Poirot

Interesting. I've never read anything beyond newspaper articles about Mother T.

Why did Hitchens get stuck into her?

Did he offer anything insightful, do you know?

Hi TBC,

This is really my own interpretation of the way it was for Mother Teresa. I'm always interested in people who do things a little differently or who find extra meaning inside institutions.
She appears to be someone who, although she embraced the church and its traditions, found another dimension of meaning in her work.

What did Hitchen's say?

I have no idea what he said, I couldn't be bothered to read his book when it came out, but he got quite nasty about her by all accounts.

It may or may not have been justified, I have no idea.

Hmm, just visited a wealth of Hitch' related stuff on The Googles.

I think the book might be worth reading after all:
http://www.slate.com/id/2090083

Quite a nasty article.

BTW, I'm not a catholic or a christian.

It's interesting that someone like Mother Teresa, who seems an authentic example of the teachings of Christ, and who undertook practical service to the poor and destitute should be attacked in this way...Not enough dogma, perhaps?

She worked in a country where suffering is on daily display, not hidden behind walls and clean white linen. She found her way by using humility, and brought comfort to those who crossed her path.
She thought suffering could become, "a means to greater love and greater generosity".

I think we'd have to both read the book, and then more, to find out if it really is a nasty article.

It's impossible to tell from that snippet, but there were some angles there that looked interesting and relevant, and much concerning the machine of the Vatican and how it used MT for its ends.

Beyond 'good vs. bad' she certainly built an amazing structure from there, an achievement in itself.

AJ Philips:>> why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?” (Carl Sagan, Cosmos, page 257)<<

AJ, I do not want to be pedantic but the universe has an age, 13 billion years. The science behind determining that use the same constants that apply to all the physics we exist by, measureable and constant. So from that premise Carl was being philosophical when he said the universe always existed.

>> If you’re making the classic mistake of thinking that atheism somehow implies absolute certainty or knowledge <<

Well yes, in general discussion given that the subject has no foreseeable resolution, I take being an atheist as a statement of denial and theist as a statement of belief.

>>That’s gnosticism and agnosticism - which both deal with knowledge. Atheism and theism are subsets.<<

No not quite. The first bit is right but to link atheism and theism as subsets is incorrect because the terms are particular to the belief in a creator, the other is knowledge on any subject including the existence of god.

>> and why do you not think that Occam’s razor should be applied in this instance?<<

Occams deems that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is a duck. I am saying "what" we have to look at to make a judgment is in real time, produced when the bang made all we can experience, yet the answer lies before time, a place alien to our physicality.

>> But what do you actually believe?<<

That anything is possible even though not particularly plausible.