Exit Christ! Exit Conversion!!

V. SUNDARAM

“We must get rid of that Christ, we must get rid of that Christ!” so spoke Ralf Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), one of the wisest and one of the most loveable of men. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), wrote thus in 1850, “If I had my way, the world would hear a pretty stern command – EXIT CHRIST!”

The great English poet P.B Shelley (1792-1822) paid this poetic tribute to Jesus Christ: “Who was Christ? He is called the “divine teacher”. Yes, -

He led
The crowd, he taught them justice, truth, and peace,
In semblance, but he lit within their souls
The quenchless flames of zeal, and blessed the sword
He brought on Earth to satiate with the blood
Of truth and freedom his malignant soul!”

Since the days of Emerson and Carlyle in the 19th Century, a revolution has taken place in the thoughts of men all over the world and more particularly in Europe, U.S.A and the Western World. From their minds Jesus Christ has made his EXIT. To quote the words of Professor Goldwin Smith, “The mighty and Supreme Jesus who was to transfigure all humanity by his divine wit and grace --- this Jesus has flown.” The Supernatural Christ of the New Testament, the God of Orthodox Christianity, is dead in the West. NOT SO IN A PSEUDO-SECULAR ANTI-HINDU, CHRISTIANITY-EMBRACING COUNTRY LIKE INDIA. The UPA II Government of India, under the stranglehold of a woman Catholic usurper from Italy (the firangi memsahib to be precise), is functioning as the most potent marketing manager of proselytising Catholic Christianity and Protestant Christianity. India today has become a despicable land of rampantly fraudulent Christian conversions with the full political support of Sonia Congress UPA II Government in New Delhi.

The solid foundations of today’s Christian Church thievery and state-assisted dacoity in India were solidly laid during the colonial days of British Raj. Recently, I came across a copy of a journal called ‘THE ARYAN PATH’. I have presented the Front Cover of the August 1944 issue of this Journal below. 

 

I came across the following news item in this issue of ‘The Aryan Path’

 

“Verrier Elwin’s renewed protest against the proselytizing activities of Christian Missionaries in the Wholly and Partially Excluded Areas deserves immediate attention. His account of proselytizing methods, particularly in the Mandla District, appeared in the Bombay Chronicle of 14th June. Not only, he indicates, are conversions effected through the offer of facilities, e.g., schools, but more objectionable methods are reported of exploiting the ignorance and poverty of the tribal people. Money-lending in impoverished India offers great opportunity, no doubt, through disinterested philanthropy, but it does establish a hold on the borrower. It should, in their own reputation’s interest, be eschewed by those who have a stake in getting helpless illiterates under their influence. Mr Elwin cites a case in which a too zealous missionary propagandist resorted to a threat of force against one of Mr Elwin’s own workers if he dared to oppose the Christians. Already the Dutch Catholic Missionaries are operating through more than a hundred minor centres, besides their Sijhora Training School with its thirty buildings. The withdrawal of a part of the Government Grant to this institution has apparently embarrassed them not at all. And Mandla is being invaded by Protestant missionaries as well. Mr Elwin charges openly that nearly every day he hears of new converts being “tricked, bullied or purchased into the Church”. The fact that the areas are nominally segregated has been helpful in avoiding public scrutiny of proselytizing methods “that would have been considered disgraceful in the Middle Ages”. The ostensible segregation was designed to preserve the cultural and religious integrity of the aboriginal population, and this is the way their cultural interests are being guarded. Without imputing any deliberate connivance on the part of the Government, its allowing of foreign missionaries an almost free hand must lay it open to misunderstanding. Mr Elwin demands that all schools opened in Mandla District since the passing of the Act of 1935 be taken over by the Government and that missionary money-lending and proselytizing activities generally be prohibited in all Excluded Areas.”

Verrier Elwin (1902–1964)

Verrier Elwin was a self-trained anthropologist, ethnologist and tribal activist, who began his career in India as a Christian missionary. He was a charismatic figure who first abandoned the clergy, to work with Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, later converted to Hinduism in 1935 after staying in the Gandhian ashram.

After Independence, Nehru appointed him as an adviser on tribal affairs for north-eastern India. Later he became the Anthropological Adviser to the Government of NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh). His autobiography, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin won him the 1965 Sahitya Akademi Award in English Language, given by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.

Priyadarshan Pant

My esteemed friend Priyadarshan Pant from Mumbai has sent me a beautiful article written by him in which he has written with great feeling of anguish against forced or induced Christian conversions in India and how many traditional Hindu families get wrenched from their ROOTS. He has rightly compared this pernicious process with what he calls the UPROOTING OF TREES in a forest. I am giving below the full text of this article:

OF TREES FLOATING IN THE GARDEN

Normally, trees growing anywhere are known by the locality they grow in. Thus, a tree which is growing in Rani Lakshmibai Park would be termed as belonging to Rani Lakshmibai Park. Similarly, if a tree is growing in my garden, I might say that that tree belongs to or is part of my garden and so on. On the other hand, if there is a tree lying uprooted in a field and finding that there is no cavity in the ground where that tree may have once stood, if someone were to ask where that tree belonged to, the answer might be – I don’t know. Why? Because we don’t know where its roots were!

Human beings are much the same as trees, as far as their roots are concerned. Humans too have roots and sometimes these roots are much stronger and deeper than roots that are visible to the naked eye. Amongst other things, Patriotism grows out of these roots.

A tree takes in air, water, minerals from its environment and gives back to its environment – clean air; flowers; fruits; cool shade; eco-balance; a beautiful ambience; poetry; literature; music and more.

A man living in a particular country would normally be taking sustenance from things in that country. He would observe the local rules, customs, norms, mores etc. and have much in common with other citizens of that country. Much the same as monkeys live with other monkeys he too would feel at home in his home country since he has so many things in common with others around him. This is the normal scenario.

Unlike trees which cannot float and live, a man can! He can continue to live in one and the same place and, only by programming his mind, a “disconnect” could be created between him and his surrounds. Thus, when a man converts to another religion, at least in India, he starts learning and speaking the language that is perceived as belonging to that religion – for instance, Urdu and Farsi for a convert to Islam, and English for a convert to Christianity. A woman convert may start wearing burqas or frocks as the case may be; her name would become Ayesha or Mary; men would shave off their moustaches and start wearing dirty perforated caps with short pyjamas and long kurtas to boot; Id and Christmas start getting celebrated – just as they are done in the respective lands of their origin; psalms are sung instead of bhajans and the loud speakers shout azans at a deafening 200 db; Mama must become Mamu or Uncle and Chacha must become Chachu or Uncle and so on. Local Hindu customs are discarded as being pagan, heathen or plain kafiri in the new religious incarnation. What were once the customs and religion of their forefathers for thousands of years and continue to be so for crores of their brothers and sisters, in an instant become things to fight against and “root” out. The human being thus shows itself out to be a strange kind of Tree – one that will bite, cut and destroy its own roots!

The jihadis and the crusaders say that their religions and only their respective gods are true. Neither the jihadis nor the crusaders pause to answer a few questions – What is the real name of God? Does he have a name at all? Why should {a (hopefully) just and correct thinking} God favour one set of men (say, Muslims or Christians) and not another (Hindus)? Does God have a religion? If God is Christian or Muslim, would he not be going to a Church or Mosque? If he is God then does he need to go to a Church or Mosque or a Temple?

Some Hindus go to temples and some don’t; some Hindus believe that God has form and some don’t; some Hindus believe in caste and some don’t and so on. The plain and simple fact the Hindus know is that God is known by many names; He has many forms but is only one! How come this is missed by the other religionists? It could, of course, be that now they have come to know the truth from the Hindus but they do not want to acknowledge it as that might lead to terrible monetary and political losses.

Why do people convert to other religions? The reasons are as varied as one can think them out but the major ones are – pecuniary or plain conning.

The harm that is done to a country that is beset with the accursed problem of “foreign religious conversions” is terrible, to say the least. Even as it is, there are so many divisions in society – language, money, caste, regions and regionalism as promoted by the government etc. On these are superimposed the foreign religious divides. INSTEAD OF UNIFYING US, FOREIGN RELIGIOUS CONVERSIONS DIVIDE US. The problem of blind beliefs (religious beliefs too are blind for the vast majority) continues; poverty, ignorance, follow-the-stupid-leader, indiscipline etc. all continue. Why then should any government interested in the well-being of a country allow foreign religious conversions? This could have only three possible answers – the government is stupid, a knave or both!

Whether religious conversions are mainly foreign in nature can be easily answered by the gargantuan proportions inflows of foreign funds have taken. These funds go into Christian and Muslim organizations, churches, mosques, so-called charities etc. The funds are then made to flow through many streams (books, pamphlets, television, teams upon teams of proselytizers etc.) into breaking Hindu Society, building more churches and mosques and even into jihadi terrorism.

The question we must ask of the government and the floating trees is how far will they go – would they even sell our own mother to gain, be it political power, money and other within-nose-tip-range benefits? VANDE MATARAM!

Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the Convenor of the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha views every act of Christian conversion as an act of unprovoked violence. In this context, let me quote the words of this great and revolutionary champion of Hinduism and Sanatana Dharma

“Christians, regardless of their denomination, are mandated by their theology to ‘bear witness to Christ’ which, in simple terms, means sharing the faith with a stranger. Why share the faith with a stranger? The vast majority of Christian believers are firmly convinced that unless a person ‘accepts Christ as his saviour’, he is, at the very least, denied entry to Heaven. More extreme, but not less common, believers are convinced that he will definitely go to Hell - and forever. So, given the theological compulsion to share the faith with a stranger, a serious Christian has no option except to exert and ‘save’ the person, inevitably a non-Christian, from such a fate. That is to say convert him to Christianity. See the effect. Obviously the theological belief that no faith other than Christianity can guarantee salvation, or that other faiths can only lead to Hell, cannot amount to honouring non-Christian religions. Can a Christian, who believes this, view a non-Christian religion as anything but inferior or, as is often the case, dangerous? So in the innocuous mandate to ‘bear witness’ to Christ inheres the denigration of the religion of the ‘other’, if not explicitly, certainly implicitly. Herein lies concealed the propensity and the potential for disharmony, for, when one’s religion is denigrated a great violence is done to what one holds most dear. … Conversion comes at the cost of extermination of native people’s cultural diversity and way of living. Without preserving as they are, the existing religious traditions and the people that practised them, we cannot access these knowledge-bases that contain the lessons of harmonious co-existence. I would unhesitatingly call the Jewish, the Zoroastrian and the Hindu traditions as non-aggressive traditions for just this reason: they do not convert. Conversion UPROOTS individuals, devastates families, creates discord in communities and destroys ancient cultures. … Destruction of culture is destruction of religion. Destruction of religion is destruction of culture. If this destruction is not violence, what else is violence? Aggression need not be physical. It need not be the Kargil type. There are a varieties of aggression. You can either be emotionally, economically or verbally aggressive. But, the worst aggression, more than physical aggression, is cultural aggression or religious aggression. That is why we say ‘Conversion is Violence’. It is the deepest and most profound violence.”

I would like to end this story with a poem titled Pagan Questions by Padma Sundaram which poetically brings out the points of view of both Priyadarshan Pant and Swami Dayanand Saraswati.

Pagan Questions!!

India is no longer the PUNYA BHOOMI (Holy land)
          envisaged by our ancestors
It has become a NARAK BHOOMI (Land of Hell)
What with Quota Mad Politicians
And Quislings of pseudo-secularism
Islamic terrorists and
Christian Evangelists
Oh God we Hindus feel Hell is a better place
For in hell at least there is no Quota
For the ABC’s and EFG’s of Quota Raj
Or reserved treatment for Christians and Islamists


India is surrounded by vultures even before the people are dead
The vultures of Islam and hyenas of Evangelizing Christianity
Islam says convert or die, for Indiaslambad belongs to us
Evangelists tempt you with
Vanilla Ice-cream (Seventh Day Adventists!)
Chocolate Ice-cream (Catholics!)
Pista Ice-cream (Born-Again Christians!)
Cassata (Pentecostals!)
Tutti-frutti (Anglicans!)
For the Evangelists say
Why fall for Islam
When we have so many varieties to offer you!!
With Christian compassion and benediction


But when the Hindus cry out
We don’t want to convert, Leave us alone!!
The Soul-saving Evangelists say
But you cannot remain a black dirty heathenish pagan,
For when we offer you the chance to become
A black clean Baptist Christian
How can you ever say no!
To this offer of Christian heaven on earth
From a trans-national departmental store
For your total salvation


Terrorist Islam says
In terms Jihadic
You leave them to us
We know how to bring these infidels to heel
They are not fit to be offered ice-cream and such dishes delectable
They must know
It is Believe The Book or else it is sure death
Dear God, I as a devout pagan Hindu cry out
I have nothing to do with the Book
I know nothing about the Book
For God’s sake
Leave me alone in peace.


OM SHANTI! OM SHANTI! OM SHANTIHI!