Audience:
I know because you're unusually fair-minded and well-balanced and never really opinionated (laughter) uh, I’m interested in why on earth would you tackle Mother Teresa as in the missionary position?
Host:
Christopher, could you give a precis of the question to the audience?
Hitchens
I was asked why someone of my natural tenderness, perdor and fair mindedness would and by the way one must not confuse fair mindedness with objectivity as you know how people often do that, in this culture people say even even-handedness is objectivity or fairness is objectivity or uh putting both sides, Objectivity is the search for truth even if it leads you to unwelcome conclusions.
It's nothing at all to do with impartiality but none of these things apply in the case of Mother Teresa because it's a simple matter of record that she was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud. (laughter) I think probably the most the most
successful confidence trickster of the last century and responsible for innumerable deaths and for untold suffering and misery and proud of it.
Should I just assert this, or would you require any proof? I just wonder we know how fair-minded some people could be
Audience:
How about John Roger and Charles Keating for example?
Hitchens:
There's one way of doing, three ways, two ways to do it one is you say what if she
was so wonderful how come she went to Haiti at the invitation of the Duvalier family,
took money from them which didn't belong to them, had been stolen from the Haitian
poor, said how wonderful the situation was for the poor in Haiti, how the poor loved the Duvalier’s, and the Duvalier’s loved them back. How does she get to Haiti in the first place, she's supposed to be in Calcutta.
You've got to go all the way to Haiti to praise the regime that is notorious for its wringing of the poor well she did it because out of solidarity with people who thought like her and because she needed their money which they'd stolen as she stole hers from Charles Keating of the Lincoln savings loan scandal and who gave for a million and a half dollars and a private jet in return, pretty good deal actually, for an olive crucifix and a blessing when he was on trial and he needed a character witness.
The court then wrote to her and said you've got a million and a half dollars we're looking for the belong to the poor of California do you feel like giving it back she never replied.
She'd written to the court in the first place.
That's just the fraudulence that’s just touching all the thoughts, but by the way, if any of any of what I’ve just said is not true and it all is, how come you need me to tell you, how come that my profession hasn't enlightened you about this already, how come this woman stands underneath a Niagara of undiluted free publicity for all these years
Ask yourselves but that's just the fraud.
As for the fanaticism and the fundamentalism, look she said that poverty was a gift from God and should be accepted should be welcomed. She believed that disease and poverty were necessary for the formation of a good character, and she opposed the only thing that is known to cure to poverty, there is only one known cure of poverty it's very simple. It doesn't matter whether you go to Bangladesh or Basra or Bolivia.
If you can give women control over their rate of reproduction up and come back to that village in 10 year’s time, everything will be better right away it's the only thing that works if you can throw in a handful of seeds in a bit of credit as well and generally try and funnel it through the mothers and the wives it'll be enormously better right away.
If you don’t do it, people die all the time very horribly and they have rabid diseases like polio that they can spread to other people.
Well Mother Teresa spent her entire life saying that that solution was impermissible she waged her entire life making sure that didn't happen so I wish there was a hell to which she could go.
Because she has a lot of death on her conscience and a lot of misery and stupidity and ignorance and dirt and filth and disease as well. A poisonous woman patronized by a poisonous pope whose national security advisor she was.
Idon't miss them and nor should anybody else religion. Religion is the enemy
How much is it gonna take to convince us our faith, faith is not a virtue but if it was it would be the most overrated of them all?
