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What
European skeptics and scholars have said about Christianity
Yet Christianity's strange obsession to Convert Hindus
Everything
metaphysical is speculative. To make them into dogmas is to
invite trouble. This is what happened to all the Semitic faiths.
They turned into dogmas what could never be proved.
In contrast, Hinduism has few dogmas.
It never pronounces the last word. It is always on the quest for
the absolute truth. Hence the absence of major disputes in Hinduism.
Christianity is a minefield of dogmas.
(So is Islam, but it suppressed all dissent.) No wonder,
Christianity has little support among the European
intellectuals.
Few of the great thinkers and sceptics of
Europe
supported Christianity. Of them six are mentioned here. They
shaped the thinking of
Europe
in the 19th and 20th centuries. They are Kierkegard,
Nietzche, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Kafka and
Camus. (I do not mention Marx because he is not of
the same category.) What did they think of Christianity?
Soren Kierkegard
(1813 - 1855) was a bitter opponent of the organised church. In
his view, the church had betrayed Jesus Christ.
He
writes: “One often heard, especially
from priests, that one cannot live on nothing. But presently
these priests manage to do just that. Christianity does not
exist. And yet they live on it.”
Marxism made no impact on him. Logic must transcend itself to
faith, he asserts. Reason is insufficient, he says, to shape the
world.
Soren
Kierkegard, Fredrich Nietzche and Fyodor Dostoevsky
Christianity is a minefield of dogmas.
(So is Islam, but it suppressed all dissent.) No wonder,
Christianity has little support among the European
intellectuals.
Christianity's strange obsession to Convert Hindus and all
Indians.
***
Fredrich Nietzche
(1844-1900)
the great German Philosopher, poet, classical philologist, who
became one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of
the 19th century. He was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer in
his youth. Deeply disillusioned by his native faith
Christianity, he called it the immortal
blemish of mankind.
He
was a
genius. He proclaimed the death of
God—that is of the Christian god. He was hostile to the
church, held Christianity alien to the German culture and racial
instinct. Nietzche hated the Christian morality. He said it was
born out of weakness, meekness and suffering. He was never
friendly to the Jews. He says sin is a Jewish sentiment and a
Jewish invention.
Whole generations of Christians, he points out, have been
reproducing themselves with a guilty conscience. The church is
responsible for this. He saw the Christian church as a
collection of primitive and predatory cultures and beliefs.
Wherever Christianity had gone, the church had adapted itself to
existing superstitions and practices, according to him. It
illustrated the coarseness and baseness of its intellectuals
status in the world.
 
Jean-Paul
Sartre, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus. Few of the great thinkers and sceptics of
Europe
supported Christianity.
Refer
to What
Some Famous People Have Said About Christianity
***
Martin Luther allowed mediocrity to flourish, says Nietzche. To him,
socialism is misapplied Christianity. It would annihilate
individuality and maintain itself by force and terror, he
feared.
By giving life to man after death, Christianity has devalued
life on earth, he says. This is a serious charge. This has made
men turn more to the “other world.” Death is final, he
proclaimed. Only life matters. It is absolute. Christianity has
perverted all values by its obsession with death. The fear of
death has thus become a “European disease,” he says.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-
1881) was an epileptic. His own sufferings gave him profound
insight into human nature. In the process, he discovered Jesus
Christ. He was not a believer. He had his doubts. He had gone
through a “furnace of doubts”, he confesses. But he was
against atheism. An atheist cannot be a Russian, he proclaims.
True, he believed in the mission of an ideal church. And he
loved Christ.
Catholicism, he says, is no more Christian. It is turning into
pagan idolatry. It is worse than atheism. Protestantism is even
worse—it is approaching atheism. He was opposed to both
socialism and dictatorship.
“Religions”, says George Bernard
Shaw, “are of no use to
us today to understand the universe we live in. People who are
educated in these (religious) scraps are unfit to be citizens of
any country, he says. And this was more true of Christianity, he
opines. He says the Bible education makes you unfit for life.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 -
1980) dominated European thinking for a century. He rejected the
entire civilisation based on Christian humanism. He created a
“New Humanism” in contrast to the god-centered Christian
humanism. Sartre asserts that life has no providential design,
that it is meaningless. Hence the despair. Man must free himself
from this despair, he says. He wanted man to live a life
detached from moral responsibilities. It led to moral anarchy.
Franz Kafka, (1883 - 1924)
the most celebrated prophet of doom, lived in a world without
God. He did not believe in salvation. He
calls church a sham that makes a “fool of God.”
He was reconciled to the triumph… of evil. He was the most
existential of the existentialists. To him, there was no moral
order, no resurrection, no will to power, no role for women.
Kafka’s pageant of accusations against the present order
(European and Christian) is formidable.
Albert Camus (1913 -
1960) perhaps was the last of the great Titans, he wanted to
know whether it was possible to become a saint without relief in
God. He saw no sense in life. But he tried to find some meaning
in it. His dilemma was how to create a world of moral perfection
without belief in God. Though an existentialist, he tried to
move away from Sartre by turning back to the moral order.
(source:
European
sceptics on Christianity - By M S Menon - organiser.org).
***
The
Skeptical Invasion of
India
- By Rev. John F Hurst, An American
missionary
One
of the most serious questions connected with the press in India
is the presence of skeptical tendencies. There is a breakup of
the old faiths throughout the country. The trend is towards
either Christianity or infidelity. Many of the learned natives
would rather see the infidel writings from
England
and
America
introduced than Christianity. There are 600 hundred native
newspapers in India, all of which, with the exception of about six, are bitterly
opposed to the Christian religion. The natives associate
Christianity with the downfall of their ancient nationality, and
the incoming of Western ideas. They welcome anything which will
arrest Christianity. They have drifted away from their ancestral
faith, and have not accepted another. They are without any
religious desire or principle. That is the status of the average
educated Hindu today.
A
parallel to the
India
of today is to be found in the universal disruption of religions
of the
Roman Empire
in the first three centuries of our era. Happily, Christianity
was aggressive enough to step in and take the place of the dying
system.
Chrales
Bradlaugh and Thomas Paine.
The
skeptical invasion of British India worried the English and
American Christian missionaries.
***
To
India
the most skeptical productions of the American and English press
are sure to come. The infidel magazines reach the country by the
first mail. Charles Bradlaugh’s writings are
familiar to the people of
Madras
, just as Thomas
Paine’s “Age of Reason” is to the people
of
Calcutta
and Bombay. Sir William Robinson says that Bradlaugh’s writings are
doing more harm than all the absurdities teeming from the native
press. The Free Thinker’s Text Book and the National Reformer
are eagerly read. The Philosophic Inquirer, published in
Madras, is a thoroughly skeptical serial. It makes the “National
Reformer its proto-type, Bradlaugh its hero, and Annie Besant
its heroine. It produces some of the foulest impieties of the
West.” A rich citizen of Madras
spends large sum every year in importing French and English
works, and distributing them among his countrymen. One of these,
the “Bible in
India
,” a translation of Louis
Jacolliot’s books, tries to prove that the Hebrew
and Christian revelation have their origin in Hinduism.
In
a circular signed by Lord
Shaftesbury and others, dated June 1883, was the
following:
“The literature of
India
itself is very inferior, and shoals of atheistic and infidel
publications are every year being sent to
India
from England. It is the bounden duty of Christian men to counteract this
evil by aiding to create a healthy Christian literature.” The
Rev. S P Jacobs reports that the country seems flooded with
literature opposing Christianity; that the Calcutta Theosophical
Society receives a large subscription from a Maharajah. In India, a purely secular education and an acquaintance with Western
science are taking from the people their ancestral religion and
destroying all faith. Infidelity, atheism, and universal
skepticism are being introduced along with European literature
and culture; and unless we hasten to give them the Gospel of
Jesus Christ they will be cast adrift, without chart or compass,
or a sea of doubts and errors.’
England
is making an educated India. But she is not making a Christian India.
Note:
Lord
Shaftesbury (1801 - 1885) was
an evangelical
of the Evangelicals, who had a fervent belief in belief in Protestant
Anglicanism.
(source:
Indika: The Country and the people of India and Ceylon
- By Rev. John
F Hurst p. 472
– 476). Refer
to Sex,
Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church’s 2000-year
Paper Trail of Sexual
Abuse - By
Thomas
Doyle, AW Richard Sipe & Patrick Wall
(LA:
Volt Press, 2006).
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of Page
End
free market fundamentalism and India's rootless
Elites
America
is
over as a financial superpower; the world financial system will
now be multi-polar. Many feel the crisis was caused by
Anglo-Saxon greed for double-digit profits and unconscionable
bonuses for bankers and company executives.
Refer to American
Power Is on the Wane - By Paul Kennedy - wsj.com
The
high tide of realism has finally hit Washington. Wall Street’s financial profligacy and lack of
accountability and the mythical regulations by the Federal
Reserve (itself owned by private bankers through private
equity), have finally brought the pigeons home to roost. For America, the party is over – the once sole superpower will no longer
be able to flex its muscles with impunity all over the globe.
The
American Model of Governance is a failure. The system which
allowed Presidents to induct private sector cronies into the
highest echelons of government gave de facto control of the
economy, polity, and even foreign policy, to Corporates rather
than professionals with accountability. Over time, this eroded
all institutions through de facto privatisation of all
activities, to the point that even Intelligence gathering has
been out-sourced! American government today is truly a headless
torso.
The
Wall Street hustlers are everywhere. India’s rootless elite is increasingly enamoured of the American
model – oblivious of its obvious failures – precisely
because it wishes to enjoy the benefits of untrammelled power
without responsibility. A growing army of corporate
lobbyists – abetted by media, bureaucracy, and other fellow
travellers – want to distort the polity and the economy for
private gain, in the name of higher efficiency. They support
appropriation of farmlands for special economic zones, big
industry in retail, shopping malls in place of local kirana
stores, and privatisation of banks, pension and provident funds
- in other words, corporate takeover of the wealth of ordinary
people. As
the
United States
is forced to deconstruct the American Dream, to retrieve
governance from the usurious classes, and stop the prostitution
of intellectuals before Mammon, this class will feel both
orphaned and betrayed.
The
rest of us will revel in the validation of the Hindu
varna
system as a
hierarchy of values relevant to all ages – brains on top (brahmin),
state power on the side (kshatriya),
wealth-generators in the middle (vaishya)
and the rest of the people all around (shudra).
In Hindu India, wealth served the society and the state; a
system where wealth subordinates society and state is Asuric,
immoral, and destructive of all human values.
(source: End
free market fundamentalism - By Sandhya Jain -
vijayvaani.com).
***
Why did Barack Obama and Bobby
Jindal become Christians?
A
church-going Christian is a necessary credential for high
political office
A
conservative columnist in the New York Times, William Kristol,
suggested Bobby Jindal’s name as a possible running mate for the
Republican presidential nominee, John McCain. Bobby
Jindal is the recently elected governor of Louisiana
and in Kristol’s view, he has several qualities that recommend
him. He is young: at 36, he is barely half John McCain’s 71
years and a McCain-Jindal ticket would help draw the sting of the
charge that McCain is too old to run. He is properly conservative,
unlike McCain who is suspected by the Republican base of flirting
with liberal positions when it comes to ‘social’ issues such
as abortion. Jindal is an uncompromising hardliner on abortion: he
opposes it in every case, even if the pregnancy is the result of
incest or rape.
It
helps that he’s very bright (he graduated from Brown and went on
to do a Masters at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship) and has an
extraordinary resumé given his youth. He was the secretary of
Louisiana’s department of health at the age of 24, he has been
an assistant secretary of state at the federal level under George
W. Bush, a two-term Congressman, president of the Louisiana
university system and now governor. Also, in a year where the
Democrats are making history with Barack Obama, it doesn’t hurt
that Bobby Jindal is every bit as brown as the senator from
Illinois.
A
church-going Christian is a necessary credential for high
political office
Bobby
Jindal and Barack Hussain Obama
A
church-going Christian is a necessary credential for high
political office. In America’s melting pot, immigrants from all
over the world are meant to be slow-cooked into an Anglo sameness.
Bobby
Jindal’s Roman Catholicism has helped him become a mainstream
Republican in a state that’s otherwise racially polarized. It
has helped him reach out to white conservative voters who might
otherwise have been disinclined to vote for a brown Hindu.
Jindal
believes in exorcisms and intelligent design
(creationism). In
the Chinese American community, some three and a half million
strong, the largest and oldest Asian community in the US,
Christianity is the largest religion. In the Korean American
community, it is the majority religion.Unlike
India — where religious minorities, despite discrimination,
thrive demographically — in America, cultural assimilation seems
to imply religious assimilation.
***
Ideologically,
Obama and Jindal occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum (Obama
has an ultra-liberal voting record while Jindal’s positions are
right of Genghis Khan’s) but they do have one thing in common:
both men weren’t born Christian, they became Christians.
Obama’s white mother practised social anthropology more
enthusiastically than she did her Christian faith. His father and
step-father were nominally Muslim. Jindal’s parents are still
Hindus.
Jindal and Obama ascribe their conversion to Christianity
to spiritual experiences. This must be true, but it’s hard not
to see in their embrace of Christianity a
more instrumental purpose. Despite the constitutional
separation of church and state in the United States America, being
a church-going Christian is a necessary credential for high
political office.
The one exception that I can think of is Senator Joseph
Lieberman, who recently retained his Senate seat as an independent
candidate. Lieberman was also Al Gore’s running mate in the
former’s ill-fated presidential campaign in 2000. In America’s
political and intellectual culture, Jews tend to be seen as ur-Christians,
as people of roughly the same Book. The
constant invocation of the Judaeo-Christian bedrock of Western
civilization, reinforces this exceptional status.
Obama’s initiation into Christianity was an essential
preliminary to a career in politics. The fact that he had a Muslim
father, Muslim relatives in Kenya and a Muslim middle name (Hussain)
required him to assert a visible public identity that would
distance him from the politically damaging perception that he was
some manner of Muslim.
Similarly
Bobby Jindal’s
Roman Catholicism has helped him become a mainstream Republican in
a state that’s otherwise racially polarized. It has helped him
reach out to white conservative voters who might otherwise have
been disinclined to vote for a brown
Hindu.
In
America’s melting pot,
immigrants from all over the world are meant to be slow-cooked
into an Anglo sameness. An immigrant is meant to learn English and his new country’s laws (for
America is a nation of laws) on his way to becoming a citizen of
the world’s oldest secular republic. What he isn’t told
(because it isn’t formally required of him) is that the liquid
in that melting pot, the stock in which Americans are stewed, is
subtly Christian. Not just immigrants seeking high office, but
ordinary immigrants of all sorts, convert over time to
Christianity. In the Chinese American community,
some three and a half million strong, the largest and oldest Asian
community in the US, Christianity is
the largest religion. In the Korean
American community, it is the majority religion.
Unlike India — where
religious minorities, despite discrimination, thrive
demographically — in America,
cultural assimilation seems to imply religious assimilation.
Equally, it’s difficult not to feel disappointed that
politicians
as prodigiously talented as Barack Obama and Bobby Jindal need to
be ostentatiously religious to succeed as public men. Barack Obama
has courageously refused to wear his patriotism on his coat lapel
(in his refusal to wear an American flag pin), but he has had to
wear his Christianity on his sleeve.
(source: Why
did Barack Obama and Bobby Jindal become Christians? - By By
Mukul Kesavan
- telegraphindia.com). Refer
to Jindal:
An
Exorcist? Watch
Washington’s
history of slavery - abcnews.com
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of Page
Gore Vidal
(1925 - ) well known American writer, the
eminent historian, and a public figure for over fifty years, in
his Lowell Lecture at Harvard University given April 20, 1996
observed:
“When
the white race broke out of Europe 500 years ago,… inspired by
a raging sky-god, the whites were able to pretend that their
conquests were in order to bring the One God to everyone,
particularly those with older and subtler religions. ………
“From
a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old
Testament,
three antihuman
religions
have evolved --Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These
are sky-god religions.
They are, literally, patriarchal --God is the omnipotent
father-- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years. The
sky-god is a jealous god, of course. Those who would reject him
must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately,
totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly
serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature
endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth
“I
regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the
human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam --
good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well,
frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race
…”
“More people have been killed in the name of Jesus
Christ than any other name in the
history of the world.”
"Christianity
is such a silly religion."
(source:
Monotheism
and its discontents - By Gore
Vidal and
Lowell
Lecture at Harvard University given - By Gore Vidal - April
20, 1996 and positiveatheism.com
and Gore
Vidal, in Time
magazine,
September 28, 1992, p. 66, from James
A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief.
Watch
the movie - Indoctrination
in Jesus Camp
***
Ours is an era of
capitalism-an era marked by financial prowess, controlled by
financial czars, and ruled by corrupt politicos. The greatest
weapon of our times is not one that kills the body"s power
to breathe, but the one which kills the mind"s power to
reason-propaganda. Any person or institution which successfully
utilizes this system is the one who can be victorious in all
endeavors. Organizations in this country, apart from political
parties, who use propaganda are Christian missionary
institutions. Their sole reason for being is to proselytize the
masses, largely Hindus, into ardent Christians.
Beginning from the time of the British, we have developed a
system of negation. We have often demeaned our own religions,
cultures, and knowledge, thereafter hailing the western ones.
How often have we spoken of caste, creed, and other
discriminatory practices like Sati and child marriage in our
textbook? And how much have we cared to inform our generation
about the brutality of Christianity which has for itself the
most blood-soaked history?
Recently, when violence flamed in Khandamal district of Orissa, mainline
media were quick enough to criticize the violent agitation of
VHP, while at the same time hastening to defend the foreign
Christian missionaries whom they called "peaceful". I
am still not clear as to what is making our eminent journalists
term those missionaries "peaceful", whereas their
ambitions are such that they can"t be achieved without
disturbing peace and harmony.
In this context, I recall an instance where our late President, Dr.
Rajendra Prasad
(1884 - 1963) had once gone to
Assam
where he visited the schools and hospitals established by
Christian missionaries in those hilly regions. He expressed his
appreciation and yet, also advised them saying "You
have no doubt done very good work. But do not exploit all these
things for the purpose of proselytization."
However, one of the missionaries bluntly replied, "If we
had been prompted to do all this by mere humanitarian
considerations, why should we have come all the way here? Why
should we have spent so much money? We are here for only one
reason and that is to increase the number of followers of our
Lord Jesus Christ."
Dr. Rajendra
Prasad, India's first President and freedom fighters, Nehru,
Bhulabhai Desai and Rajendra Prasad as well as Gandhi were all
devout Hindus.
What would
they say about this rampant Christian spiritual Imperialism in
India today?
***
These missionaries feel that all tactics, however foul, are
fair. The various surreptitious and mean methods they employ for
conversion are all too well-known. There is the case of a
village where, in the census, the Christian missionaries got the
whole population registered as Christians. When this was
revealed, the people protested, and were told by the
missionaries, "Nothing can be done now. You have been
registered as Christians in government records. So you have to
behave as Christians hereafter." The poor Hindu villagers,
cut off from the support and succor of the indifferent Hindu
society, believed their words and embraced Christianity. It is
through such tactics that they are swelling their numbers with
each passing day. It is popular knowledge that many leading
Christian missionaries have often declared unequivocally that
their one single aim is to make this country "a Kingdom
of
Christ
".
What
many people don't know is that Christ was born a Jew, lived
a Jew, and died a Jew. He is not the founder of Christianity. If
Christ could form a group of people called Christians and divide
a section of society bringing about several wars and killing
millions of people, then Christ cannot be considered a holy man.
Christ did not build churches or sit in confession boxes. The
cunning priests made Christ a son of God and created sin, hell,
and heaven, to terrorize the people so that they can dominate
and exploit them. It is evident that Christianity, followed by
Islam, has killed more people than anything else in the world.
Edward
Gibbons and Dr. David Frawley
It
is evident that Christianity, followed by Islam, has killed more
people than anything else in the world. Christianity
(like its angry sibling, Islam) does not have a reputation for
tolerance and respect for other religions.
The Christian need to convert the entire world has been an
historical obsession.
***
Sometime
ago, I happened to read Edward
Gibbons "Decline and Fall of Roman Empire".
In the book, he makes an observation on early Christians and
their tactics for conversion. Gibbons quotes a Roman proconsul
who wrote that Christians have a very effective method of
getting noticed and portraying themselves as "victims"
in order to advance their cause. Whenever a minute transgression
occurs, or even an attempt is made to implement law against
them, they kick up a fuss and in such a rowdy manner that one
would think that a "great injustice" had been
committed against them!
Christianity
does not have a reputation for tolerance and respect for other
religions. The Christian need to convert the entire world has
been an historical obsession that continues in major Christian
fundamentalist groups even today-both Protestant and Catholic.
The Christian missionaries" failure to honor other
religions, particularly non-biblical traditions, is well-known,
with Christians still denigrating the sophisticated yogic
traditions of
Asia
as mere superstition, idolatry, and polytheism.
In
the modern secular world, Christians along with Muslims, now
demand conversion as a democratic right, even though their
religion is authoritarian, and not democratic, accepting only
one way; and not honoring pluralism in approaching the
"Divine".
Christians in India, who exaggerate such minor incidents, somehow never speak of
the fact that more churches have been burnt in
America
in recent years than in India. Several dozen Black American churches were burnt to the
ground. Christian priests and ministers are robbed, assaulted,
and sometimes killed in all Western countries in numbers unlike
what occurs in India. We should note that the number of priests in
America
arrested for sexual molestation of children far surpasses the
priests assaulted in India. Should we use that to make conclusions about the nature of
Christianity?
It is a fact that many more pagans were killed by Christians,
and thousands of pagan temples destroyed throughout
Europe
by this "peaceful" community. The great Greek
(Neo-platonic) Academy in
Alexandria
was destroyed and its illustrious scholars like Hypatia, killed
by Cyril-none other than "Saint Cyril"! The number of
Native Americans killed or forcibly converted by Catholics is in
the millions, and yet Catholics rush to martyr the few priests
killed by Native Americans. There are many more such incidents
of Christian oppression.
Writes David
Frawley in his book "The
Missionary Ploy"- "As a former Catholic, I know in what little esteem the
Church holds Hinduism and Buddhism with all their great sages
and yogis. Christianity, like Islam, sees tolerance not as a
virtue to be emulated but as a weakness to be exploited.
Were
Christians really to honor Hinduism as a valid religion, all
Hindu-Christian hostility could easily come to an end. As
long as Christians hold that theirs alone is the "True
Faith" and work to convert members of other religions in
one way or another, they should not be surprised if members of
other religions do not welcome their presence."
It
is only a matter of time before missionary Christianity is seen
for what is imperialism in the name of God and Christ; the
proverbial wolf in sheep"s clothing. It is a political,
worldly movement, with little spirituality in it.
Unfortunately, such Christians confuse real Divine work, which involves
improving the self through introspection, with the institutional
work of imposing a single belief upon all humanity. This
political view of religion has no place in the global age of
consciousness that is dawning on enlightened minds all over the
world today. The
quicker it comes to an end, the better it will be for all of
humanity!
(source:
-
By
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