Sr Fan Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 People can learn lot of things ......just watch MSD......see his body language.... Okay you are Andrew Strauss..... I am Dhoni........ Lets play.....Man to Man......Let the better player win...... so much positiveness. No lingering colonial effects.....no baggage.... Sometimes history is not good. Feeling empowered, feeling positive, feeling responsible......this is a profound attitude.....it will do wonders my bros...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Conversion Tactics Charitable Allurement Missionaries take advantage of those in need, especially the poor and children, to convert them Most Missionary organizations disguise their conversion efforts as charity organization. Often in the press, we hear about “faith-based initiatives” but that is just a euphemism for aggressive and violent conversion organizations. In the Western media, Missionaries are portrayed as true saviors who feed the hungry and nurse the sick. However, Missionaries do not do this for the good of humanity, but instead to convert people to Christianity. Missionaries have also decided to target the poorest for conversions, not because they are the neediest, but rather, because they can be easily bribed into changing their faith, and they can not easily report to the press the atrocities which the Missionaries have inflicted upon them. Some people wonder fail to see the maliciousness of conversion through charitable acts. They say that though they are converting, Missionaries are also helping the poor which is more important. However, this is wrong because in times of need humans will often do anything if lured by material possessions. For example, prostitution is a despicable but existing profession because people are lured so much by money that they will sell their Modies. Similarly, one who is converted through “charitable” means is selling their religion and moral beliefs for material possessions. Just as prostitution is wrong and despicable, regardless of the prostitutes financial situation, conversion is also wrong regardless of the converts financially situation. Therefore conversion through charitable inducement is a forcible conversion. Conversion should only happen through spiritual persuasion and not through the gifting of material possessions. Below are some of the tactics which Missionaries use in the name of charity to convert: 1. Gifts – By far the most common means of conversion is by buying the poor. In one tribal village, Missionaries promised the head of each household pair of nylon pants if he converted to Christianity and a motorbike if he converted his whole family. In a matter of a few months, the Missionaries had “spread the gospel” along with pants and motorbikes to the entire village. To convert rich and middle-class non-Christians, Missionaries, who are well-funded by Western churches, buy their way in by giving money, computers to universities, and scholarships to children of influential officials. In other cases instead of feeding the starving, Missionaries give away a walkman with a tape of the Bible in their own language to brainwash them instead. Mahatma Gandhi wrote the following on one incident which he witnessed: "Only the other day a missionary descended on a famine area with money in his pocket, distributed it among the famine stricken, converted them to his fold, took charge of their temple and demolished it. This is outrageous." 2. Adoption & Child Sponsorship – Many innocent looking child sponsorship programs, such as Christian Children's Fund and World Vision, that often advertise on U.S. television are guilty of forced conversions. Many often say, “For 50 cents a day, you'll make a real impact on the life of a child and their community!” However, instead of nurturing these children as they claim, they use this money to buy children of poor non-Christian families (like slaves!). The children unwillingly are then separated from their mothers and are raised by Missionaries who brainwash them with Christian fundamentalist ideas. In other cases, Missionaries will “bribe” the entire family of the child to convert to Christianity. 3. Jobs - In 1999, the Indian Church of Christ in Assam was caught red-handed for forcibly converting at least 14 Hindus. Over a period of six months the missionaries belonging to this Church offered money, jobs and other economic benefits to these extremely poor Hindus if they adopted Christianity. These Hindus were threatened with dire consequences if they revealed to anyone the circumstances under which they had been converted. However, two brave individuals who had been forcibly converted came to the police and told them the details of how Christian priests had lured them to their residence with the promise of jobs and money. In return for this favor, the priests then asked these individuals to convert to Christianity. 4. Loans - When conversions by force not being possible, the methods that are applied are inducements and fraud. Inducements are called “social service” or “charitable” activities. In most cases, the social service benefits were provided only to those who agreed to convert. A loan given to a tribal is cancelled if he, along with his family, becomes a Christian. This inducement has been documented in Madhya Pradesh, though the practices that have been narrated are the ones that are a common practice all over India, and indeed in the rest of the world. Summary True social service should be done without expecting anything in return from the recipient. Otherwise it becomes a debased and at best can have an accidental redeeming value. If the motive is bad, then the social service has no real merit. There are many organizations that are doing noble service without expecting anything in return. And in offering such services, the Hindus are very actively involved. During his meetings with the Christian missionaries, Mahatma Gandhi had said that they are doing social service with the ulterior motive of conversions. He asked them to give up this offensive program. He also said to them that if this situation continued in a free India he would ask the foreign missionaries to leave the country. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sharvas Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 People can learn lot of things ......just watch MSD......see his body language.... Okay you are Andrew Strauss..... I am Dhoni........ Lets play.....Man to Man......Let the better player win...... so much positiveness. No lingering colonial effects.....no baggage.... Sometimes history is not good. Feeling empowered, feeling positive, feeling responsible......this is a profound attitude.....it will do wonders my bros...... chala baga chepparu anna Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KilaDi No.1 Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Such people are merrily welcome to practice whatever religion they like bhayya...But they are just exceptions to a rule ...and majority of them converted are either by force or by temptations. The temptations can be money, power, position, allurements for education, medicinal facilities or whatever it may be.. All these people are lured for what ever needs they have.. western society is keeping a keen watch on our people's needs to convert them.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Deception, Lies & Deceit Missionaries often use devious tactics to decieve innocent villagers in order to convert them. Christian Missionaries on one hand preach high moral values, yet at the same time, they follow the lowest most despicable ones in order to convert people to their religion. Missionaries especially prey on the poorest, most rural folk under the guise of helping them out of poverty when in fact they have chosen to convert them because they are the most uneducated and therefore most likely to fall for their deception. 1. Fake Medicines – One common tactic employed by Missionaries is to give a sick villager fake medicines which have no medicinal value and ask them to worship in the name of their faith for wellness. After several days, the missionary gives the villager an identical dose of the medicine, but this time it is the real medicine. Then the missionary will instruct the villager to now pray to Jesus. Soon after, due to the medicine and not due to Jesus, the villager will be cured. The uneducated and gullible villager, however, will attribute his cure to Jesus and convert to Christianity. 2. Floating Idols – In rural villages in India, Missionaries and place a stone or metal idol of a Hindu Deity in bring a bucket of water. The statue will sink in the bucket. Next the Missionary bring a wax-coated idol of Jesus or Virgin Mary (though Christianity prohibits idols) and places that in the bucket. Due the wax-coat, the Christian idol will float. The Missionary will then conclude that because the Christian idol floated, it is “higher” and, therefore, better than the Hindu one. The uneducated villager, not knowing anything about buoyancy or density, falls for the Missionary’s ridiculous explanation and converts to Christianity. 3. Fraudulent Saints – Often Missionaries will disguise themselves as religious leaders of the local religion and subtly attempt to convert the locals. The classic example was that of Robert de Nobili, a Jesuit from France, who came to India in the early 17th century. He adopted the saffron robe, started to live in a hut, squatted on the floor for conducting his discourses, became a vegetarian and gave up liquor, projected that he was a Brahmin saint from Rome and that the Bible was one of the lost Vedas (Hindu holy scriptures), and generally tried to pass himself as another Hindu sanyasi (saint). He was successful, and many Hindus came to him for spiritual reasons of which many he converted. Though Nobili used this tactic centuries ago, this deceitful and treacherous method is still in use by Missionaries even today. 4. Blasphemy & Impurity – Another tactic used my Christian is to somehow make the victim impure to their religion in some way. Then the Missionary will convince the victim that they can no longer practice their old faith due to their blasphemy, and therefore they must accept Christianity. The most infamous incident is known as the “Sepoy Rebellion”. In 1857, British General Lord Canning gave orders for the British to mix crushed cow and xxx bones into the salt, butter and sugar rations of his Indian troops. In addition the British greased Enfield rifle cartridges with cow and xxx fat. After some time, it was discovered by the troops that the rations they had consumed and the mouth-loaded cartridges had been contaminated with animal fats. This led many devout Hindu and Muslim to believe they were no longer pious members of their respective religions and so many were forced to convert. This outrage led to a massive war-like rebellion by the Hindu and Muslim troops which was eventually quelled by British. By making one impure to their religion, shows the paramount of hatred and disrespect that Christian Missionaries have for all other religions. 5. Guilt & Accusations – In 1975, Christian Missionaries were unsuccessful in converting the Panare Native Americans of the Colorado Valley. The missionaries had converted the Bible to their native language, but the peaceful and simple tribe could not understand the concepts of sin, guilt, war and plagues. So instead, the missionaries changed the Bible so that instead of the Romans and others, the Panare were responsible for the death of Jesus. One excerpt read: ”The Panare killed Jesus Christ, because they were wicked. Let's kill Jesus Christ, said the Panare. The Panare seized Jesus Christ. The Panare killed in this way. The laid a cross on the ground. They fastened his hands and his feet against the wooden beams, with nails. They raised him straight up, nailed. The man died like that, nailed. Thus the Panare killed Jesus Christ… God will burn you all, burn all the animals, burn also the earth, the heavens, absolutely everything. He will burn also the Panare themselves. God will exterminate the Panare by throwing them on the fire. It is a huge fire. I am going to hurl the Panare into the fire, said God.” And the simplistic Panare tribe immediately claimed they loved Jesus, fearing they would be burnt by God. Missionaries seem to go to any extent to convert others, even if it requires gross deception and misrepresentation of their own holy book, the Bible will for the benefit of “winning souls”. 6. False Identities – To convert a more educated and pious individual, a Missionary will pretend that he/she has a religious background that is the same as yours. For example, a Missionary who is targeting a Hindu may tell the Hindu that he (or a Christian friend or acquaintance) was once an orthodox Hindu, or that he had a solid Hindu education, a traditional Hindu family life, etc. This is almost always an outright lie so that you will open up to him. The hidden message that he is attempting to convey is that he came to believe in Jesus after knowing and overcoming all of the Hindu objections, and therefore, the Hindu he is targeting should also try to follow the same path, (which he never really took). Usually, all that is necessary to expose this type of hoax is to ask him about various small details of Hindu life that any observant Hindu child would know, and see how he responds. In almost all cases, he will begin to hedge about the extent of his "background" and "Hindu knowledge". Unfortunately, most Hindu or targets of other religions are themselves not knowledgeable enough to be able to expose this type of deception and quite often Missionaries are successful. 7. Secret Baptism – Another tactic that is deceptively employed by Missionaries is to “baptize” a victim without their knowledge. Then to reveal that they had been baptized and they must convert to Christianity. Though well-documented, it is little known that the most famous perpetrator was Mother Teresa and her sisters. “For Mother (Teresa), it was the spiritual well-being of the poor that mattered most. Material aid was a means of reaching their souls, of showing the poor that God loved them. In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to heaven’. An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.” 7. Miracles – One of the most despicable ways of deception is how Missionaries pray on young rural school children. The school bus will stop suddenly. Young kids are told that they must pray 'Krishna' to try and restart it, but it fails to do so. Then they try 'Rama', then 'Guru Nanak', then 'Allah' etc. Finally, after exhausting the common names in India for spiritual authority, they are asked to say 'Jesus' all together, and at that time the bus suddenly starts. Everyone applauds the demonstration of Jesus' love and power. 8. Miracle Boxes – Missionaries will place "Miracle boxes" are put in local churches: The gullible villager writes out a request - a loan, a pucca house, fees for the son's schooling. A few weeks later, the miracle happens, paid for by Western Christian donations. And the whole family converts believing it is a miracle of Jesus, making others in the village follow suit. Summary All in all, Christian Missionaries will not hesitate to distort, deceive and defame others in order to propagate their religion. Their devious tactics break every fundamental rule or human benevolence. Instead Missionaries often bring out the worst of humankind Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Educational Indoctrination Innocent Indian children being brainwashed and forced to read the Bible in a Christian School. Missionaries have set up thousands of Christian schools, colleges and other education institutions in India, through funding from foreign churches. These schools are simply established for subtle proselytization of the masses. Because many of these schools were set up in India under British rule, there is a common misconception that these schools have a higher standard of education and discipline. It is very important that all children be raised in their respective religious traditions. The first impressions are the most lasting, and they are what the children have to deal with throughout their lives. This is because early impressions are locked in the memory pattern of their subconscious minds. And Missionaries make use of this fact, to attempt to subtle convert children at a young age. Though these institutions are open to people of any religion, they discriminate against non-Christian faiths and attempt to convert students by the following means: 1. Curriculum Control - The entire education system in Guyana is controlled by that dominant class that promotes Westernized and Christian orientation. Having appropriated the power to define and delimit what is legitimate and not, this social bloc has monopolized the curriculum constructing it in a way that deliberately emphasizes western and Christian mores while at the same time deliberately excluding and de-emphasizing anything Hindu and Islamic in particular and Indian in general. By just going through the textbooks produced in Guyana one can hardly imagine that this is a country with a population that is half Hindu and Muslim .2. Dominance of Missionary Schools - Over the years there have been successful attempts through the instrument of the state to de-emphasize Hindu and Muslim contributions to the development of education in Guyana while at the same time reinforcing and glorifying the Christian contribution. In 1976 all denominational schools (and other institutions) were required by the government of the day to change their names in order to de-link them from their religious and ethnic background. While the government made sure that schools with Indian, Hindu and Muslim names complied with the requirement, Christian schools were never really affected. Thus Indian Educational Trust College became Richard Ishmael Secondary, Muslim Trust College became Brickdams Secondary school, Hindu college became Cove and John Secondary and Maha Sabha Secondary became Leonora Secondary. On the other hand, officially and otherwise, St. Stanislaus, St. Joseph's, St. Rose's, St, Agnes, St. John's, Sacred Heart, Stella Maris, Christ Church and others have retained their former names and their distinctive histories. 3. Defamation - Under the guise of moral education in schools when a Hindu or Muslim child is forced to listen to a Christian functionary who by force of habit and dogmatic indoctrination must invariably, subtly and otherwise, denigrate the Hindu and Muslim traditions, this is in violation of the fundamental right and the civil liberty of the child. Priests, nuns and teachers in Christian schools often defame and blasphemize Hinduism and other religions in their regular lessons. Hindu students who graduate from such institutions usually do not convert to Christianity, but through the influence of their Christian mentors, they end up mocking temples/mosques, scriptures and their own religious leaders for the rest of their lives. 4. On Campus Prayers – Most Christian institutions have mandatory daily prayers. In many schools, non-Christian students are unjustly forced to attend Christian masses and recite Christian prayers. In other schools, non-Christians have their respective prayer sessions at the same time. However, the Christian prayers are held in air-conditioned chapels, while non-Christians wishing to pray must hold their services outside in the hot Indian sun. Naturally, many non-Christian students will decide to seek shelter in the chapel and are essentially forced to attend Christian services. 5. Christian Only Teachers - Some Christian schools only employ Christian teachers and lecturers for all subjects. These Christian teachers often defame other religions and preach about Jesus Christ in the middle of physics, chemistry, etc. lectures to students who have come to learn their academic material and not about Chrstianity. 6. Beatings – In Assam, India, at the English medium Ashapalli High School it is mandatory for all students to attend church every day before classes begin. Even after following the bigoted ways of this missionary school, the Hindu and Buddhist children are ill-treated and physically abused by the Christian staff of the school. Kalindi Rani Chakma was a class VIII Buddhist student of the school; therefore she was abused mentally and physically on a daily basis by her Christian teachers. One such revolting incident has put her future academic career in jeopardy. One evening Kalindi Rani was called to the Principal, H. Lamare's residence due to alleged non-compliance of her daily routines. Once there Kalindi Rani was incessantly caned by Lamare. She begged for him to stop, but he continued to beat her because of his blind hatred for all Hindus and Buddhists. While he beat her he asked her, "Why don't you believe in Christ? What is the use of worshipping Buddha and Kali? As a result Kalidi Rani went into shock and suffered several painful bruises throughout her whole body. She did not attend school until the day after the incident. When she went back to school, once again, Lamare abused her-both verbally and physically. She is now terrified of attending school. Lamare did not punish Kalindi Rani because she did not complete her daily tasks. He beat her like a mad man because she was a heathen pagan who did not worship Christ. He has been given the divine sanction to do so by the Church establishment in India. Like other Christian Fundamentalists, he too was brainwashed to believe that followers of Christ are superior to the “heathen pagans”! 7. Scaldings - In another display of Christian Missionary barbarism, a nun belonging to the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, scalded four little Hindu girls with a hot knife. Sister Francesca is the nun in charge of Missionaries of Charity's Mahatma Gandhi Welfare Center. A young Hindu girl named Kavery was playing inside the center with three other girls when the nun approached them and accused them of stealing money. The nun then heated a knife on an electric heater and pressed in on the hands of the four children. When Kavery's father, Kabiram, heard about the incident he went to the Bowbazar police station to file a complaint, but the police refused to register a case until the local residents forced them to do so. The head of Missionaries of Charity, Sister Nirmala, said that as a disciplinary action she has asked the guilty nun to discontinue her duties and take rest for the time being! Is this a punishment or a reward for following the torture of non-Christians? Summary Though the reputation of Christian educational institutions in India claims to be of high standards in academics, we can see that these institutions in fact have the lowest standards when it comes to morality. Children who attend these schools are subjected to physical abuse, verbal defamation of their respective religions and daily brainwashing of Christian fundamentalism. In the end, there is no reason to send children to such cruel and criminal institutions, as it is not one’s academic background but one’s morality that makes a person. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Medical Care Known as "medical evangelists", Missionaries promise free medical care to operate on poor non-Christian patients. After srugery they force them to convert or pay exorbitant fees. Christian organizations have established hospitals with some of the best medical care across the globe. Many of these hospitals operate under the guise of provide free or cheap medical care to rural and poor communities. However, most of these hospitals are providing these benefits not for goodwill but for conversion. 1. Denial of Treatment – Often Christian hospitals publicize their services as pro-bono and for the needy and general public. However, when poor non-Christians require treatment, they are either force to convert or pay a large fee for the services. The incident below describes one shocking ordeal of how 17 Hindus because they refused to convert: The Serang Christian Eye Hospital was set up in the Gumma block of Gajapati district by the Baptists of Canada to supposedly provide health care to tribals. The hospital is run by the Council of Christian Hospitals, which has its head office in Bangalore. The poorest of the tribals are misled into receiving free treatment at this hospital in exchange for their souls. The victims are operated upon then pressurized to convert to Christianity, or else told that they will have to cough up the payment for the operations. Dr Sadguna Raju, a Christian convert and ophthalmologist attached to the Serang hospital, operated upon 27 patients on August 30 and 31 of 2000. Out of these at least seventeen of them are now blind in one eye. Dr Raju left Orissa a day after the operations and the tribal Hindus were given no post-operational care at all. Many times the arrangements for these "quickie" operations are makeshift and rampant malpractice increases the chance that patients could be infected in the operation theater itself. In fact at the post-operative stage the Christian doctors had even noticed the deterioration in the condition of some patients but they chose to do nothing about it as the tribals had refused to convert. Many of the victims had developed pesedomolas, a bacterial infection, following the operation leading to pus formation in the eye. Some of them have had to turn to begging for their livelihood after this devastating trauma. 2. Fake Medicines – One common tactic employed by Missionaries is to give a sick villager fake medicines which have no medicinal value and ask them to worship in the name of their faith for wellness. After several days, the missionary gives the villager an identical dose of the medicine, but this time it is the real medicine. Then the missionary will instruct the villager to now pray to Jesus. Soon after, due to the medicine and not due to Jesus, the villager will be cured. The uneducated and gullible villager, however, will attribute his cure to Jesus and convert to Christianity. 3. Intentional Denial of Medicines – In a New Tribes Mission (NTM) mission camp, many of the natives either died from starvation or from diseases transmitted by the missionaries for which they had no immunity against. In one such mission camp in Paraguay, the German anthropologist, Dr. Mark Munzel, reported that food and medicine were deliberately withheld by the missionaries. From a total of 277 natives in April 1972 only 202 survivors were left three months later. A US congressional report confirmed that 49% of the camp population had vanished! In Bolivia, William Pencille, of the South American Missionary Society, was called in to help when white ranchers moving into the tribal areas came upon the Ayoreos. Pencille persuaded these natives to stop resisting the encroachment of the cattlemen and to settle on a patch of barren land beside a railroad tract. The natives, having no resistance to common diseases of the "modern" man, began to die. Throughout all this Pencille had the means to save the lives of these people. He had access to many modes of transport, including an airplane, and to funds which could easily have been used to buy medicines for them. Yet this is what he said: "It's better they should die. Then I baptize them (on the point of death) and they go straight to heaven." 4. Secret Baptism – Another tactic that is deceptively employed by Missionaries is to “baptize” a victim without their knowledge. Then to reveal that they had been baptized and they must convert to Christianity. Though well-documented, it is little known that the most famous perpetrator was "Mother" Teresa and her sisters. “For Mother (Teresa), it was the spiritual well-being of the poor that mattered most. Material aid was a means of reaching their souls, of showing the poor that God loved them. In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to heaven’. An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.” 5. Threats – Missionaries in addition to harming non-Christian patients in their hospitals will also mental harass patients who are already in physical pain. Below is an account of one such incident: “I remember a British friend of mine, an anthropologist researching the lore of a Nilgiris tribe a decade ago. One day he visited a village hospital to comfort a sick tribal. A troop of Christians from a particular denomination entered noisily, and kindly informed all the patients in the ward that unless they accepted Christ, they would soon die and go to hell for ever. Is this Jesus' love, or mental torture? Were the patients' human rights respected or violated?” - Michel Danino (World Congress for the Preservation of Religious Diversity) Summary Though Christian hospitals claim that they “do not accept any forced conversion or conversion by fraudulent means” and they are “for the masses”, they in fact are the contrary. They are only for though who are Christian and for those who not, they must forcibly convert in order to use their facilities. Christian Medical institutions and Missionaries show that other than Christians, they selfishly do not care for the well-being of anyone. Missionaries claim their lives are dedicated to “saving” others but we can clearly see that this “saving” only applies to Christians and for all others it very well may mean death. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Conversion Tactics – Sexual Abuse Body of 14-year old school girl, Jyotirmayee, who was raped, killed and mutilated for refusing to convert to Christianity. The press has recently revealed of the sexual exploitation of children in churches in the United States by the clergy. However, the sexual crimes against children and others outside the U.S. rarely make news. There are many cases of perverted Missionaries sexually exploited non-Christians and using this as a conversion tactic. 1. Sodomy - On November 11, 2000 Indian police arrested David Berry, a 51 year old British national for brutally sodomizing and perpetrating savage sexual abuse on at least 11 minor Hindu boys in the holy temple town of Puri, Orissa. Berry was assisted in his heinous crimes by Bijoy Behera, a local schoolteacher and recent convert to Christianity. The police were forced to arrest the two Christians following a complaint lodged by a victim's father, Shree Banamali Senapati. Initially despite his lodging of the complaint, the police dismissed the case and refused to arrest the perpetrators, but were forced to act when an angry mob from the town besieged them and threatened dire consequences if the guilty were not punished. Shree Senapati was in tears as he related how Berry had sodomized his traumatized 12-year-old son at least eight times in his hotel room and elsewhere. The boy related to the police that Berry had forced him to have oral sex and kept him a virtual prisoner in the hotel room for hours. He also revealed that the Briton had sodomized at least 10 other school children, all below the ages of 12. The children were so traumatized by Berry's threats and Behera's beatings that they did not dare to confess to the horrors visited upon them until young master Senapati could take no more and broke down to his father. 2. Stripping - On October 9, 2000 a group of converted Christians stripped a 12-year-old tribal Hindu boy and paraded him naked in Gasukia village after he opposed attempts to convert him to Christianity. He was taken to the village school and brutally beaten for "refusing to accept Jesus as his savior". This event naturally led to communal tension as the Hindus were outraged at the heinous crimes being forced on them. 3. Rape – In January 2002, American Missionary Reverend Joseph Cooper and Sam Benson were expelled from India after Benson was accused of raping a young Hindu girl and Cooper was accused of making inflammatory remarks against Hinduism. Both currently walk free and Cooper is a preacher in Connecticut. Western Media only reported how Hindus had retaliated against Cooper but did not mention that he incited locals by saying Lord Krishna "spreads AIDS". American Pastor Benson Sam and his wife Sally also were found guilty of abduction and rape of a minor girl. The poor orphan girl named Laly had allegedly been sexually abused and harassed for four months at the Bible Christian Centre, which had resulted in the issue of non-bailable warrants against Sam Benson and his son. 4. Rape and Murder - In February 2005, a 14-year old school girl in Orissa was raped and killed and her mutilated body thrown to a nearby railway crossing in Dhenkanal for refusing to convert to Christianity. “One day, three Christian leaders, Prashant Ghose, D. V. John Sarangi and Rabi Naik alias D'Souza came to my home and asked me to convert to their religion, Christianity,” Shri Bej said and added that they promised him help in the form of money and material in his only daughter Jyotirmayee’s marriage. However, Shri Bej turned down their proposal. Then the local Church mandarins made a second attempt trying to allure Shri Bej’s wife Yasoda. “‘If you change over to Christianity, your daughter could get a good bridegroom as there are many well-to-do persons in our religion,’ Rabi Naik told me,” said a weeping Yasoda to Organiser and added that on that day, Shri Naik had threatened her with dire consequences if her family did not adopt Christianity. Following this threat, Bej’s daughter Jyotirmayee, a student of Class VIII in Saudamini Smruti Vidyapeeth, was reported missing from her school. Jyotirmayee’s friends intimated her family about this. A concerned father went to the police station and reported the matter. But the local police did not take it seriously. The next morning, Jyotirmayee’s naked mutilated body was found on the railway tracks. With ample circumstantial evidence of Jyotirmayee being raped and murdered, the local people staged a road blockade demanding the arrest of the culprits. In the FIR filed in the police station, Shri Alekh Bej has categorically mentioned names of Raju Naik, Rabi Naik and Ranjan Naik. “As I refused to convert, I had to face this consequence,” Shri Bej reported. Though the body of Jyotirmayee was found on February 17, till February 21 no one was arrested. The Bej family is unable to understand the inaction on the part of police to arrest the culprits. The Bej family has accused the police station incharge, Jyoti Ranjan Mohapatra, and DSP Mandardhar Sahoo of conniving with the culprits and allowing them to go scot-free. With district SP on leave, the law perhaps is yet to take its course. 4. Molestation - Hemalata Karua, 32, of Machhagarh village in Keonjhar district in Orissa, India testified in court that Australian Missionary Graham Staines had asked her to convert to Christianity to avoid financial difficulty. He also invited them to a jungle camp to be held at Manoharpur after the Hindu festival of Makar Sankranti. Karua said she and her husband converted to Christianity at the camp on January 21, 1999, and were given new clothes. They also attended a prayer meeting and a film on Christian faith that evening. Later, they were served beef at dinner, which she refused to eat, she claimed. She did mention that neither she nor her husband had been offered any money by the missionary to change their faith. Stating that she stayed alone in a hut behind the local church that night, Karua alleged that the missionary came there later and attempted to grope and rape her. She informed her husband the next morning and they left for their village. Twenty days after the incident, she claimed, the missionary's wife visited her to express regret for his actions. Summary There are hundreds more incidents which could have been listed. And there are probably even more that are only known by the victims themselves. Most victims do not report the crimes against them because they feel they will be ostracized by their community. Not only are Missionaries proctected by Western Media, Missionaries keep such scandals from surfacing by bribing local police and by threatening the victims of their heinous crimes. Missionaries serve no benefit to India and when they molest the people they are by no means spreading “the love of God” but rather acting with their sick and perverted mentality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Conversion Tactics – Violence Modies of Hindus killed for refusing to accepting Christianity by militants armed by Southern Baptist Missionaries. While Christian Missionaries preach of peace, love and harmony, their most effective tool for conversions is violence and they will not hesitate to use it. There are hundreds of violent attacks by Christian Missionaries every year. Most of these attacks can be categorized into the following: 1. Divide & Convert (Tahiti) – One of the most efficient way and brutal ways that Missionaries have converted large amounts of people is by dividing and conquering. Missionaries will persuade a leader of a tribe that they will arm him and allow him to defeat a rival tribal if he converts to Christianity. After the conquering and pillaging of the opposing tribe, under the rule of the converted leader, both tribes convert to Christianity. One classical example occurred is the story of how the South Pacific was converted: In 1797, thirty years after the discovery of Tahiti by Wallis, the first missionaries landed on the island. The missionaries, sent by the London Missionary Society, tried for seven years to convert the natives but were unable to make any headway. It was then that they discovered, as if by miracle, the proper method of converting the Tahitians. They discovered that the local chief, Pomare, liked alcohol (distilled by the missionaries) so much that he became an alcoholic. Addicted to the distilled spirit (perhaps the "holy" spirit), Pomare agreed to back the missionaries in their work of conversion. Pomare, supplied with western firearms, easily subdued his native opponents. Upon his victory over his rivals, the whole island was forcibly converted in one day. Then the process of inculcating "Christian virtues" began. Persistent unbelievers, those who refused to be converted, were executed. Singing was banned (except for hymns) and all forms of adornment, flowers or tattoo were disallowed. Of course, surfing and dancing were not permitted as well. The punishment for breaking any of these rules included, among others, being sentenced to hard labor. Within thirty years of missionary control, the population of Tahiti fell from an initial estimate of 20,000 to 6,000. On another island, Raiatea, a man who was able to forecast the weather by studying the behavior of fish was executed for witchcraft. The missionaries continued this tactic from island to island and managed to convert the whole South Pacific. Though this method was used centuries ago, it is still a commonly used tactic used by Christian Missionaries in tribal areas of Asia and Africa. 2. Terrorist Organizations (North-East India) – These relatively small armed tribal groups are eventually nurtured by Missionaries into violent and sadistic terrorist groups: On December 4th, 2000, Christians converts under the direction of Missionaries, desecrated an ashram (Hindu religious retreat) set up by murdered Hindu leader Shanti Kumar Tripura. . They desecrated Hindu idols and destroyed photos of the slain religious leader revered by both Hindu tribals and Bengalis. The Christian converts also raped two female devotees and brutally attacked two men who had come to the ashram for puja (religious rituals). The next day, Christian converts brutally desecrated another ashram at Jirania Khola and forced the inmates to stop all Hindu rituals and practices at gunpoint. A group of seven armed converted Christian terrorists barged into the ashram and threatened the 150 Hindus with dire consequences if they continued to perform Hindu rites at the ashram. The terrorists fled only after a large group of locals rushed to the ashram. Due to threats by violent Missionaries and their Christian converts, altogether 11 ashrams, schools and orphanages set up by the murdered Hindu leader in various parts of the state have been forcibly closed down by the Christian fundamentalist terrorist organization known as “National Liberation Front of Tripura” (NLFT). In early October the same Christian fundamentalists had issued a diktat ordering the indigenous tribal Hindus to stay away from Durga Puja celebrations (Hindu Festival) and warned that any tribal members seen taking part in the festival would be instantly killed. In its official public statement, the NLFT said it wanted all tribals in Tripura to become Christians. They also stated that salvation for Tripura lies only in Christianity and would eliminate anyone who dared to come in the way of their plans to forcibly convert all of Tripura to Christianity. NFLT is still an active and powerful terrorist organization that operates in Northeast India. They have converted many Hindus and tribals forcibly at gunpoint, and are involved in rapes, and assassinations. They continue to receive arms as well as moral and financial support from Western Christian organizations and Missionaries. 3. Manhunts (South America) - Another method, aptly called "manhunt", involves the missionaries going out, sometimes in motorized vehicles, hunting for natives to integrate them into reservations set up for missionary work. The New Tribes Mission (NTM), for instance, went on such a manhunt in Paraguay. Five missionized natives were killed in one such manhunt. Those unconverted natives were taken to the NTM camp in Campo Loro. Within a short while, according to Survival International, all had diedof new diseases they had no immunity to. Stung by criticism, the best reply the NTM 's Director in Paraguay could muster was: "We don't go after people anymore. We just provide transport." In another such "manhunt" in 1979, also in Paraguay, one of the frightened natives fell down from a tree and broke her leg. (Her right breast had already been shot off by a previous encounter with the missionaries.) She was compelled, with her broken leg, to walk back to the mission camp. She subsequently died. 4. Kidnappings - In conjunction with the "manhunt", converted natives are trained by the missionaries to carry guns. The "newly contacted" natives are then rounded off to the mission camp. One American organization, Cultural Survival, reported in 1986 that natives in the NTM camp in Paraguay kidnapped and forced into missionary schools. 5. Forced Captivity – In one such Missionary camp, a witness described the situation of the kidnapped captives: ”I … saw two old ladies lying on some rags on the ground in the last stages of emaciation and clearly on the verge of death. One was unconscious, the second in what was evidently a state of catalepsy...In the second hut lay another woman, also in a desperate condition and with untreated wounds on her legs. A small, naked, tearful boy sat at her side...The three women and the boy had been taken in a recent forest roundup, the third woman having being shot in the side while attempting to escape.” 6. Genocide (Brazil) – There are many accounts of genocide committed by Missionaries but they rarely reported in Christian media because of the perverse nature of the crime and because they are usually committed against remote tribals. One of the most horrific massacres was of Brazilian tribals by the grossly misnamed Indian Protection Service, which Christian Missionaries supported and often assisted in killings. In just a few years, the following tribes population was reduced due to Missionary genocide: • Munducurus tribe: reduced from 19,000 to 1,200 • Guaranis tribe: reduced from 5,000 to 200 • Cajaras tribe: from 4,000 to 400 • Cintas Largas: from 10,000 to 500 • Tapaiunas: completely extirpated • Other tribes were reduced to only a few (one or two!) individuals and some by only a single family. The Missionaries employed some of the following methods in their killings: • The Cintas Largas were attacked by dropping dynamites from airplanes. • The Maxacalis were given alcohol and then shot down when they became drunk. • The Nhambiquera were killed in huge numbers by machine gun fire. • Two Patachos tribes were exterminated by giving the unsuspecting Indians smallpox injections. • Some of the Indians were murdered by presenting them with food laced with arsenic and formicides. • One missionary persuaded 600 Ticuna Indians that the end of the world is taking place and they will only be safe on a ranch. On that ranch the Indians were made slaves and tortured. • The Bororos tribe was banned from performing customary religious rites on the dead. Deprived of their cultural identity, the Bororos, instead of converting, committed suicide on by one, until the tribe was extinct. 7. Intentional Denial of Medicines- In another New Tribes Mission (NTM) mission camp, many of the natives either died from starvation or from diseases transmitted by the missionaries for which they had no immunity against. In one such mission camp in Paraguay, the German anthropologist, Dr. Mark Munzel, reported that food and medicine were deliberately withheld by the missionaries. From a total of 277 natives in April 1972 only 202 survivors were left three months later. A US congressional report confirmed that 49% of the camp population had vanished! In Bolivia, William Pencille, of the South American Missionary Society, was called in to help when white ranchers moving into the tribal areas came upon the Ayoreos. Pencille persuaded these natives to stop resisting the encroachment of the cattlemen and to settle on a patch of barren land beside a railroad tract. The natives, having no resistance to common diseases of the "modern" man, began to die. Throughout all this Pencille had the means to save the lives of these people. He had access to many modes of transport, including an airplane, and to funds which could easily have been used to buy medicines for them. Yet this is what he said: "It's better they should die. Then I baptize them (on the point of death) and they go straight to heaven." Summary The above is only a small sampling of the atrocities that have been committed by Missionaries. It can be seen that Missionaries do not hesitate rape, torture, enslave and murder in order to forcibly spread Christianity. Though all these events occurred in the past, some occurred as recently as only a few years ago, and they still continue today on an even larger scale unreported by Western media. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sr Fan Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 I mentioned few times before.....I had the fortune to spend some of my life in the shadows of person who spent multiple years of his life in Jails in British time...... All my interactions with him......never he was bitter, caustic about British...... I mean cursing or scolding or ....all peaceful, tranquill..... so many years later even now... when my mind takes a leave to relive those memories........this is what stands out with some other attributes....... We were weak, may be not smart may be divisive, may be naive, may be short sighted what ever .....so somebody took advantage......We can not dwell on negative emotions......move forward...confident... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LION_NTR Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 every man who converts from Hinduism into another religion adds a new eneny for hindus -swami vivekananda. I personaly believe that most of the convesrions are happening either based on hatred or monetary gains. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 All these people are lured for what ever needs they have.. western society is keeping a keen watch on our people's needs to convert them.. avunu bhayya.....There are good articles to that affect which I can pm you if you are interested to read them... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KilaDi No.1 Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KilaDi No.1 Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 avunu bhayya.....There are good articles to that affect which I can pm you if you are interested to read them... Pm me bhayya.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KilaDi No.1 Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Pp ekkadiki poyadu.. Sechan lo kanipinchatla.. Convert avvataniki kaani poyada enti srk bhayyo.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 every man who converts from Hinduism into another religion adds a new eneny for hindus -swami vivekananda. I personaly believe that most of the convesrions are happening either based on hatred or monetary gains. Vivekananda ni quote chesaaru kanuka...Read the interesting article posted below which explains the Great Swami's encounters with the Evangelists...Lengthy one but definetly interesting.. Encounter with Swami Vivekananda The spokesman for Hinduism in the next dialogue between Hinduism and Christianity was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). A significant feature of this dialogue was that, for the most part, it was held in the homelands of Christianity. Vivekananda not only carried the message of Hinduism to the USA and Europe during his two trips from 1893 to 1897 and from 1899 to 1900, he also turned the tide against Christianity in India so far as educated, upper class Hindus were concerned. Henceforward, Christian missionaries would reap a harvest either in the tribal belts or during famines when charitable organisations abroad and a patronising government at home placed funds for relief at their disposal and Hindu orphans fell into their hands in large numbers. Vivekananda himself symbolised an irony of that system of education which had been deliberately designed to demolish Hinduism and promote Christianity. He was himself a product of that very education, but he turned against Christianity and in defence of Hinduism the knowledge and intellectual discipline which he had acquired as a student in a missionary college. The renewal of East India Company’s Charter in 1813 had opened the Company’s dominions to Christian missionaries. It had also advised “introduction of useful knowledge and religious and moral improvement.” A controversy had been going on ever since regarding the system of education suitable for India. The Orientalists among the British rulers advocated retention of the traditional Indian system. They were afraid that imparting of Western knowledge to natives would encourage them to claim equality with white men and demand democratisation of the administration. The Anglicists, on the other hand, were convinced that knowledge of Western literature, philosophy and science would wean Hindus away from their “ancestral superstitions” and draw them closer to the religion and culture of the ruling race. Christian missionaries were, by and large, with the Anglicists. One of them had written in 1822 that, through Western education, Hindus “now engaged in the degrading and polluting worship of idols shall be brought to the knowledge of true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.”1 Missionaries felt immensely strengthened when Alexander Duff, an ardent advocate of Western education, reached Calcutta in 1830. Alexander Duff was convinced that “of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen men, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous” and that India was “the chief seat of Satan’s earthly dominion.” He studied for some time the effect which Western education was having on Hindu young men attending the Hindu College and similar institutions which had come up in Calcutta and elsewhere in Bengal since more than a decade before his arrival. He came to the definite conclusion that Western education would make the Hindus “perfect unbelievers in their own system” and “perfect believers in Christianity.” In an address delivered in 1835 to a General Church Assembly he proclaimed that knowledge of Western literature and science would “demolish the huge and hideous fabric of Hinduism” brick by brick till “the whole will be found to have crumbled into fragments.”4 A Committee of Public Instruction had been set up by the Government for recommending a suitable system of education. Alexander Duff had been made a member of the Committee in 1834. Next year, T. B. Macaulay, a member of the Governor General’s Council, was appointed to preside over the Committee. He wrote a Minute on February 2, 1835, advocating Western education. There was a tie between the Anglicists and the Orientalists when the Minute came before the Committee on March 7. Macaulay used his casting vote and forced a decision. The Western system of education was adopted. In a letter written to his father in 1836, Macaulay predicated, “It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator among the respectable classes of Bengal thirty years hence.”5 The missionaries were trying hard to turn the dream into a reality. “And in what country,” Louis Rousslet, a French traveller to India, wrote in 1876, “could such a spectacle be witnessed as that which met my eyes that day in this square of Benares? There, at ten paces from all that the Hindoo holds to be most sacred in religion, between the Source of wisdom and the idol of Siva, a Protestant missionary had taken his stand beneath a tree. Mounted on a chair, he was preaching in the Hindostani language, on the Christian religion and the errors of paganism. I heard his shrill voice, issuing from the depths of a formidable shirt-collar, eject these words at the crowd, which respectfully and attentively surrounded him You are idolaters; that block of stone which you worship has been taken from a quarry, it is no better than the stone of my house. The reproaches called forth no murmur; the missionary was listened to immovably, but his dissertation was attended to, for every now and then one of the audience would put a question, to which the brave apostle replied as best as he could. Perhaps we should be disposed to admire the courage of the missionary if the well-known toleration of the Hindoos did not defraud him of all his merit; and it is this tolerance that most disheartens the missionary one of whom said to me - our labours are in vain; you can never convert a man who has sufficient conviction in his own religion to listen, without moving a muscle, to all the attacks you can make against it.”6 The fond hope that Hinduism will die out before long was expressed by Richard Temple before a Christian audience in England in 1883. “India is like a mighty bastion,” he wrote, “which is being battered by heavy artillery. We have given blow after blow, and thud after thud, and the effect is not at first very remarkable; but at last with a crash the mighty structure will come toppling down, and it is our hope that some day the heathen religions of India will in like manner succumb.”7 At the same time, he felt sure that Christianity had a very bright future in India. “But we are not chasing a shadow,” he continued, “we are not rolling a Sisyphean stone, we are not ascending an inaccessible hill; or, if we are going up hill, it is that sort of ascent which soon leads to a summit, from which we shall survey the promised land. And when we reach the top what prospect shall we see? We shall see churches in India raising up their spires towards heaven, Christian villages extending over whole tracts of country, churches crowded with dusky congregations and dusky communicants at the altar tables. We shall hear the native girls singing hymns in the vernacular, and see boys trooping to school or studying for the universities under missionary auspices. Those things, and many others, I have seen, and would to God I could fix them on the minds of my audience as they are fixed upon my own.”8 Vivekananda shattered the hope and the dream in the next decade. Narendranath Datta, who was to become Swami Vivekananda, was born in 1863, the year when Alexander Duff left India well satisfied that Hinduism was on its way out and Christianity on its way in, at least in Bengal. Macaulay’s prediction appeared to be coming true as there had been a spate of conversions to Christianity. In 1832 Alexander Duff had converted Krishnamohan Banerji, a student of the Hindu College. Banerji, in turn, converted fifty-nine young men in the next few years. He became a minister of the Christ Church and was “instrumental in converting several hundred Hindus in Krishnanagar in 1839.”9 The other important converts made by Duff were K. C. Banerji and M. L. Basak in 1839 and Lal Behari De and Madhusudan Dutta in 1843. Leaders of the Brahmo Samaj were perturbed and tried to arrest the trend. A meeting held in Calcutta in May 1845 and attended by a thousand Hindus, gave a call that Hindus should not send their boys to missionary schools and colleges. Some funds were collected for promoting Hindu educational and humanitarian institutions. But their efforts did not make much headway. The missionaries commanded much larger resources and official patronage. There was a craze for Western education which was thought best when imparted in missionary institutions. Moreover, the coming of Keshub Chunder Sen to the top in the Brahmo Samaj gave a further blow to Hinduism. He was infatuated with Jesus and the Bible and made hysterical outbursts in praise of both. The only resolute defender of Hinduism in this intellectually hostile atmosphere was Bankim Chandra Chatterji. He was well-versed in Western literature and philosophy and his knowledge of Hindu Shastras and history was deep as well as discerning. He had come to the definite conclusion that Hindus had nothing to learn from Christianity. For him, Jesus was “an incomplete man”, the Christian God “a despot” and the Christian doctrine of everlasting punishment “devilish”. He repudiated the missionary accusation that Hinduism was responsible for corruptions that had crept into Hindu society in the course of history. “If the principles of Christianity,” he wrote, “are not responsible for the slaughter of the crusades, the butcheries of Alva, the massacre of St. Bartholomew or the flames of the Inquisition... If the principles of Christianity are not responsible for the civil disabilities of Roman Catholics and Jews which till recently disgraced the English Statute Book, I do not understand how the principles of Hinduism are to be held responsible for the civil disabilities of the sudras under the Brahmanic regime. The critics of Hinduism have one measure for their own religion and another for Hinduism.”10 For him, Sri Krishna was the highest ideal, both human and divine. His novels and essays were creating a consciousness of pride in the Hindu heritage in that large section of Hindu society which had not yet passed under the spell of Jesus. Narendranath was a student in Alexander Duffs General Assembly’s Institution which later on became the Scottish Church College. He had made a wide study of Western literature, history and philosophy, had joined the Brahmo Samaj and come to share Keshub Chunder Sen’s admiration for Jesus. But a turning point came in his life when he met Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa in November 1880. For the first time, he was face to face with a powerful expression of Hindu spirituality and that, too, in a simple man who had not been even to a primary school. His travels all over India after Sri Ramakrishna’s death gave him further glimpses of how Hindu spirituality had percolated effortlessly to the lowest levels of Hindu society. He was thus in a position to process Christianity from the vantage point of a new vision. In the end, he frustrated Alexanders Duff’s hope and falsified Macaulay’s and Temple’s prediction. Sri Ramakrishna had never heard of Jesus till Jesus was thrust under his nose by those disciples who had come to him from the fold of Keshub Chunder Sen. Mahendra Nath Gupta, whose record of the talks of Sri Ramakrishna was to become famous as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna had an infantile fascination for Jesus and never missed an opportunity to compare the sayings and doings of Jesus with those of the Paramahamsa. But to the last, Jesus remained for Sri Ramakrishna only a figure which people belonging to a foreign religion worshipped as God. He did not have even a remote knowledge of the dogmas of Christianity. The only dogma, that of the original sin, which was presented to him by some disciples, he repudiated with repugnance. “Once someone gave me,” he said on October 27, 1882, “a book of the Christians. I asked him to read it to me. It talked about nothing but sin.” Turning to Keshub Chunder Sen, who was present, he continued, “Sin is the only thing one hears at your Brahmo Samaj too... He who says day and night, ‘I am a sinner, I am a sinner’, verily becomes a sinner... Why should one only talk about sin and hell, and such things?”11 Thus he knocked the bottom out of Christianity. Without sin, there was no need for the atoning death of a historical saviour. Vivekananda carried forward the same idea. “The greatest error,” he said, “is to call a man a weak and miserable sinner. Every time a person thinks in this mistaken manner, he rivets one more link in the chain of avidyA that binds him, adds one more layer to the “self-hypnotism” that lies heavy over his mind.”12 He compared the Hindu and Christian concepts of the soul. “One of the chief distinctions,” he said, “between the Vedic and the Christian religion is that the Christian religion teaches that each human soul had its beginning at its birth into this world, whereas the Vedic religion asserts that the spirit of man is an emanation of the Eternal Being and has no more a beginning than God Himself.”13 He hailed humans as Children of Immortal Bliss - amritasya putrAH - in the language of the Upanishads. “Ye are the children of God,” he proclaimed while addressing the Parliament of Religions, “the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth - sinners! It is a sin to call man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, lions! and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal.”14 Vivekananda repudiated the idea of vicarious saving also. He proclaimed the Hindu doctrine that everyone has to work out his own salvation. “The Christians believe,” he said, “that Jesus Christ died to save man. With you it is belief in a doctrine, and this belief constitutes your salvation. With us doctrine has nothing whatever to do with salvation. Each one may believe in whatever doctrine he likes; or in no doctrine. What difference does it make to you whether Jesus Christ lived at a certain time or not? What has it to do with you that Moses saw God in the burning bush? The fact that Moses saw God in the burning bush does not constitute your seeing him, does it?... Records of great spiritual men in the past do us no good whatever except that they urge us onward to do the same, to experience religion ourselves. Whatever Christ or Moses or anybody else did, does not help us in the least, except to urge us on.”15 He was aware that the historicity of Christ had become highly controversial among scholars of the subject. “There is a great dispute,” he wrote, “as to whether there ever was born a man with the name of Jesus. Of the four books comprising the New Testament, the Book of St. John has been rejected by some as spurious. As to the remaining three, the verdict is that they have been copied from ancient books; and that, too, long after the date ascribed to Jesus Christ. Moreover, about the time that Jesus is believed to have been born, among the Jews themselves there were born two historians, Josephus and Philo. They have mentioned even petty sects among the Jews but not made the least reference to Jesus or the Christians or that the Roman judge sentenced him to death on the cross. Josephus’ book had a single line about it, which has now been proved to be an interpolation. The Romans used to rule over the Jews at that time, and the Greeks taught them all arts and Sciences. They have all written a good many things about the Jews but made no mention of either Jesus or the Christians.” He also knew that doubts had been raised whether Jesus had himself said what was attributed to him in the gospels. “Another difficulty,” he continued, “is that the sayings, precepts, or doctrines which the New Testament preaches were already in existence among the Jews before the Christian era, having come from different quarters, and were being preached by Rabbis like Hillel and others.”16 The miracles of Christ also failed to impress Vivekananda. In fact, they repelled him strongly. “What were the great powers of Christ,” he asked, “in miracles and healing, in one of his characters? They were low, vulgar things because he was among vulgar beings... Any fool could do those things. Fools heal others, devils can heal others. I have seen horrible demoniacal men do wonderful miracles. They seem to manufacture fruits out of the earth. I have known fools and diabolical men tell the past, present and future. I have seen fools heal at a glance, by the will, the most horrible diseases. These are powers, truly, but often demoniacal powers.”17 And he was not at all interested in the historical Jesus. “One gets sick at heart,” he said, “at the different accounts of the life of the Christ that Western people give. One would make him a great politician; another, perhaps, would make of him a great military general, another a great patriotic Jew; and so on.”18 What interested him was Jesus the spiritual teacher. He saw several points of strength in the life and teachings of Jesus, particularly the purity of heart and renunciation of worldly pursuits. “If you want to be Christian,” he said, “it is not necessary to know whether Christ was born in Jerusalem or Bethlehem or just the exact date on which he pronounced the Sermon on the Mount; you only require to feel the Sermon on the Mount. It is not necessary to read 2000 words on when it was delivered. All that is for the enjoyment of the learned. Let them have it; say amen to that. Let us eat the mango.”19 Christians were welcome to seek salvation through Christ. According to Hinduism, everyone has the right to choose his own ishTadeva. “It is absolutely necessary,” he said, “to worship God as man, and blessed are those races which have such a ‘God-man’ in Christ; therefore, cling close to Christ; never give up Christ. That is the natural way to see God in man. All our ideas of God are concentrated there.” Christians go wrong only when they insist that Christ is the only saviour. “The great limitation Christians have,” he continued, “is that they do not heed other manifestations of God besides Christ. He was a manifestation of God; so was Buddha, so were some others, and there will be hundreds of others. Do not limit God anywhere.”20 Delivering a lecture on ‘Christ, the Messenger’, he quoted Sri Krishna, “Wherever thou findest a great soul of immense power and purity struggling to raise humanity, know that he is born of My splendour, that I am working there through him.” And he advised the Christians, “Let us, therefore, find God not only in Jesus of Nazareth but in all the great ones that have preceded him, in all that came after him, and all that are yet to come. Our worship is unbounded. They are all manifestations of the same infinite God.”21 Yet it was Christ that Vivekananda found missing from Christianity. He wondered which Church, if any, represented Christ. All churches were equally intolerant, each threatening to kill those who did not believe as it did.22 The person of Christ rather than his teaching had become more important for Christianity. He had been turned into the “only begotten son of God.”23 Christian baptism remained external and did not touch the inner man. It aimed at instilling some mental beliefs and not at transforming human behaviour. Most men remained the same after baptism as they were before it. What was worse, the mere sprinkling of water over them and muttering of formulas by a priest made them believe that they were better than other people. He quoted the Kenopanishad in this context: “Ever steeped in the darkness of ignorance, yet considering themselves wise and learned, the fools go round and round, staggering to and fro like the blind led by the blind.”24 The Eucharist was nothing more than the survival of a savage custom. “They sometimes killed their great chiefs,” said Vivekananda, “and ate their flesh in order to obtain in themselves the qualities which made their leaders great.” Human sacrifice was a Jewish idea which was borrowed by Christianity “in the form of atonement.” This seeking for a “scapegoat” had made Christianity “develop a spirit of persecution and bloodshed.”25 Christian missionaries were attacking the Puranas for containing passages which they considered somewhat obscene. Vivekananda had studied the Bible and knew that it contained a lot which was downright pornography. But he had his own method of exposing the Bible. “The Chinese,” he wrote, “are the disciples of Confucius, are the disciples of Buddha, and their morality is quite strict and refined. Obscene language, obscene books, pictures, any conduct the least obscene - and the offender is punished then and there. The Christian missionaries translated the Bible into Chinese tongue. Now in the Bible there are some passages so obscene as to put to shame some of the Puranas of the Hindus. Reading those indecorous passages, the Chinamen were so exasperated against Christianity that they made a point of never allowing the Bible to be circulated in their country… The simpleminded Chinese were disgusted, and raised a cry, saying: Oh, horror! This religion has come to us to ruin our young boys, by giving them this Bible to read… This is why the Chinese are very indignant with Christianity. Otherwise the Chinese are very tolerant towards other religions. I hear that the missionaries have printed an edition, leaving out the objectionable parts; but this step has made the Chinese more suspicious than before.”26 The history of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere had simply horrified Vivekananda, as it does any person with any moral sensibility. Besides being blood-soaked, Christianity has been inimical to all free enquiry. “The ancient Greeks,” wrote Vivekananda, “who were the first teachers of European civilisation attained the zenith of their culture long before the Christians. Ever since they became Christians, all their learning and culture was extinguished.”27 When he was passing by Egypt on his way to Europe, a missionary mentioned to him the miracles which, according to the Bible, Moses had performed in that country. But Vivekananda had read history. He knew the record of Christianity in Egypt. “Here was the city of Alexandria,” he said, “famous all over the world for its university, its library, and its literati - that Alexandria which, falling into the hands of illiterate, bigoted and vulgar Christians suffered destruction, with its library burnt to ashes and learning stamped out. Finally, the Christians killed the lady savant, Hypatia, subjected her dead body to all sorts of abominable insult, and dragged it through the streets, till every bit of flesh was removed from her bones.”28 Christianity had spread with the help of the sword since the days of Constantine and tried to suppress science and philosophy. “What support,” asked Vivekananda, “has Christianity ever lent to the spread of civilisation, either spiritual or secular? What reward did the Christian religion offer to the European Pandit who sought to prove for the first time that the Earth is a revolving planet? What scientist has ever been hailed with approval and enthusiasm by the Christian Church?” Coming to modem times, Vivekananda found Christianity very vindictive: “The great thinkers of Europe Voltaire, Darwin, Buchner, Flammarion, Victor Hugo and a host of others like him – are in the present time denounced by Christianity and are victims of vituperative tongues of its orthodox community.”29 Christian missionaries in India were crediting to Christianity the rise and progress of modern Europe. This was a great falsehood. “Whatever heights of progress Europe has attained,” continued Vivekananda, “every one of them has been gained by its revolt against Christianity - by its rising against the Gospel. If Christianity had its old paramount sway in Europe today, it would have lighted the fire of the Inquisition against such modern scientists as Pasteur and Koch, and burnt Darwin and others of his school at the stake. In modern Europe Christianity and civilization are two different things. Civilization has now girded up her loins to destroy her old enemy, Christianity, to overthrow the clergy and to wring educational and charitable institutions from their hands. But for the ignorance-ridden rustic masses, Christianity would never have been able for a moment to support its present despised existence, and would have been pulled out by its roots; for the urban poor are, even now, enemies of the Christian Church!”30 Christian missionaries were citing the prosperity of the modern West as an example of the superiority of Christianity. Much of that prosperity, however, was derived from the plunder of other peoples. “We who have come from the East,” he said in an interview to a U.S. newspaper on September 29, 1893, “have sat here day after day and have been told to accept Christianity because Christian nations are the most prosperous. We look about us and see England, the most prosperous Christian nation in the world, with her foot on the neck of 250,000,000 Asiatics. We look back into history and see that the prosperity of Christian Europe began with Spain. Spain’s prosperity began with the invasion of Mexico. Christianity wins its prosperity by cutting the throats of its fellow men. At such a price the Hindu will not have prosperity. I have sat here and heard the height of intolerance. I have heard the creed of Moslems applauded, when the Moslem sword is carrying destruction into India. Blood and sword are not for the Hindu, whose religion is based on the laws of love.”31 The newspaper described it as a “savage attack on Christian nations.” Vivekananda had a lot to say on Western colonialism and the massacre of natives in America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. But that is not the subject at present. What really amazed him was the utter lack of logic in Christian propaganda. “On metaphysical lines,” he wrote on his return to India in 1897, “no nation on earth can hold a candle to the Hindus; and curiously all the fellows that come over here from Christian lands have that one antiquated foolishness of an argument that because the Christians are powerful and rich and Hindus are not, so Christianity must be better than Hinduism. To which the Hindus very aptly retort that, that is the very reason why Hinduism is a religion and Christianity is not; because in this beastly world, it is blackguardism and that alone which prospers, virtue always suffers.”32 Hindus have nothing to gain from Christianity as it is only a system of superstitions. Hindus should not get frightened when the missionaries threaten them with hell; in fact, hell is better than the company of a Christian missionary. “There came a Christian to me once,” recalled Vivekananda, “and said, ‘You are a terrible sinner.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am. Go on.’ He was a Christian missionary. That man would not give me any rest. When I see him I fly. He said, ‘I have very good things for you. You are a sinner and you will go to hell.’ I said, ‘Very good, what else?’ I asked him, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I am going to heaven,’ he answered. I said, ‘I will go to hell.’ “That day he gave me up.” If Christ could help people become good, why has he failed in the Christian countries where he has been worshipped for so long? “Here comes a Christian man,” continued Vivekananda, “and he says, ‘You are all doomed; but if you believe in this doctrine, Christ will help you out.’ If this were true - but of course it is nothing but superstition - there would be no wickedness in Christian countries. Let us believe in it - belief costs nothing - but why is there no result? If I ask, ‘Why is it that there are so many wicked people?’ They say, ‘We have to work more.’ Trust in God but keep your power dry!”33 Criticism of Christianity, however, was not the primary task which Vivekananda had set for himself. He was first and foremost an exponent of Hinduism. He had to speak out about Christianity because the missionaries forced it upon him by their unceasing sallies against Hinduism. This is not the occasion even for a summary of his voluminous writings and speeches on various aspects of the subject he loved above all. We shall only touch a few points which he upheld against missionary attack. The missionaries were highly critical of the Vedas which Hindus have always held in the highest esteem. Vivekananda upheld the Vedas as depositories of divine wisdom. For him, scriptures like the Bible and the Quran were paurusheya, that is, revelations accessible only to particular persons whose experience could not be verified by other people. The Vedas, on the other hand, were apaurusheya, that is, statements of spiritual truths which any seeker could verify by spiritual practice. “Although we find,” he said, “many names, and many speakers, and many teachers in the Upanishads, not one of them stands as an authority of the Upanishads, not one verse is based upon the life of any one of them. These are simple figures like shadows moving in the background, unfelt, unseen, unrealised, but the real force is in the marvellous, the brilliant, the effulgent texts of the Upanishads, perfectly impersonal. If twenty Yajnavalkyas came and lived and died, it does not matter; the texts are there. And yet it is against no personality: it is broad and expansive enough to embrace all the personalities that the world has yet produced, and all that are yet to come. It has nothing to say against the worship of persons, or Avataras, or sages. On the other hand, it is always upholding it. At the same time, it is perfectly impersonal.”34 Rather than processing the Vedas in terms of the Bible, as the Brahmos had started doing, the Bible should be weighed on the Vedic scale and prove its worth. “So far as the Bible,” he observed, “and the scriptures of other nations agree with the Vedas, they are perfectly good, but when they do not agree, they are no more to be accepted.”35 On another occasion he said, “It is in the Vedas that we have to study our religion. With the exception of the Vedas every book must change. The authority of the Vedas is for all time to come; the authority of every one of our other books is for the time being. For instance, one Smriti is powerful for one age, another for another age.”36 Brahmanas were the next target of missionary attack. Vivekananda stood by these custodians of Hinduism. “The ideal man of our ancestors,” he said, “was the Brahmin. In all our books stands out prominently this ideal of the Brahmin. In Europe there is my Lord the Cardinal, who is struggling hard and spending thousands of pounds to prove the nobility of his ancestors and he will not be satisfied until he has traced his ancestry to some dreadful tyrant who lived on a hill and watched the people passing by, and whenever he had the opportunity, sprang out and robbed them... In India, on the other hand, the greatest princes seek to trace their descent to .some ancient sage who dressed in a bit of loin cloth, lived in a forest, eating roots and studying the Vedas... You are of the high caste when you can trace your ancestry to a Rishi, and not otherwise... Our ideal is the Brahmin of spiritual culture and renunciation.”37 Another practice of Hinduism which the missionaries never missed pillorying was idolatry. “It has become a trite saying,” said Vivekananda, “that idolatry is wrong and every man swallows it without questioning. I once thought so, and to pay the penalty of that I had to learn my lesson sitting at the feet of a man who realised everything through idols. I allude to Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. If such Ramakrishna Paramahamsas are produced by idol-worship, what will you have - the reformer’s creed or any number of idols? I want an answer. Take a thousand idols more if you can produce Ramakrishna Paramahamsas through idol-worship, and may God speed you! Produce such noble natures by any means you can. Yet idolatry is condemned! Why? Nobody knows. Because some hundreds of years ago some man of Jewish blood happened to condemn it? That is, he happened to condemn everybody else’s idols except his own. If God is represented in any beautiful form or any symbolic form, said the Jew, it is awfully bad; it is sin. But if He is represented in the form of a chest, with two angels sitting on each side, and a cloud hanging over it, it is the holy of holies. If God comes in the form of a dove, it is holy. But if He comes in the form of a cow, it is heathen superstition; condemn it! That is how the world goes. That is why the poet says, ‘what fools we mortals be!’... Boys, moustached babies, who never went out of Madras, standing up and wanting to dictate laws to three hundred millions of people who have thousands of traditions at their back!”38 Lastly, he defended the caste system, the bete noire of all missionaries and reformers inspired by them. “Caste is a very good thing,” he said. “Caste is the plan we want to follow... There is no country in the world without caste. In India, from caste we reach the point where there is no caste. Caste is based throughout on that principle. The plan in India is to make everybody a Brahmin, the Brahmin being the ideal of humanity. If you read the history of India you will find that attempts have always been made to raise the lower classes. Many are the classes that have been raised. Many more will follow till the whole will become Brahmin. That is the plan. We have to raise them without bringing down anybody... Indian caste is better than the caste which prevails in Europe or America. I do not say it is absolutely good. Where would you be if there were no caste? Where would be your learning and other things, if there were no caste? There would be nothing left for Europeans to study if caste had never existed. The Mohammedans would have smashed everything to pieces.”39 Caste was never a stationary institution. “Caste is continually changing,” said Vivekananda, “rituals are continually changing. it is the substance, the principle that does not change... Caste should not go; but should only he readjusted occasionally. Within the old structure is to be found life enough for the building of two hundred thousand new ones. It is sheer nonsense to desire the abolition of caste. The new method is - evolution of the old.”40 The great strength of Hinduism is that it does not lay down one dogma for everybody as is the case with Christianity and Islam. “The fault with all religions like Christianity,” said Vivekananda, “is that they have one set of rules for all. But Hindu religion is suited to all grades of religious aspiration and progress. It contains all the ideas in their perfect form.”41 A universality which does not preserve individuality is false. “Individuality in universality,” he continued, “is the plan of creation... Man is individual and at the same time .universal. It is while raising the individual that we realise even our national and universal nature.”42 It is because of this spirit of universality that Hinduism has never been a persecuting religion: “You know that the Hindu religion never persecutes. It is the land where all sects may live in peace and unity. The Mohammedans brought murder and slaughter in their train, but until their arrival peace prevailed.”43 The hour had come for Hinduism to carry its message abroad once more: “India was once a great missionary power. Hundreds of years before England was converted to Christianity, Buddha sent out missionaries to convert the world of Asia to his doctrine.”44 Vivekananda had himself given the lead. “I have planted the seed,” he wrote from America to the Raja of Khetri, “in this country; it is already a plant, and I expect it to be a tree very soon. The more the Christian priests oppose me, the more I am determined to leave a permanent mark on their country.”45 It was natural that Christian missionaries should notice Vivekananda the moment he spoke at the Parliament of Religions. They had never heard of the man before. They went into action in both the U.S.A. and India and were joined by some Brahmos of Keshub’s school. “They joined,” reported Vivekananda in a speech at Madras soon after his return, “the other opposition - the Christian missionaries. There is not one black lie imaginable that these latter did not invent against me. They blackened my character from city to city, poor and friendless though I was in a foreign country. They tried to oust me from every house and make every man who became my friend my enemy. They tried to starve me out.” At the same time he hit out at the Brahmo leaders who saw salvation of India through Christianity. “I am sorry to say,” added Vivekananda, “that one of my own countrymen took part against me in this. He is the leader of a reform party in India. This gentleman is declaring every day, ‘Christ has come to India.’ Is this the way Christ is to come to India?… Is that the lesson that he had learnt after sitting twenty years at the feet of Christ? Our great reformers declare that Christianity and Christian power are going to uplift the Indian people. Is that the way to do it? Surely, if that gentleman is an illustration, it does not look very hopeful.”46 J. Murrary Mitchell who was working as a missionary in India at that time reacted adversely to reports about Vivekananda’s popularity in the U.S.A. “We fear men from the East,” he wrote, “mistook politeness with which they were received as guests for sympathy with their opinions. Very singular at all events, have been the accounts that have been transmitted to Asia regarding the effect of their exposition of the Oriental creeds. They had carried the war into the enemy’s country, and were everywhere victorious.” He selected P. C. Mozumdar as the real representative of “advanced and intelligent Hindus” at the Parliament of Religions. Mozumdar had said, “Representatives of all religions, may all your religions merge in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, so that Christ’s prophecy may be fulfilled and mankind become one Kingdom under God as our Father.” Mr. Mitchell regretted that Mozumdar did not draw the applause he deserved because of his admiration for Christianity. “But Mr. Protap Chunder Mozumdar,” he said, “seems to have made much less impression than a young man who has assumed the honorofic title of Swami a step which Mr. [Keshub Chunder] Sen never ventured to take. Mr. Mozumdar appeared in plain Western dress, the Swami stood arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow. The ladies clustered around him in admiration.” What had hurt Mr. Mitchell the most was Vivekananda’s denunciation of the doctrine of sin. “We need not dwell,” he mourned, “on the Swami’s teaching. Let one specimen suffice.” He quoted verbatim what Vivekananda had said when he hailed people at the Parliament as “sharers of bliss” and “divinities on earth.” Vivekananda had hit Christianity in its solar plexus. How could Christianity thrive without selling sin? “We are truly sorry for the man,” concluded Mr. Mitchell, “who can thus trifle with his hearers with deeply solemn questions.”47 Vivekananda was rather mild in his criticism of missionaries when he spoke in the Parliament of Religions on September 29, 1893. “You Christians, who are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the soul of the heathen why do you not try to save their Modies from starvation?… You erect Churches all through India but-the crying evil in the East is not religion - they have religion enough - but it is bread that the suffering millions of burning India cry out for with parched throats... It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics.” He knew that missionaries were not preaching purely out of religious zeal; they had chosen the mission as a career and were paid for it. “In India,” he said, “a priest who preached for money would lose caste and be spat upon by the people.”48 He spoke in the same Vein when he addressed the Parliament of Religions on October 11, 1893. “Christian missionaries,” he said, “come to offer life but only on condition that the Hindus became Christians, abandoning the faith of their fathers and forefathers. Is it right?… If you wish to illustrate the meaning of ‘brotherhood’, treat Hindus more kindly even though he be a Hindu and is faithful to his religion. Send missionaries to teach them how better to earn a piece of bread, and not teach them metaphysical nonsense.”49 But when he noticed that even his mild comments on missionary activities were received with great resentment in Christian circles, his tone became sharp. The Detroit Free Press dated February 21, 1894 reported a lecture which he had delivered on ‘Hindus and Christians’. Coming to Christian missionaries he said, “You train and educate and pay men to do what? To come over to my country to curse and abuse all my forefathers, my religion, and everything. They walk near a temple and say, ‘You idolators, you will go to hell.’ But they dare not do that to the Mohammedans of India; the sword would be out. But the Hindu is too mild... And then you who train men to abuse and criticise, if I just touch you with the least bit of criticism, with the kindest purpose, you shrink and cry: ‘Don’t touch us; we are Americans. We criticise all the people in the world, curse them and abuse them, say anything, but do not touch us, we are sensitive plants?’… And whenever your ministers criticise us let them remember this: If all India stands up and takes all the mud that is at the bottom of the Indian ocean and throws it up against the Western countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of that which you are doing to us. And what for? Did we ever send one missionary to convert anybody in the world? We say to you: ‘Welcome to your religion, but allow me to have mine?’... With all your brags and boastings, where has Christianity succeeded without the sword? Show me one place in the whole world. One I say, throughout the history of the Christian religion - one; I do not want two. I know how your forefathers were converted. They had to be converted or killed; that was all. What can you do better than Mohammedanism, with all your bragging?”50 As he heard the malicious propaganda against Hinduism which missionaries were mounting in America and saw ‘their methods of raising money’, he hit them hard. “What is meant,” he asked, “by those pictures in the school-books for children where the Hindu mother is painted as throwing her children to the crocodiles in the Ganga? The mother is black but the baby is painted white to arouse more sympathy, and get more money. What is meant by those pictures which paint a man burning his wife at a stake with his own hands, so that she becomes a ghost and torments the husband’s enemy? What is meant by the pictures of huge cars crushing over human beings? The other day a book was published for children in this country, where one of these gentlemen tells a narrative of his visit to Calcutta. He says he saw a car running over fanatics in the streets of Calcutta. I have heard one gentleman preach in Memphis that in every village of India there is a pond full of the bones of little children. What have the Hindus done to these disciples of Christ that every Christian child is taught to call the Hindus vile, and ‘wretches’ and the most horrible devils on earth? Part of the Sunday School education for children here consists in teaching them to hate everybody who is not a Christian, and the Hindu especially, so that from their very childhood they may subscribe their pennies to the missions.”51 Vivekananda warned the missionaries about the effect which their propaganda was having on the moral and mental health of people who listened to them. “If not for the sake of truth,” he said, “for the sake of the morality of their own children, the Christian missionaries ought not to allow such things going on. Is it any wonder that such children grow up to be ruthless and cruel men and women?… A servant-girl in the employ of a friend of mine had to be sent to a lunatic asylum as a result of her attending what they call here a revivalist-preaching. The dose of hell-fire and brimstone was too much for her.”52 He saw how various missions were competing for collecting money and pouring calumny on each other. “Those to whom religion is a trade,” he observed, “are forced to become narrow and mischievous by their introduction into religion of the competitive, fighting and selfish methods of the world.”53 Having witnessed their ways, many educated Americans were losing respect for the missionaries. On the other hand, they were eager to listen to exponents of other cultures. “I have more friends,” he wrote in a letter to India in 1895, “than enemies, and only a small number of the educated care about the missionaries. Again, the very fact of the missionaries being against anything makes the educated like it. They are less of a power here now, and are becoming less so every day.”54 While Vivekananda caused a stir among the intellectual elite of America as was obvious from reports in the American press, the missionary circles were infuriated. “The Christian missionaries,” wrote The Indian Mirror on June 23, 1897, “rage and fume over the success of Swami Vivekananda’s mission in America. In its impotent fury, the Missionary Review of the World says that ‘Swami Vivekananda is simply a specimen of the elation and inflation of a weak man over the adulation of some silly people. If America ever gives up Christ, it will be for the devil, not Buddha or Brahma or Confucius. It will be lapse into utter apostasy, unbelief and infidelity.’ The writer, when penning these lines, was evidently under a fit of insanity brought on by the unlooked for spectacle of a Hindu preacher making disciples among American members of the Christian Church.”55 The Christian Literature Society which had its headquarters in London and a branch in Madras published a book, Swami Vivekananda and his Guru with letters from prominent Americans on the alleged programme of Vedantism in United States, in 1897. The book was reviewed by The Indian Mirror which wrote, “The object of the first part of this book is to show that, on account of his Shudra birth and for his want of knowledge as well as on the part of his Guru, Vivekananda is not qualified for teaching the Vedanta; that he, in consequence of his doings, is not entitled to be called a ‘Swami’; that Schopenhuer, the admirer of the Upanishads, was a bad man, and that Professor Max Muller (in connection with his opinion of Vedantic books) is a ‘man having two voices’.” Rev. Dr. W. W. White, Secretary to the College Young Men’s Christian Association of Calcutta, had written to “a number of ladies and gentlemen of America, mostly belonging to missions and educational institutions” in order to find out if there was any “likelihood of America abandoning Christianity and adopting… Hinduism… in its stead.” The replies he had received were reproduced in the second part of the above-mentioned book. “Some of the writers say,” continued The Indian Mirror, “that the Swami made no impression on the people, while some others asserted that the Swami may have made a few converts, but such converts were vaccilators and seekers of novelty. All of them consoled the enquirers with the assurance that Christianity had made a firm footing in America and there was no fear of its being Supplanted by any other religion.”56 Vivekananda had said again and again that he was not out to make any converts to Hinduism and that what he aimed at was the deepening and purification of Christianity which had been vulgarised by theologians and debased by missionaries. But the missionaries had their fears and wanted to be reassured that their citadel was not in danger of imminent collapse. There was a corollary to Vivekananda’s defence of Hinduism and critique of Christianity, particularly of the Christian missions. He called upon Hindu society to open its doors and take back its members who had been alienated from it by foreign invaders. Christian as well as Islamic missionaries were taking advantage of Hindu orthodoxy which was reluctant to receive those who had been forced or lured away from the Hindu fold but who were now ready to return to the faith of their forefathers. Vivekananda viewed this orthodoxy as nothing but a blind prejudice induced by the Hindus’ deep distrust of imported creeds. The distrust he regarded as well founded but the prejudice against victims of force or fraud as unjustified. His thoughts on the subject were expressed in an interview he gave to the representative of the Prabuddha Bharata, a monthly magazine started by his disciples in Madras. The interview, published in the April 1899 issue of the monthly, deserves to be reproduced at some length: “I want to see you, Swami,” I began, “on this matter of receiving back into Hinduism those who have been perverted from it. Is it your opinion that they should be received?” “Certainly,” said the Swami, “they can and ought to be taken.” He sat gravely for a moment, thinking, and then resumed. “Besides,” he said, “we shall otherwise decrease in numbers. When the Mohammedans first came, we are said - I think on the authority of Ferishta, oldest Mohammedan historian - to have been six hundred millions of Hindus. Now we are about two hundred millions. And then every man going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more. “Again, the vast majority of Hindu perverts to Islam and Christianity are perverts by the sword, or the descendants of these. It would be obviously unfair to subject these to disabilities of any kind. As to the case of born aliens, did you say? Why, born aliens have been converted in the past by crowds, and the process is still going on. “In my own opinion, this statement not only applies to aboriginal tribes, to outlying nations, and to almost all our conquerors before the Mohammedan conquest, but also to all those castes who find a special origin in the Puranas. I hold that they have been aliens thus adopted.57 “Ceremonies of expiation are no doubt suitable in the case of willing converts returning to their Mother-Church, as it were; but on those who were alienated by conquest - as in Kashmir and Nepal - or on strangers wishing to join us, no penance should be imposed.” “But of what caste would these people be, Swamiji?” I ventured to ask. “They must have some, or they can never be assimilated into the great body of Hindus. Where shall we look for their rightful place?” “Returning converts,” said the Swami quietly, “will gain their own castes, of course. And new people will make theirs. You will remember,” he added, “that this has already been done in the case of Vaishnavism. Converts from different castes and aliens were all able to combine under that flag and form a caste by themselves,-and a very respectful one too. From Ramanuja down to Chaitanya of Bengal, all great Vaishnava teachers have done the same.” “And where should these new people expect to marry?” I asked. “Amongst themselves as they do now,” said the Swami quietly. “Then as to names,” I enquired, “I suppose aliens and perverts who have adopted non-Hindu names should be named newly. Would you give them caste-names, or what?” “Certainly,” said the Swami, thoughtfully, “there is a great deal in a name” and on this question he would say no more. “But my next enquiry drew blood. ‘Would you leave these newcomers, Swamiji, to choose their own forms of religious belief out of many visaged Hinduism, or would chalk out a religion for them?’ “Can you ask that?” he said. “They will choose for themselves. For unless a man chooses for himself, the very spirit of Hinduism is destroyed. The essence of our Faith consists simply in this freedom of the Ishta.”58 Vivekananda paid a second visit to the West from June 1899 to December 1900. During his stay in California in February-May 1900, he received a gift of 160 acres from one of his American admirers. The society which he had founded during his first visit for the propagation of Vedanta, had now a home in America. It was named the Shanti Ashram. This is not the place to tell the story of how the precedent set by Vivekananda was followed in years to come by many other Hindu missionaries. It should suffice to say that today no country in the West is without Hindu presence in some form or the other. Seekers in the West have become increasingly aware of the major schools of Sanatana Dharma - Yoga and Vedanta, Buddhism and Jainism, Shaivism and Vaishnavism, Shaktism and Tantra. The impact of Vivekananda in his own country was far more momentous. He had taken over from where Bankim Chandra had left. Among the writers and thinkers of modern India, Bankim Chandra had fascinated him the most. During his lecture tour in East Bengal in 1901 he is reported to have advised Bengal’s young men to “read Bankim, and Bankim, and Bankim again.” Small wonder that Bankim’s AnandamaTha inspired revolutionary organisations fighting for India’s freedom and his Vande MAtaram became the national song par excellence when the awakening brought about by Vivekananda burst forth in a political movement soon after his death in 1902. This was the Swadeshi Movement led by Sri Aurobindo. It was renascent India’s first experiment in mass mobilization. Powerful mantras such as svadeshI and svarAjya, first invoked by Maharshi Dayananda, came to the fore and fired the people’s imagination. The struggle against Western imperialism in all its forms including Christianity became linked with the earlier struggle against Islamic imperialism. Maharana Pratap, Shivaji, Guru Govind Singh and Banda Bairagi resumed their full stature as national heroes after having suffered an eclipse in the national memory. Sri Krishna gave a message to Sri Aurobindo while the latter was incarcerated in the Alipore Jail. The Great Teacher of the Gita said, “Something has been shown to you in this year of seclusion, something about which you had your doubts and it is the truth of the Hindu religion. It is this religion that I am raising up before the world, it is this that I have perfected and developed through the Rishis, saints and Avatars, and is now going forth to do my work among the nations. I am raising up this nation to send forth my word. This is the Sanatan Dharma, this is the eternal religion which you did not really know before, but which I have now revealed to you… When you go forth, speak to your nation always this word, that it is for the Sanatan Dharma that they arise. It is for the world and not for themselves they arise. I am giving them freedom for the service of the world. When therefore it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall rise. When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the Dharma and by the Dharma that India exists. To magnify the religion means to magnify the country.”59 The speech which Sri Aurobindo delivered at Uttarpara in 1909, soon after his acquittal in the Alipore Conspiracy Case, ended with the following words: “I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it is moves, and with it grows. When the Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatan Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatan Dharma it would perish. The Sanatan Dharma, that is nationalism.”60 The Brahmo Samaj which had been fascinated by Christianity could not remain unaffected. Rabindranath Tagore wrote his novel, Gora, in 1910. The following dialogue between Suchitra, the heroine, and Gora, the hero, showed the new trend that had started emerging in Brahmoism: She put aside her shyness and said with simple modesty, “I have never before thought about my country so greatly and so truly. But one question I will ask: What is the relation between country and religion? Does not religion transcend country?” He replied, “That which transcends country, which is greater than country, can only reveal itself through one’s country. God has manifested his one eternal nature in just such a variety of forms... I can assure you that through the open sky of India you will be able to see the sun therefore there is no need to cross the ocean and sit at the window of a Christian church.” “You mean to say that for India there is a special path leading to God? What is this speciality?” asked Suchitra. “The speciality is this,” replied Gora, “it is recognised that the Supreme Being who is without definition is manifest within limits - the endless current of minute and protracted, subtle and gross, is of Him. He is at one and the same time with endless attributes and without attributes; of infinite forms and formless.. In other countries they have tried to confine God with some one definition. In India no doubt there have also been attempts to realise God in one or other of his special aspects, but these have never been looked upon as final, nor any of them conceived to be the only one. No Indian devotee has ever failed to acknowledge that God in His infinity transcends the particular aspect which may be true for the worshipper personally.”61 Later on in this novel Rabindranath rejects Christianity in more clear terms: Suchitra had been listening with her head bowed, but now she lifted her eyes and asked, “Then what do you tell me to do?” “I have nothing more to say,” answered Gora, “only this much I would add. You must understand that the Hindu religion takes in its lap, like a mother, people of different ideas and opinions, in other words, the Hindu religion looks upon man as man and does not count him as belonging to a particular party. It honours not only the wise but the foolish also and it shows respect not merely to one form of wisdom but to wisdom in all its aspects. Christians do not want to acknowledge diversity; they say that on one side is Christian religion and on the other eternal destruction, and between these two there is no middle path. And because we have studied under these Christians we have become ashamed of the variety that is there in Hinduism. We fail to see that through this diversity Hinduism is coming to realise the oneness of all. Unless we can free ourselves from this whirlpool of Christian teaching we shall not become fit for the glorious truths of Hindu religion.”<a href="http://www.bharatvani.org/books/hhce/Ch13.htm#62">62 A new spirit was abroad. The English educated intelligentsia which had turned away from Hinduism, particularly in Bengal, was acquiring respect for it at a deeper level. The missionary machine had to change gear and turn towards the tribal areas. It is an altogether different story that the Ramakrishna Mission which Swami Vivekananda had founded for the defence and spread of Hinduism, was taken over by the disciples of Keshub Chunder Sen. It was not long before an authoritative biography of Sri Ramakrishna depicted him not as a giant Hindu saint but as a unique sAdhaka who had met and absorbed into himself both Jesus and Muhammad! The next inevitable step was to present Sri Ramakrishna as a synthesiser of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Finally, the Mission was hailing Sri Ramakrishna as the founder of a new religion - Ramakrishnaism - which was “far superior” to Hinduism. Sri Ramakrishna, according to the Mission mystique, was the “first saint” (or prophet, if you please) in human history who had “demonstrated practically” that Hinduism and Christianity and Islam were only different paths for reaching the same spiritual goal! It is useless to tell the salesmen of Ramakrishnaism that this country has known thousands of saints like Sri Ramakrishna, that he would have remained unknown like most of them if Vivekananda had not made him famous, and that Vivekananda who was his dearest disciple had viewed Islam and Christianity not as religions but as doctrines of the sword. The Mission has become a world-wide network, and a wealthy institution patronized by the high and the mighty, not only in India but also abroad. And the Mission knows that Hindus can always be taken for granted. The Mission is neither the first nor the last to fatten with the help of Hindu society and then render service to the enemies of that society. The story will be repeated till Hindu society learns how to deal with turn-coats and traitors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Pp ekkadiki poyadu.. Sechan lo kanipinchatla.. Convert avvataniki kaani poyada enti srk bhayyo.. tellodi setha rape seyinchukuntunnademo bhayyooo... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VadlamudiLaxmi Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 neeku eakkada dhorikindi annai e video.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VadlamudiLaxmi Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Srk brother and chandu brother emiti e roju e topic odilipettara Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LION_NTR Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 @chsrk bro! swami vivekananda velle varaku west ki Hinduism lo unna charm teliyaledu he is the man born for a mission.. let me sheare a famous quote of Rabindranath Tagore about swamiji "If you want to know about India, read about swami vivekananda" a truely great soul Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 ma college lo ma PT gadu ide bapathi, hostel lo kurrolaki surch ki randi dabulu iatharu , devudu krupa untadi, me badalu pothayi ani antyunde vadu mana kurrolu kruth fagilidi ani direct ga pakkaki thesukeli ananru , krutgh musukuni ne pani nuvvu sesukoo ittanti lathukoor eshalu ethee kruth fagal d gutham ananru, aaaa batchey lo me babay unnado ledoo nakaithe telvaaad maa babai kooda rowdy ee batchey egaa ...unde untaadu... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KilaDi No.1 Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 neeku eakkada dhorikindi annai e video.. youtube loki velli brother anil ani search kottu sister.. saami gaaru leelalu saala bayata padathayi.. Songulu.. Dancelu.. Comedy..Fighting scenes.. Paruchuri brother level lo dialoguess... .abboo.. pedha hero le... aa video choosava sister.. ee hero ki varsham aapagala power undhani YSR ki telisinattu ledhu.. telisunte bathikunde vaademo.. helicopter accident ayi undedey kaadhu.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 @chsrk bro! swami vivekananda velle varaku west ki Hinduism lo unna charm teliyaledu he is the man born for a mission.. let me sheare a famous quote of Rabindranath Tagore about swamiji "If you want to know about India, read about swami vivekananda" a truely great soul avunu brother...not only the west, those were the times when Indians themselves were forgetting about their own religion and losing their confidence....atuvanti keelaka samayallo udbavinchaadu aa mahanubhaavudu.....His teachings greatly inspired our Freedom Struggle too....Every Indian should follow the teachings of Swami Vivekanandha... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chsrk Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Srk brother and chandu brother emiti e roju e topic odilipettara no yaa..topic discussion ki vachchindi kanuka ...atta vadhilaam anthe... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sr Fan Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Even though lot of shades exist in deception.......Just keep things in perspective...... There is only one menace staring at human civilization and way of life globally.......It is extremist Wahabhi nature of Islamization...... producing Terrorists all around the world ........... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KilaDi No.1 Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Srk brother and chandu brother emiti e roju e topic odilipettara knowledge is wisdom annattu kadha sister.. ila entha sepayina discuss knowledge penchukuntam annattu.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ntradmirer Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 sorry for the intrusion cum deviation, but I have posted something in Chat section.. can you all have a look and give your opinion ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VadlamudiLaxmi Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 ee hero ki varsham aapagala power undhani YSR ki telisinattu ledhu.. telisunte bathikunde vaademo.. helicopter accident ayi undedey kaadhu.. idi gud joke naku navvu agatam ledu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VadlamudiLaxmi Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 knowledge is wisdom annattu kadha sister.. ila entha sepayina discuss knowledge penchukuntam annattu.. ok meeru baga penchukondi knowledge ni .... bye gud ngt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VadlamudiLaxmi Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 no yaa..topic discussion ki vachchindi kanuka ...atta vadhilaam anthe.. meeru continue cheyandi...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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