Announcement

Collapse

Forum Rules (Everyone Must Read!!!)

1] What you CAN NOT post.

You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use this forum to post any material which is:
- abusive
- vulgar
- hateful
- harassing
- personal attacks
- obscene

You also may not:
- post images that are too large (max is 500*500px)
- post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or cited properly.
- post in UPPER CASE, which is considered yelling
- post messages which insult the Armenians, Armenian culture, traditions, etc
- post racist or other intentionally insensitive material that insults or attacks another culture (including Turks)

The Ankap thread is excluded from the strict rules because that place is more relaxed and you can vent and engage in light insults and humor. Notice it's not a blank ticket, but just a place to vent. If you go into the Ankap thread, you enter at your own risk of being clowned on.
What you PROBABLY SHOULD NOT post...
Do not post information that you will regret putting out in public. This site comes up on Google, is cached, and all of that, so be aware of that as you post. Do not ask the staff to go through and delete things that you regret making available on the web for all to see because we will not do it. Think before you post!


2] Use descriptive subject lines & research your post. This means use the SEARCH.

This reduces the chances of double-posting and it also makes it easier for people to see what they do/don't want to read. Using the search function will identify existing threads on the topic so we do not have multiple threads on the same topic.

3] Keep the focus.

Each forum has a focus on a certain topic. Questions outside the scope of a certain forum will either be moved to the appropriate forum, closed, or simply be deleted. Please post your topic in the most appropriate forum. Users that keep doing this will be warned, then banned.

4] Behave as you would in a public location.

This forum is no different than a public place. Behave yourself and act like a decent human being (i.e. be respectful). If you're unable to do so, you're not welcome here and will be made to leave.

5] Respect the authority of moderators/admins.

Public discussions of moderator/admin actions are not allowed on the forum. It is also prohibited to protest moderator actions in titles, avatars, and signatures. If you don't like something that a moderator did, PM or email the moderator and try your best to resolve the problem or difference in private.

6] Promotion of sites or products is not permitted.

Advertisements are not allowed in this venue. No blatant advertising or solicitations of or for business is prohibited.
This includes, but not limited to, personal resumes and links to products or
services with which the poster is affiliated, whether or not a fee is charged
for the product or service. Spamming, in which a user posts the same message repeatedly, is also prohibited.

7] We retain the right to remove any posts and/or Members for any reason, without prior notice.


- PLEASE READ -

Members are welcome to read posts and though we encourage your active participation in the forum, it is not required. If you do participate by posting, however, we expect that on the whole you contribute something to the forum. This means that the bulk of your posts should not be in "fun" threads (e.g. Ankap, Keep & Kill, This or That, etc.). Further, while occasionally it is appropriate to simply voice your agreement or approval, not all of your posts should be of this variety: "LOL Member213!" "I agree."
If it is evident that a member is simply posting for the sake of posting, they will be removed.


8] These Rules & Guidelines may be amended at any time. (last update September 17, 2009)

If you believe an individual is repeatedly breaking the rules, please report to admin/moderator.
See more
See less

Christopher Hitchens- RIP

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Siggie
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by Armanen View Post
    You can claim a dead person stood for one thing or another based on how you use his/her teachings, writings, actions, etc. One thing I know though is that Mother Teresa did more for mankind than hawkins ever did, and she certainly is in a much better place.

    Yes, a militant atheist is one who can't keep their disbelief to himself but must try to convert others to his/her destructive viewpoint. Mind, body, soul, if you are an atheist you are missing one part of the triangle. Hence a militant atheist is much more dangerous than a fundamentalist theist. But I do not expect you to understand, afterall, you only believe in the material, hence anything you do not see must not exist. Anyway, I have had this discussion with you and others her before, I don't see that there has been any progress on your end. I hope you find true enlightenment one day; it won't be science that gives it to you though you can bet on that.
    What do you call what you just did? The reason I am even as outspoken as I am is because of people like you saying things like that to me. By the way, you don't understand and have misrepresented it by simplifying it to preschool level by saying I don't believe in what cannot be seen.



    This is just the summary from Wikipedia.

    Criticism

    Towards the end of her life, Mother Teresa attracted some negative attention in the Western media. The journalist Christopher Hitchens was one of her most active critics. He was commissioned to co-write and narrate the documentary Hell's Angel about her for the British Channel 4 after Aroup Chatterjee encouraged the making of such a programme, although Chatterjee was unhappy with the "sensationalist approach" of the final product.[58] Hitchens expanded his criticism in a 1995 book, The Missionary Position.[76]

    Chatterjee writes that while she was alive Mother Teresa and her official biographers refused to collaborate with his own investigations and that she failed to defend herself against critical coverage in the Western press. He gives as examples a report in The Guardian in Britain whose "stringent (and quite detailed) attack on conditions in her orphanages ... [include] charges of gross neglect and physical and emotional abuse",[77] and another documentary Mother Teresa: Time for Change? broadcast in several European countries.[58]

    The German magazine Stern published a critical article on the first anniversary of Mother Teresa's death. This concerned allegations regarding financial matters and the spending of donations. The medical press has also published criticism of her, arising from very different outlooks and priorities on patients' needs.[68] Other critics include Tariq Ali of the New Left Review and the Irish investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre.[76]

    She has also been criticized for her view on suffering. She felt that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus.[78] Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International, criticised the failure to give painkillers, writing that in her Homes for the Dying, one could "hear the screams of people having maggots tweezered from their open wounds without pain relief. On principle, strong painkillers are even in hard cases not given. According to Mother Teresa's philosophy, it is 'the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ'."[79]

    The quality of care offered to terminally ill patients in the Homes for the Dying has been criticised in the medical press. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal reported the reuse of hypodermic needles, poor living conditions, including the use of cold baths for all patients, and an approach to illness and suffering that precluded the use of many elements of modern medical care, such as systematic diagnosis.[68] Dr. Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, described the medical care as "haphazard", as volunteers without medical knowledge had to take decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors. He 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. Dr. Fox makes it a point to contrast hospice, on the one hand, with what he calls "Mother Teresa's Care for the Dying" on the other hand; noting that, while hospice emphasizes minimizing suffering with professional medical care and attention to expressed needs and wishes of the patient, her approach does not.[80]

    Colette Livermore, a former Missionary of Charity, describes her reasons for leaving the order in her book Hope Endures: Leaving Mother Teresa, Losing Faith, and Searching for Meaning. Livermore found what she called Mother Teresa's "theology of suffering" to be flawed, despite being a good and courageous person. Though Mother Teresa instructed her followers on the importance of spreading the Gospel through actions rather than theological lessons, Livermore could not reconcile this with some of the practices of the organization. Examples she gives include unnecessarily refusing to help the needy when they approached the nuns at the wrong time according to the prescribed schedule, discouraging nuns from seeking medical training to deal with the illnesses they encountered (with the justification that God empowers the weak and ignorant), and imposition of "unjust" punishments, such as being transferred away from friends. Livermore says that the Missionaries of Charity "infantilized" its nuns by prohibiting the reading of secular books and newspapers, and emphasizing obedience over independent thinking and problem-solving.[81]

    Christopher Hitchens and the German magazine Stern have said Mother Teresa did not focus donated money on alleviating poverty or improving the conditions of her hospices, but on opening new convents and increasing missionary work.[82] Mother Teresa accepted donations from the autocratic and corrupt Duvalier family in Haiti and openly praised them. She also accepted 1.4 million dollars from Charles Keating, involved in the fraud and corruption scheme known as the Keating Five scandaland supported him before and after his arrest. The Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles, Paul Turley, wrote to Mother Teresa asking her to return the donated money to the people Keating had stolen from, one of whom was "a poor carpenter". The donated money was not accounted for, and Turley did not receive a reply.[83]

    Leave a comment:


  • Armanen
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by Siggie View Post
    Were they false? Others have criticized her as well. Did she not believe that people should suffer and that that suffering brought them closer to God? I wonder how the people whose suffering she did nothing to relieve felt about that.

    And what exactly is a militant atheist? One that speaks negatively about religion? By that definition every Christian who does the same about Islam is a militant Christian, and so on... Funny how you have to blow sh!t up and kill people to be a "militant" anything else, but the second you put voice to some of your doubts about the value of religion, you're militant.
    You can claim a dead person stood for one thing or another based on how you use his/her teachings, writings, actions, etc. One thing I know though is that Mother Teresa did more for mankind than hawkins ever did, and she certainly is in a much better place.

    Yes, a militant atheist is one who can't keep their disbelief to himself but must try to convert others to his/her destructive viewpoint. Mind, body, soul, if you are an atheist you are missing one part of the triangle. Hence a militant atheist is much more dangerous than a fundamentalist theist. But I do not expect you to understand, afterall, you only believe in the material, hence anything you do not see must not exist. Anyway, I have had this discussion with you and others her before, I don't see that there has been any progress on your end. I hope you find true enlightenment one day; it won't be science that gives it to you though you can bet on that.

    Leave a comment:


  • hrai
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by bell-the-cat View Post
    I didn't need, and will never need, a "drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay" to tell me how I should think, so he wasn't important to me. If Hitchens convinced even a single person to change his or her opinion, I'd be surprised. I admit that I haven't read any of his books, but from a general awareness of his articles and broadcasted stuff, I got the impression that a lot of what he did wasn't actually dangerous or damaging attacks on those he opposed, it was just easy verbal grandstanding to those who already held the same views. And a lot of of his output had too many snide cheap shots that show the truth of that "popinjay" epithet. Sure, you can cherry-pick this or that opinion of his to prove how wonderful (or how awful) he was, but what was the overall output and its effectiveness?
    Re-arrange these words : Pot, black, kettle, calling................

    Leave a comment:


  • bell-the-cat
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by yerazhishda View Post
    He was a second-rate 'philosopher' who probably had an inferiority complex due to the overwhelming success of his cohort, Mr. Dawkins.
    ...your post has an inept understanding of the word "philosopher". I doubt anyone (excepting you) has ever described Hitchens as a "philosopher"!
    Last edited by bell-the-cat; 12-21-2011, 12:05 PM.

    Leave a comment:


  • bell-the-cat
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by yerazhishda View Post
    If you can't figure it out, you're probably not a good candidate to be judging such matters.
    Of course, the overwhelming odds are that it IS a post by an idiot; however, eternal optimist as I am, I still like to give them the benefit of the doubt.

    Leave a comment:


  • bell-the-cat
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by bell-the-cat View Post
    Honestly, that was such a pathetic, dreary, amateurish, petty, crude, childish, and pointless article, that I have better things to do that give it a line-by-line dissection.
    I'll do the first third of it, that is enough.

    Look at how he begins his article. He starts by attacking a situation where rape is not treated as a crime, but where the victim is considered the criminal for having being raped, and the misuse of the word "honor". By starting his diatribe with content that no intelligent person would argue against, he seeks to weasel in unopposed the equally obnoxious opinions of his own. And a vanity-fuelled person like Hitchens wastes little time in getting down to business.

    In the very next paragraph he starts behaving EXACTLY like the society he has just criticised. Hitchens treats the victim (President Asif Ali Zardari, who has seen his wife murdered) as the criminal, and uses the language of sexual repression to attack him: Zardari is “lacking in manliness”, has a “puny chest” (and, by implication, our little popinjay Hitchens has a Tarzan-like chest and “manliness” in abundance).

    Then he goes on to give the explanation of all America’s problems in the world, why America is so hated everywhere. And such a simple explanation it turns out to be: “We are richer than they are, and they are jealous about it”. That is SUCH a relief: they are the ones with the problem, not us; it is their behaviour that is at fault, not ours.

    He then neatly sidesteps the fact that the origins of those American subsidies to Pakistan were in American intents to destabilise what he hypocritically calls the “democracy of India”. And by using the word “democracy” he also neatly sidesteps mentioning the regular and always unpunished massacres of Muslims in India which feed Pakistan’s anger against India.

    The he starts to preen himself in public, stating "as I wrote for Vanity Fair in late 2001" – i.e. "how wise and how wonderful I am: I could see things a decade before anyone else could!"

    The he quotes an obscure quote (this one of his favorite pastimes btw: indulging in obscure quotes, or correcting others who quote quotes by informing them that the full quote actually says more than that). So we have an "aren't I so clever" quote, but one that has such little clarity of meaning and relevance that he has to resort to cliche to clarify it: "the tail wagging the dog". Except that, by going on to talk about lapdogs, he completely alters the meaning of "the tail wagging the dog" (perhaps because HE is the tail, and HIS READERS are the dog, or perhaps because the phrase is best known in the context of criticism of America’s foreign policy propaganda).

    Then he goes on to make a wild claim, a claim he does not justify: "everybody knew that the Taliban was originally an instrument for Pakistani colonization of Afghanistan". I love the way he actually thinks he can bully his way out of having to back up this extreme claim by just saying “everybody knows it”, i.e. you asking me to justify my opinion just shows how ignorant you are. And he piles on the weasel: "Everybody knew that al-Qaeda forces were being sheltered in the Pakistani frontier town of Quetta". He next says the exact opposite, that Pakistan has little or no control over its border/frontier areas: so how can it be "sheltering" forces, or indulging in "colonisation". And Al-Qaeda, of course, has no "forces", it has a few leaders, a small group committed of supporters, and a very large number of sympathizers: but Hitchenesque extremism, perhaps because of its Marxist roots, has no shades or nuances, or any sense of humanity – the end always justifies the means (a bit like al-Qaeda: again, Hitchens ends up behaving like those he opposes).

    Leave a comment:


  • yerazhishda
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by Armanen View Post
    Nothing great about him. He was a militant atheist and those are the worst kind. He wrote negative things about Mother Teresa, of all people!
    He was a second-rate 'philosopher' who probably had an inferiority complex due to the overwhelming success of his cohort, Mr. Dawkins.

    That being said, RIP. Hopefully God will be merciful on him.

    Leave a comment:


  • yerazhishda
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by bell-the-cat View Post
    Once again on this forum, I am torn between not knowing if a post is meant to be serious, but posted by a idiot, or if it is a post meant to be ironic.
    If you can't figure it out, you're probably not a good candidate to be judging such matters.

    Leave a comment:


  • bell-the-cat
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by Armanen View Post
    He was a militant atheist and those are the worst kind. He wrote negative things about Mother Teresa, of all people!
    Once again on this forum, I am torn between not knowing if a post is meant to be serious, but posted by a idiot, or if it is a post meant to be ironic.
    Last edited by bell-the-cat; 12-21-2011, 08:10 AM.

    Leave a comment:


  • bell-the-cat
    replied
    Re: Christopher Hitchens- RIP

    Originally posted by Joseph View Post
    One of my favorite recent pieces, and btw F#CK PAKISTAN!


    Hating the United States—which funds Islamabad’s army and nuclear program to the humiliating tune of $3 billion a year—Pakistan takes its twisted, cowardly revenge by harboring the likes of the late Osama bin Laden. But the hypocrisy is mutual, and the shame should be shared.
    Honestly, that was such a pathetic, dreary, amateurish, petty, crude, childish, and pointless article, that I have better things to do that give it a line-by-line dissection. If it is typical of his recent output, and is indicitive of future displays of his vanity had he lived on, then I am greatly gladdened by his death.
    Last edited by bell-the-cat; 12-21-2011, 08:14 AM.

    Leave a comment:

Working...
X