot, so nobody has every dreamt of hot-water heaters (since you only need to heat water a bit, to boil it for cooking). They quickly decided that hot showers were not pleasant. Since it is an agrarian area and people get up before dawn, they were not happy to have lights go on at dark and stay on, for hours. Within a couple weeks, villagers had put out the bulbs with stones. As for the well-and-pump, the batteries died after a year or so, and the pump only got in the way of drawing water by hand, as they had done since time immemorial quite happily. They ripped the pump out and broke it down for parts to sell.

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In my thinking, the chief reason that our foreign aid programs usually don't amount to much is that we don't understand the realities we are dealing with. So we increase funding for projects that become like black holes until we grow disenchanted and give up.

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It's OK not to know about those realities. The ones we have to deal with on a daily basis are complex enough for us. I am not sure (can't remember earlier posts) if you are a believing person, Arminius, but I can tell you are a humble one, anyway.

What really startles me about Jacoby's writing, and about the ideas expressed by Prof. Dennett and Prof. Hitchens is their arrogance, really. About almost any other topic, I am sure they would admit ignorance when ignorant. Here I am afraid that their animosity against religion and the religious has really gotten the better of them. It has also unmasked an pretty startling amount of self-conceit as well, as they sit in judgment over Mother Teresa's presumedly judgmental beliefs; as they lecture about how she would lecture her workers and guests and patients; as they pontificate about the pontiff with whom she collaborated; as they imagine they have fathomed her faith. All of this, while they give no indication of any familiarity with the concrete facts of the day-to-day reality (both exterior and interior) with which she (and other "relief workers") have to deal. It's really stunning, actually.

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It is really encouraging that meaningful discussion can occur on these boards though.

Thank you, Arminius.

No, seriously, what do you really think of Mother Teresa? I truly think Mother Teresa enjoyed pain.

Ryan Haber:

I came onto this discussion, apparently, as a 'fat Disneylander'. Between you and Moderate, I am beginning to see the grim truth. Thanks.

If you want to understand Mother Teresa, go volunteer with some her of her sisters here in Washington, D.C. There are at least two communities that I know of. One is in Mount Pleasant. When asked by an atheist how he could come to believe in God, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins replied, "Serve the poor."

My hunch is Teresa, like other saints, realized God had not abondoned her but that He WAS the people she helped. "Whatever you did for the least of my brothers, you did for me."

To paraphrase Dorothy Day, that means that the least of us are not symbols of Christ, or make us think of Christ. It means they are Christ!

See you on the bread lines?

Ryan Haber,

Very well said. I had similar thoughs on the matter and was unable to articulate them as well as you did.

I am from Detroit and lived in Florida for four years (then came back after the '04 hurricanes).

I had many neighbors from Latin America and the things that would amaze them about being here were equally amazing to me because I take them for granted.

The nearly guaranteed treatment in an emergency room was one of them. For some it was not just that you can go to a SUPERmarket, but that there is the availablity of all those products at all.

A Cuban friend commented to me that when he arrived here and went to the supermarket for the first time, "I could not believe you could actually buy all those things." He had been accustomed to stores with empty shelves, or stores where only tourists were able or ALLOWED to buy things.

A friend from Peru had never heard of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches...honestly! He thought the idea was disgusting and said they had peanut butter there (occasionally for toast), but that it was like us with a bottle of Tabasco...everybody has it and the bottle is always full.

I even heard heard people from England marvel at the "giant" containers of milk and orange juice we buy. An older British man commented to me when I asked what he thought of his first trip to the U.S., "It's amazing! The urinals flush themselves, and the tap is automatic!"

I didn't even leave the country to learn just how impossible it would be for me to begin to comprehend just what Mother Teresa did, and under what circumstances.

You said:

"It is easy to sit in a nice armchair at a desktop and speculate about what Mother should have or could have done."

I couldn't agree more.

Maureen Seymour,

Do you really think that guilt-feelings could power and direct the sort of operation that Mother Teresa developed? Maybe as a child or teenager you went to the Catholic religion out of guilt-feelings, but I can assure you that my faith has a firmer foundation.

To those criticising how Mother Teresa ran the Missionaries of Charity, esp. vis-a-vis painkillers and adequate medical care, etc.:

If you have never been to a poor, developing country like India, it is really, really hard to imagine the depths of poverty present there. It's not like poverty in an American inner-city for a couple reasons. A kid dying from a treatable kidney condition (usually) by law gets life-saving treatment in hospitals, at the hospital's own expense, in Western nations. Not so in many places. That kid with the kidney ailment might literally have been picked out of the gutter in front of the hospital. Keeping too many supplies on hand can be a dangerous invitation to burglary and even open invasion by gangs. When even cooking gas is almost completely beyond reach, even sterilized water must be rationed cautiously. It's a simple fact. Some of the people who worked with Mother Teresa and left probably did so out of revulsion at life's harsh realities, and confused them with some sort of preference of Mother Teresa's.

When I visited Cambodia for two weeks to work in medical clinics with missionary friends of mine, it was amazing what I saw. There were (in 2001) no hospitals comparable to Western standards operated by the government even in the capital city. There was a hospital operated by the Russian government, and one operated by the Japanese government. The Japanese was pretty spiffy and modern; the Russian was abysmal. Patients there simple sat on the floor and rotted, waiting to die, without even adequate or appropriate food.

In such a situation, if a nun comes and takes a patient out and brings the patient to a center where there is at least a bed and better nutrition, everything else lacking, has the nun harmed the patient by not also giving antibiotics? Hardly.

It is easy to sit in a nice armchair at a desktop and speculate about what Mother should have or could have done. It is gratifying to sit in judgment over someone admired the world over. But both attitudes are tinged with hypocrisy and naivite. Mother Teresa was from a (more-or-less) developed country, was educated, and knew what options were available in the West. Antibiotics may have helped any number of her patients. I'm guessing she thought of that.

Here in my East Coast office, it is really, really hard for me to remember what destitution without government-welfare actually looks like.

moderate- excellent observations- if you have no objection, may i use your phrase fat disney landers in the future?

Tom wrote:

"... I do not know your gods, but I hope you are at least open to the possibility of the existence of mine. ... "

Tom,

I will admit that there is a remote possibility that gods exist (including yours) if you will admit that there is also a high probablity that your god does not exist because there is no credible evidence that any gods exist outside the imaginations of men.

Pray quietly if you must but remember, you don't get a refund if you over-pray.