I love Penn and Teller.  Absolutely love them.  I do disagree with them from time to time, but I love how they debunk popular myths, and do magic and juggle and play jazz…kinda.

The two-man-variety-show-nod-to-vaudville-while-promoting-rationality just kicks me.

But.

I gotta disagree with them on the subject of Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, and Mahama Ghandi.  And not just because the soon-to-be-saint shares my name.

Their primary criticism of Mother Theresa is that she did not minister to the sick and dying of Calcutta the way that they thought she should.

Their primary criticism of the Dalai Lama was that historically, people in his position have ruled over a theocracy that used mutilation and torture to punish criminals, and that the monk class lived in (relative) leisure and opulence while a peasant class did all the work.  They ignored his reputation as a reformer and modern thinker prior to the Communist invasion.

Their primary criticisms of Mahatma Gandhi are that he was a racist and slept naked with young women (allegedly to prove to himself that he had overcome his libido) and used enema’s as a health treatment, and administered them to young women.  Creepy, I admit…but still glossed over in a very incomplete way that basically amounted to salacious innuendo without actually building a case.

They spent the most time on Mother Theresa, so I’m going to focus on her as well.

Penn and Teller say that people there are not allowed to be visited by family.  OK, I will admit, that sounds rather cultish, but I wonder how many of them had family to visit them who could find them anyway?  As I understand it, her charges have always been described as “the poorest of the poor”…people that no one else would touch.   People who had nowhere to go.  People who had diseases that were considered so dangerous or unclean that they lead to abandonment, abuse and neglect of the streets.  So while it was possibly a draconian rule to not allow family to visit, I wonder how many people it actually affected.  Also, there might have been a good reason for it, at the very least, I imagine they would have given a reason of some kind if asked, and it would have either been so completely lame as to not need to be debunked, or they could have debunked it.  At least we would have had a chance to decide for ourselves if it was a good reason.

I’m kind of used to Penn and Teller telling us stuff like that.  They’ll say something like “The reason THEY say they do this is…blah blah blah…but that’s bullshit because yadda yadda yadda.”  They are biased, they admit it…but they are usually thorough.  I find myself very disappointed when they fail to be in particular cases.

Also, they object that the Sisters of Mercy do not have modern facilities, and only provide small cots and only give people a place to suffer and die…implying that they should be trying to save these people’s lives.  Implying that these people could live if ministered to properly by highly trained specialists in modern facilities.

Now, the story I’ve always gotten on this ministry is that they take people out of the gutters and the ditches and the streets.  People who are terminal and uncared for and give them a dry bed with no rats and bugs.  They wash the dirt off of them, bind their wounds, talk to them, pray over them, touch them, change their diapers if necessary so they don’t have to die in their own filth…and let them know that someone out there does not consider them to be human garbage.  The way I understand it, people who could be helped by modern medicine don’t go to the Sisters of Mercy, people who have family that can and will care for them don’t go there.  People who have any sort of hope at all don’t go there…to my understanding.  My understanding on this matter was not at all challenged by the show.

To my understanding, they are cared for in such numbers that a modern facility to give modern care to even a fraction of them would have excluded thousands, and relegated them to the gutters and the streets.  Penn and Teller do not address the point that world-wide, we have many many more suffering and dying terminal people than can be cared for by modern facilities and highly trained staff.  There are even more than can be cared for at the level that the Sisters of Mercy provide, yet they criticize her for working to expand her ministry and for amassing vast sums of money to maintain that ministry in the Vatican bank…without ever once addressing the fact that all catholic ministries must be self-supporting, and if you want your ministry to be stable and enduring, it’s best to have massive amounts of cash on hand to ensure that.  They never once gave any evidence that Mother Theresa used any of that money on herself.

The message I have always gotten from Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama is that suffering and dying are part of life, and when the times come for suffering, and ultimately for dying, it is best to endure them with grace and dignity, and it one of the tasks of all human beings to help others with that burden to the extent that we can.

Penn and Teller assert that Mother Theresa’s ministry is a cultic obsession that glorifies suffering and dying to such an extent that they actually have an emotional investment in the continuation and increase of suffering and dying…and do so to fulfill some sort of sick sado-masochistic kink.

Well, that is not unheard of in religious circles, and also not an unheard of result in the kind of ego that it takes to found a world-wide ministry.

But they did not convince me of this because they did not deliver the crippling blows to the pillars of the myths surrounding these three people.  They didn’t adequately address the foundations of the assumptions that the myths are based on.

I am prepared to be convinced.  I have a certain base of experience that prepares me to buy the story that people who are famous, glorified, and celebrated for their holiness are charlatans…but even with that they didn’t do the job this time.

They certainly succeeded in reporting news and views about these popular holy figures that don’t get a lot of air time.  They put an opposing view out there…but all they did was propose the other side.  They didn’t get to the part where they destroy the popular myth and provide a rock-solid foundation for the opposing side.