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The Greek Philosopher Saint: Apollonios in In India

India influenced Pythagoras

Philostratos says Apollonios (6th century BCE) of Tyana thought Indians had influenced Pythagoras. So going to India was an effort to improve his moral education. He followed the road of Alexander the great to India, probably entering the country through the Khyber Pass and going to Punjab, where he met the wise men of India on a forested hill not far from the Ganges River.

He delighted in their company and their lengthy discussions.

He said: “I saw the Indian Brahmins living on the earth and not on it, walled without walls, and owning nothing and owning everything.”

Clearly, Apollonios was impressed by the spiritual power of the Brahmins who had foreseen his coming. He spent four months with them. They lived exemplary lives very close to the gods. They ate what he ate and shared his love for the natural world.

But what impressed Apollnios the most was the Indians contact with Hellenic culture. The Indian wise men spoke Greek, and were well versed in the Greek philosophical tradition and Greek culture. Both the Indian philosophers and Apollonios worshipped the gods and a supreme god, a divine being like Zeus, who was the father of the gods and humans. The wise men, however, described themselves as gods in the sense of being good.

(source: The Passion of the Greeks - By Evaggelos G. Vallianatos p. 57).

Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes: Lessons for Indic Civilization

Why Greece is not Hellas any more

"Religious intolerance was inevitably born with the belief in one God." - Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism.

"The Christians to whom we owe all our misfortunes." "Christianity is a monstrous lie and legend" - Julian the Great, in his treatise Against the Gallileans

""Christianity was a vampire which sucked the life blood of a society and produced the state of general enervation against which patriotic emperors struggled in vain." Ernest Renan (1823 - 1892) in Marc Aurelle p. 589.

‘What, after all is the cross of Jesus Christ? It is nothing but the sum total of a sadomasochistic glorification of pain.’ - asks Joachim Kahl, author The Misery of Christianity

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Evaggelos G. Vallianatos Greek scholar. He has written with great passion, this impassioned book (The Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellen) recounts with graphic details the historical “passion” of the pagan Greeks at the crucial time, when they encountered the fanatic hordes of missionary monks and Christianizing Roman Emperors. They tried to convert the remaining Greeks too to the new, fanatical, and fashionable faith at the time, willy-nilly.

This book is unlike other books, which present the Christianizing of Greece and of the Mediterranean region as some kind of felicitous meeting and mating of the philosophic spirit of Hellenism and the prophetic spirit of the new and ecumenical religion of love and peace. For it chronicles, with boldness and candor, the other and more hideous side of this tragic story. The meeting of Christianity and Hellenism was not peaceful and pious, in the eyes of the author, but bloody and brutal, and has been kept secret and hidden for a long time.

Some excerpts from his book:

The conflict between Greeks and Christians in late antiquity from 4^th to 6^th CBE. Christianity assisted and funded by the Roman Empire, conspired to kill the Greeks whom it had dehumanized, branding them as idolaters and pagans. Christianity’s genocidal policies against the Greeks destroyed their civilization. The Christianization of Greece was a catastrophe that precipitated the fall of Rome and engendered the dark ages of Western civilization. The Christians made Greece a cemetery, which quite unintentionally preserved the aftermath of their murder and genocide.

In fact, Christianity gave its highest rewards to those who killed the most Greeks. The Christians made the Roman Emperor (Flavius Valerius Constantinus) Constantine I, 285-337, who started the war against the Greeks, a “Saint” and “Great”. The butcher of the Greeks, Emperor Theodosios I, 379-395, also received the title of “Great.”

The Monks: Expert Killers of Hellenism

The monks were unmatched in their ferocity against Hellenism. They became the shock troops for the destruction of Hellas, and for forcing and savaging people into Christianity.

The monks were the first architects of globalization – in this instance, spreading Christianity to the end of the world with all the hatred and violence of a crusade.

The moment the Eastern Roman Byzantium became Christian, they dropped from the heights of Hellenic culture to the crude, childish fiction of Christianity. They had to worship a foreign god, and through their behavior, they had to show to the state and to the church that they believed Christianity’s irrational and repulsive doctrine.

Christian Platonists and Aristotelians, however, were never sincere students of Hellenic culture. Whenever it was convenient, they would quote Platon and Aristoteles and the Stoics and Neoplatonists out of context, while they never ceased to believe in the superiority of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Tertullian, 160-220, the most eloquent theologian of the West at the end of the second century, was an outright enemy of philosophy.

He denounced Aristoteles, calling him wretched, cunning and shifty. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem,” he says “Platon’s academy with Church.”? The result was the triumph of Christian fanaticism all over Europe, East and West. By the 12^th century, Western Europe was infected with hatred for heretics. Church officials called heretics “pestilential people.”

The Theodosian and Justinian Codes cover Roman laws from the 4^th to the late 6^th century. They are full of imperial orders against the “pagans,” Greeks, Jews, and other non-Christians. The appalling horror of the Inquisition, the vicious witch pogroms, and the bloody Crusades came out of this theological and political decision to give Christianity total control of the faithful. It was this violent and undemocratic tradition, the product of Christianity, which was at the heart of the European culture down to the 19^th century.

The Romans detested the Christians. They considered them “notoriously depraved.”

Tacitus described Christianity as a communicable disease, a “deadly superstition” that started Judaea and spread to Rome.

Statue of Juno Sospita from Lanuvium, wearing a goatskin, holding a shield, and brandishing a spear as she advances to battle.

The goatskin and stance as a warrior goddess are attributes of the Greek goddess Athena, rather then Hera (who is generally associated with Juno).

(source: Author's collection of photos from the Vatican Museum).

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Epiktetos, c. 50-120, a Stoic philosopher who influenced Marcus Aurelius, had contempt for the Christians whom he called Galileans.

He said the Galileans faced death out of habit. Their marching to death had nothing to do with courage or reason. Kelsos (Celsus) a Greek Platonic philosopher who wrote a book against the Christians concluded that the Christians failed to have a more comprehensive view of the supreme god because of their flesh-and-blood preoccupation with their salvation, their obsession with the resurrection of the body, which was intimately related to their worship of a dead man. This dead man, Jesus, turns Christian away from worshipping the supreme god.

Julian, the Great (?) and Epiktetos, a Stoic philosopher.

Julian the Great saw But he always saw Christianity as “an illegal, treasonous and newfangled cult and ideology that destroyed Greek culture.”     

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Julian the Great, as the last great champion of the old Gods (- 4th Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity. A nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshiping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign.

Justinian was a killer, but he was not innovator. He worked within a well-established Christian tradition that the ends justify the means; the fourth century historian and lawyer, Sozomen, says that the Christians routinely destroyed the temples of the polytheists, “thinking that it would not be that easy otherwise for them to be converted from their former religion.”

Tholos, along with the temple of Apollo was eventually destroyed in 390 AD by Christian Emperor Theodosius I in order to silence the oracle in the name of Christianity. Delphi at the base of Mount Parnassus was considered the center of the earth by many ancient Greeks who came to seek advice.

(image source: webmaster's own collection of photos taken during a visit).

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Augustine 354-430, a prominent Western father of the church, used all sorts of sophistic arguments in favor of coercing the pagans of Christianity. He also sided with repressive legislation that provided that “stimulus of fear” necessary to shake people of their negligence to seek the Christian lord. In other words, Augustine and Nestorios, the bishops of both West and East of the Roman Empire, recommended killing the pagans who refused to convert to Christianity as proper state policy.

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The Greek Tragedy of Christian Greece

To be Greek – as Friedrich Nietzsche understood so well – is to be closely related to the gods and to strive to be like them in beauty, goodness, curiosity, courage and freedom. All Greek traditions pulled men and women close to nature, constructing their homes and altars and temples and theatres and public buildings and monuments not to obscure or dominate nature but be part of it. In addition, Greek culture was about the exploration of the inner world of man, the world of nature and the universe. The Greeks lived mostly in small villages and larger villages or poleis and tried to put into practice their theories and create theories from their experience – such was their life.

In contrast, to be Christian is to be a subject of an empire or an authoritarian state with factory models for religion, work, science, art, and culture. In other words, Hellenism and Christianity (despite Christianity’s appropriation of some Greek ideas and rituals) are from two different worlds. Like oil and water, they don’t mix.

Statue of Augustus, disfigured - mark of a cross carved on his forehead.

For more refer to Cultural Vandalism and Did Christians Destroy Classical Culture and Create the Dark Ages?

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During the bloody centuries it took the Christian Roman Empire to make the Greeks Christian – and without an option outside of Christianity open to them save death most Greeks did convert to Christianity – nothing Greek was left standing. The destruction was so thorough that the Greek people had to abandon even their name, Hellenes. For about 1,400 years they described themselves as Romans, Greek Christians – very much like the slaves European planters kidnapped from Africa for their American cotton plantations – had to relearn who they were and what they could think. They knew that to admit they were Hellenes meant death. So they had to say they were Romans who worshipped by only Jesus, the dead Jewish man.

With Christianity, the Greeks lost their traditional piety and freedom. They were cut off from their ancestors. Their books were burnt. And instead of Homeros and Platon and Sophokles they had to drop to the illiteracy and lies of the Christian legends.

The antagonism between Hellenism and Christianity is so intense and lasting – because of Christianity’s banning of Hellenic culture – that to be one is to negate the other. A Greek can only be Greek. A Christian cannot be a Greek. A “Greek Christian” is an oxymoron. A “Greek Christian” is a product of the manifest legacy of colonialism, a schizophrenic state of mind, a tragic contradiction fated to deny his/her nature and culture.

The Ruins of Zeus temple in Olympia, Greece.

The Christian emperor Theodosius abolished the Olympics in the late 4th century after its life of 1,169 years. The Hellenes started the athletic event of Olympics to honor God Zeus, father of both gods and people. Yet, the people of the West, who now own Olympics have the illusion that they are following in the path of the Greeks. They are not.

(image source: webmaster's own collection of photos taken during a visit).

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Dr. Vallianatos comments on the imperial order that brought an end to the Olympics, on page 136 as follows:

"Here was a millennial tradition of athletic competition for arete (courage, virtue, equality before the law, goodness, manliness, nobility and excellence) started by Herakles, son of Zeus and the Greeks’ greatest hero, and Theodosios, thinking like a barbarian, brought it to an end. The Olympic agon (contest) was much more than a struggle between outstanding men for physical excellence. It was, above all, a Panhellenic honoring of the gods. It was an extraordinary effort to rein in the Hellenes’ passions for war and bring them together from all over the world for the celebration of their common culture. The overwhelming idea behind the Olympic contest was political. The Olympic contest was an effort to build a Panhellenic polis and commonwealth, a united Hellas under democratic governance. The Olympic agon was also building better and nobler human beings. And, yet, the Hellenes’ greatest athletic contest and celebration of national identity were buried…. by a barbarian king who knew no better than listening to the fanaticism of his Christian advisors."

The failure of the Christian Greeks to claim their legacy pleases the Western scholars of the West. They want the Greeks to remain Christian. That way the Greeks are securely tied to their Christian overlords, so colonized with foreign ideas, customs, institutions, and, above all, religion that for all practical purposes, they have become foreigners in their own land.

The part and parcel of this anti-Hellenic spirit always blowing in the West is to cover up the treacherous history of Christianity’s rape of Hellenism. It is simply too embarrassing. The history of Christianity’s war against Hellenism remains a taboo subject. Christianity made Greece a palimpsest.

The Christianization of Greece

It was during the time of Iamblichos, the 4^th century, that the Roman Empire married Christianity and, together, they killed more than the image of Pythagoras. With dosage of barbaric violence during the bloody course of several centuries, Christianity leveled Greece, uprooted Greece culture, and exiled reason and the sciences from the country. Palladas, a 5^th century Greek writer, summed up the genocide of Christianity against the Greeks this way: “We Greeks,” he said, “are men who have been reduced to ashes. We cling to the buried hopes of the dead. Today everything has been turned upside down.”

So the Greeks who survived the Christian genocide remade themselves…and worshipping a dead man as god. Thus, Christianity became a global force for the annihilation of Hellenism.

(source: The Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes - By Evaggelos G. Vallianatos p. 57 and 106-112 and 190 - 203).

Also How Elgin Marbles were stolen - From 1801 to 1812, Elgin's agents removed about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, as well as sculptures from the Propylaea and Erechtheum. The Marbles were transported by sea to Britain.

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Why the notion of ‘Hindu Nation’ alone is chosen for criticism?

So why do media worldwide get so worked up about ‘Hindu fundamentalists’ and a possible ‘Hindu nation’.

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If the critics only imagined what a Hindu nation looks like, they might start propagating Hindu nations all over the globe. – by Maria Wirth 

I sometimes wonder who influences whom: the Indian mainstream journalists influence the foreign correspondents or the other way round, as they always hold the same view. Or is there even a directive from the top of the media houses about who must be protected and who can be abused? 

Obviously, Hindus can be abused. I was shocked when I recently checked articles in major newspapers like the New York Times on the appointment of Yogi Adityanath as chief minister in Uttar Pradesh. Like in the run-up to the general elections in 2014, when a Modi victory loomed large, the media went berserk. The gist was: By appointing Yogi Adityanath, Prime Minister Modi has finally shown his true face of a Hindu fundamentalist who wants to make India a ‘Hindu nation’ where minorities have no place. The articles peddled untruths and drew unacceptable conclusions. The Swiss NZZ for example wrote that it is hardly possible for Prime Minister Modi’s government to call itself the representative of all Indians after appointing a figure like Yogi Adityanath. 

A Hindu nation is projected as the worst possible scenario by the wrongly called ‘liberal’ media. Yet, the same media don’t react when America or most other western countries are referred to as Christian nations. Nor do they get agitated about the numerous Muslim nations; not even about those which still have harsh blasphemy laws. Why are these ok, and a Hindu nation is not ok? They don’t explain; they just insinuate that minorities (read Muslims and Christians) will suffer in a Hindu nation.

Maybe they came to this conclusion because minorities like Jews or Hindus suffer in certain Christian or Muslim nations though the media hardly pulls those countries up for it. However, even otherwise, this conclusion is wrong, as Hindus have a different mind-set. They are open towards other views, unlike ‘good’ Christians and Muslims who feel obligated to make everyone believe what they believe, if necessary by deceit or force. 

Hindus cannot be put into one single box. There are too many different ways to reach the goal of life. As it were, there are many minorities within Hinduism. But they all are based on the Vedic insight that everything, including our persons, is permeated by the same divine essence which is called by many names but is ultimately ONE. Our human consciousness (Atman) is one with the cosmic consciousness (Brahman) and to realize this, is the goal and fulfillment of life. “Satyam vada, Dharmam chara” the Veda exhorts – speak the truth and do what is right under the given circumstances. And find out who you really are: you are not a separate entity but in the depths of your being one with all.

Hindus never fought crusades or jihads to establish their dharma in foreign lands. So why do media worldwide get so worked up about ‘Hindu fundamentalists’ and a possible ‘Hindu nation’.

***

From this follows that ‘good’ Hindus are those rare human beings whose dharma makes them regard all others as brothers and sisters. Their dharma makes them further respect nature and not harm unnecessarily any living being. Hindus do not, unlike Christians and Muslims, divide humanity into those who are chosen by God and those who are eternally damned. Hindu children are not taught to look down on those who are not Hindus, unlike children of the dogmatic religions who are taught that their God does not love those others unless they join their ‘true’ religions.  Hindus are also comparatively kinder to animals. The great bulk of vegetarians worldwide are Hindus.

What is wrong with the fundamentals? There is nothing wrong with the fundamentals. But there is one major difference: For Hindus, the Divinity is in all and all is in the Divinity, whereas for Christians and Muslims the Divinity is separate from his creation watching us from somewhere.  

The concept of Divinity is also different. For Hindus the best description for the absolute truth is sat-chit-ananda (it is true, aware and blissful). The many personal gods help the devotee to realize the Absolute. Christians and Muslims perceive Divinity in its highest form as a personal, superhuman entity who is jealous of other gods. The first commandment in Christianity and a very important issue in Islam is the claim that nobody must worship other gods except the ‘one true god’, which both religions claim is only with them.

Hindus are the exemplary role model for ‘how not to exclude others’? Where else have religious minorities flourished and grown like in India? Is not the relative harmony in this amazing diversity in India generally admired abroad? Media persons need only to look around in the world to realize this fact.  

Why then are Hindus of all people accused of excluding others? 

The reason may be this: neither the west nor Muslim countries want a strong India.  India was the cradle of civilisation and over most of the known history economically very powerful. They may fear that based on her ancient culture, India may rise again to the top. Is it the media’s job to put Hindus perpetually on the defensive by spreading this bogey of Hindu fundamentalism and prevent a better education policy which would give India an edge?  

“Imagine, India would become a Hindu nation!” the media shout infuriated. The problem, however, is that they don’t imagine it and don’t ask basic questions. If they only imagined what a Hindu nation looks like, they might start propagating Hindu nations all over the globe. One day, when people have become tired of blindly believing strange things, and when nobody is threatened any longer with dire consequences if he stops believing in those strange things, the world may be grateful to Bharat Mata that she has conceived and preserved over millennia those eternal, precious insights for the benefit of humanity.

(source: Why the notion of ‘Hindu Nation’ alone is chosen for criticism? - by Maria Wirth - indiafacts.org).

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Nehru's Dismal Legacy

When Nehru Opposed Restoration Of Somnath Temple

After India’s Independence and the accession of Junagarh State into Indian Union, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the then Union Home Minister, pledged that Somnath will be reconstructed and restored to its original glory. When Patel broached this subject with Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi endorsed the plan but said that the contribution for the reconstruction of the temple should come from the public. Patel accepted this advice.

With the demise of Patel, the task of the restoration of the temple was ably led by K M Munshi, a cabinet minister in then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government. Munshi wrote , “I was clear in my mind that the temple of Somnath was not just an ancient monument; it lived in the heart of the whole nation and its reconstruction was a national pledge.”

However, Nehru never liked the idea of restoring this ancient monument, and “more than once criticised” Munshi for working for its reconstruction. Munshi was referred to in the Cabinet as someone “connected with Somnath”. 

In the early months of 1951, just few weeks before the temple inauguration, the matter came to a head. At the end of a Cabinet meeting, Nehru called Munshi and said: I don’t like your trying to restore Somnath. It is Hindu revivalism.

Nehru had revealed his cards. He was haunted by the spectre of ‘Hindu revivalism’. Restoring an ancient monument, a place of immense veneration, which had been repeatedly obliterated, was according to Nehru an act of Hindu revivalism. 

Munshi was incensed. Without replying to Nehru’s insinuation, he left the meeting and the very next day wrote to him a long letter, stating “Yesterday you referred to ‘Hindu revivalism’. I know your views on the subject; I have done justice to them; I hope you will equally do justice to mine…. It is my faith in the past which has given me the strength to work in the present and to look forward to our future. I cannot value freedom if it deprives us of the Bhagavad Gita or uproots our millions from the faith with which they look upon our temples and thereby destroys the texture of our lives…. this shrine once restored to a place of importance in our life will give to our people a purer conception of religion and a more vivid consciousness of our strength, so vital in these days of freedom and its trail.” Nehru evidently wasn’t too convinced. When the then president of India, Rajendra Prasad, was invited to inaugurate the temple, Nehru shot him a letter, admonishing, “I confess that I do not like the idea of your associating yourself with a spectacular opening of the Somnath Temple. This is not merely visiting a temple, which can certainly be done by you or anyone else but rather participating in a significant function which unfortunately has a number of implications”. It seems by “number of implications” he meant that Rajendra Prasad inaugurating a temple would be a challenge to the secular fabric of the Indian Republic. Rajendra Prasad ignored Nehru’s advice and added, “I would do the same with a mosque or a church if I were invited.”

So, on 11 May 1951, Rajendra Prasad, while presiding over the opening ceremony of the temple, gave a stirring speech. He said that the physical symbols of our civilisation maybe destroyed, but no arms, army or king could destroy the bond that the people had with their culture and faith. Till that bond remained, the civilisation would survive. He added that it was the creative urge for civilisational renewal, nurtured in the hearts of the people through centuries that had once again led to the praan-pratishta of the Somnath deity. Somnath was the symbol of economic and spiritual prosperity of ancient India, he said. The re-building of Somnath will not be complete till India attains the prosperity of the yesteryear.

Thus, with the devotion of millions, the pledge of Patel, the blessing of Gandhi and an untiring effort by Munshi, the majestic Somnath temple was restored and a soothing balm was applied to the unhealed wounds of the nation.

“Many years later, reflecting on the Somnath incident, Munshi, penned the most devastating critique of Nehruvian secularism. He stated: “In its (secularism) name, anti-religious forces, sponsored by secular humanism or Communism, condemns religious piety, particularly in the majority community.”

Munshi said:  

“In its name, again, politicians in power adopt a strange attitude which, while it condones the susceptibilities, religious and social, of the minority communities, is too ready to brand similar susceptibilities in the majority community as communalistic and reactionary. How secularism sometimes becomes allergic to Hinduism will be apparent from certain episodes relating to the reconstruction of Somnath temple. “These unfortunate postures have been creating a sense of frustration in the majority community. “If however the misuse of this word ‘secularism’ continues…if every time there is an inter-communal conflict, the majority is blamed regardless of the merits of the questions; if our holy places of pilgrimage like Banaras, Mathura and Rishikesh continue to be converted into industrial slums…, the springs of traditional tolerance will dry up.”

Written in the Sixties an erstwhile member of Nehru’s Cabinet, truer words were perhaps never spoken.

(source: When Nehru Opposed Restoration Of Somnath Temple – by Manish Maheswari).

Refer to Nepal had offered to merge with India after Independence. PM Nehru refused and US President Kennedy offered to help India detonate a nuclear devise before the 1962 China War. Nehru refused - Had India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru accepted US President John F Kennedy's offer of helping India detonate a nuclear device much before China did in 1964, India need not have to make desperate efforts to enter the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) now, according to former Foreign Secretary Maharajakrishna Rasgotra. Rasgotra said if Nehru had accepted the offer, not only India would had tested the nuclear device first in Asia, before China, but it "would have deterred China.

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Academic bullying: Whitewashing Aurangzeb

“Aurangzeb cared for nothing for art, destroyed its ‘heathen’ monuments with coarse bigotry, and fought, through a reign of half a century, to eradicate from India almost all religions but his own.” - Will Durant, in his much acclaimed ‘Story of Civilization’, narrates the religious fervour of Aurangzeb that led him to ‘smash every idol’ that his eyes fell upon.

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Like Truschke herself, I am neither Hindu nor Indian, yet I can read for myself with what explicit glee the Muslim chroniclers described temple destructions and massacres of unbelievers. – Dr Koenraad Elst

Audrey Truschke is a Professor of Religious Studies in Stanford, California, and has gained some fame with her work on the patronage of Sanskrit by the Moghuls. In order to get that far, she had to toe the ideologically mandatory line: neither in America nor in India does the Hindu-baiting establishment allow a dissident to get seriously established in the academic world. Predictably, we see her elaborating the same positions already taken by an earlier generation of academics, such as whitewashing Aurangzeb. Not that this was a hard job for her: one gets the impression that she is a true believer and really means what she says. Then again, she may have done an excellent job of creating the desired impression all while secretly knowing better.

Bullying

Her position in the article “The Right’s problem with history” (DNA, 26 Oct. 2016) is summed up as: “Unable to defend a fabricated history of India on scholarly grounds, many foot soldiers of the Hindu Right have turned to another response: bullying.” It would be normal to compare secularist historians and their Western dupes with people of the same rank, namely different-minded historians, in this case belonging to the “Hindu Right”. These are not exactly numerous, having been blocked systematically from academe by the single permitted opinion in both India and America, but they exist. Yet, they and their output are absent from her paper. From a street bully, I would expect a denunciation of street bullies, and from an academic a polemic against her own peers.

The photograph accompanying the article tells it all. If it had been about her own school of history, the picture would have shown established historians involved in this debate, such as Wendy Doniger or Sheldon Pollock. But now that the opposition is at issue, it shows a group of non-historians, not in an air-conditioned college hall but in a street demonstration exercising their freedom of expression. The reader is expected to recognize them as representatives of the “Hindu Right”, and as “bullies”.

She testifies to verbal attacks she herself has endured “from members of the Hindu Right”, and which she evaluates as “vicious personal attacks on the basis of my perceived religion, gender and race”. Correction: she could have maintained the very same religion, gender and race and yet never be attacked by those same Hindus (indeed, most Jewish female whites have never experienced such attacks), if she had not belonged to the “scholars who work on South Asia” and who have earned a reputation as Hindu-baiters. She has been attacked on the basis of what she has written, nothing else. From the start, Truschke tries to capture the moral high ground by citing one of her lambasters as tweeting: “Gas this Jew.” In America, such reference to the Holocaust is absolutely not done, and Indian secularist circles adopt the same sensitivities once they see these as valid for the trend-setting West. To the Hindu mainstream, this hyper-focus on anything associated with the WW2 is not there, and they had no history with antisemitism; but still this quote would be unacceptable there, for regardless of what Jews exactly believe, Hindus tend to respect other faiths.

(source: Academic bullying - By Koenraad Elst). Refer to Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam - by Koenraad Elst.  Refer to Aurangazeb’s fan girl Audrey Truschke turns logic on its head!

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Truth about Aurangzeb

Islam is always presented as the one, progressive, emancipatory religion.  - Arun Shourie in his book how India's Eminent historians have portrayed Islam

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Aurangzeb did not just build an isolated mosque on a destroyed temple, he ordered all temples destroyed, among them the Kashi Vishwanath temple, one of the most sacred places of Hinduism, and had mosques built on a number of cleared temple sites. Other Hindu sacred places within his reach equally suffered destruction, with mosques built on them. A few examples: Krishna's birth temple in Mathura; the rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujarat; the Vishnu temple replaced with the Alamgir mosque now overlooking Benares; and the Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. The number of temples destroyed by Aurangzeb is counted in four, if not five figures.

We want to draw a veil over our past to appease the Muslims. We have done it for a long time. It is time to lift the veil. - Rabindranath Tagore (Patriotism is not enough - By M.S.N. Menon).

In one year (1679 – 80) sixty-six temples were broken to pieces in Amber alone, sixty-three at Chitor, one hundred and twenty-three at Udaipur; and over the site of a Benares temple especially sacred to the Hindus he built, in deliberate insult, a Mohammedan mosque. He forbade all public worship of the Hindu faith, and laid upon every unconverted Hindu a heavy capitation tax. As a result of his fanaticism, thousands of temples which had represented the art of India through a millennium were laid in ruins. We can never know, from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty she once possessed. - Will Durant. n his much acclaimed ‘Story of Civilization’,

Refer to The Never-Ending Sanitisation Of Aurangzeb!

Aurangzeb did not stop at destroying temples, their users were also wiped out; even his own brother Dara Shikoh was executed for taking an interest in Hindu religion; Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because he objected to Aurangzeb's forced conversions.

Yet, Percival Spear, co-author with Romila Thapar of the prestigious A History of India (Penguin), writes: 'Aurangzeb's supposed intolerance is little more than a hostile legend based on isolated acts such as the erection of a mosque on a temple site in Benares.' L'histoire de l'Inde moderne (Fayard), the French equivalent of Percival Spear's history of India, praises Aurangzeb and says, 'He has been maligned by Hindu fundamentalists'. Even Indian politicians are ignorant of Aurangzeb's evil deeds. Nehru might have known about them, but for his own reasons he chose to keep quiet and instructed his historians to downplay Aurangzeb's destructive drive and instead praise him as a benefactor of arts.

Since then six generations of Marxist historians have done the same and betrayed their allegiance to truth. Very few people know for instance that Aurangzeb banned any kind of music and that painters had to flee his wrath and take refuge with some of Rajasthan's friendly maharajahs.

Thus, we thought we should get at the root of the matter. History (like journalism) is about documentation and first-hand experience. We decided to show Aurangzeb according to his own documents. There are an incredible number of farhans, original edicts of Aurangzeb hand-written in Persian, in India's museums, particularly in Rajasthan, such as the Bikaner archives. It was not always easy to scan them, we encountered resistance, sometimes downright hostility and we had to go once to the chief minister to get permission. Indeed, the director of Bikaner archives told us that in 50 years we were the first ones asking for the farhans dealing with Aurangzeb's destructive deeds. Then we asked painters from Rajasthan to reproduce in the ancient Mughal style some of the edicts: the destruction of Somnath temple; the trampling of Hindus protesting jaziya tax by Aurangzeb's elephants; or the order from Aurangzeb prohibiting Hindus to ride horses and palanquins; or the beheading of Teg Bahadur and Dara Shikoh.

People might say: 'OK, this is all true, Aurangzeb was indeed a monster, but why rake up the past, when we have tensions between Muslims and Hindus today?' There are two reasons for this exhibition. The first is that no nation can move forward unless its children are taught to look squarely at their own history, the good and the bad, the evil and the pure. The French, for instance, have many dark periods in their history, more recently some of the deeds they did during colonisation in North Africa or how they collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War and handed over French Jews who died in concentration camps (the French are only now coming to terms with it).

The argument that looking at one's history will pit a community against the other does not hold either: French Catholics and Protestants, who share a very similar religion, fought each other bitterly. Catholics brutally murdered thousands of Protestants in the 18th century; yet today they live peacefully next to each other. France fought three wars with Germany in the last 150 years, yet they are great friends today.

Let Hindus and Muslims then come to terms with what happened under Aurangzeb, because Muslims suffered as much as Hindus. It was not only Shah Jahan or Dara Shikoh who were murdered, but also the forefathers of today's Indian Muslims who have been converted at 90 per cent. Aurangzeb was the Hitler, the asura of medieval India. No street is named after Hitler in the West, yet in New Delhi we have Aurangzeb Road, a constant reminder of the horrors Aurangzeb perpetrated against Indians, including his own people.

(source: Truth about Aurangzeb - By Francois Gautier - rediff.com).

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Cultural Genocide and Atrocity Literature

The Onslaught on Indic Civilization continues...

"Gospel narratives were a tissues of absurdities" - maintained Thomas Woolston (1668- 1733) an English theologian in his six Discourses on the Miracles of Christ. He was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death.

"We rule India, we are a superior race" " It is a terrible business this living among inferior races" - remarked British Viceroy Lord Elgin (1811- 1863)

"Ah how can we (Japanese) prevent the world from falling prey to the barbarians (Christians)" – Aizawa Seishisai Yasushi (1782- 1863) Japanese nationalist thinker of the Mito school during the late shogunate period.

Monotheism is blind, and determined because it is blind.

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"Hinduism is the biggest danger to Christianity as the last of the major earth-bound nature traditions." - Sankrant Sanu

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Atrocity Literature: A Western Recipe to dismantle India and Hinduism – by Ranjith Vadiyala

Christians like to tout the exceptionalism of their religion. They are correct in one regard. Christianity is exceptional among the major religions for beginning with a killing, and for keeping killing central to the faith ever since. No other religion, for instance, dangles a dead man from the necks of believers - David Eller, in the book, Christianity is not great – Edited by John W. Loftus p. 87.

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It is high time that we take note of such propaganda wars being inflicted on India and Hinduism using Atrocity Literatures. In 1927, Katherine Mayo wrote a viciously anti-India and anti-Hindu book “Mother India”, which portrayed Hindu society as uncivilized, barbaric and oppressive towards women and children by cherry picking incidents and twisting the facts to suit the pre-decided agenda[1]. The purpose of this book was to show to the world that the Indian society was barbaric, which needed to be ‘civilized’ by the ‘civilized white Christian men’ of the British and defend British rule in India. Gandhiji called this book “a gutter inspector’s report”. Mayo’s Mother India was perhaps one of the earliest attempts at creating Atrocity literature against India and Hinduism and this has continued to this day by various vested interests that are inimical to India and Hinduism. 

What is Atrocity Literature? 

“Atrocity Literature” is a psychological warfare which the West has been using for centuries to subjugate, control, digest and ultimately destroy native cultures and civilizations.  This, when supported by media can have a devastating, long lasting and sometimes permanent effect on that target civilization/culture. It is particularly dangerous, because it makes the people of the civilization, which is being targeted; believe that those who are trying to destroy them are their saviours. The West has successfully used this against Native Americans, African Blacks, Bharath and many other places it colonized and invaded.

Christian Missionaries/Church, NGO’s, Western/Indian Academic institutions, Private Western Foundations, Human/Animal Right groups, Media, and Western Governments – have all used Atrocity Literature to undermine India. In “Breaking India”, Rajiv Malhotra describes Atrocity Literature as a “technical term referring to literature generated by Western interests with the explicit goal to show the target non-Western culture is committing atrocities on its own people, and hence in need of Western intervention”.  The ultimate aim of Atrocity Literature that is being produced against Bharath is to demean our culture and religion, specifically Hinduism, and ultimately destroy it. This strategy is based on a simple fact that every society, civilization, system, religion, country, community or even artificially formed communities like labour unions will have members, who do criminal acts/atrocities. This is also true with social institutions like marriage, joint family, etc.

Is India the Rape Capital of the world?

Ever since Nirbhaya rape incident, there is continued coverage by both national and international media about rapes in Bharath. At a point of time, Bharath was called the rape capital of the world. A German university even rejected admission to an Indian male, citing the security of female students in the university as a reason[4]. While even a single such incident is shameful to the entire nation, we also should not forget about the reality. German professor can’t be blamed. The problem is Atrocity Literature and its propagation through media, which created an image that “Indian men are rapists”, though we are lot better than several so called developed countries. This is despite our inferior judiciary and police, at least in quantity, if not quality. The rape incidents fit into the pre-decided narrative of the left-liberals and feminists that – India, especially Hindu society, is a patriarchal society and women are being oppressed.

Narratives being created around indigenous practices like Jallikattu, Kerala Temple elephants, Holi, Deepavali, Dahi Handi, Ganesh Chaturthi, Sabarimala, etc. all fall under the category of Atrocity Literature. 

The modus operandi is same in each case. Choose an indigenous festival or practice. Then prepare documents showing that there are atrocities and then demand for a ban. Take the example of Jallikattu, where you have a large number of bulls participating in the event. It is obvious that there may be a few incidents of mistreatment of bulls. But, this cannot be a justification for a blanket ban on the entire event. It is like asking for a ban on travelling because of accidents. The solution is reform and tight monitoring and not ban. The real objective behind all the outrage is to distance the Hindus from their culture and tradition, so that they can be easily converted.

(source: Atrocity Literature: A Western Recipe to dismantle India and Hinduism – by Ranjith Vadiyala). Refer to the Merciless and Cruel Goa Inquisiiton - By Jai Sharma - indiafacts.org

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Killing the feminine: Misogyny in Christianity - by Sankrant Sanu

“She can show you the world we come from. There’s no green there. They killed their Mother, and they’re gonna do the same thing here.” From the movie, Avatar.

“The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? What happened to their mother? They killed their mother and now she is a ghost.” Executive and speaker Jeffrey Armstrong. At the heart of the civilizing mission and the White man’s burden are the prejudices coming from Christian theology. Only Christians can be saved, all others are in the grip of Satan.

Amy Carmichel, an early 20^th century missionary to India, is quoted here in “Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India.”

"...Our voices grow weary enough, and our hearts grow wearier still, for it seems like fighting shadows, till the remembrance suddenly comes - Not shadow, but substance, the great grim substance of Satanic opposition. And then we take courage for the battle is the Lords."

It is the characterizing of others as Satanic that lead to the unspeakable crimes of Christianity, including, by one count, the extermination of nearly one hundred million natives in the Americas. These prejudices are alive and well and at the heart of exclusive Christianity and its missionary activities worldwide.

Though liberal Western society is shown up in opposition to right wing Christianity, the civilizing mission persists in the liberal West with some of the terminology changed.  Orientalist stereotypes of Hindus turn their Satanic nature into descriptions of culture-blame. Nothing is as important as “saving their women.” I had written earlier about the disproportionate coverage of rapes in India in Western media and how films and websites use their alleged “plight” as a fund-raising tool for NGO’s and evangelical missions.

The Indian elite has been schooled into the idea of Christianity as a benign force. The white man’s burden has become the brown coconut’s burden. So what if all the people convert? Won’t we become advanced? As per the propaganda film, Veil of Tears, won’t conversion into Christianity rescue the poor Indian women?

As it turns out, not quite.  As nationmaster.com collates in a helpful chart, the top 6 countries by rape rate are all majority Christian.

Far from saving our souls or “rescuing” Indian women, Christian conversion will have precisely the opposite effect, an increased rate of rape.  This may explain the dramatic difference between the US and Canada as well. The stridently Christian evangelical US has nearly 16 times the rape rate of its northern neighbor.  As someone who has lived and studied in the US, I have been appalled at locker room and dorm talk that looks at women merely as sex-objects, as “whores and bitches”, a phenomena that is documented in the book “Boys Will Be Boys.” This is quite different from my experience of college talk about girls among boys in India, at least 20 or so years ago when I studied there, before the latest download of American modernity.

In the Catholic Church, the Pope, literally, the father is the ultimate patriarch and priests held power over nuns, leading to unimaginable abuse. After, all entire mankind is cursed because of the sin of Eve.

As The Atlantic notes, “many Native Alaskan children were shipped off to boarding schools—some as young as 6 years old—and many were beaten, sexually abused, and urged to forget their languages and cultures.”  Suits have been filed “against Catholic priests and church workers for molesting almost an entire generation of Alaska Native children.”  It is not surprising that this cycle of abuse perpetuates in Alaska as it does in other Christian societies.

Thus the necessity of highlighting Indian rapes comes from two important and well-funded imperatives. The first is that Hinduism is “oppressive of women” and Christianity, or its dual in the White Man’s civilizing burden, Western liberalism, must rescue these women.  Secondly, Hinduism is a theological challenge and poses a great danger in attracting an increasing interest from Western women finding their own power through it, exemplified by the Yoga movement.

Hinduism in the form of the yoga movement is extremely popular among Western women. Nearly 80% of yoga practitioners in the US are women.  Many of these have taken in a deeper way to Hindu spirituality with its empowerment of the divine feminine. The book and movie “Eat, Pray, Love” further fuelled this movement in recent times, with popular actress Julia Roberts also declaring her conversion to Hinduism.  This is extremely threatening to Christianity.  People don’t get that, unlike Hinduism, Christianity is largely an institutionalized religion and a very organized force. When a threat like this is perceived, systematic institutional efforts and strategies are set into motion to counter it. I have various unconfirmed reports of journalists being specifically tasked to source rape stories from India that are them amplified in world media. This serves the dual purpose of culture-blame of Hinduism and painting India as an unsafe place for Western woman tourists inclined to undertake the “Eat, Pray, Love” journey into Hinduism. Unfortunately many deracinated Indian “liberals”, cut off from Hindu traditions are useful idiots, though some are also likely paid sepoys in this conversion war.

As Maria Wirth, a German native who grew up Christian, points out,  “…the exclusive focus by the world media on “rapes in India’ is not justified and raises suspicion of an agenda behind it. Articles appeared now, often written by Indians with Hindu names, that Indian (read Hindu) culture is to be blamed for the rapes, because it does not consider women as ‘autonomous entities’, which probably means that they can’t do what they want. The Washington Post proclaimed that sexual violence was endemic in India. The Reuters Trust Law group named India one of the worst countries in the world for women. A Harvard committee crafted strategies for ‘adolescent education’ to change the Indian mindset about gender. It was getting a bit much. Don’t westerners look at their own record – past and present – and compare it with that of India? Are they not ashamed?

Christian evangelism comes from a deeply wounded culture. Every Christian carries the latent memory and karma of their own uprooting and the burden of violence inflicted on them in Christianity’s imperial expansion.  Before Europe colonized others, it was itself colonized by Christianity, its traditions destroyed and its wise strong women burnt at the stake as witches. This civilization cannot but help inflict violence on others. While we protect ourselves, we must also help them see light. This has been the role of our gurus bringing yoga and Indian spiritual wisdom to the West for decades, without carrying the agenda of religious conversion, to help heal the Christian West before it destroys itself and others.  To help restore their mother, we must first connect to our own mother traditions and restore the balance of feminine power.

For the rest of article refer to link below.

(source: Killing the feminine: Misogyny in Christianity - by Sankrant Sanu - indiafacts.org). Refer to The Church, Popes, Sainthood and their private lives versus public sermon - by C I Issac

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A process of decolonization from a British-Mughal view of Indian history

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Baahubali 2: India’s Blindfolds Are Off, And It’s a Dazzling Sight Indeed - by Vamsee Juluri

An Indian Vision of India’s Past 

Baahubali is an audacious celebration of being not just Indian, but being Hindu. Its popularity has to be understood in relation to not only the timeless tradition of the Ramayana and Mahabharatha, but also in relation to a newer pop culture genre in India of historical fantasies inspired by the epics. The genre stormed the market in 2010 with the runaway success of the Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi. The important thing about this genre, and this is evident in Baahubali too, is the evocation of modern and liberal sensibilities in the social world of their characters. Women fight, speak up for their rights, and authority is constantly questioned. Heroes are rarely preordained prophets or avatars, but ordinary human beings who struggle to earn their place. Critics see this genre as a right-wing fantasy, but as I wrote some time ago in Foreign Affairs, that view is shallow, and the popular rediscovery of India’s civilizational heritage is better understood as a generational process of decolonization from a British-Mughal view of Indian history.

Baahubali tells the story of two generations of a royal family set at an unspecified time and place in India’s past. It is a tale of palace intrigue and war drawing on the epics as well as a modern Indian cinematic idiom of male-star-worship. But what sets it apart from virtually any movie made in India is the absolute panache of its production. The cities and palaces tower up to fill the screen, as do the gardens and the battlefields. Every one of the hundreds of actors is in character, and the screen invites you to soak in every frame like a graphic novel panel (albeit a serious and dramatic one, in the vein of 300, right down to muscular heroes and villains facing off with chariots and spears and explosions of splinters and rubble). 

The movie is an experience of beauty, most of all, and it marks, in some ways, a return to Telugu cinema’s artistic roots from an earlier era. But unlike the older movies, it is not gentle at all, but breathlessly adventurous and violent. It is so sure of itself, and what it is doing to its viewers, that the intermission is preceded by a sign saying “let’s give the people of Mahishmati (the imaginary kingdom in the movie) a chance to breathe.” It takes absolute bravado to say that, and it is justified. 

Baahubali is an audacious celebration of being not just Indian, but being Hindu.

Baahubali has been described as the rediscovery of India’s traditional ideal of kshatra, or warrior-spirit, after decades of its suppression by Gandhian notions of pacifism.

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That confidence, in some ways, is part of the desire to self-represent that Baahubali’s global Indian audience perhaps wishes to see fulfilled. Unlike most Indian productions that cut short on detail, Baahubali shows muscle literally and otherwise in its grandeur and vision. It speaks to and from an aspirational Indian generation that can announce itself, and say it can speak to the world on its terms. This is a desire that has been circulating in Indian media and popular culture since the early years of economic liberalization in the 1990s, of Indian success, and “arrival” of sorts in the global marketplace. 

The cultural tensions between Bollywood and Baahubali are accurately reflected in a popular meme going around in social media that suggests that films that respect Hinduism will earn a lot more than films that disrespect Hindus. The image contrasts Baahubali with an earlier Bollywood blockbuster, P.K., a comedy about an alien who mocks Hinduism. In P.K. the wide-eyed alien (played by activist actor Aamir Khan), who supposedly exposes the failings of all organized religions tip-toes around Islam but hits Hinduism ruthlessly. For example, one scene in P.K. depicts Hindus mistaking red-colored paint (from chewing paan, or betel leaf) on a rock for a sacred mark and offering worship to it as if it were a deity. It is exactly this sort of ignorance about the cosmology, aesthetics, and practices of India’s largest religion by Bollywood elites that has turned the loud celebration of Baahubali into a representation of an India long mocked and derided by its postcolonial elites. 

The nation, it seems, no longer belongs to those who believed they had a monopoly on its definition.

Baahubali has been described as the rediscovery of India’s traditional ideal of kshatra, or warrior-spirit, after decades of its suppression by Gandhian notions of pacifism. It is that, and a lot more too. The rest of the world accustomed to dogmatic and dated textbook theories and pop culture stereotypes about what the Hindus are supposed to be like might find it hard to get used to or understand at first. But in the end, it has to return to the inevitable, to the vision of the infinite that has sustained the life of a people threatened with extinction more than once before in history only to find the people and their lives surviving, and rising, again and again.

(source: Baahubali 2: India’s Blindfolds Are Off, And It’s a Dazzling Sight Indeed - by Vamsee Juluri).

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Native Americans say Junípero Serra enslaved them; Pope Francis says he saved them. Lessons for Hindus

Yes if you go to polytheistic cultures, India or Japan, and you say 'I don't believe in God', they say, That's fine, which one don't you believe in? There are plenty around, you can have others.' And of course I think the original meaning of atheism maxims apply to Christians, because they refused to accept the Roman Pantheon. The Romans offered, 'We can include you in the Roman Pantheon, we've included other people.' 'No, no, our God is the only God, the others aren't God at all.' And so they were call atheists.- John Gray, English philosopher and author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia                                                                                  -  

"‘It is imperative [Pope Francis] is enlightened to understand that Father Serra Junipero was responsible for the deception, exploitation, oppression, enslavement and genocide of thousands of Indigenous Californians, ultimately resulting in the largest ethnic cleansing in North America,’ a MoveOn.org petition read.” – Jack Jenkins 

Pope Francis has been widely lauded as a champion of the oppressed, advocating for the victims of war and passionately declaring that “to discriminate in the name of God is inhuman.”But in September, the pontiff is planning to canonize, or declare a saint, a man who some Native Americans say not only discriminated in God’s name, but also subjugated thousands of Indians along the West Coast using missionary tactics that effectively enslaved his Christian converts.

A saint who beat Native Americans? Credited with baptizing around 90,000 Indians during his lifetime, there is wide agreement among historians that Serra’s evangelism tactics were harsh by any modern standard. George Tinker, Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology and author of Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide, described to ThinkProgress what he called the “almost slave-labor conditions” that Native Americans were subjected to under Serra’s leadership. Citing accounts from Serra’s own lieutenant, Tinker said the Franciscan priest prohibited converts from leaving his Christian compounds, often called missions, and forced them to endure grueling labor on Spanish-run farms. Any attempt to flee was met with brutal reprisals. “The army would round the person up, bring him back to the mission compound, and then the person is punished,” he said, “The mission compound was run kind of like a military boot camp.”

“Indian people had little free choice,” he said. “Conversion [was] almost a last desperation in order to stay alive.”

Indian people [of the time] would agree that they were better off dead than living under a Franciscan rule. “Indian people [of the time] would agree that they were better off dead than living under a Franciscan rule,” he said. “How is that better than what the Puritans did? It’s the same results. Invariably, mission work was a component of colonization, either explicitly or implicitly, and in the case of Serra it was inordinately explicit.” “This [was] an act of pure colonialism, of nailing down territory.”

Pope Francis’ saint

Whatever the reasoning for Serra’s sainthood, however, the controversy largely centers around one question: should the pope elevate a man who played a key role in a colonial campaign that harmed Native Americans?  “It legitimizes the conquest,”

(source: Native Americans say Junípero Serra enslaved them; Pope Francis says he saved them – By Jack Jenkins).

The Edict of Thessalonica and attack on Hindu traditions

"If Church wishes to harvest souls, let it sow seeds of faith in Christian Europe. The fields there are lying fallow, uncared and untended." - Kanchan Gupta in his article Christianity withering away in Christendom

"Opium and Christianity are harmful to the state and need to be stopped." - Hibino Teruhiro, a Japanese sojourner in conversation with Hua Yilan in Maiden Voyage by Joshua A. Fogel.

"Christianity may be considered a religion, but it was actually developed and used as a system of mind control to produce slaves that believed God decreed their slavery." - Joseph Atwill, author of a book entitled 'Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus', asserts that Christianity did not begin as a religion, but was actually a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire.

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Theodosius was labeled “The Great” by Christian historians for his attack on pagan Roman and Greek traditions. That “next civilization” is India.

“When Barbarians seize another people’s land, they first seize their minds.” – Takasugi Shinsaka, (1839-1867) a Japanese samurai quoted in Maiden Voyage by Joshua A. Fogel.

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After Jallikattu, Sabarimala, Shani Shignapur, Kerala Temple elephant ban and Ganesh Chaturthi, Dahi Handi is the latest Hindu tradition to be attacked by an NGO-PIL system in conjunction with the able help of the Indian judiciary. This is not an accident. Rather, this is aligned with an evangelical strategy of death by a thousand cuts. While the verdict is still out on the specific actors behind Dahi Handi, it is worth understanding the historical erasure of pagan traditions and how this has been critical to a monopolistic establishment of Christianity. These attacks cannot thus be separated from evangelical interests in the Conversion War.

When the Roman Empire turned Christian: Banning the Olympics

In 380 CE, the Roman Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity to be the official state religion of the Roman Empire. His “Edict of Thessalonica,” also called the “Cunctos Populous,” declared all those who didn’t believe in the Nicene Creed to be “heretics” and subject to both “earthly and heavenly” punishment. Everyone in the empire shall be part of the religion that believes in God as a single Deity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – the Holy Trinity, as taught by St. Peter to the Romans, and now taught by Damasus of Rome and Peter of Alexandria. Only those following this rule shall be called “catholic Christians.” Meeting places of those who follow another religion (including heretics of a Christian variety) shall not be given the status of churches, and such people may be subject to both divine and earthly retribution. 

Tragic and despicable Cultural Vandalism of Greece and Rome

Emperor Theodosius and Temple of Zeus

Theodosius, Emperor from 379-395 AD, took it on himself to suppress Paganism for good by persecuting the few remaining Pagan leaders of Rome and making Pagan worship punishable by death. He banned the Olympic games and stopped all Pagan worship. Mobs of Christians looted Pagan temples and destroyed temple libraries. Many fine Pagan buildings were also destroyed.

Christians were responsible for putting a stop to the original Olympic Games, of which they disapproved. The famous statue of Zeus at Olympia, wrought in gold and ivory, one of the seven wonders of the world was carted off to Constantinople where it was later destroyed.

Refer to Cultural Vandalism and Did Christians Destroy Classical Culture and Create the Dark Ages?

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Theodosius also embarked on a persecution of the pagan rituals and festivals, including banning the Olympic Games that were seen to be associated with the Greek gods and seen to be “too pagan.”

This is a quote from Christianity Today:

“Under the emperor’s direction, fanatical Christians closed and later tore down ancient wonders of the world, most notably the Temple of Zeus built in Olympia and the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria…Theodosius’s successor, Theodosius II, ordered his Roman army in 426 to demolish the impressive stadium of Olympia, which could accommodate more than 40,000 spectators at its peak.

I deliberately use the Christian site “Christianity Today” for the quote above, since they later proffer apologia for this behavior of Theodosius and his successor. The games needed to be banned because they were violent and they injured Christian sensibilities by paying respect to the Greek gods.

“That feast, held on the third day of the Games, was marked by a procession—priests scooped up glowing embers from the fire of Hestia, goddess of the hearth, then carried those embers past spectators singing a hymn to Zeus.”

According to Christianity Today, the banning of pagan rituals was due to the Bishop Ambrose’s influence on Theodosius, which “fanned the flames of Theodosius’s Christian faith and conscience.” And what does this Christian faith and conscience make Theodosius do?

“And so, on February 24, 391, the emperor began issuing a series of decrees that effectively outlawed Greco-Roman paganism and all the rituals that accompanied it. First, he prohibited pagan sacrifice, including—for the first time—the state ceremonies still practiced in Rome. Then came the closing of all shrines and temples: “No person shall approach the shrines, nor walk through the temples, nor revere the images formed of mortal hands.” Next came a law forbidding apostasy from Christianity to paganism, and finally, on November 8, 392, Theodosius declared all sacrifice and divination punishable by death. That meant destroying private altars, domestic idols placed in hearth and kitchen, hanging garlands, etc.”

It is easy to map this to Hindu rituals, murtis placed in the home, garlands of flowers at the entrance, the temples and shrines and use of jyotishya (“divination”). Theodosius outlawed all this on the penalty of death, destroyed the temples, and banned the festivals and sports associated with paganism.

Xavier and after 

In the 16th century, the Catholic Saint, Xavier undertook a similar exercise, when he called upon the Inquisition under Portuguese rule in Goa, which led to killing, torturing and skewering of both non-Christians, who had not submitted to the Christian faith, as well as Christians, who still continued some Hindu pagan festivals or kept murtis at home. The Inquisition killed thousands, many with brutal torture, including burning at the stake. Hundreds of Hindu temples were destroyed and many Hindu practices prohibited, including “greeting people with Namaste, wearing sandals, removing of the slippers, while entering the church, and growing of the sacred basil or Tulsi plant in front of the house.

Fast forward another few centuries. In 1894, Canada passed an amendment to the Indian act, criminalizing many native festivals including the ceremony of the potlatch. 

The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Christian Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized". Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice.

For more refer to Cultural Vandalism and Did Christians Destroy Classical Culture and Create the Dark Ages?

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“Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the “Potlatch” or in the Indian dance known as the “Tamanawas” is guilty of a misdemeanor, and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than six nor less than two months in any gaol or other place of confinement; and every Indian or persons who encourages, either directly or indirectly, an Indian or Indians to get up such a festival…shall be liable to the same punishment."

By the 19th century, even though the suppression of native festivals was due to Christian theological fixations of other religions being Satanic, it started being couched in more secular reasoning.

While Christian missionaries were often at the forefront of banning these festivals, secular administrators were not far behind, often using the argument of progressive values. But, haven’t Christians changed now and acknowledge they were mistaken in the past? As I write in “Dead Peoples Tell no Tales”, Western scholarship about Native Americans starts to be more favorable only after they have been practically eliminated:

“The interesting point is when does “oops we were mistaken” scholarship emerge. It emerges when the civilizational genocide of Native Americans is complete. Christianized, confined to reservation and dis-armed the Native American poses no threat. There is no danger in extolling his civilization. In fact, praising him helps in reinforcing the self-image of the contemporary enlightened non-prejudiced liberal academic, no longer consigning the other as Satanic. Except for the next civilization that is not yet quite dead.”

Contemporary India: The Joshua Project and Project Thessalonica 

Why did we go on this journey into Christian history? Whatever does this have to do with the Dahi Handi restrictions or with Jallikattu or Sabarimala entry? 

We have to understand two things. Firstly, India is the biggest target of the Christian conversion war in contemporary times. It is the only non-Christian society that is open, plural and allows unhindered access to missionaries at this scale. Further, it is a key strategic and civilizational target. The Joshua Project aiming at the 10/40 window is part of the overt plan for Christianizing the world with billions of dollars of resources deployed to target India. If you think any of this is a “conspiracy theory,” I would urge you to visit the Joshua Project website first.

Lesser known, and far more secretive than the Joshua Project, is Project Thessalonica. Recall that the emperor Theodosius’ edict, aimed at destroying pagan Greek and Roman temples, rituals and festivals was called the “Edit of Thessalonica.” Modern day missionaries have the same aim but their methods are more varied. In India, in states like Nagaland, where they are in the majority, they can indeed work by edict and ban and destroy native traditions and temples (with not a peep from Indian mainstream media). In other parts that have an unconverted majority, they have to use more stealth. Let us first look at Project Thessalonica (PT).

Just like the “Edict of Thessalonica” attacked Greek and Roman pagan festivals and traditions, PT aims to do that in contemporary India.  

“Project Thessalonica aims to stop or limit Hindu activity by converting people who form the pillars of Hindu culture, festivals, traditions and activity…

Missions want to ensure that no new temple construction activity starts. With this objective they are converting masons, craftsmen and others involved in temple construction activity. The First Baptist Church of Nashville, Tennessee adopted towns where the annual Kumbh Mela takes place and has been actively converting the locals so that visitors face extreme hardship during their next visit trying to find services and supplies. Another mission group is adopting boatmen of Kasi where Hindus drop rice balls in river Ganges as an offering to their forefathers. The boatsmen are being trained in other fields so that they abandon this profession.

They are making environmental groups raise the voice so that Ganesh processions, Kumbh Melas and Jagannath Rath Yatras are limited.

Why are these Christian organizations so keen to “save” Indian women, especially when Christianity itself has a horrendous track record of misogyny? 

Some decades ago, evangelicals identified Hindu women, who were seen as upholding the Hindu traditions, as the major obstacle to conversion. Thus, a conscious process was put in place to attack their links to the culture using the “feminism” trope, the same feminism that many of these conservative Christian organizations opposed in their own countries.

Male-god Christianity, using a secular cover of feminism, could thus attack the Hindu traditions of the Divine Feminine with impunity.

As in the entire history of Christian persecution of pagan festivals, the fig-leaf reasons given for the bans are absurd. Jallikattu is apparently “cruelty to animals”, never mind that unlike bull-fighting, animals are not killed, but merely wrestled with and far more cruelty happens in the killing of animals for meat which evangelicals sometimes forcefully feed beef for conversion. Jallikattu bulls are also raised with care, like family, and support an ecosystem of local breeds. There is news though that after the “Hindu” Jallikattu being banned, a Church sponsored event is starting to take its place, much like the pagan feast of Mithra was replaced by “Christmas” and passed off as the day of Jesus’ birth.

The non-legislative way starts first and foremost with a massive awareness building. The attacks on the Hindu traditions are not unrelated. They form part of a systematic strategy being executed on a war footing. Unfortunately, only those attacking know that a war is even going on. If the other side doesn’t wake up from its slumber, it is unlikely to offer any resistance to this cultural genocide.

(source: The Edict of Thessalonica and attack on Hindu traditions - By Sankrant Sanu - indiafacts.org).

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Targeting Hindu Festivals: Anti-Pagan hatred that animates the new-found ecological concerns.

"And in those days [the reign of Theodosius] the orthodox inhabitants of Alexandria were filled with zeal and they collected a large quantity of wood and burned the place of the heathen philosophers." - John, Bishop of Nikiu, Chronicle (LXXXIV.45)

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At Another Time, In Another Place, A Community Was Similarly Targeted For Its Festivals

This is not the first time in the history of the world that a community is being shamed for celebrating its festival.

Deepavali comes and also comes with it voices of ‘concern for the environment’ from a section of media and intellectuals. Suddenly Hindus are made to feel that the way they have been celebrating Deepavali for generations is actually a grave sin. 'Do not use crackers' is the bottom line as crackers have become the defining character of this festival of light in India. This strange campaign is done to remove as much as possible from the public celebration of a Hindu festival. However, this is not the first time that such an agenda is afoot. Shaming Hindus to abandon the public exhibition of their festivals has been done in a sustained and systematic way from the colonial period.

And it goes on today. There have been protests against fireworks during Deepavali. Bans have been effected on Jalli Kattu during Pongal (Makara Sankranthi) in Tamil Nadu. Overt Hindu practices like fire-walking and hook-swinging have been decried constantly as barbaric and every year petitions are filed to stop them. Come Durga Puja or Navratri, outdated racist interpretations based on pseudo-scientific theses get peddled in a section of media.

Of late this has almost become a media ritual. Any popular Hindu festival is targeted along with its public manifestation. Either the festival is demeaned or its public exhibition is curtailed or both. Not the first time in the history of the world.

At another time in the past, in another place, a community was similarly targeted for celebrating its festivals. David Baile, Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, traces how political antisemitism and animal right concerns colluded to create a discourse against Jewish culture:

The attacks on Jewish ritual slaughter originated in animal rights campaigns starting in the 1850s that had little to do with the Jews. It was only with the rise of political antisemitism in the 1880s that humane slaughter activists turned their wrath on the Jews or, more commonly, that antisemites exploited the new language of animal rights to attack Jewish practices. (‘Blood and discourses of Nazi Antisemitism’ in ‘Varieties of Antisemitism: History, Ideology, Discourse‘, 2009)The campaign was effective. Switzerland banned the Jewish ritual in 1893, Norway and Bavaria followed suit in 1930 and in 1933 even before the Nazi ascendancy, entire Germany banned the Jewish ritual. It was in Poland, with the largest Jewish population, that the campaign became fierce. Top ranking Catholic clergyman Monsignor Stanislaw Trzeciak claimed that the ritual was not required by Mosaic Law.

The Catholic Church was arrogantly arrogating to itself the control of the religious narrative and authority over the cultural life of another religion. Rev. Trzeciak declared that the ritual was not only a 'concoction' of the rabbis but that it was 'a relic of eastern barbarism from the dark ages'. The Catholic Church suddenly exuded a new found mercy for the animals. The official organ of the Archdiocese of Warsaw called for action to end 'the barbarism properly described as the ritual murder of animals'. Prof. Ronald Modras, in his in-depth study ('The Catholic Church and Antisemitism', 2005) points out that the Church-catalyzed campaign also had the economic aim of removing Jews from meat industry.

In India the cracker-less Deepavali campaign coincides with the aggressive expansion of the market by Chinese cracker industry. Maybe a destruction of domestic market for Indian cracker industry can eliminate for the Chinese a potential competitor in the international cracker market.

What now?

Regardless, it is time Hindu scholars, like their Jewish counterparts, start studying academically these hate campaigns against their festivals and cultural practices the same way anti-Semitic propaganda had been studied and documented. Perhaps time has come for Hindu academics to run a peer-reviewed journal on anti-Hindu hatred and study the tactics as well as psychology of these hate-peddlers: a journal of anti-Hinduism or to borrow Rajiv Malhotra’s terminology, a ‘Journal of Hinduphobia in media, academia and social campaigns’. Crackers have emission standards and decibel controls. If the norms are not followed then the problem lies elsewhere.

Hindus need to understand the anti-Pagan hatred that animates the new-found ecological concerns. The string-pullers behind the campaign for cracker-less Deepavali do not really love birds and animal rights.

(source: At Another Time, In Another Place, A Community Was Similarly Targeted For Its Festivals - by Aravindan Neelakandan).

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How being anti-Hindu became fashionable among India's middle-class

Despite the chilling brutality of the Islamic State (ISIS), the harsh laws of Sunni Saudi Arabia and the hate speeches of mullahs from Tehran to Islamabad, the more extremist strains of radical Islam receive less criticism than they deserve. Few want to meet the fate of the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, murdered by Islamist terrorists, or Kamlesh Tiwari, still languishing in jail nearly a year after his allegedly derogatory comments on the Prophet.

Islamaphobia is rightly condemned. Hinduphobia though is acceptable in living rooms across upper middle-class urban India where secular poseurs are many in number. In India it's kosher, even fashionable among the nouveau elite, to be anti-Hindu. 

Pathology

We'll come to the pathology of this curious phenomenon in a bit but first a look at The Economist's story on Muslims in India whom it calls 'An Uncertain Community'. The magazine grudgingly concedes that 'India's Muslims have not, it is true, been officially persecuted, hounded into exile or systematically targeted by terrorists, as have minorities in other parts of the subcontinent, such as the Ahmadi sect in Pakistan.' The Economist has displayed poor editorial judgement so often (it backed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003) that its insight on secularism in India is predictably myopic.

And yet, the patronising, all-knowing tone it adopts towards India's secular ethos echoes the position of India's Hinduphobes. Most Indian Hinduphobes are, strangely, Hindus. They call themselves secular but are often not. Secularism requires religion-neutrality. They lack that. Bias colours their views. So why are sophisticated, educated Hindus who aspire to be secular so Hinduphobic?  Because they completely misunderstand what real secularism means.

As I wrote in my book The New Clash of Civilizations, 'Influential sections of especially the electronic media, suffused with hearts bleeding from the wrong ventricle, are part of this great fraud played on India's poverty-stricken Muslims - communalism with an engaging secular mask. 'The token Muslim is lionised - from business to literature - but the common Muslim languishes in his 69-year-old ghetto. 'It is from such ghettos that raw recruits to the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Indian Mujaheedin (IM) are most easily found. 'India's religious diversity though is deeply embedded. Six of India's highest constitutional functionaries have recently been Sikh (prime minister), Christian (UPA chairperson), Muslim (chief election commissioner), Parsi (chief justice of India), Dalit (speaker of the Lok Sabha) and Hindu (president). 'There is no other country in the world with such breathtaking plurality at the highest level of leadership.

'Consider Britain: only Protestant (not Catholic) Christians can be monarch. 'In Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, minorities (including Muslim Ahmadis) have severely restricted rights.

'Unlike burqa-banning Western democracies such as France and Belgium, Indian secularism does not separate church from state. 'It allows them to swim together in a common, if sometimes, chaotic pool.'

Atrocities

Politicians are the worst offenders. Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee turns a blind eye to atrocities by Muslims against Hindus. In a brazen exhibition of communal politics, she does so in order to secure Bengal's 27 per cent Muslim electorate that, along with a small slice of the Hindu majority, can guarantee her over 40 per cent of the vote-share and a near-landslide in a four-cornered contest with the Left, BJP and fr-enemy Congress. This sort of communal polarisation suits the BJP. The rise of majoritarianism has underpinned its success in states like Assam. The biggest loser has been the Congress, the original communal polariser in the 1985 Shah Bano case. It is now reaping the ill wind. The rise of Hindu extremist fringe elements is a direct consequence of decades of political parties pandering to minorities in the name of a fraudulent secularism.  Meanwhile, the 'mild', everyday Hindu, inured to caste stratification, fatalism, karma and centuries of Islamic and Christian-British subjugation, is an easy target for Hinduphobes.

Uncertain

The Economist's piece on Indian Muslims - 'An Uncertain Community ' - ends with a quote by a veteran Muslim voice: ' 'They called it a secular state, which is why many who had a choice at Partition wanted to stay here,' says Saeed Naqvi, a journalist whose recent book, Being The Other, chronicles the growing alienation of India's Muslims. 'But what really happened was that we seamlessly glided from British Raj to Hindu Raj.' 

This is misleading for two reasons. First, it is of course a misnomer to call the British occupation of India the British Raj. That connotes a benign presence which the occupation was not. Second, India is hardly a 'Hindu Raj' given the fact that Muslims, Christians, Parsis and others have their own personal laws and, bar isolated incidents, are safer in India than virtually anywhere else in the world. While Hinduphobia is a psychological affliction, countering it with Hinduphilia is hardly the answer. The RSS is wrong to call for a Hindu Rashtra. It should instead work for a Bharat Rashtra. Confine religion to your home. It has no place in public discourse. Secularism is not top-down but bottom-up. No number of laws can guarantee religious tolerance as the examples of France, Belgium and the United States demonstrate.

It is the inborn secularism of Hindus that makes India secular. 

(source: How being anti-Hindu became fashionable among India's middle-class - by Minhaz Merchant - dailymail.co.uk).

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Hate Hinduism industry flourishes in the Western media and Academia

***

Hindus certainly need to tackle privilege and caste-based discrimination, but not on the terms set by Western media and academia.

It’s a shame that many good people don’t understand the reality of anti-Hindu fanaticism. It is one of the slimiest, nastiest, persistent, violent and intolerant hate-industries in history and yet people don’t even know how to see it, name it, or fight it. Worse, some people even actively deny it, even as they profess their dedication to fighting Islamophobia and the like. Some people deny it so much they abhor saying they are Hindus (preferring to call themselves South Asian, or “born into a Hindu family” and the like). There are others who call themselves Hindu, but that doesn’t equip them to see that there is such a thing as anti-Hindu prejudice and hate either. They merely become pawns in perpetuating it.

Anti-Hindu hatred is not a matter of explicit religious hatred between one group and another, as it was in the medieval or colonial era when Muslim and Christian imperialists sought to conquer and convert the non-Muslims and non-Christians of India (of course, there were some non-imperialist Christians and Muslims already living in India at that time, but unfortunately, their legacy of coexistence and love pales before the destructive effects on economy, culture, education, families, animals, nature and virtually every sphere of life in India by the imperialisms). It is more complex.

There is some debate these days in academia about the nature of imperialism’s impact on India. Postcolonial scholars agree European imperialism was real and devastating. Most of them look away from Islamic imperialism though, and prefer instead to argue that even the most ardent and militant Islamic crusaders in India such as Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan were acting non-religiously while ordering mass slaughters of Hindus and destructions of their most sacred spaces of civic, spiritual, and economic life.

These scholars have retreated somewhat in the last few years on this last point. They no longer insist openly that India was invaded by Hindus/Aryans who massacred and colonized the natives. They say instead that there was an “Aryan migration,” and then proceed to ignore every bit of fact and truth expressed by dissenting scholars to go on doing what the openly racist and religiously intolerant colonizers were doing a few generations ago: hating Hinduism and making up completely false stories in order to destroy it.

First of all, as scholars like S.N. Balagangadhara have argued, it doesn’t make sense at all to reduce Hinduism to a “religion” in the Western sense. It is a historic fabrication. However, since we live in a deeply interconnected postcolonial global culture, it is perhaps impossible to escape the use of a non-Hindu notion like “religion” to identify, self-represent, and indeed, survive. And survival is still a concern given that for centuries the original self-proclaimed “Religions” denied even the right to exist for people they sneered at as “unbelievers” (okay, we must grant that after several centuries of only partly successful if enormously destructive attempts, the believer/unbeliever dichotomy-makers now grant that everyone else is a “believer” too; not unlike how in the age of the colonial “civilizing mission” the dichotomy was civilized Europe versus the primitive or savage other, but now academia and media speak commonly of “civilizations” in the plural).

So, if Hinduism is not even a religion in your sense of the word, why do self-identifying Hindus even go along with this inaccurately self-relativizing “every religion has a dark side and this is mine” modus operandi? It makes sense for members of religions that have been at the heart of global imperialisms and violent conquests driven by their religion’s clearly stated, organized, and practiced theologies of conversion. Unless you believe that Hinduism too is a “religion” in the same sense, right down to messianic founders, civilizing missions, conquest-management institutions, and most of all, blood on its hands and its books, why would you go along with such a delusion? Do you believe, still, that Hindus are fair-skinned Aryans from Eurasia who invaded and enslaved Dravidians in 1500 BCE after destroying the Indus Valley Civilization, and therefore that you must chirpily rise up and denounce your non-existent invading class of religious zealots? 

And even granting that Hindus have an obligation to denounce caste-privilege and oppression (which I agree with), why would you do so on the false terms set by colonial propagandists and not on your own? And most of all, is the media environment in which you denounce Hinduism for its dark side presenting an equal set of arguments from other religionists about their “dark side”? I only see writers from and about other religions arguing about how they invented civilization, science, math, astronomy, justice, law, all that is great, while the poor self-flagellating Hindu denounces himself without a clue.

The evidence of this trauma may not be obvious to you on the face of it. But if you look, you will see it. It is there, everywhere, from the destroyed ruins of a Hindu temple lying around the Qutub Minar in Delhi, to the ravaging of one of the greatest art treasures of the world in Hampi. It is also there in Kashi, the City of Light, currently being smeared as the “City of Death” by CNN (incidentally, I wonder if we will get to see Reza Aslan standing in front of the Kashi Vishwanath temple and saying “my religion has a dark side” and admitting that it destroyed this holy shrine and built a gigantic mosque that hulks over it to this day).
 

(source: Hate Hinduism industry flourishes in the Western media and Academia - by Vamsee Juluri - swarajyamag.com).

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What is Christian – by Joachim Kahl (excerpt from the book, ‘The Misery of Christianity’)

Joachim Kahl (1941 - ) is a German freelance philosopher whose work focuses on the criticism of religion, ethics and aesthetics and written the book, The Misery of Christianity.

Christian politicians are in the habit nowadays of evoking, with excessive emotion, the ‘great social and moral values of Christianity’ which, they claim, ‘cannot be abandoned’ and which alone can preserve us from the evil arch-enemy from the East. Similarly, Christian theologians are in the habit of tracing almost all the advances made in history – including, for example, the emergence of the natural sciences – back to an ‘ultimately Christian origin.’

The Church as Slave owner

The New Testament has many harsh things to say against illicit sexual intercourse, against homosexuality and against the wearing of long hair by women. The parables which Jesus told according to the gospel presuppose slavery. Paul, too, not only accepted slavery as a matter of course, but even affirmed it explicitly. He sent Onesimus, the runaway slave whom he had converted back to his master, Philemon. This is what Paul had to say to slaves in his household codes: submit yourselves voluntarily to your masters in a spirit of humble obedience, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be defamed.’ I have given all these quotations to prove that early Christianity was guilty of being the agent of a repressive society.

The New Testament is a manifesto of inhumanity. It is mass deception planned on a large scale. It make people stupid instead of making them aware of their own objective interests. What, after all, is the cross of Jesus Christ? It is nothing but the sum total of a sado-masochistic glorification of pain. The early Church retained the New Testament attitude to slavery. From the very beginning, Christian preaching stabilized the practice of slavery. Augustine showed what excellent oil the new religion was for the machinery of the masters in society when he called on those who were not slaves to give thanks because Christ and his Church did not make free men of slaves, but good slaves and bad slaves.

The Church’s adaptation to the social and political power structure of the state – an unhesitating act of opportunism – took place at last in the 4^th century. As the exponents of the Roman feudal class, the emperors raised Christianity to the level of the state religion. Constantine began this process in AD. 313 and it was completed in 380 by Gratian and Theodosius. Slavery continued throughout the whole of the Christian Middle Ages and was defended by leading scholastic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great and Duna Scotus. Popes and bishops, prelates and superiors of monasteries had control of thousands of male and female slaves who had the task of cultivating the enormous farm lands. Those who ran away were relentlessly pursued, caught and brought back. As fugitivi, an iron ring with Christian symbols was then put round their necks. Cannon law treated all slaves as objects and classified them under the heading ‘church property’ (human material). In 1179, at the Third Lateran Council, all those who opposed the Roman papacy were threatened with slavery. Even though the punishments could not be carried out, the popes imposed slavery on Venice in 1309, 1482 and 1506, on Florence in 1376, and on the whole of England in 1508.

The slave trade was given a new lease of life at the end of the Middle Ages by the Spanish and Portuguese conquests and colonization in the New World. In his bull of 1454, Romanus Pontifex, Pope Nicholas V gave his blessing to the practice of enslaving all conquered peoples.  In 1487, Innocent VIII accepted, as a gift from Isabella of Spain, a large number of slaves from Malaga. In 1493, Alexander VI divided the world between Spain and Portugal and sanctioned the normal practice of forced labor, declaring it to be quite lawful. In 1548, Paul III granted to all men and to all members of the clergy the right to keep slaves. Papal galleys set out to catch men and many fervent prayers of thanksgiving rose up to heaven whenever a rich catch of ‘tools with souls’ was made.

Christian theologians seriously discussed the ‘problem’ of whether a pocket mirror was a just price for a negro. The Jesuit College in the Congo owned 12,000 slaves in 1666 and the popes rejoiced in their services until the end of the 18^th century in the Papal States. Even at late as 1864, there were slaves in the service of the Church – owned by the Benedictines in Brazil. After Luther had justified serfdom and slavery, Protestantism followed the same course. The missionaries gave theological approval to the slave trade and it was consequently practiced with a clear conscience by the Protestant states until far into the 19^th century.

Whenever men become dissatisfied with their state of life (as they sometimes do during or after a war), Christian theologians are still not at loss and can use the doctrine of creation with shallow rhetoric. This smokescreen is mad thicker by the Christian use of the doctrine of sin, according to which all conflicts between men and all abuses are a consequence of man’s disobedience to God’s holy commandments. Since Adam’s fall, all human beings have been living in a ‘state of corruption’. They are evil.  This situation will last until the end of the world and cannot be done away with because of the fact that evil in inherent in man. Every Sunday, people are chastised in sermons in which they are told that they are sinners, worthless and cringing creatures without freedom. In fact they are, as such, extremely useful to the social elite, the ruling classes, who can only survive and prosper s long as the great masses of the people remain helpless and lacking in self-confidence.

Persecution of Pagans

The whole of the New Testament resounds with extreme aggressiveness towards everything which deviates only very slightly from the Christian norm.

The 4^th century marked the end of religious toleration and freedom of rights both of non-Christians and of non-Catholics Christian minorities were systematically curtailed. From the time of Constantine, every Roman citizen had to be an orthodox Christian. Practicing a pagan religion or heresy was regarded as committing a crime against the state and visiting a pagan temple or offering a pagan sacrifice was punished by banishment or death. Christian mobile detachments, monks, bishops, and laymen, stormed and plundered pagan places of worship. Huge numbers of art treasures of immeasurable value were destroyed and most of the pagan literature was burnt. The process of Christianization within the Roman Empire was ultimately concluded in the 6^th century during the reign of Justinian I (527-565), who imposed compulsory baptism, renewed the death penalty and outlawed all pagans and non-Catholic Christians. The marked the completion of the setting up of a totalitarian system which was to have a deep impact on the Christian centuries that followed including the Crusades. Contrary to what many people, in their unsuspecting innocence, imagine, the crusades did not end with the close of the Middle Ages – colonialism and imperialism, the characteristic activities of modern age, also flourished under the banner of the Christian faith.

Anyone who has read the unforgettable account of the devastation of the ‘West Indian’ countries published by the Dominican Bartholome de las Casas, will know what was done in those countries during the Golden Age of Spain and Portugal – in a word, the mass murder of 20,000 Indians. Those who were not massacred at once died later in the gold mines, the pearl fisheries and the plantations. There were an endless succession of the most horrifying crimes. Indians were impaled, hanged or slowly burnt alive, or had their hands, feet, ears and other parts of their bodies cut off.

What did the Catholic priests who came with the colonists do while this was going on? They gave them absolution and the body of the Lord and assured them that He would bestow His grace and favor on them.

The predominantly Protestant Christians – mostly Congregationalists – who brought the faith to North America were no less cruel. The conquest of New England and the extermination of its Indian inhabitants was accomplished according to the pattern of the occupation of idolatrous Canaan by the Israelites. This was the will of the Father of Jesus Christ and those who clung stubbornly to the worship of the false Indian god Manito, had to experience it.

Even more recently, in the 19^th century, colonial exploitation and the preaching of the gospel went hand in hand. A good example of this is the opium war in China (1840-1842). Opium was forbidden in England as a narcotic and it was also a punishable offence to take opium in China. Imperialist Britain therefore unleashed the opium war – her motives were purely and blatantly economic – and forced China to allow the drug to be imported. The Peace of Nanking, concluded in 1842, opened the Chinese ports to opium and, at the same time, to Christian missionaries. Just as no representative of the Church had raised his voice in protest against the unscrupulous sale of alcohol, hitherto unknown to the Indians, by Christian merchants in North America, so too no Christian objected publicily to the open crime of the Opium War. On the contrary, the missionaries rejoiced – their God, who was not averse to using crooked ways, was clearly opening a door to admit the gospel into pagan China.

As the Protestant pastor Karl Gutzlaf wrote, ‘Now that the way to China lies open, my heart has begun to beat with joy.’

The missionaries often followed trade. But it often happened the other way about, the exploiters following the Christian missionaries and fleecing the newly-won converts mercilessly. ‘Gospel-financial exploitation-political subjection. This was touchingly expressed by a Maori: ‘While we (under the influence of the mission) were looking up to heaven, your (that is, the missionaries) brothers came and took our land away from us.’

Is this only something that took place in the past? I know it is not. Colonization by Christian nations is still going on, but it now more cunningly camouflaged (as ‘help for the underdeveloped countries’) and brutality and violence are less clearly visible. The German Confessing Church and the Catholic Church both supported the Second World War as a crusade against the godless Bolsheviks and, quite recently, the American Cardinal Spellman, who dies in 1967, defended the war in Vietnam as a war for the Christian faith. It is possible to glorify any war with the equipment provided by theology.

(source: The Misery of Christianity - By Joachim Kahl p. 1 -95).

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Regarding Compassion International: A Christian Charity in India

We have had enough of 'service' 

Dear lawmaker,

Recently, 107 of you (members of the US Congress, both Republicans and Democrats) wrote to the Indian Home Minister, Rajnath Singh to allow the American charity, Compassion International (CI) to continue it's work in India.

Your missive opens on a warm note: ''As the largest and oldest democracies in the world, India and the US share bonds rooted in political pluralism and respect for the rule of law." The subsequent sentences, reveal your real intent. "It is with this in mind that we write to express our deep concern over the lack of transparency and consistency in your government's enforcement of the Foreign Contribution (regulations) Act."

"The ongoing case of US-based Compassion International, which will have harmful consequences for many Indian children, has caused serious concern within the US Congress."

Dear US lawmakers, on the face, your letter is touching, full of concern for the unfortunate destitute children of a faraway developing country. But are you sure that CI's activities are motivated purely by compassion for the underprivileged children of India? Is there no hidden agenda? What has been the record of CI since it started its operations in India in 1968?

We have had enough of such "service" after the Portuguese landed in Goa in the 15th century and also when the Church secured the inclusion of a clause in the East India Company's charter Act of 1813 that opened the doors of our country to British missionaries.

For more refer to Funding Evangelism through ‘Compassion’- A report on Compassion International-I - indiafacts.org

***

If compassion for the destitute kids was the core of the organisation's operations in India, it has a lot of work cut out for it in the US itself. In 2011, child poverty in the US reached record-high levels with 16.7 million children living in insecure households, about 35 per cent over the 2007 levels, the second highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world. According to a 2016 study by the Urban Institute, teenagers in low income communities are often forced to save school lunches, sell drugs or offer sexual favours because they couldn't afford food. Refer to a 2014 report by the National Center on Family Homelessness on homeless children in the US. Along with poverty, children in your country suffer in broken families as well. There is a divorce every 36 second. That is nearly 2,400 divorces per day, 16,800 divorces per week and 8,76,000 divorces a year. As a result, only 46 per cent of the children are living with two parents who are both in their first marriage. While in the early 1960s, babies typically arrived after a wedding, today four in ten births in your country occur to women who are either single or live in with a partner.

Honourable US lawmakers, you will agree that a secure home and strong family help a child cope up with poverty better. In your country, a large number of children suffer double disadvantage. They need enormous emotional support from the society to make up for broken homes, apart from monetary assistance. But CI's heart does not bleed for these hapless American children. It spends around $50 million annually in India as "humanitarian aid". Why? Because, CI has souls to save for the Christ in India and the US does not offer any such opportunity, since the destitute there are already Christians.

Dear US lawmakers, CI has been duly investigated by Indian officials, within the framework of our legal system, accountable to our Parliament and Judiciary. Is it fair on your part to interfere in our affairs? CI operated through Caruna Bal Vikas Trust in India. Its child "welfare" activities included holding Christian prayers on a daily basis, celebrating only Christian festivals, offering prizes for recitation of Bible verses and holding "Compassion Young Adult Meet", where a person gives Christian inputs. Are the CI's objectives not clear?

We have had enough of such "service" after the Portuguese landed in Goa in the 15th century and also when the Church secured the inclusion of a clause in the East India Company's charter Act of 1813 that opened the doors of our country to British missionaries. In the name of "service", missionaries broke families, divided communities and alienated converted individuals from the land of their birth. In the 1857 war of independence, the community of Indian Christian converts was the only one to remain loyal to the British in the areas that revolted. Are you caught in a time warp? We are in the 21st Century, but a part of you lives in 18th, wherein western Christian missionaries and organisations took upon themselves the "noble" task of shouldering the "white man's burden" of saving the souls of heathens and civilising them.

(source: We have had enough of 'service' - By Balbir Punj -  newindiaexpress.com).

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The Barbarity of the Goa Inquisition: No Apology from the Catholic Church

"At least from 1540 onwards, and in the island of Goa before that year, all the Hindu idols had been annihilated or had disappeared, all the temples had been destroyed and their sites and building material was in most cases utilized to erect new Christian Churches and chapels. Various viceregal and Church council decrees banished the Hindu priests from the Portuguese territories; the public practices of Hindu rites including marriage rites, were banned; the state took upon itself the task of bringing up Hindu orphan children; the Hindus were denied certain employments, while the Christians were preferred; it was ensured that the Hindus would not harass those who became Christians, and on the contrary, the Hindus were obliged to assemble periodically in Churches to listen to preaching or to the refutation of their religion." 

"A particularly grave abuse was practiced in Goa in the form of 'mass baptism' and what went before it. The practice was begun by the Jesuits and was alter initiated by the Franciscans also. The Jesuits staged an annual mass baptism on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (January 25), and in order to secure as many neophytes as possible, a few days before the ceremony the Jesuits would go through the streets of the Hindu quarter in pairs, accompanied by their Negro slaves, whom they would urge to seize the Hindus. When the blacks caught up a fugitive, they would smear his lips with a piece of beef, making him an 'untouchable' among his people. Conversion to Christianity was then his only option." 

The Goan inquisition is regarded by all contemporary portrayals as the most violent inquisition ever executed by the Portuguese Catholic Church. It lasted from 1560 to 1812. The inquisition was set as a tribunal, headed by a judge, sent to Goa from Portugal and was assisted by two judicial henchmen. The judge was answerable to no one except to Lisbon and handed down punishments as he saw fit. The Inquisition Laws filled 230 pages and the palace where the Inquisition was conducted was known as the Big House and the Inquisition proceedings were always conducted behind closed shutters and closed doors. The screams of agony of the victims (men, women, and children) could be heard in the streets, in the stillness of the night, as they were brutally interrogated, flogged, and slowly dismembered in front of their relatives. Eyelids were sliced off and extremities were amputated carefully, a person could remain conscious even though the only thing that remained was his torso and head. 

Diego de Borda, a priest and his advisor Vicar General, Miguel Vazz had made a 41 point plan for torturing Hindus. Under this plan Viceroy Antano de Noronha issued in 1566, an order applicable to the entire area under Portuguese rule: 

"I hereby order that in any area owned by my master, the king, nobody should construct a Hindu temple and such temples already constructed should not be repaired without my permission. If this order is transgressed, such temples shall be, destroyed and the goods in them shall be used to meet expenses of holy deeds, as punishment of such transgression." 

In 1567 the campaign of destroying temples in Bardez met with success. At the end of it 300 Hindu temples were destroyed. Enacting laws, prohibition was laid from December 4, 1567 on rituals of Hindu marriages, sacred thread wearing and cremation. All the persons above 15 years of age were compelled to listen to Christian preaching, failing which they were punished. 

A religious fatva was issued on the basis of the findings of Goa Inquiry Commission. It stated, "...Hereby we declare the decision that the conventions mentioned in the preamble of the fatva as stated below are permanently declared as useless, and therefore prohibited."

Prohibitions Regarding Marriages 

The instruments for Hindu songs shall not be played.

While giving dowry the relatives of the bride and groom must not be invited.

At the time of marriage, betel leaf packages (pan) must not be distributed either publicly or in private to the persons present.

Flowers, or fried puris, betel nuts and leaves must not be sent to the heads of the houses of the bride or groom.

Gotraj ceremony of family God must not be performed.

On the day prior to a wedding, rice must not be husked, spices must not be pounded, grains must not be ground and other recipes for marriage feast must not be cooked.

Pandals and festoons must not be used.

Pithi should not be applied.

The bride must not be accorded ceremonial welcome. The bride and groom must not be made to sit under pandal to convey blessings and best wishes to them.

The poor must not be fed or ceremonial meals must not be served for the peace of the souls of the dead.

There should be no fasting on ekadashi day.

Fasting can be done according to the Christian principles.

No rituals should be performed on the twelfth day after death, on moonless and full moon dates.

Hindu men should not wear dhoti either in public or in their houses. Women should not wear cholis.

They should not plant Tulsi in their houses, compounds, gardens or any other place.

Following the law of 1567, orphans were kidnapped for converting them to Christianity. 

On September 22, 1570 an order was issued that: 

The Hindus embracing Christianity will be exempted from land taxes for a period of 15 years.

Nobody shall bear Hindu names or surnames. 

In 1583 Hindu temples at Esolna and Kankolim were destroyed through army action. 

"The fathers of the Church forbade the Hindus under terrible penalties the use of their own sacred books, and prevented them from all exercise of their religion. They destroyed their temples, and so harassed and interfered with the people that they abandoned the city in large numbers, refusing to remain any longer in a place where they had no liberty, and were liable to imprisonment, torture and death if they worshipped after their own fashion the gods of their fathers." wrote Sasetti, who was in India from 1578 to 1588. 

An order was issued in June 1684 eliminating Konkani language and making it compulsory to speak Portuguese language. The law provided for dealing toughly with anyone using the local language. Following that law all the symbols of non-Christian sects were destroyed and the books written in local languages were burnt. 

The Archbishop living on the banks of the Ethora had said during one of his lecture series, "The post of Inquiry Commission in Goa is regarded as holy." The women who opposed the assistants of the commission were put behind the bars and were used by them to satisfy their animal instincts. Then they were burnt alive as opponents of the established tenets of the Catholic church. 

The victims of such inhuman laws of the Inquiry Commission included a French traveller named Delone. He was an eye witness to the atrocities, cruelty and reign of terror unleashed by priests. He published a book in 1687 describing the lot of helpless victims. While he was in jail he had heard the cries of tortured people beaten with instruments having sharp teeth. All these details are noted in Delone's book. 

So harsh and notorious was the inquisition in Goa, that word of its brutality and horrors reached Lisbon but nothing was done to stop this notoriety and escalating barbarity and it continued for two hundred more years. Nobody knows the exact number of Goans subjected to these diabolical tortures, but perhaps it runs into hundreds of thousands, may be even more. The abominations of inquisitions continued until a brief respite was given in 1774 but four years later, the inquisition was introduced again and it continued un-interruptedly until 1812. At that point in time, in the year of 1812, the British put pressure on the Portuguese to put an end to the terror of Inquisition and the presence of British troops in Goa enforced the British desire. Also the Portuguese power at this time was declining and they could not fight the British. The palace of the Grand Inquisitor, the Big House, was demolished and no trace of it remains today, which might remind someone of inquisitions and the horrors inside this Big House that their great saint Francis Xavier had commenced. 

Dr. Trasta Breganka Kunha, a Catholic citizen of Goa writes, "Inspite of all the mutilations and concealment of history, it remains an undoubted fact that religious conversion of Goans is due to methods of force adopted by the Portuguese to establish their rule. As a result of this violence the character of our people was destroyed. The propagation of Christian sect in Goa came about not by religious preaching but through the methods of violence and pressure. If any evidence is needed for this fact, we can obtain it through law books, orders and reports of the local rulers of that time and also from the most dependable documents of the Christian sect.

(source: The Goa Inquisition - By Dr. T. R. de Souza).

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Western Media Hinduphobia: Spinning the same tired stories about Hinduism

"If Christianity had been checked in its growth by some deadly disease, the world would have become Mithraic," - speculates the 19th century historian Ernest Renan. (Refer to Franz Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism p. 60).

"The pagan gods, even the gods of mysteries are not jealous of one another," explained historian and anthropologist Walter Burkert quoted in - Jonathan Kirsch, God against Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism. p. 111

***

The above Guardian article is mostly about how a group of American Hindus is supporting Donald Trump and how this reeks of the so-called Hindu supremacist agenda rather than simply being a political inclination. It might carry an iota of truth. I personally know people who support Donald Trump simply because he sounds anti-Muslim although, just as it used to happen with Narendra Modi, I’m pretty sure that lots of his utterances are twisted or quoted out of context by a very sophisticated propaganda machinery controlled by the leftist intelligentsia. The writer talks about Hindus and Donald Trump lighting lamps and celebrating Dussehra. Then she talks about how festivals like Dussehra and Diwali are mostly upper-caste Hindu festivals. She quotes someone called Soundararajan, a Dalit American artist and activist who says that: "Celebration of Diwali suggested that attendees were mostly upper caste (Hindus), thus excluding South Asian communities who have been marginalized by the caste system, which places people into a hierarchy based on birth and has been used to oppress lower caste and Dalit communities in India and the diaspora. The same person then says: Diwali and Dussehra are both upper-caste (Hindu) holidays that celebrate the death of tribals and the ascent of Aryan culture over Dravidian culture… In many ways Dalit communities do not celebrate this event is literally about ‘the killing of our people’.

There are two possibilities: this, the so-called artist and activist either has never visited India or is completely bullshitting because such liars are given lots of leeway in the Western media simply because they are badmouthing about India in general and Hinduism in particular. There is nothing upper caste about Diwali and Dussehra. Wherever these festivals are celebrated. I wouldn’t claim to know that they are celebrated across India they are celebrated by everybody. Rich and poor and middle class, everybody celebrates Diwali and Dussehra. In order to know this, you have to be in India during these festivals.

There is nothing upper caste about Diwali and Dussehra.

Wherever these festivals are celebrated I wouldn’t claim to know that they are celebrated across India they are celebrated by everybody. Rich and poor and middle class, everybody celebrates Diwali and Dussehra. In order to know this, you have to be in India during these festivals. And Diwali and Dussehra are not about Aryans celebrating the death of tribals. What is this, Game of Thrones? Rawan, the king of Lanka, presided over one of the most affluent kingdoms in the world. Rawan, who was the ultimate asur (demonic person) of that time, was in fact, a Brahmin. The tribals, in the form of the Vanar Sena, if you really want to draw comparisons, actually were the primary force that helped Ram. What does it tell you? It tells you that you become an asur not by birth but by your actions. Wherever Rawan went he spread hatred and misery. He was an egoistic asshole who, by worshipping Lord Shiva for thousands of years, had gained the blessing of immortality. Thinking that he couldn’t be killed, he laid waste everything he came across. Even after killing Rawan, Ram stood at his feet because of the knowledge that he possessed. Anti-India forces that want to divide the country have turned epics like Ramayana into Aryans versus Dravidians tales simply because the main villain lives in the South. Had the main villain lived in the East, or the West or the North, they would have found another version. Maybe then the Aryans would have wanted to eliminate the Nagas, or the Tibetans. Who knows? Maybe even the Punjabis. Go in any direction and you will find someone Aryans could be fighting against.

Another fact that journalists like Rashmee Kumar will never talk about (purposely) is that most of the famous saints in India were non-Brahmins. Valmiki, the original author of the Ramayana, was a Bheel (a tribe that still exists). Just imagine, the holiest book of Hindus has been written by a person of the so-called lower caste. Ved Vyas, who wrote the Mahabharata, was the illegitimate child of a fisherwoman. Again, the Mahabharata, that includes the holiest of holy, Geeta, was written by a person of low birth. If upper caste Hindus were so intolerant why would they consider the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha, one written by a lower caste and another written by a person born out of wedlock from a fisherwoman’s womb (again, lower caste), their holiest books? Beats every contemporary logic, doesn’t it?

There are numerous such examples these authors and writers are too scared to mention because then it would change their narrative. These people are so anti-Hindu that they will twist facts belonging to even recent history. This Guardian journalist writes:

In the 1990s, about 100,000 Hindu Pandits in the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir fled from a separatist uprising in response to frustrations with the Indian government’s treatment of Kashmir and its people.

So the Hindus fled because the Muslims of the state mistreated them because the Muslims of the state were frustrated with the Indian government. What sort of twisted logic is this? The reality is that Kashmiri pandits (whom she writes Hindu pandits) didn’t flee, they were forced out of their ancestral land with blatant intimidation and slaughter. Kashmir is a Muslim-majority state now but these Kashmiri pandits and their ancestors had been living in Kashmir for the past 5000 years. In broad daylight Kashmiri pandit women were abducted and raped and Kashmiri pandit men and children were slaughtered in broad daylight in the streets. All over Kashmir threatening messages were written on the walls that Kashmiri pandits should leave the valley immediately, overnight, or the men would be killed and the women would be kept as sex slaves and wives. But no, Hindus should never, ever be depicted as victims otherwise the narrative will have to be changed. When it comes to dealing with Hindus, even perpetrators should be shown as victims, and the victims should be shown as perpetrators because they are Hindus, and if they happen to be pandits, it’s icing on the cake.

Racism still exists in the Western world that supports the so-called Indian activists and Dalit champions who, going by such writings, are nothing but peddlers of falsities and charlatans. They need to be exposed, and they need to be exposed constantly.

(source: An example of lies about Hinduism being propagated in Western media - by Amrit Hallan).

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The Sati Strategy: How Missionaries Used An Extinct Practice As A Rallying Point To Christianize India

Book Review: Dr. Koenraad Elst (excerpts)

"The open-mindedness of the pagan Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (c. 345 – 402) was a Roman statesman, orator, and man of letters, who allows that there are many roads to enlightenment and salvation, Bishop Fulgentius (486-533) insists that only a single narrow path leads to the Only True God." " The good bishop also insisted that "Of this you can be certain and convinced beyond all doubts not only all pagans, but also all Jews, all heretics and schismatics will go into the everlasting fire which has been prepared for the Devil and his angels. 

                             - Jonathan Kirsch, God against Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism p. 10

***

Prof Meenakshi Jain adds to her reputation with the present hefty volume Sati - Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse (Aryan Books International, Delhi 2016).  

In it, as a meticulous professional historian, she quotes all the relevant sources, with descriptions of Sati from the ancient through the medieval to the modern period. She adds the full text of the relevant British and Republican laws and of Lord Wiliam Bentinck’s Minute on Sati (1829), that led to the prohibition of Sati. This book makes the whole array of primary sources readily accessible, so from now on, it will be an indispensable reference for all debates on Sati. 

But in the design of the book, all this material is instrumental in studying the uses made of Sati in the colonial period. In particular, the missionary campaign to rally support for the project of mass conversion of the Indian Heathens to the saving light of Christianity made good use of Sati. This practice had a strong in-your-face shock value and could perfectly illustrate the barbarity of Hinduism.

The issue of Sati was used as the most vivid proof of the need for this radical remaking, but it did not take into account the changing political equation during the centuries of gradual European penetration.  In the 17th century, European traders and travellers mostly joined the natives in glorifying the women committing Sati, whereas, by the 19th century, they posed as chivalrous saviours of the victimized native women from the cruel native men. This was because they were no longer travellers in an exotic country and at the mercy of the native people, but had become masters of the land and gotten imbued with a sense of superiority.

Then again, it is, of course, interesting to realize the continuity between the present-day interference in Indian culture by leftist scholars like Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock and that of the British colonialists: “We know best what is wrong with your traditions and we have come to save you from yourselves.”

In this respect, the changes in the Western attitude to Sati run parallel to that regarding caste. Until the early 20th century, caste was seen as a specifically Indian form of a universal phenomenon, viz. social inequality. Nobody was particularly scandalized when in 1622, the Pope gave permission to practise caste discrimination between converts inside the Church. Around the time of the French Revolution, the idea of equality started catching on, but only gradually became the accepted norm. 

Women, who once enjoyed an honored position and are found in the Upanishads conversing freely with men upon the highest philosophical topics. 

Seventeen of the seers to whom the hymns of the Rig Veda were revealed were women — rishikas and brahmavadinis. 

***

Evangelisation 

In this case, an extra factor came into play to effect a change in British attitudes to Sati. In Parliamentary debates about the East India Company charter in 1793, there was no mention yet of Sati though it had been described many times, including by Company eyewitnesses. But by 1829, Sati was forbidden in all Company domains. This turnaround was the result of a campaign by the missionary lobby. Ever since the missionaries set out to convert the Pagans in India, they made it their business to contrast the benignity of Christianity with the demeaning atrocities of Heathenism. This was an old tradition starting with the Biblical vilification of child sacrifice to the god Moloch by the Canaanites. 

The practice was also attested by the Romans when they besieged the Canaanite (Phoenician) colony of Carthage. The Bible writers and their missionary acolytes present child sacrifice as a necessary component of polytheism, from which monotheism came to save humanity. And indeed, we read here how Rev. William Carey tried to muster evidence of child sacrifice too (but settled for Sati as convincing enough, p.178).

This way, Sati came in very handy to justify an offensive in India. Mind you, in a military sense India had partly been conquered already, and British self-confidence at the time was such that the complete subjugation of the subcontinent seemed assured. The offensive, in this case, was not military, its target was the Christianization of the East India Company, to be followed by the conversion of its subjects. Around 1800, the Company was still purely commercial and even banned missionaries for their religious zeal might create riots, and these would be bad for business. So, the Christian lobby had to convince the British Parliamentarians that the Christianization of India was good and necessary, and, therefore, worthy of the Company’s active or passive support, namely to free the natives from barbarism. To that end, there was no better eye-catcher than Sati.

After the Subjgation of the subcontinent of India,  its target was the Christianization and Sati came in very handy to justify an offensive in India.

Refer to British Colonization of India – By Shrinidhi Rao - indiafacts.org

***

Here I will skip a large part of Prof Jain’s research, namely into the details of the specific intrigues and events that ultimately led to the success of the missionary effort. While these chapters are important for understanding the Christian presence in India, and while I recommend you read them, I have decided for myself to limit my attention to colonial history as it is presently eating up too much energy, especially of the Hindus. The study of colonial history is instructive and someone should do it, but for the many, it is far more useful to study Dharma itself, to immerse yourself in Hindu civilization as it took shape, rather than in the oppression of and then the resistance by the Hindus. India is free now and could reinvigorate Dharmic civilization, which is a much worthier goal than to re-live the comparatively few centuries of oppression.

Let us only note that the missionaries are responsible for associating Hinduism with Sati much more prominently than would be fair. The missionary assault on Hinduism dramatized the practice of Sati, which had been “an ‘exceptional act’ performed by a minuscule number of Hindu widows over the centuries”, of which the occurrence had been “exaggerated in the nineteenth century by Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries eager to Christianize and Anglicize India”. (p.xix)

Sati was not confined to Hindu civilization. It existed elsewhere, both in Indo-European and in other cultures. Rulers in ancient China or Egypt are sometimes found buried with a number of wives, concubines and servants.

Among the Germanic people, a famous case is that of Brunhilde and her maidservants following Siegfried into death. Yet Indian secularists preferentially depict Sati as one of the unique “evils of Hindu society”.

Naïve readers may not have noticed it yet, but here we are dealing with an instance of a widespread phenomenon: the crass manipulation of the term “Hindu”. Every missionary and every secularist does it all the time: calling a thing “Hindu” when it is considered bad, but something (really anything) else as soon as it is deemed good. Many Hindus even lap it up: it is “instilled, albeit inadvertently.”

Thus, whenever Westerners show an interest in yoga, the secularists and their Western allies hurry to assure us: “Yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism.” (It is like with Islam, but inversely, for whenever Muslims make negative-sounding headlines, we are immediately reassured that these crimes “have nothing to do with Islam”.) There may be books on “Jain mathematics”, but never about “Hindu mathematics”, for a good thing cannot be Hindu. If the topic cannot be avoided, you call it, say, “Keralite mathematics” or fashionably opine that it “must have been borrowed from Buddhism.” So, yoga cannot be Hindu when its merits are an issue. However, when it is presented as something funny, with asceticism and other nasty things, then it can be Hindu, and even used as a middle term to equate something else (something nasty, of course, like Sati) with Hinduism. So: Sati is Hindu!

In this case, the poor hapless secularists are even right. Sometimes even a deplorable motive, like their single-minded hatred for Hinduism, makes men speak the truth: Sati is Hindu.  

But Sati is not Brahmanical: the Rig-Veda enjoins continuing life rather than committing Sati, and most of the Shastras either don’t mention it or prefer widowhood, for which they lay down demanding rules. 

The rest of this book, 500-something pages, is designed to stand the test of time. It will survive the flames that tend to engulf its topic: the brave Sati.

(source: The Sati Strategy: How Missionaries Used An Extinct Practice As A Rallying Point To Christianise India - by Koenraad Elst).

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The Defamation of Sexuality and of Women in Christianity - by Joachim Kahl (excerpt from the book, ‘The Misery of Christianity’)

The ideological basis of the hostility of Christian ethics towards the sexual impulse, which has been and still is so disastrous in its consequences, is to be found in the New Testament. Paul also demanded that ‘those who have wives’ should live as though they had none (1.Cor.vii, 29). Marriage for the Christian then, was a joyless brothel in his own home, a situation which Tertullian, faithful to Christian tradition, attempted to correct by insisting on the renunciation of marriage since it was based on the same act of harlotry.

The defamation of sex inevitably leads to the defamation of women, who tend to be regarded as inferior beings.

‘Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children…’ (I Tim. Ii, IIff).

The New Testament is the work of neurotic philistines, who regarded human sexuality not as a source of joy, but as a source of anxiety; not as a means of expressing love, but as a means of expressing sin. Sometimes overtly, but sometimes in a more concealed manner, the New Testament writers outlawed everything to do with man’s body.

Jerome, (347 - 420) who was responsible for the Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, wrote:

‘Women is the gate of the devil, the way of evil, the sting of the scorpion, in a word, a dangerous thing’. It is therefore hardly surprising that Jerome, who would have liked most of all to have shaved off the hair of women, was later made the patron saint of misogynists!

Despite all the claims made by Christian apologists that womankind is ennobled by the example of Mary as the antitype of the sinful Eve, the cult of Mary undeniably dishonors women. Mary has, after all, been venerated since the second century as semper Virgo – always a virgin – in other words, as a woman who never experienced sexual intercourse either before or after the birth of Jesus, since this, as Pope Siricius (384-399) stated, would have defiled her. The cult of the blessed Virgin is the product and the expression of an infantile and mutilated sexuality, of a mother fixation or psychological virginity. Sin is inherited physically, by the way of sexual act. This is why Jesus had to be born of a virgin.

At a Lenten synod in 1074, Pope Gregory VII made celibacy obligatory. There was no end to the succession of scandals in monasteries and nunneries. In his De contemptu mundi – ‘Contempt of the World’ – Pope Innocent III complained about members of the clergy who embraced Venus at night and worshipped the Virgin Mary in the morning.

Medieval theology was characterized by a brutal hostility towards woman. As early as the 6^th century, the bishops attending a synod in Macon (Gaul) had earnestly debated whether woman was really a human being after all and later, in the Middle Ages, the ‘angelic’ teacher, Thomas Aquinas, defamed her by calling her a ‘failed man’ (mas occasionatus) and by insisting inflexibly that she should not be permitted any equality in the Church or in civil society.

This deep hostility reached a horrifying climax in the Christian witch-hunt, which resulted in several million women being tortured and burnt at the stake from the 13^th until the 18^th century. The early Church must have been swarming with demons, because there was a special office, that of exorcist, to deal with them. There were devils at work everywhere and holy water, prayers and exorcisms were helpful in warding them off. The longer Christianity existed, the deeper became men’s fear of occult powers. Thomas Aquinas taught that the rain, hail and wind were caused by demons.

Gregory IX (1227-1241) was the first pope to instruct the Inquisition to take legal action against witches and the first trail was held in his pontificate near Trevers.

The second call to hunt witches was made by Pope John XXII in his bull, Super illius specula, of 1326, and other official documents were published by the Church in 1374, 1409, 1418, 1437, 1445, and 1451. Three years later, the infamous ‘Witches Hammer’ (Malleus maleficarum) appeared. This disgraceful concoction was the work of two Dominicans, Heinrich Institoris and Jakob Sprenger, and had been reprinted 29 times by 1669. Later popes, such as Alexander Vi, Julius II, Leo X, Hadrian VI and Clement VII, also called upon Christians, in various bulls, to murder innocent women and leaders of the Reformation did exactly the same. In the sermons that he delivered in Wittenberg, Luther again and again urged his followers to hunt and torture witches, and Calvin, without doubt one of the greatest sadists who ever lived, constantly advocated mass executions in order to exterminate witches (extirper telle race).

Witches were burnt all over Europe. The flames were rising everywhere and it seemed as though they would never be put out. Everyone was being burnt – men and women, Catholics and Protestants, idiots and scholars, four-year-old children and 80 year old women. Everyone was being sent indiscriminately to the stake and burnt to ashes.

In 1678, The Archbishop of Salzburg sent 97 women to the stake because so many cattle were dying of disease. Bishop Fuchs von Bornheim of Bamberg had some 900 witches and sorcerers put to death round about the year 1630 and his victims included the five burgomasters of the town. Bishop Adolf von Ehrenberg of Wurzburg also sent about 1200 witches and sorcerers to the stake at about this time, but had the kindness to endow masses to be said for the repose of their souls. Archbishop John of Trevers had so many witches burnt in 1585 that there were only two women life in each of the two villages.

Witch hunting reached its peak during the Thirty Years’ War. The last witches were burnt in Switzerland in 1782 and drowned at the witches’ ordeal near Danzig in 1836.

The hostile attitude towards sexuality that has characterized Christianity throughout history is basically unchanged today. Let me give one example to prove my point, that of the Vatican castrati. Until as late as 1920 or thereabouts, many members of the choir of the Sistine Chapel were men who had been castrated simply for the sake of church music. 230 Popes, beginning with Sixtus V, who died in 1590 had men mutilated because God could be praised more sweetly by eunuchs.

 Christianity has never accepted man’s sexual urge as valid human impulses in the good sense. Very physical act of love has always been shrouded in a darkness and has only been permitted by the Churches as a means of begetting children.

English historian William E H Lecky, (1839 - 1903) has said, namely that it is no sense an exaggeration to say that the Christian Church has caused a greater measure of undeserved human suffering than any other religion.

(source: The Misery of Christianity - By Joachim Kahl p. 1 -95).

Sermons on Equality and Women from the West to India?

Pope Francis says women will never be Roman Catholic priests 

Pontiff’s reply to journalist asking about church’s position is not change in stance, but will disappoint advocates of change has ruled out a woman ever serving as a priest in the Roman Catholic church.

The declaration is not a change in stance for the Argentinian pope, who has always said the door was closed on women being ordained as priests. But when he was asked and then pressed on the matter by a Swedish journalist during a press conference onboard the papal plane, Francis suggested the ban would be eternal. “Saint Pope John Paul II had the last clear word on this and it stands, this stands,” Francis said in his initial response, referring to a 1994 document stating that women could never join the priesthood.

Women have been barred from the priesthood for centuries. Under current rules, deacons are ordained similarly to ministers, and are men. While they cannot celebrate mass, they are allowed to preach and conduct some ceremonies, including baptisms, wakes and funerals.

The issue of women’s inequality in the Catholic church remains a hot topic among activists, despite Francis’s position. At a recent gathering, representatives of Catholic priest movements and international lay organisations called for reform on issues including equality for women and LGBT rights. In a statement released by organisers, Kate McElwee, the co-executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, said: “In this space, we wrestled with the damaging effects of oppressive structures, knowing that patriarchy and hierarchy hurt us all. “We discovered, time and again, that by sharing as equals and asking hard questions, we can transform ourselves, our church and our world.”

(source: Pope Francis says women will never be Roman Catholic priests - guardian.com).
 

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Why Mother Teresa’s Success Is A Reflection Of The Wounded Civilisation That Is India

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu arrived in Darjeeling during the British Raj as a teenager in 1929. She became a nun in 1931 and began her missionary work in India shortly after India became independent. 

The Second World War consumed the early part of the tumultuous decade of the 1940s, and the nation became independent immediately in its aftermath. The Bengal famine of 1943, which historians have recently shown was worsened because of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s deliberate decision to hold back food supplies to India, killed up to four million people, or more than five percent of Bengal’s population, at the time and ruined communities across the region. Moreover, communal tensions surrounding the Partition of India had torn Kolkata apart through the late 1940s, with thousands more killed. It was in this context that Bojaxhiu, who is today known as Mother Teresa, set up the Missionaries of Charity. 

Independence did not bring much respite for Bengal, as militant trade unionism and communist state governments destroyed local industry over the decades. By the turn of the century, Kolkata, which had once been the commercial and political capital of India, become an also-ran, as cities like Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Pune raced ahead. It was over these same decades that Teresa built her operation, with the destitution and hopelessness enveloping the city providing the raw material for the missionary machine. It is no coincidence that the rise of Teresa coincides with the socio-economic ruination of Kolkata and Bengal. 

Dissenting views on Teresa’s contribution and work are not new, the works of Christopher Hitchens and Aroup Chatterjee being the most prominent. As a devout Catholic, Teresa saw personal suffering as a service to Christ. As a missionary, Teresa came to India to convert Indians and did it with success. This is the reason why the Catholic Church has decorated her with its highest title. Let’s just say that the Church is not known for bestowing the title of Saint on those who are not believers.

It is well-established that Teresa frequently denied scientific treatment to the ailing, preferring to glorify human suffering as an end in itself.

As Aroup Chatterjee has recorded, Teresa would baptise the dying, and openly accepted this fact when speaking at the Scripps Clinic in California on 14 January 1992, when she exulted that “29,000 have died…from the time we began the work in 1952” and “not one has died without receiving “ticket for St Peter”…we call baptism “ticket for St Peter”.” 

What does it say about Teresa’s personal ethics that she sought to convert the infirm, who came to her seeking care and comfort, on their deathbed, at a time when they may not have been in the mental and physical state to make considered choices?Robin Fox, writing in the medical journal The Lancet in 1994 after a visit to Teresa’s home for the dying in Kalighat, observed “systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Theresa (sic) prefers providence to planning; her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards materialism; the sisters must remain on equal terms with the poor.” 

Commenting on the ability of the sisters to mitigate pain, Fox wrote, “I could not judge the power of the spiritual approach, but I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics.”

By the 1990s, Teresa was an international figure and had raised millions of dollars in donations. If her home for the dying did not even provide basic pain management medication, how and where was the money being spent? Fox’s observations are a troubling indictment of Teresa’s approach of prizing faith and religion above science in the treatment of those who came to her for care. As she often eulogised suffering, it would not be uncharitable to say that Teresa’s faith prevented her from provisioning relief to the helplessly poor who came to her, even though she had the means to do so. 

Teresa railed against the rights of women to choose what they do with their bodies. Delivering the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1979, Teresa proclaimed “the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion.” This was at the height of the Cold War when the world was on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. “We are fighting abortion by adoption”, Teresa had said then.

It is a little-known fact that Teresa supported the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975. “People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes,” she said blithely, even as tens of thousands were jailed and Indira Gandhi wielded dictatorial power. After she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Teresa was given the Bharat Ratna by the Indian government in 1980. An official biography of Teresa was published in 1992, written by the infamous Navin Chawla, who went on to become chief election commissioner under the UPA government in 2009.

Chawla is a long-time courtier of the Nehru-Gandhi family and was particularly close to Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency. The Shah Commission that investigated the dictatorial government’s actions during the Emergency observed in its report that Chawla was “unfit to hold any public office which demands an attitude of fair play and consideration for others” and said that Chawla had been authoritarian and callous, grossly abusing his powers in “cynical disregard of the welfare of citizens”. In a 2007 article, Observer Research Foundation distinguished fellow Ashok Malik recorded in more detail some of Navin Chawla’s cruel actions during the Emergency. Chawla had supported the construction of jail cells with asbestos roofs to “bake” inmates, prevented student-prisoners from taking their exams to punish them and came up with a scheme that gave prisoners freedom if they agreed to be sterilised.

It was this man who was picked by Nobel Laureate and Bharat Ratna Mother Teresa to write her authorised biography when she could have selected practically anyone. What does this choice say about Teresa’s values, allegiances and personal character?

Despite this mountain of uncomfortable facts, Teresa enjoys a cult following among Indians, and people from Kolkata in particular. It would be simplistic to say that Teresa’s reputation persists because of ignorance – there is something deeper at play. 

The identity of Kolkata and its residents has become enmeshed with Teresa. As people who have little to be proud of about their city, given its ruinous trajectory over the last several decades, they are inert to any honest discussion about Teresa because they see her as among the few icons they can take pride in. Teresa’s success is ultimately only a reflection of the failures of India’s society, and of the defeated spirit of India’s wounded civilisation. Joining the bandwagon lionising Teresa is a quick and cheap way to rid oneself of any personal guilt at not having done something to address dehumanising destitution. In Teresa’s misguided efforts, we all take succour and seek emancipation that at least somebody tried.But Teresa and her institution stand against practically every single modern value that we hope to see India embrace. She celebrated suffering and promoted superstition rather than seeking out science-based medical solutions with the substantial donations she amassed. She glorified poverty rather than finding ways to ameliorate the downtrodden. She practised and preached intolerance towards women while being one herself.

This is not to suggest that the Indian government should cripple or persecute Teresa’s organisation. They should be allowed to preach and practice what they please. After all, there is a difference between the values of the free Indian Republic and the fanatical dogma of missionary institutions out to harvest souls.

The correct way to tackle elements like Teresa is to reduce her customer base, to use a corporate analogy. Building an India that offers opportunity and uplifts all citizens is the surest recipe for ensuring that the twenty-first century does not see the emergence of another such person, and that project is well underway. The day India eradicates mass poverty, no Teresa will ever rise again.

(source: Why Mother Teresa’s Success Is A Reflection Of The Wounded Civilisation That Is India - by Rajeev Mantri).

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The Bizarre Hoax of Mother Teresa: Kolkata will take a century to recover from Mother Teresa 

If Mother Teresa, to be canonised at the Vatican today, is to be named a patron saint of anything it should be for “misinformation”. In the last 20 years of her life, truth became an unknown entity to her. The media aided and abetted her lack of integrity and in a way she cannot be blamed for believing in her own lies. Intellect was not her strong point and, for someone like her, to be surrounded by hordes of sycophants who were telling her if she said black was white then that had to be true, it became intoxicating. The media did spread the mega-myth about her, but she herself was the source. She repeatedly told the world she went around the city 24x7 “picking up” destitute from its squalid “gutters” (she did not), that she fed up to 9,000 in her soup kitchens (she did not), she never refused a helpless child (she did as a rule), that the dying destitute in her so-called home for the dying, Nirmal Hriday, died a “beautiful death” (they were treated harshly and often died a miserable, painful death). 

Mother Teresa was an ultimate politician who worked on behalf of the Vatican.

No, she was not an “agent” as that would be conspiratorial. She did not have to do much subterfuge or skulduggery in India itself, as Indians, particularly the media, were in awe of her and connived with her. 

I do not blame world media as much as I blame Indian and particularly the media in Kolkata. There she was, a jet-setting celebrity — although appended with the epithet “of Calcutta” — spending six to nine months in a year in Europe and the United States, making strange claims about her work and about the disgusting state of the city, but never to be seen in the city’s disasters — major or minor.

Why was she not asked why she re-used needles on her residents in Nirmal Hriday (it was official policy) when she herself received the finest care in the world’s best hospitals? Even after her death, the Indian fear of blue-bordered saris continues. On August 1, 2005, UK TV showed a child tied to a cot overnight in her orphanage — one Kolkata newspaper grudgingly reported the matter with lots of “alleged”. During her lifetime, even that would be unthinkable. She was white, she hobnobbed with the then US president Ronald Reagan, and oh yes, she had the Nobel — so she had to be divine. 

Opposite metaphor 

Did no one know that she hobnobbed with the Duvaliers of Haiti whose brutality was unsurpassed (whose opponents were often cut up and fed to dogs)? No one in India wanted to know. For the western media, she was a metaphor, a set-piece, a stratospheric certainty of image in an uncertain and changing world. Conversely, Kolkata was the opposite metaphor of absolute degradation.

It was beyond the West’s interest, energy or remit to robustly challenge these wrong stereotypes. But did Indian journalists not know that her main bank was the Vatican Bank, a dark cavern of corruption, intrigue and murder? Before she died, it was well known that she had accepted millions from Charles Keating, the notorious American swindler, but no one in India cared.  

Bengalis showed some rare guts when she was beatified through a “miracle” in 2003. Doctors, and even the then state health minister, made statements that Monica Besra was cured by prolonged treatment, and not by an aluminium medal. Even Besra herself periodically said her cure was not a miracle. But the Vatican treated Indian opinion with the contempt it always has and proceeded with canonisation. But what is so great about Catholic saints? People should realise a Catholic saint does not have to be saintly or nice in the secular sense, but has to be pure to Catholic dogma. Jose Maria Escriva, a Fascist, is a Catholic saint; another Fascist, Cardinal Stepinac, is a “blessed”. 

If one looks around Mother Teresa’s homes in Kolkata today, one would find many of them acceptable. But one must not forget that this comes after 25 years of campaigning by me, and also persistent global criticism from Hemley Gonzalez, the American former volunteer who in 2008 was so utterly disgusted by what he saw that he founded the Stop the Missionaries of Charity movement and founded his own Responsible Charity. Moreover, in the last six months, the order has spruced up a great deal, preparing for the canonisation on today. And yet, the Indian government is dutifully sending a delegation to the ceremony in Rome. Be that as it may, my own wish would be to reclaim Kolkata/Calcutta from Teresa — to sever the automatic connection of the two names as the whole wide world sees it. Kolkata’s image under the yoke of Mother Teresa will take a century to recover. In the last 50 years, the city has lost an unimaginable amount from the loss of international business and tourism and will continue to do so. But let the people at least loudly, proudly proclaim that they have nothing to do with a medieval creature of darkness — not anymore.

(source: Kolkata will take a century to recover from Mother Teresa - by Aroup Chatterjee - gulfnews.com).

The Destruction of Library of Alexandria and temple of Serapis:  Lessons for Pagans

Hypatía of Alexandria - Pagan philosopher, scientist, mathematician, and civic leader. Assassinated in 415 by Christian zealots

" 'Paganism' to the pagan never existed," explained historian John Holland Smith in The Death of Classical Paganism. "It is not far from the truth to say that before Christianity invented it, there was no Roman religion but only worship, expressed in a hundred-and-one different ways."

"Monotheism, by contrast insists that only a single deity is worthy of worship for the simple reason that only a single deity exists." - Jonathan Kirsch, God against Gods. p. 9

***

In 390, for example a mob of Christian zealots attacked the ancient library of Alexandria, a place where works of the greatest rarity and antiquity had been collected. Here were preserved the oldest manuscripts – pagan texts were even more ancient and even more abundant, some 700,000 volumes and scrolls in all. The whole collection of parchment and paryi was torched, the library itself pulled down, and the loss of Western civilization is beyond calculation or even imagination. 

The next year, Theodosius I ordered the destruction of the Serpaeum, a magnificent temple that served as the principal shrine of Isis and Serapis and “the most important monument in the Empire after the Capitol in Rome.

The order was carried out with ardor by the Christian patriarch of Alexandria – his name was Theophilus, and he is memorably described by Edward Gibbon as “a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.” Pagan diehards fortified the shrine, but they were overwhelmed by the Christian attackers, and the Serapeum was left in ruins. Meanwhile the Christians delighted when they broke up a wooden statue of Serapis and discovered that it was infested with vermin.  

“The Egyptians’ god had become an apartment-block for mice!” exults the ancient Christian historian Theodoret. “So they broke him into pieces and fed them to the flames. But the head they dragged through the whole city, so that his worshippers could see it, and with it the impotence of the gods they prayed to.” 

The most poignant incident of all, however, took place in 415. A pagan woman called Hypatia, who is recalled as both beautiful and brilliant, succeeded in scandalizing the Christians of Alexandria, not only because of her faith but also because of her gender. She participated in the study of the old pagan texts on astronomy, mathematics and philosophy, and she did so alongside the otherwise male faculty and student body. But Hypatia inspired only contempt and disgust in the zealous Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria, a nephew of Theophilus, and he prevailed on the “men in black” to do something about the vile woman. So it was that a “wild black army,” as the English novelist E.M.Forster describes the mob, followed her carriage as he headed toward the hall where her students were waiting – they dragged her out, carried her into the convenient darkness of a nearby church, stripped her naked, tortured her with broken shards of pottery and finally hacked her body into pieces. Then they put her butchered body parts on public display and, finally tossed, her remains on a bonfire.”

(source: God against the Gods – By Jonathan Kirsch p. 276 – 277).

Death of Hypatia by Christian zealots: Suppressed History

Excerpted from "War Against the Pagans," in Secret History of the Witches

... The Roman state gave free rein to Christian extremists who destroyed pagan shrines and images, or who committed violence against pagan leaders. They attacked people at pagan services and destroyed their temples. Arson was a favorite tactic. From the late 300s on, monks stand out as the primary aggressors in the battle to suppress pagans in the east. Even Christian documents describe them as violent and crime-prone, beating people they considered sinful, stirring up sectarian strife.  

The pagan Eunapius remarked that these monks looked like men but lived like pigs, "and openly did and allowed countless unspeakable crimes." He added bitterly, “For among them, every man is given the power of a tyrant who has a black robe and is prepared to behave badly in public.” Some were not above murder. One target of the fanatical monk was Hypatia, an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher of international reputation. Socrates Scholasticus wrote that "she far surpassed all the philosophers of her time,” and was greatly respected for her “extraordinary dignity and virtue.” Hypatia's house was an important intellectual center in a city distinguished for its learning. Damasius described how she "used to put on her philosopher's cloak and walk through the middle of town" to give public lectures on philosophy. [Life of Isidore, in the Suda]. Admired by all Alexandria, Hypatia was one of the most politically powerful figures in the city. She was one of the few women who attended civic assemblies. Magistrates came to her for advice, including her close friend, the prefect Orestes. [Damasius, Socrates Scholasticus] In the midst of severe religious polarization, Hypatia was an influential force for tolerance and moderation. She accepted students, who came to her "from everywhere," without regard to religion.
 

Hypatia, one of the last great thinkers of Alexandria. On the streets of Alexandria, Hyptia was dragged and butchered by Christian zealots.

The intolerance of Christians is illustrated by the plot by Cyril of Alexandria to murder the fashionable and virtuous Neoplatonist philosopher and daughter of the “last member of the Library of Alexandria”, Hypatia. It is the Cyril who succeeded Theophilus. He ordered a gang of monks to murder her by hijacking her carriage, mercilessly killing her then stripping her naked body of its flesh using broken tiles or oyster shells—a monstrous deed even Christians cannot deny.

The final death blows to Pagan culture however came from Justinian the Great, Emperor from 527-565 AD. He is considered great because he persecuted the pagans.

For more on Hypatia refer to the book, Euclid and Jesus - By C K Raju and watch movie Agora

(source: Smithsonian.com).

***

Hypatia's father Theon was an astronomer and mathematician who was devoted to divination and astrology and the pagan mysteries. He wrote commentaries on the books of Orpheus and Hermes Trismegistus and poems to the planets as forces of Moira (destiny). Nothing indicates that Hypatia departed from her home culture. The Chaldean Oracles and Pythagorean numerological mysticism figured in her teachings, as the letters of Synesius indicate. Like her father, she saw astronomy as the highest science, opening up knowledge of the divine. The surviving fragments of Hypatia's teachings indicate a mystical orientation. Glimpses of her spiritual views survived in the letters of her disciples, which speak of "the eye buried within us," a "divine guide." As the soul journeys toward divinity, this "hidden spark which loves to conceal itself" grows into a flame of knowing. Hypatia's philosophy was concerned with the "mystery of being," contemplation of Reality, rising to elevated states of consciousness, and "union with the divine," the One. Her disciples certainly regarded her in the light of a spiritual leader.

She spoke out against dogmatism and superstition: “To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force.” Unquestionably, Hypatia's teaching represented a challenge to church doctrine. The apparent destruction of her philosophical books underlines the point. Her mathematical works survived and were popular into the next century. Damasius wrote that “The whole city rightly loved her and worshipped her in a remarkable way...”

Her popularity galled Cyril, the new bishop of Alexandria, who “was so struck with envy that he immediately began plotting her murder...”  The bishop's enmity was also fueled by political motives: the politics of religious intolerance and domination. When Cyril became bishop in 412, he began pushing to extend his power into the civic sphere. His enforcers were the parabalanoi, strongmen who had been the shock troops of bishop Theophilus' war on pagans and Jews.

Accusations of Witchcraft
 

Cyril prevailed, and his parabalanoi were never punished for killing Hypatia. The bishop covered up her murder, insisting that she had moved to Athens. No one was fooled. Our nearest contemporary sources agree that the bishop was behind the witch-rumors and the killing, and that his men carried them out. Hypatia was not targeted only as a pagan.

It is clear that Hypatia's femaleness made her a special target, vulnerable to the accusation of witchcraft. Her courage in opposing the escalating anti-Jewish violence and her moral stance against religious repression were factors as well. In defending the assault on the philosophical tradition of tolerance, Hypatia had everything to lose, yet she acted boldly. Later in the century, her male counterparts also came under attack. By the mid-400s, pagan professors were being sentenced to death in Syria. Sometime after 480, an Alexandrian Christian society called the Zealots hounded the pagan prefect and his secretary from office and into exile. The Zealots capped their triumph with the burning of "idols."

The cultural repression used to Christianize the Roman Empire was unprecedented anywhere up to that time, in extent, duration and geographic scale.

(source: Hypatía of Alexandria - suppressed histories.net).

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The Sheer Intolerance of Monotheism

How Diwali is portrayed by Christian Missionaries in United Kingdom

As the children sit by their shrines to the elephant god in classrooms up and down the land, their parents won’t be told that Rama, according to the Hindu scriptures, went on to marry many other women as well as Sita, mutilated and tortured women, called his father a fool and an idiot and burnt the Dravidians of Sri Lanka alive.  So much for peace and happiness.

Hinduism’s social darkness

Nor will they be told, as their children paint red tilak dots on each others’ foreheads, about the Hindu caste system which keeps millions of families in permanent bondage, about dowry murders of young brides, about female infanticide nor about the ritual slaughter of buffalo and horses to appease the Hindu goddess Durga.

In all the talk of light, no school will own up to the darkness of Hindu violence over the thousands of Dalits (or ‘Untouchables’) converting to Christianity nor about how the idea of reincarnation and ‘karma’ means that beggars must be left to suffer for their sins in a previous life.

But we’ll tell you, in Diwali – a parents’ guide.

We’ll give you all the background to the Diwali festival, set out the Hindu belief system with its demonic ‘trinity’, explain how the caste system keeps one racial group in permanent ascendancy, and show you how the Hindu faith works out in practice.

(source: Diwali - a parents guide - christianvoice.org.uk).

Christianization of history and Racism -  excerpts from C K Raju's book Euclid and Jesus

Questioning the West is taboo for the indoctrinated colonized minds produced by Western education.

Throughout the Roman Empire, in the later 4^th century, Christian mobs had smashed “pagan” temples, and seized their accumulated wealth. As historian Edward Gibbon described it:

“In almost every province of the Roman world, an army of fanatics, without authority and without discipline, invaded the peaceful inhabitants; and the ruin of the fairest structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of those barbarians.”

By the end of the 4^th century most pagan temples in the Roman empire were gone – destroyed by rampaging Christian mobs. For these tasks of spreading Christianity by smashing pagan deities, the church later declared Theophilus a saint, a perfect example of how to spread the doctrine of love! This event continues to be celebrated today by Encyclopedia Britannica as a great triumph: “The destruction of the Sarapeum at Alexandria by the patriarch Theophilus and his followers in AD 391 signaled the final triumph of Christianity not only in Egypt but throughout the Roman Empire.

The Dark Ages

The Dark Ages began with the complete destruction of non-Christian books in Christendom, during the first religious war which the church fought against the pagans, in the 4^th and 5^th century.

The priest themselves owned slaves and participated in this big business. For example, the Archbishop of Cantebury owned the Codrington plantation in Barbados from 1710. Conditions on the plantation were so bad that 4 out of 10 imported slaves died within three years; it was more profitable to work slaves to death, and replace them, than to feed them or take minimal care of them. Being the Society for Preservation of the Gospel, they branded the word “Society” on the chest of their slaves.

From the 15^th to the 18^th century, the priests extolled the institution of slavery, and profited from it. They pointed out that slavery was mentioned and accepted in the Bible, in both the Old Testament and the New. The bull Romanus Pontifex, not withdrawn to this day, directs Christian kings to turn the non-Christian “Negro” into slaves.

A difficulty developed later on when many of the slaves converted to Christianity. Could a Christian enslave another Christian. This presented a moral problem for the priest who saw no evil in the notion of slavery, or a sadistic hell for non-Christians, or the persecution of non-Christian “pagans” or the Crusades against Muslims, or the Inquisition against Jews and Muslim converts, or the genocide in the Americas against non-Christian “Injuns”.

The priest spoke of civil property, not civil rights. For example, Thomas Sherlock, later Bishop of London, assured the planters that “Christianity and the embracing of the Gospel does not make the least difference in civil property.”

However, theologically speaking, the priests produced two broad questions of Christian slavery. The first to point to the “curse of Ham” meaning black, was a reference in the Bible to the ancestors of Egyptians. Thus, the story went, God had cursed blacks to slaves. The second answer was that blacks (and reds, browns, and yellows) were such a deprived and savage lot that slavery or other form of white domination were actually a matter of advantage for them. The false history that all intellectual achievements were the work of Christians (or their friends, the early Greeks) was used to justify this racist answer.

Traditionally, false history has been an essential element in the arsenal of the church. The church carries out conversions by attacking the self-esteem of the individual: the stock tactic is to use false history to denigrate the group to which the individual belongs. This allows the church to establish its superiority. The church employs thousands upon thousands of people who incessantly recite a litany of these lies. No marketing company today, no TV channel, nor even an entire nation can compete with such propaganda. The propaganda is drummed into the heads of people from childhood through “education” – controlled by the church. Naturally European intellectuals were supporters or victims of this propaganda.

The leading intellectuals of the time used false history to justify racism. The philosopher John Locke, a champion of liberty had invested heavily in the Royal African Company. He helped to draft the constitution of Carolina, which stated “every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slave of what opinion or religion soever.”

The philosopher David Hume wrote in a 1753 essay, “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites.

Hegel proposed the negro race as the antithesis of the white race. Samuel Johnson’s biographer Boswell wrote a long poem (with footnotes!) in favor of slavery, and addressed it to plantation owners.

“Noodles, who rave for abolition
Of th’African improv’d condition…
Don’t rob from pure humanity.

Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881) Scottish philosopher and writer, ranted against “niggers” “sitting there, up to the ears in pumpkins, and doleful whites, sitting here, without potatoes to eat.”

Today, the usual apologia for this rabid moralizing is that these thinkers were products of their times which left no European untouched by racism and deep-seated belief in inequality. But to overlook the root cause of their attitude – the false history created for church propaganda – which cause persists till today. This belief in white supremacy was but a slight modification of the earlier church belief in Christian supremacy, adapted to suit the then-current economic reality that European prosperity depended upon the labor of blacks in America.

Earlier, the church had maintained that all ingenuity in science and technology was the work of Christians and friends. During Inquisition, and the related religious intolerance in Europe, this myth blossomed because individual Europeans were terrified of acknowledging any non-Christian sources. Thus, two supposedly most creative scientists of Europe were Copernicus and Newton, today credited with the “Copernican revolution” and the “Newtonian revolution.” In fact, today we know that all that Copernicus did came from Islamic sources, which he merely translated, without full understanding. Likewise, the calculus attributed to Newton came from Indian sources, brought from Cochin by Jesuits in the 16^th century and used by Europeans who lack a proper understanding of it to this day. The astronomical model of Tycho Brahe came from India, as did the “observations” fudged by the half-blind) astrologer Kepler. Thus the claims of Christian/White/Western inventiveness were based on theft and appropriation, just like European prosperity, and it is curious how one sort of theft (of ideas) was used to morally justify another.

Black Athena

While false history led to racism, there is no doubt that racist historians deliberately falsified history even further. With the persistence of racist attitudes, from the late 18 c. onwards, the Hellenization of history received yet another boost at the hands of racist historians. Martin Bernal explains in the first volume of his Black Athena: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 how racist historians in the past couple of centuries systematically suppressed references to Egypt because its inhabitants were black. 

(source: Euclid and Jesus - By C K Raju p. 140 - 144).

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Why Does The Left Ignore India’s Indigenous Intellectual Traditions? 

India has one of the greatest intellectual traditions in the world and it has nothing to do with modern Indian leftist scholars and writers. It is the tradition of numerous yogis, sages and seers going back to the Vedas, extending through Vedanta, Buddhism and related dharmic traditions to their many exponents today. Dharmic traditions teach us how to develop the mind in the highest sense of universal consciousness, not simply logic and conceptual thought. India’s great minds, centuries ago, produced the many paths of yoga and the largest variety of exalted spiritual philosophies and psychologies in the world. And their teachings remain alive and vibrant even today, spreading globally.

Yet, India’s dharmic tradition has not just addressed consciousness and spirituality, but has also produced a vast literature on art, science, medicine, mathematics and politics – all the main domains of thought and culture. 

At the turn of the twentieth century, Swami Vivekananda transformed world thinking, introducing yoga, meditation and higher states of consciousness at a time before Einstein had discovered the relativity of time and space and the illusory nature of physical reality, something long taught in Vedanta and Buddhism. Sri Aurobindo unfolded the idea of a higher evolution of consciousness in humanity and produced Savitri, the longest blank verse poem in the English language, revealing transformative yogic secrets that the West had yet to conceive. Yet, many of these great Indic thinkers wrote in Sanskrit or regional languages of India and have not been properly noted, much less studied. Vedantic teachers like Swami Chinmayananda and Swami Dayananda have guided India in recent decades, commenting on cultural as well as spiritual affairs, using English as their main language of expression, so that the modern audience can easily understand them. Ram Swarup and Sitaram Goel produced excellent critiques of communism and Western religious fundamentalism. New Yoga teachings have come out from India’s modern gurus, too numerous to mention, and there is now a detailed modern literature on Ayurvedic medicine in English. New books on India’s past have been written by important archaeologists and historians, uncovering the depth and antiquity of India’s many-sided civilisation. 

Meanwhile, there is a dynamic new generation of insightful and articulate Indic/dharmic writers with new books and articles, and active in the social media, including Sanjeev Sanyal, Hindol Sengupta, Vamsee Juluri, Tufail Ahmad, and Amish Tripathi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been an important part of this intellectual/media awakening of pro-India scholars and writers, who honour the profound traditions of the country going back to ancient times. 

The Left’s false claim to intellectual superiority 

India’s Left has long claimed that Hindus are not intellectual and are unscientific, mindlessly repeating old racist colonial and missionary propaganda. Yet the Left has not produced any original thinkers, much less sages. It hasn’t even understood India’s own vast culture, which is the saddest commentary on its endeavours. India’s leftist scholars are largely Lord Macaulay’s children, promoting Western thought, disowning India’s older and more extensive cultural heritage. India’s Left has no understanding of higher states of consciousness, as clearly explained in the dharmic traditions, or any interest in exploring them. It is wedded to gross materialism and physical reality, preferring to write about sex and politics, not anything transcendent. While traditional Hindu thought recognises seven chakras from basic human urges to the highest cosmic consciousness, leftist writers are happy to wallow in the lower one or two, as if they were contributing something exalted to the world.  

While modern physics is embracing the idea of cosmic consciousness and great physicists like Oppenheimer have quoted the Bhagavad Gita, India’s Left is firmly caught in the outer world of maya, which it does not question. It has little sense of cosmology and not much vision beyond political propaganda. Yet, India’s scientists honour their own spiritual traditions like Subhash Kak and George Sudarshan, who are not products of the Left.  

India’s leftists seldom learn Sanskrit or study the great philosophers, thinkers and poets of the country. While they can quote Shakespeare they deem it’s beneath their dignity to honour Kalidas. They cannot examine the Ramayana or Mahabharata except in terms of Marxist or Freudian theories. They may discuss women’s rights but have no experience of India’s powerful traditions of Goddess worship. They are like the children of the old British Raj for whom anything Indian, particularly Hindu, is primitive superstition to be frowned upon. Indian immigrants now make up the highest strata of Western society in terms of education and affluence, comprising doctors, engineers, scientists, and software developers, most of who are respectful of India’s spiritual traditions. They are not products of the Left either.  India’s leftists, meanwhile, take academic posts both in India and the West, from which they can take potshots at their own culture and pretend to be wise while drawing comfortable salaries from the very governments they like to criticise. They would never practice yoga, mantra or meditation, as the people in the West are now doing more and more – including many thinkers and innovators. Note the example of Steve Jobs of Apple Computers, who carried Paramahansa Yogananda’sAutobiography of a Yogi with him, and probably never heard of Romila Thapar, Ram Guha or Irfan Habib. 

Intellectual arrogance of the Left 

The problem is that India’s leftist intellectuals are products of the ego-mind, what is called the rajasic buddhi in yogic thought, which is marked by intellectual arrogance. Without first learning deep meditation, one cannot go beyond the prejudices of the outer intellect and its attachment to name, form and personality. One needs to become silent and receptive within in order to truly know oneself and the universe. This teaching has been clearly articulated since the ancient Upanishads did so in a series of inspired dialogues and debates over 3,000 years ago. It is time for India’s leftist intellectuals to honour their own profound dharmic traditions. Then they might be capable of something more original and transformative than to imitate the superficial views of the western leftists, which is their current state of affairs. It might give them better ethical rules of behaviour to emulate as well.  

The role of India’s true intelligentsia should be to sustain India’s cultural unity, spirituality and creativity, for the nation and the world – not trying to replace their own venerable traditions with worn out leftist agendas that have failed everywhere they have been implemented.

(source: Why Does The Left Ignore India’s Indigenous Intellectual Traditions?  - By David Frawley).

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The great Hindu revival has begun - and we must celebrate it – by Sunil Rajguru

Red is dead. Saffron is on.

When the Mughals started ruling India, the land’s long-standing Hindu culture was already thousands of years old. Aurangzeb tried to destroy it in its totality, but ended up destroying his empire instead. The British followed and continued with the suppression of Hinduism, but couldn’t finish the job because they had to leave in 1947.

One would have thought that the great Hindu revival would finally begin that year, but it didn’t because of a certain gentleman called Jawaharlal Nehru who became our first Prime Minister. Nehru was a closet communist and that ideology believes in suppressing whatever culture a country has. 

Mao Zedong taught his people to be ashamed of the glorious Chinese culture, which was thousands of years old. British and American communists are ashamed of Christianity, whiteness and their respective empires.

So in India, we were taught to be ashamed of Hinduism while the Mughal and British cultures were eulogised. If you don’t believe me then just go back to your school days and remember the history books which just went on and on about the Mughal dynasty, the communist revolutions and the many great benefits of British rule.

Hinduism was something that had to be kept at home and not to be displayed in public else you were branded a communal bigot.  

***

The Cholas ruled the entire eastern coast of India along with Sri Lanka, the islands of Maldives and invaded areas of Malaysia and Indonesia. We are taught of the virtues of Mughal centralisation, but they did it hundreds of years before. Yet most history books in India reduced the Cholas to a mere paragraph in some cases. All our founding fathers, especially Mahatma Gandhi, promised to implement a permanent and total cow slaughter ban across India and abolish English as the official language by 1965. Yet, nothing of the sort happened. If anything, we became more British than the British.  

Hinduism was something that had to be kept at home and not to be displayed in public else you were branded a communal bigot. The RSS were a bunch of untouchables. The BJP due to its Hindu heritage couldn’t rule on its own and had to be “kept in check” by allies.That was the case till 2004 and Atal Bihari Vajpayee couldn’t change much and was happy to be part of the system. He was even dismissed as a “Congressi” by many hardline RSS supporters. Sonia Gandhi through her 10-year UPA "rule" took it to greater heights after that. She was a Roman Catholic who hired a Sikh prime minister, a Christian defence minister and a Muslim foreign minister. While there’s nothing wrong with that, her hatred against Hinduism showed in more ways than one.

Right To Education is virtually a “Reservation in Hindu Private Schools” Act. She tried to introduce the Communal Bill which demonised Hindus. There was a further revision in history books and school textbooks which took Nehruvian ideals further. #AdarshLiberals and the Left lobby were encouraged to criticise and even abuse Hinduism in louder and louder voices. Even in Bollywood there was a crackdown on scenes that merely criticised Christianity and Islam while Hindu abuse was cleared without a murmur.

However, all that changed overnight in 2014. 

Narendra Modi is the first prime minister who proudly wears his Hindu nationalism on his sleeve. Modi doing a Ganga aarti at Dashashwamedh Ghat in Varanasi celebrating his victory was symbolic in more ways than one. They say “Jaisa raja, waisi praja” (the people will be like the king). Well, more and more Indians are now wearing their Hindu nationalism on their sleeve and are no longer ashamed of their religion. The RSS, hitherto a pariah confined to the Hindi heartland, is gaining more and more acceptance and is even spreading to areas in the south such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu along with the east and north-east. Now, more and more RSS members are holding key posts of the government.  

It all culminated with the elevation of Yogi Adityanath as Uttar Pradesh chief minister. If Modi’s rise was considered next to impossible, then a saffron robe-wearing Mahant heading India’s most populous state was plain impossible. But it happened!  

Pre-2014, Communism was mainstream and Hinduism the fringe. Post-2014, Hinduism is mainstream and Communism the fringe.

(source: The great Hindu revival has begun - and we must celebrate it – by Sunil Rajguru).

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Anti-Hindu Media Fueled By Bigotry is a Growing Problem in India

Indian’s take pleasure in the fact that India is renowned as the world’s largest democracy.  However under the disguise of being massively populated yet governed democratically through a transparent electoral process, lies the truth: India’s democracy runs at the cost of Hindu rights.  This is the case due to the enactment of ongoing government policies related to actions of constant appeasement to minorities—the Muslims and Christians of India.  In other words it’s a form of reverse discrimination but to a degree that has become utterly unacceptable.

Primarily, this form of appeasement is seen through the biases in media that have become so prevalent that even an ordinary news reader, lacking any professional, analytical skills can point them out.  Take NDTV for example.  There will not be a day that goes by on this website, where an anti-Hindu article is not posted on the front page headlines.  Sadly it’s a good day for Hindus, if only one hateful headline is posted since it has become the norm to bash Hindus daily through a multitude of articles.

Furthermore, when there is major headline news such as the Mumbai attacks of November 2008, news reporters on sites such as NDTV write with the utmost care to not point out whether a Muslim might have been involved in the attacks even though the evidence of the crime proves guilty. Contrary to this, when a Hindu person is mentioned even as a possible suspect, news reporters in India have no shame or reluctance in typing negative headlines that defame Hindu’s across the country and world—when nothing has been proven.  The question is why is this being accepted by a majority in India?  If India comprises the world’s largest Hindu population then why are people not speaking out about such an injustice?

The pattern and consistency of this bias is clearly evident, yet people choose not to question such forms of abuse.  Just because a majority exists in a country, does not mean that they deserve constant criticism for merely being a majority because it is obvious that in India’s case, the voice is not of the Hindu’s.  In the desperation to appease and prove oneself to be a democratic country to the outside world arena, India’s government and media have forgotten to represent the Hindu majority of the country.  One may say, that how can such a misrepresentation be possible in a country that is presumably very transparent in its governing practices?  It is important to note that a large portion of the Indian population is made up of people living in poverty.  When a large number of people are poverty stricken, it is easy to manipulate this population to follow any hidden agenda that a person running for office might have.  So although at the surface the process seems clean and mildly bureaucratic, it is at the grassroots level that the corruption can be seen.  How does this all relate back to the biases of Indian media?

Anti-Hindu media bias is evident from this cartoon

***

(NDTV and CNN-IBN are claimed by many readers as 2 of the most known Anti-Hindu Media channels in India)

The media cannot get away with portraying Hindu’s as the so called “bad guys” or “villains” while others are always portrayed as the victims plainly because of their numbers.  The reality is that the Hindu population is decreasing in India while the Muslim and Christian populations are growing in their respective majority-based countries.  Hindu’s need to start paying attention to the inappropriate and unnecessary bias displayed in media and fight for what is not fair.  If we do not help our own kind then no one else will until it is too late and there is no turning back to recuperate what has been lost.

(source: Anti-Hindu Media Fueled By Bigotry is a Growing Problem in India - chakranews.com).

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The Beauty of Greater India: The Majapahit Empire

13th-Century Relics from Malaysia's Majapahit Kingdom Found Beneath Malacca River

Relics possibly dating back to the 13th-century Majapahit empire are believed to have been found along a 1.25 mile stretch beneath the Malacca river. Two weeks ago, a group of professional divers apparently discovered parts of a Hindu temple and a fort-like structure. They believed that these ancient finds could point to a submerged city that existed even before Parameswara founded Malacca in 1400.

Chief Minister Datuk Seri Idris Haron, when contacted, acknowledged that he had received a report about the sighting of the relics. "But we have yet to get an in-depth report. "The finding is still vague until archaeologists from the Heritage Department make their conclusions," he said.

The Majapahit Empire was centralized in east Java and was a vast archipelagic kingdom during its peak between 1293 and 1527. Malacca was once an important town for Majapahit's palace officials and soldiers who made the town their maritime headquarters.

(source: 13th-Century Relics from Malaysia's Majapahit Kingdom Found Beneath Malacca River - straitstimes.com).

Mosaic distinction - excerpts

In India, what passes for debate and discussion on this issue in the public sphere has so far been high on politicisation and wanting in scholarship. In academia, however, ironically even the Western variety that many Indian traditionalists like to ignorantly scoff at, there have been some articulate expositions of why the Abrahamic religions are fundamentally different from and unequal to the faith systems of the cultural Indosphere and elsewhere. The argument runs that the differences between the two groups are not simply about what to call the sine qua non (G-d) or even if it is indeed sine quibus non (many gods) but involve a radical difference in views on the political order as well. 

How Many Gods? 

Theo Sundermeier, professor of theology at Heidelberg University, makes an insightful distinction between religions in his Was ist Religion? Religionswissenschaft im theologischen Kontext between primary and secondary religions. The former, Sundermeier explains, developed over hundreds if not thousands of years, usually within a single culture, society, and language with which the religion is inextricably intertwined. These would include the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian religions as easily as Hinduism. The latter category of religions are those that originate from an act of revelation or foundation and are monotheistic, universal, and of the Book. Secondary religions denounce primary religions as paganism, a collection of superstitions, and idolatry. The three Abrahamic faiths fit this description well. This seemingly obvious categorisation holds an evolution of great import – from primary to secondary, religion changes from being a system that is irrevocably embedded in the institutional, linguistic, and cultural conditions of a society to become an autonomous system that can transcend political, ethnic, and other boundaries and transplant itself into any alien culture.  

As Jan Assmann, an Egyptologist at the University of Konstanz, describes in his Die Mosaische Unterscheidung: oder der Preis des Monotheismus, this change, which he calls the Mosaic distinction, is hardly about whether there is one god or there are many gods but about truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance.

Monotheistic faiths rest firmly on the distinction between their true god and the falseness of other gods; their truth does not stand in a complementary relationship to other truths but relegates any such claims to the realm of falsehood. They are exclusive, antagonistic, and explicitly codified and clearly communicated. As Assmann explains, the truth to be proclaimed comes complete with an enemy to be fought – only they know of “heretics and pagans, false doctrine, sects, superstition, idolatry, magic, ignorance, unbelief, heresy, and whatever other terms have been coined to designate what they denounce, persecute and proscribe as manifestations of untruth.” Secondary religions do not evolve from primary religions – rather, the emergence of the former represents a revolution, a rupture with the past that uncompromisingly divides the world between “Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Christians and Jews, Muslims and infidels, true believers and heretics.”

Such orthodoxy was unknown to the followers of primary religions and they found secondary religions intolerant.

Before the Mosaic distinction, knowledge and faith were not separate concepts. Pagans knew their gods but did not believe in them for they were not objects of faith; like myths, they were unverifiable to science but not necessarily devoid of knowledge. Before the Mosaic distinction, there were four kinds of fundamental truth: experiential (water is wet), mathematical (two plus two is four), historical (the life of Mokshagundam Visveswaraya), and truths conducive to life (ethics). The Mosaic distinction cleaved faith from knowledge and installed the former as a fifth truth that claimed knowledge of the highest authority even if it could not be verified on scientific grounds. The psychological and social impact of this differentiation is most visible in how Greek or Hindu science never conflicted with its philosophy, myths, or religious practices – each operated in their own domain. In fact, there are several anecdotes of highly acclaimed Hindu scientists subscribing to superstitions – S Ramanujan’s belief in astrology and CV Raman’s concern about the ill-effects of a solar eclipse come most readily to mind. But the monotheistic preoccupation with untruth in conjunction with faith-as-truth caused much acrimony in Christendom and the dar al-Islam. In contrast, Christianity and Islam excluded the pagan rather than themselves. The Great Commission of Christianity and the Islamic obligation of da’wah not only excludes the pagan but directly puts them on a path of conflict. This intolerance stems from the absolute certitude that faith brings to Christianity and Islam. As Assmann points out, it makes no sense to talk of tolerance in pagan systems because there is no notion of incompatibility: one can tolerate something that is incompatible and irresolvable with one’s own views but how does one tolerate something that is not so steadfastly oppositional?

Translatability 

Among the practitioners of primary religions, there has always been a translatability of divinity – the cosmology of different communities was believed to be compatible with each other. In a practice that has been the norm since at least Sumerian times, pagan communities sealed contracts upon oaths to their gods – for example, if the Akkadians wanted to consecrate a treaty with the Egyptians, the former would swear by Utu and the latter by Ra, the solar deities of their respective civilisations. There was no question of the falsehood of the other’s cosmology. The worship of each others’ gods was not unknown either – the Egyptian goddess Isis had a popular cult in Rome and the Syrian Atargatis and Phrygian Cybele and followers all around the Mediterranean. Usually, these gods would travel to foreign lands with traders and with increasing commerce and familiarity, would be established in the local pantheon as well. In the Indian context, the spread of Vedic Hinduism in India occurred along similar lines. The philosophical precepts of the Vedic Hindus were laid over the beliefs of the local communities and their gods were integrated into the Vedic pantheon. Many temples in Indian and Sri Lankan villages are dedicated to gramadevate – village deities – the legends behind whom trace their lineage back to a Puranic deity.

Disenchanting the World 

Were the rejection of Christianity and Islam by Indian traditionalists merely a matter of geography, it would be silly. Yet the grounds for suspicion and Otherness are twofold – a predatory proselytism of exclusive monotheisms and the entire cosmology of secondary religions. Neither of these traits have mellowed over the 1,000+ years secondary religions have been in India, and until they do, the two religions will remain outsiders to the Indosphere.

(source: Mosaic distinction - jaideepprabhu.org).

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Let Women Fight Feminist Propaganda Against Hinduism

In April 2015, the Dravidar Kazhagam had organized a thaali (called mangalsutra in some parts of the nation) removal festival in Tamil Nadu. Dravida Kazhagam, started by Periyar (EV Ramaswamy), the patriarch of the Dravidian movement, considers the thaali a symbol of slavery. The members of this ‘rationalist’ organization opined that thaali symbolized a woman’s bondage to husbands through the medium of caste and religious belief and they were doing away with the thread. A group of women took off their thaalis in a gesture they termed as “emancipation of womanhood from the shackles of existing social system”. 

The Hindu Makkal Katchi amused the believers by countering the protest through distribution of thaalis, vermillion and turmeric to women in temples. The thaali holds a powerful sentiment among Tamil people. Until recently, thaali was a powerful tool in the hands of film makers to whip up audience emotion. 

As the contentious topic was raised in social media, human rights activists and scribes left no stone unturned to conclude that the thaaliis just another chain/thread. To wear or remove the mangalsutra is an individual choice!

The propaganda is nothing but an orchestrated attempt that betrays a condescending attitude of half-baked intellectuals towards things that are Hindu. Misinterpreting a ritual out of ignorance of its history or, even, twisting the facts to suit a certain brand of politics is a standard operating procedure in this trend.

Mantras play a significant role in traditional Hindu wedding.The sacred hymns for wedding ceremony are mostly from Rg Veda.The priest chants the mantra mentioned  in Rg veda  10^th mandala. Vak daan,kanya daan, vara prekshan,mangala snanam,mangalya dharan, pani grahan and saptapadi  are the steps followed in Vedic wedding. Prior to mangalyadharan, the thread is prepared by chanting  Surya Vivaha Sukta (Rg Veda 10-85-47) summarizing the values of marriage. According to the Hindu belief, the mangalsutra is neither a thread of control nor just another chain.Before chanting the  mangalyadharan  hymn, blessings of Soma, Agni and Gandharva are invoked to bestow strength, beauty and youth upon the bride. During the mangalyadhaarana ceremony, the groom chants the shloka:

“maangalyam tantunaanena mama jeevana hetunaa/ kanthe badhanami subhage sajjeeva (or tvam jeeva) Saradaa Satam“

[This is a sacred thread; this is essential for my long life. I tie this around your neck, O maiden with many auspicious attributes! May we be happily married for a hundred years!]

Alas, what doesn’t fit into a predetermined script is opportunistically ignored. Over the past few years, there has been an orchestrated attempt to portray Hinduism as anti-women; the gratuitous attack has gathered momentum recently. Ironically, the poor depiction is backed by activists who have no knowledge of the subject. Manusmriti comes in handy to corroborate their half-baked knowledge. It is a tragedy of the discourse on the religious aspect of Hinduism that people (and not least the media) hear only what they want to hear; the folks who complain about Manusmriti have successfully positioned themselves as pro-emancipation, pro-liberalism, their perfidious behaviour notwithstanding.

The scriptures of this land comprising the Ramayana, Mahabharata, 18 Puranas, 4 Vedas, numerous Upapuranaas, 251 Upanishads, Dharmashastras and Agamas are kept obscured in debates on religion that are fuelled by the champions of liberal causes. Both pop spiritualists and revolutionaries need to understand the context, history and gist while commenting authoritatively on the subject.

If Hinduism had been anti-women, how did the Vedic period witness women intellectuals in numerous spheres — particularly in the spiritual field? The position of women in ancient Hindu society was unarguably an enviable one. In a debate between Shankaracharya and Mandana Mishra, the latter’s wife Ubhaya Bharathi was appointed to be the judge purely based on her scholarship, superior knowledge and spiritual attainments.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad contains verses which describe Maitreyi opting for Brahmavidya rather than wealth and worldly pleasures. During a philosophic debate, Gargi challenged Yajnavalkya with a volley of questions on aatman that baffled the learned scholar. The eminent women in the field of learning and scholarship who opted for Vedic studies were known as “Brahmavadinis”.

In the contemporary era, women scholars are conspicuous by their absence in theological discussions. No wonder, the systematic attack on religious Hinduism to illustrate the faith, any sect thereof, its followers and traditions as anti-women has escalated in the recent past. The reason to invoke the glorious chapters of Hindu scriptures has, therefore, arisen henceforth.

There are innumerable women in Hindu community with intense enthusiasm to learn and understand the scriptures. Women interested in the subject (irrespective of castes) should be groomed as experts in shashtrs, puranas, agamas so on and so forth. Make women participate fully in the mainstream of Hindu theological conferences. It would puncture the lies and the hit-and-run job carried out by the Breaking India forces can be dealt efficaciously. For example, the exiling of Sita in the Uttara Kanda of the Ramayana should be defended not by the pontiffs of Kanchi or Sringeri mutts, but by women scholars. This would set a new precedence in debates and will bring a new dimension to the discourse on rituals and traditions. Also, the deliberate attempt to portray Hinduism as anti-women will fall into disuse.  

It is time we did away with pop spiritualists and politicians who act as mediators on issues related to shastras and agamas. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad contains verses which describe Maitreyi opting for Brahmavidya rather than wealth and worldly pleasures. During a philosophic debate, Gargi challenged Yajnavalkya with a volley of questions on aatman that baffled the learned scholar. The eminent women in the field of learning and scholarship who opted for Vedic studies were known as “Brahmavadinis”.

In the contemporary era, women scholars are conspicuous by their absence in theological discussions. No wonder, the systematic attack on religious Hinduism to illustrate the faith, any sect thereof, its followers and traditions as anti-women has escalated in the recent past. The reason to invoke the glorious chapters of Hindu scriptures has, therefore, arisen henceforth.

There are innumerable women in Hindu community with intense enthusiasm to learn and understand the scriptures. Women interested in the subject (irrespective of castes) should be groomed as experts in shashtrs, puranas, agamas so on and so forth. Make women participate fully in the mainstream of Hindu theological conferences. It would puncture the lies and the hit-and-run job carried out by the Breaking India forces can be dealt efficaciously. For example, the exiling of Sita in the Uttara Kanda of the Ramayana should be defended not by the pontiffs of Kanchi or Sringeri mutts, but by women scholars. This would set a new precedence in debates and will bring a new dimension to the discourse on rituals and traditions. Also, the deliberate attempt to portray Hinduism as anti-women will fall into disuse.

Indeed, the Gita, shrutis, shaastras, sutras, puraanas, agamas describe the essence of Hinduism. The need of the hour is a counter-narrative lead by Apalas, Gargis, Ghoshas, Lopamudras, Indranis, Maitreyis and Ubhayabharatis of the modern times. The moment has come. Let the women take the mantle of leadership of Hinduism for its resurgence with the glory that once was associated with the culture of the land to the east of River Sindhu.

(source: Let Women Fight Feminist Propaganda Against Hinduism - sirfnews.com).

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