RE: Religion as currency Sandhya Jain, Aug. 22, 2006Pioneer

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Nice article sandhya

 

 

 

 

vediculture [vediculture] On

Behalf Of Vrndavan Parker

Wednesday, August 23, 2006 8:24 AM

vediculture

[world-vedic] Religion as currency Sandhya Jain, Aug. 22, 2006

Pioneer

 

 

 

 

 

SIARAM (AT) aol (DOT) com wrote:

 

SIARAM (AT) aol (DOT) com

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 13:37:17 EDT

Religion as currency Sandhya Jain, Aug. 22, 2006 Pioneer

SIARAM (AT) aol (DOT) com

 

 

 

 

Religion as currency

 

Sandhya Jain, Aug. 22, 2006 Pioneer

 

Archbishop Mar Varkey Vithayathil recently startled India's

intellectual elite with his call for more babies to arrest the decline

of Kerala's Catholic community. Perturbed at the toll taken by

abortion and the small family norm on the Syro-Malabar Church, he

insisted the burgeoning national population is no problem and that the

State should not try to curb family size

 

Kerala's rich and large Christian community constitutes nearly 20 per

cent of the votebank, and the Archbishop's call is intensely

political. It is reportedly inspired by the fear that the Sons of

Ismail may soon surpass the Sons of Isaac in god's own country. In the

monotheistic world, allegiance to the Abrahamic cult is not enough;

what matters is sectarian affiliation. Naturally our secular media, a

subordinate ally of the Church, spared the Archbishop the encomiums

heaped upon RSS chief KS Sudarshan last year when he asked Hindu

families to have at least three children.

 

Kerala's Christian population registered a 22.6 per cent growth rate

in the decade 1991-2001. Christianity's second highest growth rate was

in Gujarat, nearly 56 per cent, and Mr Narendra Modi's sympathy for

Hindu alarm in the matter explains the antipathy towards him. Ms Sonia

Gandhi's ascent as UPA supremo, coupled with America's muscular

espousal of evangelism, has given the Christian community the daring

to make Governor Balram Jakhar stall amendments to the Madhya Pradesh

Freedom of Religion Act, 2006, which require church officials to

pre-notify district authorities before conducting conversions, thus

effectively restraining them. Evangelical anger is growing as

Chhattisgarh has also moved to toughen conversion by force or

allurement, while exempting those returning to their natal faith from

the ambit of 'conversion'.

 

It needs to be stated unequivocally that proselytisation has nothing

to do with freedom of religion, conscience, or choice. Like the

so-called borderless terrorism plaguing the world, evangelists have

territorial ambitions, which they seek to fulfil through domination

and control of the human mind and body. Akin to the autonomous jihadi

cells, evangelists have a grand design, an international network, and

an overarching high command. At least since 1974, the blueprint to

evangelise the non-Christian world, known as the Joshua Project, has

been conducted under the auspices of the International Congress on

World Evangelisation (ICWE). The international network is funded and

controlled by Western Christian nations, led by the United States, and

is typically insensitive to the physical and emotional violence

inflicted on the poor and defenceless when free food, medical aid,

money, employment, or outright violence are used to compel

conversions.

 

Prof Arvind Sharma has often argued that the academic discourse on

conversions is biased in favour of faiths that convert, as opposed to

those that do not. Hindu dharma and the Hindu people respect the

religious freedom and choices of non-Hindus. Yet they are subjected to

the depredations of theologies committed to their own annihilation

through conversions. This, as Swami Dayanand Saraswati contends, is a

conscious aggressive intrusion into the religious life of the

individual, into his religious core.

 

Worse, the clan and community of the converted person are deeply

wounded. In fact, the convert himself suffers secret hurt, wondering

if he has acted correctly in alienating himself from the community to

which he belonged for generations, thus sundering ties with his

ancestors. Religious conversion is violence; that is why it breeds

communal violence. In the Hindu tradition, religion and culture are

inseparable and hence the loss of religion invariably amounts to loss

of cultural heritage. This can be readily seen in the case of the

Greek, Mayan, Roman and other civilisations lost to the sword of

Christian soldiers.

 

Ironically, protests against conversions are dubbed as persecution or

the denial of religious freedom. This untruth veils the fact that the

intended victim of the evangelist is being denied the freedom to

observe his natal faith without physical or cultural assault. It is in

fact an intentional insult to the faith sought to be annihilated, and

is a cognisable offence. In no civilised society is freedom of

religion co-terminus with a planned programme of conversion.

 

In the post-World War II era, evangelists have benefited from Article

18 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which

permits violence against human dignity, reason and conscience, and

violates the fundamental declaration in Article 1 that all human

beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Since its

adoption in December 1948, the UDHR has been perceived as a

Christian-centric text with pretensions to universalism. It is, in a

sense, the twentieth century version of Emperor Akbar's Islam-centric

Din-i-Ilahi, a high-sounding doctrine that failed to make the grade

with his Hindu courtiers and subjects.

 

The world needs a genuine Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Religious scholars at McGill University have made a credible effort to

prepare a wholistic document titled, Universal Declaration of Human

Rights by the World's Religions, which is now set to be discussed at

the forthcoming global congress on World's Religions after September

11 at Montreal (September 11-15, 2006).

 

Some clauses are exemplary, such as "Everyone has the right to freedom

from violence, in any of its forms, individual or collective; whether

based on race, religion, gender, caste or class, or arising from any

other cause" (Article 2). Interestingly, Article 9 (1) equates

proselytisation against the will of a person with arbitrary detention.

There is also the right "not to have one's religion denigrated in the

media or the academia" (Article 12, 4), along with the corresponding

duty of adherents of every religion to ensure that no religion is so

denigrated (Article 12, 5).

 

Article 18 (1) explicitly bars compulsion in religion, giving everyone

the right to retain his religion or change it (2). The right to retain

one's religion has thus for the first time been brought into the

international arena on an equal footing with the freedom to change

one's faith. Finally, the document enshrines the right to protect

one's cultural heritage and accords world heritage status to

everyone's cultural heritage (Article 27, 3).

 

If adopted by the United Nations, this document could mitigate the

burgeoning civilisational strife and blunt conversion as a foreign

policy tool of many Western nations. It could facilitate respect for

the natural geographical borders of myriad faiths, and check the

expansionist drives of crusading monotheisms.

 

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