Forgive me for stating the obvious, but suffering is good for people. That is not a religious doctrine – it is a simply observation of real human experience. Any psychologist would tell you the same. I mean c’mon, have none of you gone through a period of trial and suffering in your life that helped shape you and strengthen you and made you a better person? Let’s be honest here – if we were having a different conversation that had nothing to do with Mother Teresa or religion at all, but instead were talking about difficult experiences we’ve all faced in life, I can imagine that most of you would say that those experiences have had positive effects in your life.

Mike, your comments about suffering being positive and about psychologists opinions on suffering lack specificity and important qualifiers. As a student of psychological research myself, I’d like to attempt to provide some clarification. While it is not inconceivable that some positive benefits could come (socially or personally) from pain and suffering: for example, it could be argued that suffering can offer a richness of human experience and allow a person to explore their own limits, capabilities and strength.

I will try to add some clarification:

1) You seem to be assuming that it is the suffering that is making you a stronger person. But, there are so many other psychological explanations: one is justifying the suffering by seeking confirmatory evidence to make it appear positive by recruiting either real or illusionary “benefits” of that suffering (perhaps ignoring the not-so-positive consequences). In psychology, we call this the “confirmation bias.” People have a need for control over their environments. Not feeling in control or feeling a lack of autonomy can be devastating and lead to learned helplessness – it may give suffering a justifiable reason, but that may be a defense mechanism, or self-protective strategy. That justification is a post hoc explanation of suffering making you stronger, is an assumption, it is not supported by direct causal evidence. People can justify and (falsely) explain and make sense of all kinds of things (e.g. racism, sexism, domestic violence, human torture, genocide, etc.) Also, I don’t know the personal suffering you have been through that was so positive in your life, but in the conditions we are taking about in some of the most extreme and dire situations (especially for the most marginalized of society in developing countries), people may not feel (or in reality possess) much control over their circumstances or much hope for a better life or future (based on past experience telling them their suffering hasn’t end and will not end). That is not positive. (So, in this respect, I agree with many of Bad’s sentiments stated in his post.) In your example of suffering being “good” you refer to a “period” of suffering, which implies an end. Are your experiences comparable to extreme forms of suffering? If not, I think your generalization that pain is good, falls short of being convincing for all cases. I personally have witnessed that that kind of suffering in others; it can (though does not always) break the human spirit. And, perhaps the “good” that the suffering produced for you happened after the fact – when it was over (at a point when you were longer being influenced by your current state of emotions and physical realities of unbearable pain) – for many the suffering never really ends. These examples are extreme, but they are I believe the kinds of suffering that many of the people – Teresa’s organizations were said to serve – were living and dying with.

2) Anything is excess is not necessarily a good thing. Take alcoholic beverages, for example, a glass of wine can be lovely and may (arguably) even offer some health benefits, but too much of that causes serious dependency or even immediate death. Not very adaptive. For pain and suffering also, too much is probably not a good thing. Pain is the organism’s way of providing feedback that the current situation is noxious and that the organism needs to rest or escape the current situation. If your hand is on a hot stovetop burner, it is the pain (or the smell of scorched flesh) that tells us it is time to remove it. It is useful signal. Every person is different, and I would never personally take away someone else’s autonomy over how much pain they are willing and wanting to endure or how much they seek to alleviate it when possible if that is a viable option. It’s one thing to choose to endure child birth with no drugs. It’s another thing to be water-boarded. One involves autonomy and choice, the other involves lack of control and choice. In MT’s case, some have argued that she made the choice to not provide treatment or alleviate pain to any significant degree (with the limited – or not so limited – resources she had), assuming it was good for them or that she knew what was best for the poor and therefore made the choice to ignore that suffering or even encourage and praise it. (In a perverse way, I actually can understand how if resources truly are limited and there is great suffering and pain, it psychologically feels better just to resign oneself to that reality…though perhaps more resources could have been found and allocated to health treatments to prevent, manage or cure some of the ills of the suffering patients of MT.)

3) Not all pain for all reasons is “good” for people. By this line of reasoning, one could try to make the leap to justify domestic violence, even sexual assault or abuse. Human torture even! Can you imagine tying someone up unable to move their limbs or eat or drink with their face in the sand and their body exposed to the heat, sun, wind, rain for 26 days straight and then saying how grateful they should be because you made them stronger! (Now they have crippling incurable deformities as a direct result of the torture, malnutrition and likely psychological damage.) That’s about the most ridiculous thing I could fathom. Not only arguing that people might preserve after such experiences, in spite of the experience or because of it, but that these behaviors are actually virtuous, because they allow for this “good” to occur. If suffering is good, why then do jurisprudence systems punish more someone, who in making transgressions against someone else intentionally harms or torture them in doing so, rather than mitigating the transgressor’s punishment? This would seem to provide evidence that causing pain is frowned upon.

4) Finally, telling people suffering is good for them, is one example of how cruel systems to perpetuate. (Again this relates to justification and is a psychological defense against feeling powerless to the realities one lives in.) I suggest you take a look at System Justification Theory: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/jost/ Wouldn’t it be better to try to fix the system rather than be resigned to it and forever maintain the status quo, unless you think society is already perfect as is, which many privileged people probably do think is best (for them).

I hope this helps explain how at least one psychologist thinks about this issue.

But regardless of what happens in heaven, in this life suffering is an unavoidable reality. I can either try to ignore it and treat it as illusory, as the Buddhists would have me do (e.g. by eliminating my desires, since if we don’t desire anything then we can’t suffer when our desires go unmet), or I can embrace suffering and try to bring some good out of it (e.g. by using it as a catalyst to work towards the fulfillment of one’s more noble desires, not simply suppress them.)

Personally I choose to acknowledge the reality of suffering, not simply try to avoid it. To quote another good movie, “Life is pain your Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”

All due respect to the Buddhists, with whom I agree on many things, but I think on this one I’m going to go with Captain Kirk

Are you sure? When you envision Heaven, do you then see people starving to re-death, murdering each other, cheating, lying, stealing, raping, taking drugs, and engaging in all of the other sordid affairs which cause human suffering? Or do you imagine an afterlife in which you lose your identity due to the absence of pain?

Buddhists would disagree with that statement. If not religious, it’s at least a cultural doctrine.

Have you ever seen Star Trek V? Spock’s brother, Sybok, is convinced it is his mission to help people release their pain, to give up their bad memories and regrets that are causing them emotional suffering – in many ways similar to the Buddhist philosophy. And do you remember Kirk’s response to Sybok? He refuses to give up his regrets and his suffering. He says “I need my pain. My pain makes me who I am.”

All due respect to the Buddhists, with whom I agree on many things, but I think on this one I’m going to go with Captain Kirk.

Countless people have lived and died rich full lives without experiencing the sort of suffering of these people, and if the world is one day made free of such suffering, I see no reason to think that we will somehow be less complete human beings for it. The fact that some people can rise above suffering (and clearly, not all can: a heck of a lot just die, or fall into despair, etc.) does not mean that suffering is a good or necessary thing, or that we should be indifferent to reducing it when it is in our power to do so.

Bad, I don’t disagree with what you said here, and I don’t see anything I said as contradicting what you said. I was not trying to say that suffering is in itself a good thing, only that good can be brought out of suffering. And of course we should attempt to reduce suffering. That is a given. Again, you seem to be reiterating the same point I was trying to make: suffering is not good, it should be diminished, but even when it cannot, some good can be brought out of it.

The second misconception I see you espousing is that Christian people are deliberately irrational. Perhaps I didn’t explain it thoroughly enough, but apophatic theology is not a rejection of reason. It does not say that we should believe in God despite the lack of all evidence. What apophatic theology says is that we have reasons for believing that God may exist – we have had experiences of God in the past or encountered philosophical arguments or personal stories that seem convincing to us, among other things – but at the same time we have these experiences of God’s distance or absence too. Apophatic theology is thus simply one possible explanation for why we have these conflicting experiences.

It’s not always the case that Christian people intentionally reject reason, but the above paragraph demostrates that atleast one Christian rejects reason.

This seems particularly ridiculous in the face of the SORT of suffering we are talking about, most of which involved lack of access to basic medical care, nutrition, and so on.

Countless people have lived and died rich full lives without experiencing the sort of suffering of these people, and if the world is one day made free of such suffering, I see no reason to think that we will somehow be less complete human beings for it. The fact that some people can rise above suffering (and clearly, not all can: a heck of a lot just die, or fall into despair, etc.) does not mean that suffering is a good or necessary thing, or that we should be indifferent to reducing it when it is in our power to do so.

None of this provides any sort of good refutation to the issue of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of donations never showing up in Calcutta, the accusations of some of the former people in her order, her hobnobing with brutal dictators, her hypocrisy on divorce when it came to the rich and famous, and so on. I’m not bringing these things up because I’m trying to make the case that she was an evil person. But the picture we are given of her is distorted without including these things, and “oh, well she struggled with stuff, we all do” is really not an acceptable deflection of all criticism, unless of course you are prepared to use it for everyone all the time for any action.

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but suffering is good for people. That is not a religious doctrine – it is a simply observation of real human experience.

Buddhists would disagree with that statement. If not religious, it’s at least a cultural doctrine.

I said that she and the church think suffering is good for people

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but suffering is good for people. That is not a religious doctrine – it is a simply observation of real human experience. Any psychologist would tell you the same. I mean c’mon, have none of you gone through a period of trial and suffering in your life that helped shape you and strengthen you and made you a better person? Let’s be honest here – if we were having a different conversation that had nothing to do with Mother Teresa or religion at all, but instead were talking about difficult experiences we’ve all faced in life, I can imagine that most of you would say that those experiences have had positive effects in your life.

The paradox that we all live with (atheists too, not just MT and other Christians) is that while on the one hand suffering does produce good results in our life, on the other hand no one should think that this is an excuse to simply do nothing about the suffering of others. I think most people, atheist or Christian or whoever, will recognize that while on the one hand suffering is something that can produce good results in our lives, on the other hand, it is something to be resisted and alleviated whenever and however we can.

This is just a tension we all have to wrestle with and it does no good to blame Mother Teresa for wrestling with it too. As far as I can see she did find a balance. Her work was about alleviating the suffering of others insofar as she was able, but she also realized the limitations of her own abilities to alleviate all of the suffering around her, and thus sought ways to transmute the suffering into positive spiritual growth as well (for her, the nuns and the patients). The basic existential reality we all have to face is that in this life you can fight suffering or you can utilize suffering for good ends. Mother Teresa did both.

I don’t see a mention of your friends seeing any medical care – did they? Did they see that people brought in off the streets were given a complete medical workup to determine if they needed medical care instead of hospice care? Were they doctors who could tell if the people dying were treatable or not?

Yes, there were doctors that examined people and helped treat the ones who could be treated (with the limited supplies they had – if you’ve never been to a Third World country like India you may not realize just how overwhelming the needs are and how impossible it is to help everyone who comes… no matter how many millions of dollars a charity has). My friend spent a portion of his summer there rolling cotton balls in the doctor’s office while watching them perform examination after examination. That’s all the details I know, but to answer your question, yes, there were doctors and there was a triage system of sorts.