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'Secular
India' declares three day State mourning - Who mourned the Pope?
Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694-1774)
France's greatest writers and philosophers, was
atheist, and a bitter critic of the Church, which he looked upon
as the instigator of cruelty, injustice, and inequality, wrote, in a letter to Frederick
the Great (1712–86):
A portrait of Francois Voltaire. Voltaire at the Court of Frederick the Great in
Prussia. Voltaire began a correspondence with Frederick in
August 1736. Frederick greatly admired Voltaire and invited him
to come to Prussia many times.
***
"Christianity is the
most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has
ever infected the world."
(source: Letter to Frederick
the Great, quoted in the Encyclopedia
of Unbelief, Prometheus Books, 1985, p. 715).
***
In a country, India
whose 98 per cent population is non-Christian the Indian Government
declares a 3-day state mourning. When did the Secular
Government of India start declaring mourning on the death of a
religious head. It is indeed ironic.
There was something
puzzling about the Indian government's decision to declare a
three-day state mourning for Pope John Paul II, Karol Jozef
Wojtyla.
Did it try to appear more
Christian than Christians, or more "secular" than the
rest?
Did it declare a state mourning because the
Pope was a head of state?
Does the death of a sovereign of an artificial state of less
than 1,000 people deserve it? Vatican is a "state"
whose head, the Pope, is elected by an electoral college
consisting of 117 voting cardinals - all foreigners! Should it
not show similar gestures on the demise of heads of other
persuasions in India and abroad? A few
years ago, when the Paramacharya of
Kanchi, in whom many saw a
"living God," died, no such gesture was shown. Isn't
our "secularism" skewed?
How did the rest of the world react to the event? Ireland, a
country with 92 per cent Catholic population, did not declare
any state mourning and Catholics were not upset over it at all.
The same was true for Spain, a deeply believing Catholic
country. Leading French left-wingers criticised the government
of President Jacques Chirac for lowering flags on public
buildings in tribute to the Pope for a day, arguing that it was
a breach of the country's secular principles.
Protestant countries like the US,
Britain, Sweden, Denmark etc., declared no national mourning.
The same was true for countries like Russia, Greece, Ukraine
under the Eastern Orthodox Church. Of about 100 Christian
countries, just a dozen, all insignificant ones apart from Italy
and Canada, declared a mourning. Only Egypt, a
predominantly Muslim country with hardly any Catholics amongst
its Coptic Christian minority, declared a mourning. John
Paul II saw himself primarily as an evangelist.
John
Paul II's views on divorce, artificial birth control, abortion
were regressive and out of sync with the AIDS-era.
Had a Hindu dharmaguru been professing such views, he would have
been dubbed a saffron lunatic. His successor will have to
grapple with many issues this Pope was not even ready to
discuss. Islamic fundamentalism, emergence of China and India as
major players, paedophilia
in the Church are a few of these issues.
Will
the government declare state mourning if one of the important
religious heads of the Hindu, Buddhist or Jain community passes
away? Should
we have a national day of mourning when the Dalai Lama and
Ayatollah die as well?'' he questioned.
(source:
Who
mourned the Pope? - By Balbir K Punj - Asian
Age April 12, 2005).
Refer
to VINDICATED BY TIME: The Niyogi Committee Report On
Christian Missionary Activities -
Christianity
Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee 1956
and
The
Sunshine of Secularism. Also
refer to chapter on Conversion
and
The
Burningcross
Refer
to
Former
Catholic Sister Says Even Mother Teresa Is a Fraud
- By By Greg Szymanski
June
6, 2007
***
Pope
vs. Shankaracharya -
How the West treats its Head of Religion vs. Shankaracharya's
treatment in the Indian Media?
The
Pope, head of a Billion Catholic Christians is honored by US
Presidents at the Vatican. In contrast, Sankarcharya (a
Hindu pontiff) in India, in a country consisting of 80% Hindus
is hounded in the jails/courtrooms and media.
The
Pope had made clear that Evangelisation in Asia remained a
priority for the Catholic church in the next century.
Refer
to The
Criminal History of Papacy and Sex,
lies and videotape: turmoil at the
Vatican
and
Vatican
forced to acknowledge debauched behaviour of priests and nuns and
Victims
of pedophile Christian priests and
Pedophiles
and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis - By Philip
Jenkins.
***
A
Hindu pontiff is hounded in the jails/courtrooms and a national
mourning is declared for another religious leader who is not
even Indian!
The Pope committed the
greatest of crimes in India by calling for" a harvest of
souls". Only a person who has no regards for Indian
sensitivities or Indian culture is capable of doing something
like that.
Even a Catholic nation
like Ireland is not having a
national
day of mourning on the death of the Pope. Not just Ireland and France. The Christian
US did not, nor did other European Christian nations declare
state mourning. Not England, not Germany, not Holland, nor the
Scandinavian countries. Not Russia. Not Greece. Not even the
most Catholic nation, Spain. Of
about a hundred Christian nations hardly a dozen, most of them
insignificant, declared state mourning. Except Italy and Canada
no significant ones did. Egypt was the only Muslim nation to
mourn officially. China has banned Chinese Christians from
recognising the Pope.
But look at home here, India, whose 98 per cent population is
non-Christian. `Secular' India followed, of all nations, the
unsecular, all-Christian Italy. But,
why should the `secular' Indian state mourn for the Roman
Catholic Pope? If the Pope were the head of the Vatican state,
how come three Cardinals from India are flying to vote at
Vatican to elect the new head of the Vatican state? Who are they
- citizens of India or citizens of Vatican?
(source: 92
per cent `secular', 98 per cent pseudo
- By S Gurumurthy - newindpress.com).
Government
Forces Hindu Schools to Mourn for Pope - The
Directorate of Schools in Tamilnadu has issued a GO directing
all schools to fly the Indian flag half-mast on Friday, 8 April
2005 to mourn the death of Pope John Paul II. Schools have been
asked to send a "compliance report" to confirm that
they have observed the mourning. One wonders why a secular
government should issue GOs to secular government schools and to
private religious schools (which are not govt.aided in anyway)
to mourn the passing away of a religious head of a foreign
religious institution?
Will the
Indian government declare state mourning if one of the important
religious heads of the Hindu, Buddhist or Jain community passes
away?
(source: Government
Forces Hindu Schools to Mourn for Pope -
christianaggression.org).
French
Secularists protest at state's tribute
- Hardline defenders of France's secular traditions have denounced
the government for ordering the French flag to be flown at half
mast on official buildings in honour of Pope John Paul II. These
republicans argue that the state's gesture to commemorate the
head of the Catholic Church contravenes France's
1905 law separating Church and state.
“When Christians render homage to the head of their church that
is a private affair. But when the head of state acts on behalf
of the whole French community and all French people, whatever
their religion, there is manifestly an abuse of power on his
part,” Yves Contassot, a Paris city official, said in an
interview.
(source: French
Secularists protest at state's tribute - ft.com).
China
not to send envoy for Pope's funeral - Expressing
strong dissatisfaction with Vatican and Italy for granting visa
to Taiwan President Chen Shui-Bian, China on Thursday announced
that it will not send an envoy to attend the funeral of Pope
John Paul II. "Under the current circumstances, the Chinese
side will not send a delegation. I think my answer is
clear-cut," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said when
asked whether Beijing, which has no ties with Vatican, will send
a representative to attend Pope's funeral scheduled for Friday.
(source:
China
not to send envoy for Pope's funeral - indianexpress.com).
Church
overtakes communist China
Evangelical
Christianity, funded and backed by the United States, is
threatening to escalate into China’s new Opium War. Unless
timely measures are taken, the land of Confucius, degraded by
Chairman Mao into a spiritual, cultural and economic wasteland,
may well emerge as a major outpost of a new imperialist thrust
spearheaded by America. This would be a blow to the hitherto
proud Han people, and a loss to India which has always regarded
ancient Chinese civilization as a sister civilization. American
newspapers are gleefully documenting this phenomenon.
(source:
Church
overtakes communist China - By Sandhya Jain -
organiser.org).
India, however, crawled
without being asked to bend.
Through all the solemn grandeur of the ceremony,
however, one noted with admiration the silent dissent of the People’s
Republic of China, which simply stayed at home.
Unlike India’s political elite, who
seek international endorsement through self-abasement and
compromise, China’s mandarins demand respect through dogged
assertion of national pride. Western media hype over the funeral
of John Paul II did not send Beijing scurrying to send a
representative for a photo-op with George Bush or Cardinal
Ratzinger. Instead, the atheist regime remembered how the
Chinese people suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church and
how the late Pope bestowed sainthood upon 120 “evil-doing
sinners.”
Chinese
Bishop Fu Tieshan and St. Albericus Crescitelli (1863 - 1900)- an infamous Italian missionary canonized by the
Vatican, was notorious for taking the "right to the first
night" of each bride under his diocese.
India, however, crawled
without being asked to bend. Unlike India’s political elite, who
seek international endorsement through self-abasement and
compromise.
Refer
to The
Criminal History of Papacy and Sex,
lies and videotape: turmoil at the
Vatican
and
Vatican
forced to acknowledge debauched behaviour of priests and nuns
and Victims
of pedophile Christian priests and
Pedophiles
and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis - By Philip
Jenkins.
***
Bishop
Fu Tieshan of the state-run Catholic Church said:
“Some of those canonized… perpetrated outrages such as
raping and looting in China and committed unforgivable
crimes…” (Associated
Press, 1 October 2000). One saint was Albericus
Crescitelli (1863 - 1900) an Italian missionary
who died in the anti-Western, anti-Christian Boxer
uprising. He “was notorious for taking the ‘right
of the first night’ of each bride under his diocese,”
according to the Chinese
State Administration of Religious Affairs. For
more refer to China's
State Administration of Religious Affairs Spokesman on Vatican's
"Canonization of Saints"
India, however, crawled
without being asked to bend.
Perhaps out of deference to the Italian-Roman
Catholic origins of UPA chairperson
Sonia Gandhi, the Government followed Italy in
declaring three days of State mourning. And far from remembering
the atrocities of the Goa Inquisition,
for which the Pope refused to apologize on his India visit,
every luminary with access to a centrimetre of newspaper space
recorded a vacuous eulogy in honour of the departed soul.
(source: John
Paul: a loveless legacy - By Sandhya Jain - saag.org).
Refer
to VINDICATED BY TIME: The Niyogi Committee Report On
Christian Missionary Activities -
Christianity
Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee 1956
and
The
Sunshine of Secularism.
Also
refer to chapter on Conversion
and
Catholic
Priests Molest Third World Nuns to Avoid AIDS.
Refer to Quotes
from The American Taliban.
Refer
to Crimes
of the Popes - by G W Foote and J M
Wheeler.
Refer
to Christian
Supremacy: Pushing the Dhimmitude of Non-Christians in America.
Refer to The
Swami Devananda Saraswati Interview with Rajeev Srinivasan -
christianaggression.org and The
Burningcross.
Refer
to Can
Hinduism face the onslaught of Project Thessalonica?
-
By Alex Pomero and Christians
have Destroyed Various Ethnic Cultures of the World -
christianaggression.org. Refer
to From
De Nobili to Clooney: The Christian Methods of Inculturation
and
American
Christian Fundamentalist Leader Calls for Global War
- By Yoginder Sikand - christianaggression.org). Also
refer to and
Missionary's
Dark Legacy
and Dutch
Christians Target Hindus for Conversion
No
praise for pope from AIDS campaigners
-
AIDS
campaigners
sounded a jarring note over the papacy of John Paul II,
describing his ban on condom use, abhorrence of homosexuality
and conservatism on women's rights as bleak failures in the
fight against
HIV.
(source: No
praise for pope from AIDS campaigners
- yahoo.com).
For more refer to Only
one more Pope? – by Anvar Alikhan.
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City
Under the Sea
Who would have thought
a city that could be older than the Harappan civilization could
be lying beneath water right off the coast of Mahabalipuram?
Sometimes, it pays to listen to the stories of humble fishermen.
Local fishermen in the coast of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu have
for centuries believed in that a great flood consumed a city
over 1,000 years ago in a single day when the gods grew jealous
of its beauty.
The myths of Mahabalipuram were written down by British traveler
J. Goldingham, who visited the town in 1798, at which time it
was known to sailors as the Seven Pagodas. Legend had it that
six temples were submerged beneath the waves, with the seventh
temple still standing on the seashore.
“The scale of the submerged ruins, covering several square
miles and at distances of up to a mile from shore, ranks this as
a major marine-archaeological discovery as spectacular as the
ruined cities submerged off Alexandria in Egypt.”
India’s NIO said in a statement: “A team of underwater
archaeologists from National Institute of Oceanography NIO have
successfully `unearthed’ evidence of submerged structures off
Mahabalipuram and established first-ever proof of the popular
belief that the Shore temple of Mahabalipuram is the remnant of
series of total seven of such temples built that have been
submerged in succession. The discovery was made during a joint
underwater exploration with the Scientific Exploration Society,
U.K.”
Graham
Hancock says this discovery proves scientists should be more
open-minded. “I have argued for many years that the world’s
flood myths deserve to be taken seriously, a view that most
Western academics reject. “But here in
Mahabalipuram, we have
proved the myths right and the academics wrong.”
Who would have thought
a city that could be older than the Harappan civilization could
be lying beneath water right off the coast of Mahabalipuram?
(For
more refer to chapter on Greater
India: Suvarnabhumi and
Sacred Angkor).
***
Hancock believes far
more research needs to be done on underwater relics.
“Between 17,000 years ago and 7000 years ago, at the end of
the last Ice Age, terrible things happened to the world our
ancestors lived in,” he says. “Great ice caps over northern
Europe and north America melted down, huge floods ripped across
the earth, sea-level rose by more than 100 meters, and about 25
million square kilometers of formerly habitable lands were
swallowed up by the waves.
(source: City
Under the Sea - By
B.K. Parthasarathy - siliconeer.com).
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By Paul Utukuru
Symbolism
is a common feature in all religious traditions. Bread and wine
symbolize the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Christian
Eucharist. Jesus himself spoke in parables. The ancient Hindu
and Greek mythologies personify stars, planets and the elements.
While this may seem strange now, a quick look around will show
you that science and technology does the same thing.
Brahma,
Vishnu and Shiva are said to be the creator, sustainer and the
destroyer respectively of the universe in Hinduism. Setting
aside the personified symbolism here, the idea can be seen as an
extrapolation of what is observed on earth to the universe at
large: birth, growth, decay and recycling are central to
everything we observe in the world within us and around us.
Extrapolation from the particular to the general is commonly
done in science, especially physics.
Based
on similar considerations, some ancient astronomers seemed to
have arrived at the conclusion that the creation of the
universe, its growth, its eventual decay and regeneration are
eternal processes without a beginning and without an end,
repeating in endless cycles. The Hindus named each half cycle a
night or day of Brahma in symbolic terms. There is also the
mention of a transition or a twilight zone referred to as Yugasandhi
between these half cycles.
According
to the Hindu scriptures, each half cycle is said to last for
4.32 billion years. The Sun, too, revolves around the center of
our galaxy once in 325.5 million years. Modern science pegs this
in the range of 225 to 270 million years.
(For
more refer to chapter on Greater
India: Suvarnabhumi and
Sacred Angkor).
***
In
any case, the point of interest to us here is that the metaphor
extends to some amazing mathematical details. According
to the Hindu scriptures, each half cycle is said to last for
4.32 billion years. The Sun, too, revolves around the center of
our galaxy once in 325.5 million years. Modern science pegs this
in the range of 225 to 270 million years. The point of departure
between ancient Hindu cosmology and modern cosmology is that
unlike modern cosmology, ancient Hindu cosmology relates the
rotational speed of our own galaxy to the period of oscillation
of the endless cycles of creation, growth and eventual decay.
Our known galaxy is known as Parameshti
Mandala, and it is said to rotate
around Svayambhu Mandala,
the center of all galaxies with a time period of 4.32 billion
years, also. Interestingly, the 18th century German philosopher
Immanuel Kant suggested that the universe might actually consist
of rotating systems rotating around larger rotating systems.
Pursuing
this chronology further in detail, it can be shown that the
present day of Brahma began exactly 5 Brahma hours, 28 minutes
and 40 seconds ago as of April 1, 1986. Going a step further,
they calculate the age of our present universe is 19.252 billion
years, amazingly close to the modern-day estimate. Modern
historians have also documented that according to some ancient
Hindu scriptures, the Sun is 108 Sun-diameters from the earth
and the moon 108 Moon-diameters away. The modern values for
these figures are 107.6 and 110.6 respectively.
Parenthetically,
the number 108 has special significance in astrology and in most
Hindu rituals even today. The rosaries used in many Hindu and
Buddhist chanting routines contain exactly 108 beads. Also, the
number 108 is exactly one quarter of 432, the most important
number in the ancient Hindu and Babylonian cosmologies.
Today,
we are still faced with issues such as the singularity problem,
the horizon problem, the magnetic monopole problem, the
smoothness problem, the flatness problem, anisotropy of the 3º
K cosmic ray background and the recently-discovered phenomena of
gamma ray bursts by satellites and space telescopes. We have not
yet figured out whether the big bang is a one-time affair or a
cyclical affair. Proton decay is yet another unresolved issue.
Cosmologists are also not sure whether the universe is open,
flat or closed.
Quantum
mechanics and the theory of relativity have still to be
reconciled. The most recent development in this regard has been
a return to a cyclical theory of expansion and contraction of
our universe by Paul
Steinhardt at Princeton and Neil
Turok at Cambridge University. In their view, the big bang
is a bridge to a pre-existing contracting era. The universe
undergoes an endless sequence of cycles in which it contracts in
a big crunch and re-emerges in an expanding big bang, with
trillions of years of evolution in between, almost exactly as
outlined in ancient Hindu cosmology. Steinhardt and Turok
contend that the visible universe exists within a
three-dimensional membrane, or brane, that is like a stretched
rubber sheet. Another brane separated from ours by only a
microscopic thickness contains a universe in which there is only
dark matter. In each periodic cycle, a collision between the two
membranes results in enormous amounts of matter and radiation.
I
am by no means suggesting here that the cyclical model is right
and the one-time big-bang model is wrong. Rather, my point is
that since birth, growth, decay and recycling are universal
phenomena throughout nature, their extrapolation to the universe
at large, following the tradition of the ancients, might give us
newer insights. Likewise, it may be worthwhile to recognize the
similarities between the atom and the solar system and see if
the extrapolation of this might lead us to a more elegant
cosmological model involving rotation of systems within systems
in an endless fashion.
I
will close with one final note. Whether or not we take ancient
cosmologies such as the one discussed here seriously, it is
interesting that their methods for predicting solar and lunar
eclipses yield results almost as accurate as our modern ones. In
the case of India, the Hindu pundits still use them.
(source:
By Paul Utukuru). Dr. Paul Utukuru is a retired medical physicist and
writes for Science
and Theology News - a French monthly newspaper).
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