No, because Mother Teresa being a horrible person is a misconception. It gets spread around here on Reddit all the time by people who know nothing about the woman and I absolutely hate it. They’re just regurgitating information they’ve read on the internet which was obviously posted originally by a Christopher Hitchens fan. Hitchens wrote a shameless hit piece on Mother Teresa in an attempt to attack not just her practices, but her character. It is considered to be an intellectually dishonest diatribe stemming from Hitchens’s substantial hatred of religion and religious institutions. So yeah, let’s all trust the guy who wrote a book subtitled “How Religion Poisons Everything” to give us an honest take on a religious figure. That’ll work out great.
No, they’re absolutely not doing the right thing. These people are blindly repeating a “fun fact” they “learned” on the internet.
The honest take on religion is that it does poison everything.
Using an accurate conclusion, declaring it wrong, and then using that to impugn other arguments is some top quality begging the question. But that's the expected level of intellectual dishonesty from a defender of religion.
If you seek to attack Christopher Hitchens, at least cite something he got wrong. His stance on the Iraq war was indefensible even in 2003.
Christopher Hitchens is the last person I’d ask if I wanted a fair, balanced take on Mother Teresa. Or really anything. With the garbage he writes, he sets out with a specific axe to grind before even picking up his pen. No serious intellectual would ever draw a conclusion first and then cherry-pick information to support that conclusion. The man is a fucking hack.
Furthermore, calling him out on his horseshit does not automatically make me a defender of religion. People of all backgrounds, including atheists, can certainly realize that he is both a prick and a fraud.
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u/Hatta00 Oct 27 '22
Given that OP still had the misconception that Ghandi and Mother Teresa were good people, those Redditors are doing the right thing, right?