inthegobi - 07 April 2012 06:36 PM
Asanta:
On selling the art to ‘billionaires’ and then using the money:
Breaking up collections is not generally a good idea.
Billionaires tend to like to hang their loot, I mean art, in their private homes, to show everyone they can.
I don’t know about your area of the country, but most of the very fine collections in our museums are on loan from million/billionaires.
Come to think of it, instead of curling the lip at the church for not selling their art to billionaires, why not instead complain that billionaires don’t use their money responsibly and charitably in the first place?
Why should I care how the billionaires donate to charity? They don’t pretend to be humanitarian
Churches generally don’t charge to let you in the door.
Yes, they fleece you after you get in the door.
If you don’t trust the Church with the money (re Theresa), then why raise the scenario in the first place?
I’d like to see your sources for Theresa’s crimes to the poor. Considering most poor Indians, Hindus included, praise her a lot, your story sounds a bit conspiracy-theorist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aplank/Criticisms_of_Mother_Teresa
The Missionaries of Charity do not disclose either the sources of their funds or details of how they are spent. In 1998 an article in the German magazine Stern estimated that the order received about US$50 million a year in donations. Other journalists have given estimates of US$100 million a year. Critics have argued that this money cannot have all been spent on the purpose for which it was donated - aid to the sick and the poor - because the order’s facilities, staffed by nuns and by volunteers and offering little in the way of medical facilities, are very cheap to operate and cannot cost anything like these sums to maintain.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html
MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit.
http://bigthink.com/ideas/41486
....It happened almost instantly, literally on my first day volunteering. I was shocked to discover the horrifically negligent manner in which this charity operates and the direct contradiction of the public’s general understanding of their work. ....After further investigation and research, I realized that all of the events I had witnessed amounted to nothing more than a systematic human rights violation and a financial scam of monumental proportions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrPjX5_gI1c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdYKsiredbM
Her former volunteers are her loudest critics. The ‘mother Teresa’ you know of, is a myth. The truth is that she was a horrid person, and even the East Indians have complained about her. They won’t even go there unless they are absolutely desperate.
). To be sold or donated somewhere? That’d be up to the Church itself, clearly. Were they to sell these golden gewgaws and use the money for charity, and I mean real charity, not simply proselytization, they would be doing a very good thing.
