Thomas In India? History Of Christianism In India

[Guest]

The Spread of myth of
“Doubting Thomas” by South Indian Historians!

Now, it is evident that a vested group inside SIHC works faithfully to spread “the Doubting Thomas” myth through their proceedings, which is reportedly meant for secular and scientific history. When Dr. B. Maria John, Reader in History, Manonmaniyam Sundaranar University, Tiruynelveli read a paper on January 21, 2005, he was asked by another participant delegate many questions for which he could not answer.

The sectional President Prof A. R. Ramachansdra Reddy was clearly convinced about the motivated attempt of the paper presenter. But, what is surprising is that the unhistorical paper containing only myth, trash etc., has been appearing in the proceeding volume distributed during the 26th session of SIHC held at Bangalore during conference held from March 3rd to 5th 2006.

“St. Thomas, the Indian Apostle” has been printed in the pages 680-683. Interestingly, the volume has been edited by the Chief Editor Dr. B. S. Chandra Babu with members of the Editorial Committee –

Prof. B. Narasingaraja Naidu, Bangalore.
Prof. G. Sethuraman, Madurai.
Prof. Yenadhi Raju, Tirupati.
Prof. K. Gopalan Kutty Calicut.

Therefore, even if A. R. Ramachandra Reddy was reluctant to recommend considering the dubious nature of the paper, these professors of history from their respective universities must have impressed upon him to recommend for publication or otherwise, as the paper is appearing in the volume as noted above. Why these professors being historians and all want to support and spread the myth of doubting Thomas in India? Why they want to accommodate such blatant lies and thereby become “liars of Indian history”? To know the facts, the conduct of the 25th session of SIHC has to be analyzed.

There has been a “historical fight” between the historians Dr. D. Daniel and Dr. D. Janaki and the reasons are not known. See the version of Dr. D. Daniel appearing in the proceeding volume reproduced below for convenience.

As Dr. D. Daniel has been the General Secretary, the Christians decided to support and save his face. The Pillar Guest House came forward to provide food and accommodation to the delegates. Of course, though food was common to everybody (it is entirely a different story that some of the delegates could not get lunch daily), accommodation was restricted only to the coterie of the SIHC. Many delegates openly accepted that but for the Christian support, Daniel could not have conducted the session. Having helped, the co-called “Silver Jubilee Session” was conducted with the Christian help. Thus, the Church must have dictated the editorial committee to accommodate the Christian supporting articles / papers with its vested interests through Dr. D. Daniel. A close study of 154 papers selected for publication shows the following trend:

Papers published under different sections Total papers Presented by Christians Christian supporting papers
Political 35 9 4
Social 44 12 10
Economic 19 4 2
Cultural 45 5 3
Hist. & Matritime 10 1 -
Total 154 31 19

Thus totally 50 out of 154 papers have been thus presented by Christians and Christian supporting writers. Of course “against non-Christian category” might be also clubbed together, but not done. In any case, the Christian bias and the influence are clearly noted and recorded.

It is unfortunate that the scholars proclaiming themselves historians have stooped down such level to support and spread unhistorical lies, deceits and fabrications. It is well known fact that as to how the former Archbishop Arulappa was involved in such fabrication with the engaged self styled Professor Dr. Acharya Paul only to spread the “Thomas myth”. It is a fact that Archbishop Arulappa took Professor Dr. Acharya Paul to the then Pope through Cardinal Retzinger, the present Pope! It is better historians to keep away from this type of “history fabricators”, as otyerwise, the involved historians have to held responsible for their “unhistorical activities and alliances”.

[Guest]

St Thomas the apostle of Jesus - did he visit India?

Once upon a time, it was a matter of great contention and debate amongst the European Christian missionaries in India. On one hand Roman Catholics, Syrians and Jesuits (mostly Portugese, Dutch, Germans) strongly propelled that Thomas was the first missionary to India. On the other hand protestants and more scholarly christians denied this empathatically (French and especially British scholars).

While the "Role of Christian Missionaries" thread mostly deals with present times, I would like to use this thread to discuss history aspect of Christianism in India.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Of the first Indian missionaries, we have no account.  There is a legend which attributes to the apostle Thomas the establishment of the Christian Church in India.  Slowly does reason reject a tradition which imagination is so eager to embrace.  It would be pleasant to accord the fullest faith to the legend of the apostolic origin of Christianity in India; but there is really no authority in its favor to divest it of all the attributes of fable.  A very exciting account of life and death of the apostle in India is to be found in the pages of a Portugese historian.  With apparent good faith Maffeus relates the miracles that Thomas wrought in India; how he converted certain Magi; how he built a temple at Meliapore; how he brought the dead to life; how e delivered himself of certain wonderful prophesies; and , finally how he became a martyr of the faith. 

The Portugese, at all events, beleived these traditions, and invoked the miraculous aid of the saint when they went into battle.

Marco Polo, who visited India before the times of Portugese, relates that St. Thomas was accidentally killed when at prayer in a wood, by a low-caste man, who was shooting at peacocks; and that, as a consequence of this mischance,none of the poor man's tribe could ever enter the place where the saint lay buried.  "Nor", adds the Venetian, "could twenty men force them in, nor ten hold them there, on account of the virtue of that sacred body."

Every one who visits Madras knows "St Thomas's Mount".  It has for centuries been held, both by the Syrian and Romish churches, to be the burial place of the apostle; but the more the legend is investigated, the more fabulous it appears.

<span style='color:red'>I do not know a modern writer of any note who has the least faith in the story.</span>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Above is written in 1859 by John William Kaye, a military British historian posted in India.

Page 3 & 4, "Christianity In India : An Historic Narrative"

About John WIlliam Kaye

[Guest]

http://www.hamsa.org has much to say on this subject.

About Thomas Didimus et al !

About how a fraud is being perpetuated by repeated assertion!

[acharya]

This thread will be moved to the Indian culture forum.

[Guest]

<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>For those, who say Christians opposed untouchability and castism in India:</span>

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In virtue of privileges granted by Sharen Perumal, former emporer of Malabar, the <b>Syrian Christians take precedence of the Nairs, who are the nobility of the country; and they are second to rank only to brahmins</b>, for who the kings themselves manifest an extraordinary veneration.

<b>If a pagan strikes one of the Christians, he is put to death on the spot</b>, or forced himself to bear to the church of the place an offering of gold or silver hand, according to the quality of the peson affronted.

<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

As reported by a contemporary British writer in 1833, a Catholic himself, <span style='color:red'>Christians not only practiced untouchability, also took pride in it!</span> and today they are blaming Brahmins!
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
In order to preserve their nobility, the Christians never touch a person of inferior caste, not even a Nair.  In the roads or streets, they cry out from a distance, in order to XXXX them away from passengers; and if any one, even a Nair, should XXXX XXXX XXXX mark of respect, they are entitled XXXX XXXX XXXX on XXXX XXXX Nairs, who are the nobility and XXXX.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>XXXX portion is not readable. Can a member attempt to reconstruct the missing portion? See the page using below URL. </b> Does any member have any experience with getting pages of eBooks repaired by Google?

Captain Swanton's Memoir Of The Primitive Church Of Malayala
Presented to Royal Asiatic Soceity on January 5th, 1833
By Captain Charles Swanston of East India Company, Madras

[Guest]

Post 5 & 2 (Bodhi):
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->XXXX portion is not readable. Can a member attempt to reconstruct the missing portion? See the page using below URL. Does any member have any experience with getting pages of eBooks repaired by Google?

http://books.google.com/books?vid=0a7x3jVX...C&pg=RA21-PA181
Captain Swanton's Memoir Of The Primitive Church Of Malayala
Presented to Royal Asiatic Soceity on January 5th, 1833
By Captain Charles Swanston of East India Company, Madras<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Above is written in 1859 by John William Kaye, a military British historian posted in India.
http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC0122...ntsec=titlepage
Page 3 & 4, "Christianity In India : An Historic Narrative"<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Bodhi, thanks for pasting the contents of the above pages. Unfortunately, Google Books seems to be having some problem at the moment. Will try again tomorrow.

Post 3:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.hamsa.org <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->seems to be off-line. Or maybe it's merely on my end that the Myth of Saint Thomas site won't show up. I've not been able to access it for some weeks now. ( http://www.hamsa.org gives me a gateway time out, and http://hamsa.org gets me an Internal Server Error every time.)
Chandramoulee, were you able to open its main page or any of its other pages yesterday when you wrote your post?

[Guest]

Husky,

About Hamsa.org, yes it is down for quite some time. Don't know why.

Here is one more resource which will give you some of the content of that site:

Chennai’s Own Holocaust Deniers

<!--QuoteBegin-Husky+Sep 3 2006, 06:30 AM-->QUOTE(Husky @ Sep 3 2006, 06:30 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Bodhi, thanks for pasting the contents of the above pages.
[right][snapback]56696[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I actualy had to key-in the content. Is there a way to copy-paste from google-books? Would be easier to reproduce the content if there is.

[Guest]

Chandramoulee, were you able to open its main page or any of its other pages yesterday when you wrote your post?
[right][snapback]56696[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]

No sir. I visited this site long back and was so impressed that I have been referring to this whenever I get a chance !

[Guest]

India and Christian Opportunity
Written in 1908 by Harlan Page Beach, 1854-1933, a missionary to China under the American Board from 1883-1890. He was professor of missions at Yale Divinity School from 1905-1921 and librarian of Yale's Day Missions Library from 1911-1925.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Traditions of the missionary labors of one of the twelve, St Thomas, have for centuries existed in India.  In their fullest form, they are found in two of the apocryphal books of the New Testament, "Acts of the Holy Apostle Thomas", and "Consummation of Thomas the Apostle".  <span style='color:red'>The "Acts" a Gnostic work written by Leucius, does not go back further than the 2nd century and is manifestly fanciful</span>.

Following is a specimen:

"We portioned out the regions of the world, in order that each one of us might go into the region to which the Lord sent him.  By lot, India fell to Judas Thomas, also called Didymus.  And he did not wish to go, saying he was not able to go on account of the weakness of the flesh; 'and how can I, being an Hebrew man, go among the Indians to proclaim the truth?'

And while he was thus reasoning and speaking, the Saviour appeared to him: 'Fear not, Thomas; go away to India and proclaim The Word, for my grace shall be with thee.'

But he did not obey, saying: 'Wherever Thou wishest to send me, send me elsewhere; for to Indians I am not going.'"

The following day Jesus sold Thomas as a slave carpenter to one Abbanes from India, who purchased him for his king.  As a carpenter he was not to be commended; for, being bidden to build a alace for the king, he expended the money on the relief of the poor.  His missionary efforts, however, were crowned with success.  In both East and West Thomas's name was cnnected with India from the 4th century, and the Malabar Christians of St Thomas still count him as the first martyr and evangelist of their country.

<span style='color:red'>These traditions and others of later date are not beleived by most reputed scholars of today</span>, but are variousely explained.

Explanations :

1. The Name "India"
Ethopia and Arabia Felix, the adjacent Insula Diocoridis - Socotra - were designated by this name 'India'.  These countries however maintained by trade a lively intercouse with 'India Proper', and could thus furnish a channel for the propagation of Christianity in the later age.  Gregory Nazianzen says that Thomas preached the Gospel to Indians, but Jerome understands the India here meant to be Ethopia. 

If the tradition in Origen, which makes Thomas, the Apostle to the Parthians, were credible, it would not be so very remote from the former legend; since the Parthian empire touched, at that time, on the boundaries of India.

As persistent traditions connect, his work and his tomb with Persia, this last explanation seems probable.

2. Different Thomases
Others would explain the traditions by the stories of two other prominent Thomases who were actually connected with the early Indian church, one a Manichaean who was in India towards the end of the 3rd century, and the other an Armenian of the 8th century, who was a resorter of their faith. On his death, his memory received the gradual and spontaneous honors of canonization by the Christian communities for whom he had labored, and his name became identified with that of the apostle.

Bernard suggests still another explaination.  As it seems probable that India was evangelized through someone from Edessa, where St. Thomas's grave was located, later memories connected his name with that of Edessa's famous saint.

3. Pantaenus
Pantaenus, the Principal of the Christian college at Alexandria, had been a Stoic of Athens or Cicily. He thus possessed intellectual qualities which when brought into captivity to Christ, made him a fit instrument to lead philosophial Brahmins of India to Jesus's feet.  <span style='color:red'>The end of 2nd century thus brings us to the first historical missionary of Christ to the people of India.</span>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

other reasons why it is probable that India is being confused with other lands:
1. At the famous council of Nicea in 325 AD, Johannes, the Metropolitan of Percia, also signed himself as "Of the Great India" - while Persia was not India.

2. According to the 'Acts', "Abbanes" from India, purchased slave Thomas for his king. Abbanes is not possibly an Indian name of 1st century AD. (unless a lot of imagination is used, "Avaneesh" :-) )

[Guest]

<span style='color:red'>Christo-ashtakam for India</span>
Historically, below would summarize the 8 fundamental tenets of Christianism about Hinduism and India. Shows why another AIT (Apostle of India - Thomas) is important o them.

1. That the Hindus have never had a Saviour whose historicity can be ascertained, with the possible exception of the Buddha;

2. That Jesus Christ whose historicity cannot be questioned has superseded all earlier Saviours of Hinduism (if they were Saviours at all and not disciples of Lucifer) and rendered superfluous all subsequent Hindu saints and sages;

<span style='color:red'>3. That St. Thomas, an apostle of Jesus himself, was specially chosen by the Church to win India for his Master’s message.

4. That St. Thomas could not complete his mission in India because he met an untimely martyrdom at the hands of some Hindu, most probably Brahmin, heathens;

5. That the converts made by St Thomas, the first century Christians of the South, establish beyond doubt that Christianity is an ancient Indian religion and not a Western import as alleged by the Hindus;

6. That it is the sacred task of the Christian Church to complete the mission of St. Thomas and see to it that India becomes a Christian country, once and for all;
</span>

7. That if there is any thing good and wholesome in Hindu religion, it is not because Hindu saints and sages ever made any direct or conscious contact with Truth but because they merely stumbled upon some of it in the workings of Universal Nature which was preparing itself over a long time for the advent of Jesus Christ;

8. That no Hindu, even if he follows the Ten Commandments in letter and spirit and lives by the Sermon on the Mount, can ever hope to escape eternal hell-fire unless he has been baptised in a Christian church and administered the Christian sacraments.

http://www.voiceofdharma.com/books/hsus/ch3.htm

[Guest]

<span style='color:red'>The motives for manufacturing the myth of AIT (Apostle of India Thomas): </span>

The history of Christianity, crowded as it is with crimes of the most horrendous kind, provides a running commentary on the Christian doctrine. And the biggest share in Christian crimes down the centuries can safely be alloted to the Roman Catholic Church, its head, its hierarchy, its theologians, its religious orders, and its missionaries.


There is, however, one criminal field in which the Roman Catholic Church has remained unrivalled. No other Christian denomination - these are as many as 23,000 of them comes anywhere near the Roman Catholic Church when it concerns committing of blatant forgeries and foisting of pious frauds. It is no exaggeration to say that starting with Jesus Christ, the entire doctrinal and institutional edifice of Catholicism rests on a series of staggering swindles.


The Roman Catholic Church in India has remained true to the tradition. The literature it has produced during the last five centuries is full of lies of the filthiest sort, not only about Hindu religion and culture but also about its own ‘religion’ and role. And this garbage heap is topped by the hoax about the so-called St. Thomas.


What difference does it make whether Christianity came to India in the first or the fourth century? Why raise such a squabble when no one denies that the Syrian Christians of Malabar are fairly old immigrants to this country?


Firstly, it is one thing for some Christian refugees to come to a country and build some churches, and quite another for an apostle of Jesus Christ himself to appear in flesh and blood for spreading the Good News. <span style='color:blue'>If it can be established that Christianity is as ancient in India as the prevailing forms of Hinduism, no one can nail it as an imported creed brought in by Western imperialism.</span>


Secondly, the Catholic Church in India stands badly in <span style='color:blue'>need of a spectacular martyr of its own. Unfortunately for it, St. Francis Xavier died a natural death and that, too, in a distant place.</span> Hindus, too, have persistently refused to oblige the Church in this respect in spite of all provocations. The Church has had to use its own resources and churn out something. St. Thomas about whom nobody knows anything, offers a ready-made martyr.


Thirdly, the Catholic Church can <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>malign the Brahmins more confidently.</span> Brahmins have been the main target of its attack from the very beginning. Now it can be shown that the <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Brahmins have always been a vicious brood, so much so that they would not stop from murdering a holy man who was only telling God’s own truth to a tormented people.</span> At the same time, the religion of the Brahmins can be held responsible for their depravity.


Fourthly, the <span style='color:blue'>Catholics in India need no more feel uncomfortable when faced with historical evidence about their Church’s close cooperation with the Portuguese pirates in committing abominable crimes against the Indian people.</span> The commencement of the Church can be disentangled from the advent of the Portuguese by dating the Church to a distant past. The Church was here long before the Portuguese arrived. It was a mere coincidence that the Portuguese also called themselves Catholics. Guilt by association is groundless.


Lastly, it is quite within the ken of Catholic theology to claim that a land which has been honoured by the visit of an apostle has become the patrimony of the Catholic Church. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>India might have been a Hindu homeland from times immemorial. But since that auspicious moment when St. Thomas stepped on her soil, the Hindu claim stands cancelled.</span> The country has belonged to the Catholic Church from the first century onwards, no matter how long the Church takes to conquer it completely for Christ.


writes K Elst

[Guest]

http://www.bahamapundit.com/2006/02/raci...onial.html


Racism & Colonialism in the Bahamas

by Andrew Allen

Helen Klonaris, a white Bahamian, recently published a letter on the issue of racism and colonialism in the Bahamas. Her letter prompted several responses, among them a rebuttal last week from The Nassau Institute.

While it is easy to disagree with some of Ms Klonaris\' suggestions (such as the supposed racism of most whites, or the extent of \'white\' economic power in The Bahamas today) it would seem that the writer of the institute\'s response either did not understand or did not want to understand the broader thrust of her arguments.

In fact, to her credit, Ms Klonaris sets out, in a compelling way, some of the legacies of the colonial and racial domination that did undoubtedly blight most of our history.

While we may or may not agree with her observations about race relations today, her basic ideas about some of the psychological effects of a colonially imposed value system are not effectively countered in the Institute\'s long-winded response.

It is perhaps natural that the Institute should focus on economic theory in addressing some of Ms Klonaris assertions. But it is unfortunate that, having initially taken up what would seem to have been her central point, the letter from the institute then fails to directly address it.

That point is that there is, in our society, a \"well defined system of relationships\" including \"educational curricula, the legal system, Judeo Christian church hierarchies and the English language itself whose effect is to \"suppress, condemn and ghettoise \" other cultures.

It would be interesting to see how the critics of Ms Klonaris can directly deny, for instance, that, where Judeo-Christian values have been imposed among indigenous peoples, their proponents have uniformly stigmatised and undermined the legitimacy of the thought systems they have sought to replace, including in The Bahamas.

This also ties in with the experience of colonial interactions throughout the world, where seemingly indisputable patterns emerge.

THE FILIPPINO AND JAPANESE EXPERIENCES

Japan\'s first contacts with the west occurred in the 16th century. This was an era in which European maritime powers, taking advantage of the newly discovered Cape of Good Hope, began large scale trade with many East Asian societies.

These trade relations evolved into domination in some instances, such as in the Philippines (named after a particularly unsavoury Spanish King). Here, evangelism and guns went hand-in-hand to create a western satrapy, whose language, customs and native religions were all either obliterated or bastardised.

What replaced them was a society organised along predictable lines, with a small, highly westernised elite presiding over a large, ghettoised majority. Those with \'native\' characteristics (such as followers of the old religions) were made to occupy a sub-class, while the ruling oligarchy lost all sense of social responsibility toward the masses, to whom they were now culturally alien.

Were it not for the wise decision of the 17th century Shogun, Tokugawa Hidetada, to totally ban the propagation of the Christian faith in Japan, there can be little doubt that Japan would have suffered a similar fate. Hidetada, sensibly, was happy for the west\'s guns, its technology and its learning, but had no interest in its religion, which he saw as the vanguard of an attempt to psychologically dominate Japan and undermine her independence. So he sent in his Samurai and expelled all westerners except for a few useful, clever Dutchmen.

At the time of the ban, missionaries and European \"authorities\" at the ports of Nagasaki and Deshima (the two points where western trade settlements were initially allowed) had already begun a campaign of burning Buddhist and Shinto texts and had begun debunking Japanese traditional histories (such as the origin of the Imperial family) as shameful, savage myths. Hidetada\'s expulsion of westerners and banning of their faith was therefore a timely one, and probably saved Japan from the fate of the Philippines, \'discovered\' by the Spaniards at around the same time.

Today, Japanese people are probably more at ease with themselves, their ancestors and the historical achievements of their country than almost any non-European people. Their faith, an easy accommodation of Chinese, Indian and native religious traditions, has proved highly adaptable to the rapid changes through which their country has gone in the last 400 years. Japan, incidentally, has the lowest incidence of Christianity of any major country.

THE INDIAN EXPERIENCE

Though India was the victim of colonisation, it had the relative good fortune of being colonised for commercial, rather than evangelical purposes. This was a feature that distinguished British (and, even more so, Dutch) colonial policy from that of Spain or Portugal. India was also fortunate in having a complex and extremely old value system of its own that was not easily susceptible to penetration by alien ones.

These factors saved India\'s original thought system intact and spared it the marginalisation and stigmatisation that have inevitably resulted elsewhere from total colonial immersion. Though Indians did and still do suffer some of the traditional ill-effects of colonialism, a rejection and stigmatisation of everything associated with Indian-ness never took root.

THE NEW WORLD SLAVE SOCIETIES

The African in the new world is often wrongly thought of as a blank slate who only began accumulating culture upon contact with his new colonial society. In fact, he brought with him a fairly complex system of social rules, beliefs and values, including religious ones.

In the case of the Yoruba, for instance, he brought a pantheon of Gods, including Ogun, the chief god of the Santeria religion still practised in Cuba today. So he did have values of his own.

But unlike the Indian or the Japanese, the totality of his immersion in the colonial system produced a psychological lack of resistance to the prejudices and presumptions by which these were deemed worthless or even worse. In this respect, he had much in common with the Amerindians of the Andean nations especially.

Insofar as Ms Klonaris sees racism as being responsible for the ghettoisation of New World blacks, I would disagree. Like so many indigenous peoples, from Australia to Bolivia, it was the New World black who internalised the colonial value system, and so ghettoised himself.

To empowered people, the \"racism\" of others is a trivial matter. The tragedy facing the new world African, the Amerindian and others was not someone else\'s \"racism\". Rather, it is that he has internalised someone else\'s values not on the basis of a free exchange, but on the basis of an uncritical hierarchy, which places anything originating outside western institutions or western values at the bottom.

He was psychologically penetrated to the point that he no longer recognised value in anything arising from his own heritage, ancient or modern. In fact, he became an active accomplice in the stigmatisation of such things.

Take, for instance, the hierarchy of religions. To the colonialised new world black, while Hindu pantheism connotes a neutral Eastern mysticism and Greco-Roman pantheism connotes high classicism, African pantheism connotes a savage and unequivocally negative \"black magic\".

THE BAHAMAS MOVING FORWARD

So where does this leave The Bahamas? For good or ill, most Bahamians, black, white and otherwise, today share cultural and religious values derived from sources from which only a minority of Bahamians physically descend. Most have also come to accept a basically western narrative of history, even though this narrative sometimes propagates harmful myths and assumptions.

None of this need be fatal to harmonious national development for The Bahamas, so long as our self-image is constantly \"tweaked\" to reflect the interests of the Bahamas as an independent nation of many races.

But huge and monstrous legacies of the colonial psychological system remain. Black Bahamians routinely associate African bone structures, curled hair and dark skin with ugliness, and seem to assume that there is some universality to that view.

In religion, it is shocking to observe the extent to which black Bahamians have taken up the almost militant Christian bigotry that once stigmatised their own ancestors. Only recently, Rastafarian students complained of the horrendous discrimination they faced at the College of The Bahamas.

From time to time, local pastors rail about \'black magic\' and voodoo is often cited among the reasons for looking down at Haitian immigrants.

Less exposed black Bahamians, of course, will never realise that all these things come back to a rejection of the legitimacy of their own ancestors and, ultimately, of themselves.

On the other hand, some better educated black Bahamians may assume that whiteness in the Bahamas is a monolithic phenomenon, there being no diversity of views among whites on these very important, sensitive issues.

Which is why honest, well thought-out contributions from intelligent white Bahamians like Ms Klonaris are so helpful.

[Guest]

Under St. Thomas the Apostle topic, Wikipedia points to this document:
History of Early Christianity In India

<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>A very heady mix of Aryan Invasion and Thomas-in-India. </span>

The author "Dr. M M Ninan" is an active missionary, and history professor(?) in USA. In another book of his, "The Emergence of Hinduism from Christianity", he says, "This book establishes that Hinduism is really of very recent origin. Evidences based on Archealogy, Linguistics and History establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the modern Hinduism is an outgrowth of Thomas Christianity under the influecne of Syrian Gnositicism. The myths of Mahabali and Parasurama refers to the defeat of Christians at the hands of the Vaishnavite gnostics."

"Outgrowth" !!!

Members, any experience in fighting wikipedia war? Any best practices/advise to share?

[Shambhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-Bodhi+Sep 26 2006, 09:28 AM-->QUOTE(Bodhi @ Sep 26 2006, 09:28 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Under St. Thomas the Apostle topic, Wikipedia points to this document: 
History of Early Christianity In India

<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>A very heady mix of Aryan Invasion and Thomas-in-India.  </span>

Members, any experience in fighting wikipedia war?  Any best practices/advise to share?
[right][snapback]57972[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I don't know about Wiki handling, but here is my contribution of sites to disprove the deluded self-hater:

Heliodorus Column
knapp 1
knapp 2
knapp 3

[Guest]

X-posting from another thread. Lengthy, but so much more informative.

<span style='color:red'>Rajeev Srinivasan Interviews Swami Devananda (Ishwar Sharan), August 26, 2001</span>

1. Can you tell me a little about your background? How long have you been in India? What prompted you to become a monk?

I was brought up in the foothills of western Canada. My family was middle class and God-fearing and I was fed from birth on the strong meat of the Old. Testament prophets. But in my early teens it was discovered that I did not love Jesus and was not afraid of Jehovah. I was excommunicated from my father’s small Protestant church. It was a very liberating experience and I left home soon afterward. I began to read Buddhism and existential philosophy. Perhaps as a legacy of my early years, I retained an avid interest in Christian history. I read Gore Vidal’s book Julian about the last pagan emperor of Rome. Julian became my hero along with Alexander the Great. Julian was the great ascetic and Alexander the great king and traveler. I followed in Alexander’s footsteps, visiting as nearly as possible every place that he bad visited.

I reached India in 1967 and immediately fell in love with Hindu civilization. It is the best civilization of the Great Mother Goddess. She is called Asherah in the Bible and the prophets are always cursing Her. As a small child I had seen Her once in a garden, and later I had read about Her in the Golden Bough. She has always cared for me, and like the great guru Shankara I believe that She is the liberator of man and the revealer of truth. I became a sannyasi because of Her. It is a sacrifice of love that I am still trying to perfect.

2. What was your objective in writing The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple? You are quite critical of the Christian establishment and their fellow travelers in the Indian media.
Most historians will tell you that St. Peter never went to Rome and did not establish a Christian church there. Yet the very authority of the papacy rests on this fiction and most educated people accept their claim. I was interested in the Indian parallel, in seeing what the historians had to say about the coming of St. Thomas to India and his establishing a church in Kerala. I soon discovered that the most reputed historians of Christianity including Eusebius, von Harnack, de Tillemont, Latourette, Winternitz and. Bishop Stephen Neill, all denied the coming of St. Thomas to India. Some denied his very existence.

In writing The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple (which I did under the ‘secular’ pen name Ishwar Sharan), I also wanted to show that there was a carefully orchestrated cover-up in the Indian English-language media regarding the St. Thomas story.

Indeed, even after two editions of the book, The Indian Express and The New Indian Express remain the main purveyors of the fable through editorials and their columnists A.J. Philip and Renuka Narayanan. Little leftist magazines like The Indian Review of Books, edited by the St. Thomas advocate S. Muthiah, also put in a good word for St. Thomas when the opportunity arises. This is their unprofessional response to the exposure of a fraud that does not serve their financial interests.

Yet in writing the book and giving the source material for the legend, the 3rd century Syrian religious romance called the Acts of Thomas, my sincere hope was that Indian scholars would take up the study of the legend seriously. But this has not happened. Indian historians with their Marxist bent of mind are not willing to touch it. They are afraid for their tenures and their politically correct professional reputations. For the English-language newspaper editors, all of them brown sahibs with brown noses, the St. Thomas fable is a useful stick to bash Hindus with when the occasion arises, as the story is a vicious blood libel against the Hindu community.

3. You allege that there is, in effect, a conspiracy of silence to hide a lot of uncomfortable facts about Christianity in India. Why?

The establishment of the Christian church in India was intrinsically part of the European colonial enterprise. Its history is shocking for its violence and duplicity. Read the letters of St. Francis Xavier or the diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai.

The Indian church today is not so much different from the original 17th century church. It is very wealthy and corrupt and politically ambitious. But it has learned the propaganda value of social service and is making a great effort to disassociate itself from its colonial origins. This involves a lot of deceit, of course, and a massive cover-up of past deeds. But as the late Archbishop Arulappa of Madras would say, the end justifies the ­means - even if that is not exactly what Jesus taught. The Christian church uses the St. Thomas legend to claim a 1st century origin for Christianity in India.

It also claims St. Thomas to be a martyr at the hands of a wicked Hindu priest and king. Better still, Christianity becomes the ‘original’ Indian religion, as it would be older than many of the sectarian Hindu cults practiced in the country today. The whole idea is a gross perversion of truth and a grave injustice to the Hindu community that has offered refuge to persecuted Christian refugees down through the ages. It is Hindus who have been martyred by these same Christian refugees starting in the 8th and 9th centuries when Syrian and Persian immigrants in Malabar destroyed temples to build their St. Thomas churches. It is Hindus who were martyred in Goa by Catholic inquisitors and in Madras by Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican priests who operated under the protection of the Portuguese. And it is Hindus who are martyred today by the Christian churches and the secular press who support them, including the BBC - all of whom have mounted a base campaign of vilification and calumny against Hindu religion and
society.

4. You make the startling revelation that the fondly believed story of St. Thomas, an apostle of Christ, coming to India and establish­ing an Indian church, is a convenient fiction. What was the original rationale for this story? Who propagated it? What has been the consequence?

The original rationale for the St. Thomas story was to give the first 4th century Christian immigrants in Malabar a local patron saint. The story also gave them caste status that was important in integrating them into Hindu society. There is nothing unusual in a refugee community creating this kind of mythology of identity and it is part of the process of getting established in a new land.

The St. Thomas legend, which they brought with them from Syria, was easy enough to adapt to India. St. Thomas was already the patron saint of “India”, “India” being not the subcontinent that we know but a synonym for Asia and all those lands that lay east of the Roman Empire’s borders. ‘India’ even included Egypt and Ethiopia in some geographies, and China and Japan in others.

The Syrian Christian refugees had been led to India by a merchant who is known to history as Thomas of Cana, i.e. Canaan, but is also known as Thomas of Jerusalem. Over time it was natural enough for the Syrian Christian community to identify their 1st century patron saint Thomas the Apostle with their 4th century leader Thomas of Cana. As a result of this process it is now mistakenly accepted by most educated Indians that St. Thomas came to India in 52 CE and establisheda Christian church at Cranganore in Kerala.

5. The great Kapaleeswar Temple in Mylapore, Madras, was demolished, according to you, and that is where the San Thome Cathedral now stands. This is news to many people who believe temple demolition was largely a Muslim act.

The evidence for the demolition of the original Kapaleeswar Temple is according to a variety of sources including government records and archaeological reports. There is the presence of temple rubble in the San Thome Cathedral walls and in the grounds of Bishop’s House (removed since my book’s publication). The news of the demolition of the original temple was not news to anybody of a past generation and was discussed in the Madras newspapers during British times. The origins of the present Kapaleeswar Temple are recorded and directly reflect and confirm the destruction of the original temple. It is true that Hindus do not associate temple breaking with Christians. That is due to the success of the historical cover-up of which the ASI and the state archaeological departments are partly responsible. But we in the West know better about Christian history and have access to a vast stock of published material that is not usually available in India. We know that every great pagan temple in Europe and the Mediterranean basin was destroyed and replaced with a church after Christianity gained political ascendancy in the Roman Empire. We also know that it is not any different in India today where Christian missionaries hold sway in remote tribal areas) because we have seen the evidence.

In Central India, Orissa, the Northeast, even Arunachal Pradesh and Nepal where missionaries cannot officially operate, village temples are demolished and sacred images broken by new converts. The video films of these “good works” are then shown on TV in Europe where missionaries go to collect funds for theirevangelizing effort.

Temple breaking in India seems to have originated in the 8th or 9th century with Nestorian Christian immigrants from Persia. They built churches on the temple foundations and then attributed the temple breaking to St. Thomas himself by claiming he built the churches in the 1st century. Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit priests destroyed temples in Goa, Malabar, and Tamil Nadu in the 16th century. St. Francis Xavier left a fascinating written record of his temple-breaking work on the Coromandal Coast. The Portuguese entombed the Vel Ilang Kanni Amman Temple near Nagapattinam and turned it into the famous Velankanni church called Our Lady of Health Basilica. The Jesuits destroyed the Vedapuri Iswaran Temple in Pondicherry and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception now sits on the site. The list is very long. Christians were destroying temples long before the Muslims got into the act.

6. I have heard some Christians say that they believe that the Bhakti movement in Tamil lands was influenced by Christian ideas of a personal god. How do you respond?

Christian missionaries and Marxist intellectuals have a mantra: There is nothing Hindu in Hindustan and nothing Indian in India. According to them everything of value in Indian civilization came from outside, from someplace beyond the pale of Sindh. They are aware of the Hindu’s low self-esteem and seek to undermine it further.

Be that as it may. Devotion to a personal god is there in the Rig Veda itself: “Oh, Agni, be easy of access to us, as a father to a son.” Dr. Pandharinath Prabhu tells us in his much-acclaimed book Hindu Social Organisation that the very term bhakti first appears in the Svetasvataropanishad. Bhakti is there in the Puranas and finds its best expression in the Bhagavad Gita; a better expression, I must say, than is found anywhere in the Bible. Tamil bhakti has its roots in the Tirumantiram, ca. 200 BCE. So there is no influence from Christianity at all. But even if it was true that Christianity influenced Hindu concepts of a personal god, what do Christians gain by making such a claim? Hindu bhaktas direct their love and devotion to Shiva and Murugan, Vishnu, Krishna and Rama, not to Jesus. Jesus has failed in India! And failed and failed and failed again in India!


7. There appears to be an effort on the part of certain Christian groups to ‘indianize’ the church: for instance, they have created a cult of the Infant Jesus to compete with the worship of the Baby Krishna, and a cult of the Madonna to compete with the worship of the Mother Goddess. Is this a genuine effort at cultural synthesis?

The Pope has made it absolutely clear in the Vatican document called Dominus Jesus that enculturation and indigenization are the means by which the Indian heathen is to be evangelized. Enculturation is not an effort at cultural synthesis but a means of conversion. Its object is to undermine the integrity of Hindu religion and culture and subsume it into Christianity. It is a tried and true method. It is by this method that Christian mission­aries starting with St. Paul undermined Greek and Roman religion and culture and. took it over for themselves.

Christianity is a simple personality cult with an elitist ideology. It can be insinuated into any open society. It is parasitical in nature and feeds on the spiritual and cultural body of the society it invades. In the process it destroys the invaded culture and absorbs it into itself. This is what happened in Pagan Europe.

Hindus do not understand this process because Hinduism is spiritually self-sufficient and does not require outside nourish­ment. At the same time Hindus are flattered by the attention given to their religion and culture by Christian operators and are vulnerable to their overtures. See my dialogue with Fr. Bede Giffiths in Sita Ram Goel’s book Catholic Ashrams concerning this important subject.

8. Some Christians have written to me quoting various Sanskrit texts to “prove” that they foreshadow the arrival of Jesus Christ. What do you think of this?

Prophecy is the last refuge of the religious scoundrel and unfortunately the Indian missionary community is made up entirely of scoundrels. They can find and foreshadow whatever they like in scripture (be it Hindu, Muslim or Christian) because of scripture’s

obscure language and context and the poet’s use of allegory and metaphor. For example, Bible scholars know that the Old Testament “prophesies” concerning Jesus’ birth are forced contrivances of interpretation and editing used to give Jesus divine legitimacy and royal linage. They know that these prophecies are false but because they appeal to the believer’s imagination and reason and help inculcate faith in Jesus, they continue to be quoted as divinely inspired and true.

In India a favorite method of foreshadowing from Vedic texts is closely related to the enculturation process. Christian preachers simply appropriate the meaning of Sanskrit terms and claim them for Jesus. They argue in a round about way that terms like Isa, Ishwara and Parameswara only ever referred to Jesus in the first place! I have got letters from Baptist converts who claim that Prajapati is really Jehovah! If Christian missionaries want to find Jesus in the Veda and Christ in India they can do so with the help of clever and amoral scholars like Fr. Raimundo Panikker. He and they should carefully consider that these “inspired” claims, and, indeed, the inducement to convert by means of these claims is a sin against the Holy Spirit. According to their own doctrine, there is no forgiveness for a sin against the Holy Spirit. But the real problem is not that Christian religious entrepreneurs invent prophecies and manipulate the mean­ing of Sanskrit texts, the real problem is that Hindus accept their claims at face value and do not know how to reply.

People who follow prophets invariably become idolaters of The Word. They believe that the prophet’s word is divine word, that a man’s word is God’s word. It is the worst kind of idolatry and leads to the religious fundamentalism and violence that we are witness to today throughout the world.


9. If you criticize Christians in any way, their immediate response is. “We are a tiny minority of two per cent of India’s population, and see how much social work we are doing.” How do you respond to this?

The question of numbers of population, which for Christians is something like three per cent, is very misleading. Not long ago India’s millions were ruled by a cadre of 30,000 Christian foreigners. It is not a question of numbers but of institutional wealth and influ­ence, of organization, political ambition and high ideological motivation, and, especially, of undue control of institutions like education and health care that counts. And then there are the special constitutional privileges for minorities that make Hindus second-class citizens in their own land, and the uncritical sympathy for all things Christian in the English-language press.

It is an absurd situation. No country in the world allows a minority community to dictate to the majority the way India does, or to allow a foreign-trained minority community to proselytize in a society that has never proselytized and cannot protect itself against the psycho­logical and emotional assault and material inducements that go with proselytisation. No country in the world would allow virtually unchecked the foreign money and expertise that flows into the Indian churches, much of it under the guise of social aid, when the bigoted leaders of these churches have declared over and over again that they intend the religious and spiritual annihilation of the Hindu community.

10. There is a shadowy group called Opus Dei that is supposed to be doing significant theoretical work to help spread Christianity around the world. I believe the well-known Indian-Spanish Jesuit priest Raimundo Panikker is associated with them. What do you know about them?

Opus Dei is everywhere but nobody really knows anything about them except their Vatican banker and the Pope who is their special advocate and patron. They are an authoritarian secret society with members in such places as the CIA and MI5. I am inclined to doubt that they would employ a theologian like Fr. Raimundo Panikker because he is a married priest and they are advocates of strict church discipline. Their fronts in India (and other developing countries) are scholars associations, history conferences, Hindu-Christian dialogue seminars, certain NGOs and aid agencies (all missionary outfits use NGOs and aid agencies as cover for their proselytizing activities), some Western embassies and the English-language media.

Opus Dei is especially interested in creating favorable public opinion for the Catholic Church and has infiltrated every major English-language daily. Read the op-ed page and letters column in any big city newspaper and you will probably find the handwork of Opus Dei. They want to manipulate and control public opinion. They would never employ a venomous journalist like A.J. Philip but soft columnists like Renuka Narayanan are definitely on their list of honorary lady Jesuits.

11. Arun Shourie and other scholars have detailed the on-going assault on Hinduism by Christians from British times. Do you see this clash of civilizations abating any time soon?

The clash of civilizations will continue, indeed, will become more pronounced, unless Christianity and Islam give up their religious bigotry and worid-conquering ambitions. This is very unlikely as bigotry and religious imperialism are inherent within their belief systems. These systems have to be reformed, but can­not be reformed because their adherents believe that they are the work of Gods of divine revelation.

As the systems cannot be changed, the adherents of the systems have to be weaned away from them. This has happened in Europe and, to a lesser extent in America where Christ­ianity has been abandoned for a rational humanism and Vedantic spirituality. But it has riot happened in the Islamic and Marxist worlds of Asia and will not happen without a war.

12. In your book Koenraad Elst quotes the fact that the place where Jesus is alleged to have been crucified was “divined” by Emperor Constantine’s mother in a dream. What similar stories do you find in Christian mythology in India?

In the 4th century when Christianity gained political clout in the Roman court, the Emperor’s mother Helena “divined” various sites in Palestine which, she claimed, were associated with the life and death of Jesus. These sites already had old Roman temples sitting on them. Nevertheless, in Bethlehem the Church of the Nativity was built on the ruins of a demolished Adonis temple and in Jerusalem the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built over a Venus temple that had been destroyed on Constantine’s personal order. See Joan Taylor’s book Christians and the Holy Places.

The parallel in India is the identification of various temple sites in Kerala with St. Thomas and the building of churches on them by Christian immi­grants from Persia in the 9th century. Nestorian Christian mission­aries were active on the West Coast and up into Kashmir and Ladakh in the 9th and 10th centuries, and it is they who left crosses carved on rocks and various Christian signs and symbols that later European writers of historical fiction have associated with a life of Jesus in Kashmir.

In the 16th century the Portuguese “divined” various sites in Madras at Mylapore. Saidapet, and Big Mount (now known as St. Thomas Mount) that they claimed were associated with the martyrdom and burial of St. Thomas. The temples that occupied these sites, including the original Kapaleeswar Temple referred to in the hymns of Jnanasambandar and Arunagirinathar, were demolished and churches built on their ruins.

13. There is a certain school of thought that says Jesus Christ came to India and that a lot of what he taught is based on Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Comments?

The idea that Jesus came to India as a boy and studied in a Buddhist monastery or, alternatively, came to India after the crucifixion and married a princess of Kashmir, tickles the romantic imagination of Western travelers and quite a few Indians too. The story originates in a clever piece of fiction by the Russian forger Nicholas Notovich that was published in Paris in 1894.

It cannot possibly be true, and if it is true it destroys completely the special claims made by Christian doctrine, of the sacrifice made on the cross and the resurrection, and the vicarious salvation of the Christian believer. The Buddhist monastery where Jesus is said to have studied did not exist until the 16th century, and the Srinagar tomb where he is allegedly buried is really the tomb of a Mogul ambassador to Egypt who converted to Christianity while on tour there. The key to unraveling the tale is to study the activities of the 10th century Nestorian Christian missionaries who passed through Kashmir on their way to China and left crosses on rocks and an abundance of children with biblical names in their wake.

The Hindu and Buddhist ideas found in the New Testament books, including the Sermon on the Mount, were picked up by the gospel writers in Alexandria from Indian pundits and monks who were teaching there.

But it should be remembered that the New Testament books contain ideas quite the opposite of Hindu ideas of pluralism and tolerance. For example, there is the virulent anti-Semitism and religious bigotry of the gospels. Jesus was perhaps the first religious teacher in history to threaten his critics with eternal damnation.

14. There is another school of thought that says Jesus Christ did not actually exist and that the legends about him are a collection of stories about several other leaders and teachers of the time. Comments?

It is quite true that the New Testament books as we know them today are composite works edited and rewritten a number of times after the 4th century Council of Nicea. Christian doctrine was formalized as this council and Jesus was raised from mortal prophet to immortal God by a vote of the collected bishops.

(Two bishops from Libya voted against deification and were soon murdered by their colleagues.) Some years after the Council, Emperor Constantine sanctioned and financed a new edition of the Bible. As there were no original documents to work from (they had been destroyed by Emperor Dioclet­ian), the bishops were free to edit, revise, and rewrite the Bible according to their own tenets. (The Old Testament books are also compiled from many sources and they are not a true history of the Jewish people.)

The result of all this 4th century religious activity is that the Pauline salvation cult that we know today as Christianity came into being. It was modeled on earlier Greek salvation cults except that Jesus replaced Apollo as the saving god. The famous Sermon on the Mount that so appealed to Mahatma Gandhi, is a later literary interpolation from a Pagan source. It may even be of Indian origin.

The Jesus of the Bible is a literary creation not a real historical person, though it is probable that his character was modeled on that of a real person, say, the Teacher of Righteousness of the Essenes of the Dead Sea. The evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated 100-200 BCE, bears out the fact that there is nothing new or true in Christianity. The Catholic Church has for decades tried to suppress the evidence of the Scrolls as they virtually prove that there was no historical Jesus as depicted in the New Testament stories.

I do not think that St. Paul believed in a historical Jesus either, which is why he preached a Christ of faith rather than a Jesus of history. The term “christ” is a Greek title not a proper name. It can be used as an appellation for any person so deserving and there were many christs in the Roman world of the 1st century CE. St. Paul is the true founder of the Christian religion. He was a Gnostic and a very forceful character who has left his imprint on all aspects of Christianity.

Does Jesus exist? Yes, indeed, he does. He exists in the romantic imagination of every Christian believer (and not a few Hindus too). He is a dark knight of the soul, an asuric being not a human being.

15. If Jesus did not really exist, how does that affect the organized church and its shibbohths?

Christianity is not going to collapse just because it has been discovered that Jesus was not torn of a virgin mother (as a recent BBC programme declares), did not die on the cross for our sins, and did not bodily rise to heaven on the third day to sit at the right hand of God. People believe what they want to believe, and, more important, what they are taught to believe as children. The Pope or any dictator will tell you in private that there are not many people in this world who are willing or able to think for themselves, and those few who do are to be eliminated (like the courageous Giordano Bruno who we burned at the stake for teaching that the universe was infinite).

It is not a question of seeking truth, as the naïve Hindu pilgrim seems to think, but of ideological indoctrination, of repeating the shibboleths over and over again until the believer is “saved”. But salvation theories aside (and Marxism is also a salvation theory), there is the more important business of Big Business. The Christian churches are Big Business. They employ hundreds of thousands of people who are otherwise unemployable. They are important cultural and political institutions. The Vatican itself is Europe’s most famous circus and the Pope her best-loved clown.

More importantly, the churches, and especially the Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Baptist varieties, are important international financial institutions. They hold all, the ready capital, not only in souls but also in dollars. They are not going to disappear just because their doctrines have been proved false and their god has been found to have feet of clay.

16. There have been recent admissions from the Vatican itself about nuns being raped and sometimes murdered by missionaries and priests. Similarly, there was a startling expose in the Kansas City Star about the rate of AIDS among Catholic priests in the US being four times the national average. Does this imply that the system of celibate nuns and monks is not quite working?

Incidentally, these reports died quiet deaths in the Indian Press whereas they regularly jump all over allegations of misconduct by Hindu sadhus and saints.

Sodomy, incest, the abuse of nuns and the molestation of children have been endemic in the Christian church from its very origins. Read the fascinating book A Testament of Christian Civilization by the famous Jesuit-ex-Jesuit historian Joseph McCabe. He was a linguist and had access to documents that are never published in Christian histories. He records the extraordinary sexual, license among ecclesiastics from the first centuries of Christianity up to the 1950s. At the various church councils where the Christian creed was formulated, the bishops would quarrel over doctrine during the day and dancing boys during the night. More shocking than the sex was the violence and cruelty that went with it, which found its high point in the Inquisition. This institution was run by Dominican monks and was an orgy of sadism and unspeakable cruelty. It was introduced into India by St. Francis Xavier, whose tomb sits on the site of Old Goa’s most important Shiva temple. In the medieval period in Europe, convents became high-class brothels and their bishops forbade priests to live with their mothers and sisters because of the moral dangers involved. The then pope introduced a rule of chastity for priests and nuns but it was never taken very seriously.

Today there are thousands of priests involved in various kinds of sexual relationships and thousands more who seek to be relieved of their vow so that they can marry. Abuse of children in church-run institutions has become rampant and recently in Canada a major Protestant church has gone bankrupt paying the lawsuits brought against it by hundreds of victims who were sexually molested in church boarding schools. All of this is not very surprising to those who have read history and know the moral rot that has always existed within the Christian church even at its highest echelons. After all, it was not very long ago that the Pope was collecting a tax from the lepers and prostitutes who operated in St. Peter’s Square. Of course, the great irony in this sad state of affairs is that in Christian doctrine sex is a sin, indeed, it is the original sin invented by woman to bring about the downfall of man. In fact it has brought about the downfall of the Christian churches.

They have tried to deny this state of moral debasement but modern human rights and instant exposure in the Western media do not allow the deceit to continue except in India. In India the churches are protected from scandal by state authorities, minority commissions and the English-language press. If the allegedly impartial editors of our national newspapers nd news magazines spent as much time at the local convent or seminary or church-run boy’s school as they do at the ashrams of Premananda and Satya Sai Baba, they would get a story much more satisfying of their prurient interests. All of these editors are sewer inspectors at heart but they will not touch a Christian sewer with a barge pole. Such is the power of the Christian church in India and the overt bias of the national English-language press.

The Christian church in India is still an 18th century colonial church financed from abroad. It has a sophisticated international support system in place (and this is especially true of the newer American evangelical churches). It is very arrogant and corrupt, a quasi-independent state that is coddled and pampered by the Indian government and media alike. It is answerable to nobody, which is reason enough for a responsible government to order a white paper investigation into its finances and activities. Calumny and more calumny is the Church’s current weapon of choice and all of the bad press India and Hindus get in Europe and America originates in bishop’s houses, church councils and the offices of Christian NGOs in India. Their authoritative” and “secular” views are picked up by an accommodating English-language press and broadcast abroad with alacrity.

The truth of this observation can be verified by listening to Indian editors and Christian fathers reporting from Delhi and Madras to their English masters in London on the BBC’s various religious programmes and South Asia news services in the morning. It does not enter the heads of these Indian media worthies that the BBC is a neo-colonialist radio network dedicated to the promotion of Christian culture and values and British government foreign policy, and that it does not have a kind word for Hindus or Hinduism or Hindu issues even though Hindus make up a large part of its world audience.

(It may be noted that this interview was given to Rajeev Srinivasan with the understanding that it would be published in his column on the rediff.com web site. However, the editors of this website have not published it allegedly because of my criticism of their col1eagues in the English-language media. They have unwittingly proved my point about the pusillanimity and bias of Indian editors and their inability to tolerate any kind of criticism.)

17. There seems to be a large element of land-grab in the actions of Christians in India. They buy land, get it ceded by the authorities, and then grab the hillsides by painting crosses on rocks and. claiming the area as Christian.

The Christian churches are the largest landowners in India after the government. Much of this land is alienated temple land that was given to them by the British in the 19th century. They also own large amounts of prize commercial property in the cities. This fact has become a scandal among many of the Christian faithful who do not feel that their churches should be real estate agents and owners.

However, this reservation is not true of the newer, smaller American churches like Pentecostals and Evangelicals who have mounted a caste war against the Hindus and seek to provoke the Hindu community at every opportunity. They simply grab land in the towns and districts by painting crosses and Christian slogans on stones and hillsides and then claiming the property as their own.

This activity is especially evident in Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. In Arunachal Pradesh where proselytizing and conversion are illegal, Christians claim whole villages and put up signboards that say “Non-Christians Not Allowed” at their entrances. These Arunachal converts originate from Mother Teresa’s institutions in Assam where they are indoctrinated and baptized and then sent back to their villages to convert the elders.

In Tamil Nadu Christian slogans appear on Hindu pilgrim routes to Tirupati and on the route around Arunachala Hill at Tiruvannamalai that pilgrims circumambulate on full moon days. I am told that Christians plan to raise a cross on the hill’s summit when the opportunity arises. I am not at all surprised. The theoretical ground for this “good deed”

has been laid years ago by Catholic theologians and missionaries like Fr. Raimundo Panikker and the Benedictine monk Abhishiktananda. They have already claimed the holy hill and all of India for Christ in their writings. I myself hope that the cross-raising comes soon. Perhaps then Hindu leaders and district officials will wake up to the threat that an aggressive, proselytizing Christianity poses to Hinduism’s most ancient sacred sites.

18. There are detailed war-game scenarios on the Internet by various Christian fundamentalist groups who have identified India as a soft target for conversion.

India is a soft target for the Christian missionary for a number of reasons. Firstly, Hindu society still suffers from many social ills that the missionary can exploit; secondly, Hindu society is by nature pluralistic and accommodating of all ideological views including those that would destroy it; and thirdly, Hindu society is divided against itself and its religious and political leaders have failed it totally. These leaders with few exceptions are not willing or able to challenge the ideological forces that would destroy Hindu religion and society.

The result is that Christianity and its younger sister Marxism have the ideological upper hand in India today. They have an unhealthy influence on government, education, publishing, the English-language media, and some vital social services. It is a shocking situation for which Hindus themselves are to blame (even if the overall situation is a legacy of British days). The very fact that Hindu intellectuals and entrepreneurs are not able to publish a national daily newspaper and present their own point of view to the world is sad proof of Sri Aurobindo’s observation that Hindus have lost the power to think.

19. There is the decline of the church, particularly the Catholic Church, in Europe and the Americas. Hence the need to find new recruits to man the barricades in the growing clash of civiliza­tions with Muslims.

There is the need to create nuns and priests in Kerala as they provide a lot of menial labour in European convents and monasteries. Is there a pattern? Is there an element of racial exploitation as well?

As this is the last question, I would like to make a digression before replying to it. New converts to Christianity like to tell me, a white foreigner of European descent who has lived among the white Jews of Israel, that Jesus was an Asian and by extension he was therefore an Indian. I am very much amused by this rhetoric. It is so juvenile and simplistic. There is a whole world of difference between Semitic West Asia and Hindu South Asia. To begin with, one is white and the other is brown.

But were Jesus born in Asia, Africa or Antarctica (we must assume here that be bad a human birth), he is verily the white man’s god and personifies the white man’s race and values. Look at any statue or painting of him. He has red or brown hair, blue eyes, a Roman nose, and lily-white skin. If you take a peek under his Roman toga you will find that he has been circumcised (a very un-Indian custom except among Muslims who follow a West Asian religious code).

Now, it is true that Hindu sadhus had penetrated the Egyptian desert as early as the 4th century BCE and that Brahmin pundits and Buddhist monks taught at the great university of Alexandria in the first centuries BCE-CE, but their contribution was to Jesus’ philosophy not to his ethnicity and culture. Where then is the Indian Jesus? And who is fooling whom by pretending that Israelite is synonymous with Indian? St. Thomas too had a Roman nose, blue eyes, red hair, and a lily-white skin. He too was circumcised. He was Jesus’ look-alike twin brother according to the Acts of Thomas. He wore a Roman toga and lay at table to eat and drink just like a Roman aristocrat. All of these facts require some explaining by the local Indian priest if we are to accept him as our own Indian apostle. And I am talking here only about physique and culture, not about the vexatious doctrinal problem of there being TWO only sons of God, Jesus and Judas (for St. Thomas was known as Judas Didymus).

Now to your question. Indian priests and nuns are the peasant workers of the Catholic Church. They are welcome in Europe and America to clean the toilets and scrub the floors of the empty convents and seminaries, nurse the sick and dying, present the news in funny English on Vatican Radio, write lengthy disserta­tions on indiginizing the church in India, and get trained as native missionaries for work in the jungles and outback.

This is the pattern and it has been followed for decades. Indian priests and nuns are numerous and expendable. They are everywhere there is dirty work to be done. They are the first victims of the white man’s most elitist institution. Casteism is rampant. They seldom if ever move up the ecclesiastical ladder if there is a European available to fill the post. There are in South India only two or three Dalit bishops and one of them is an Anglican (CSI).

Everybody knows that if a black pope were ever elected (and Indians are black people according to Europeans) the Catholic Church would lose half of its membership. It cannot be otherwise in a European feudal institution whose bishops wrote the first theoretical justification for slavery in the 16th century. After all, the Bible says (1 Peter 2:18-25); “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the forward.”

I have had more than one Dalit convert tell me that the racism and caste prejudice within the Christian churches is a crime against human­ity. I have to agree. I have to say after a lifetime of study, that the advent of Christianity and its forced establishment in the Roman Empire under the wicked Emperor Constantine is one of the great disasters in the history of mankind.

[Guest]

Bodhi,
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->wicked Emperor Constantine<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Very true. Look here:
http://freetruth.50webs.org/Appendix1.htm Constantine the Great - Rome's first Christian Emperor
He was a serial-murderer and was made a saint (by the Greek Church, Orthodox).

bhushan,
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->JAPANESE EXPERIENCES<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--> http://freetruth.50webs.org/A4c.htm#Japan - section on Japan:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>In Japanese, Kyushu means both arsonist and a Christian</b>. Its origins lie in the fact that, besides employing other means of persecution, <b>Nihonjin Christians would burn down Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in order to convert the Kyushu population</b>. It was one of the reasons for Japan banning Christianity. As seen before, Christianity caused the same problems wherever it went and amongst all populations practising pre-Christian religions. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->So, the Japanese started to refer to Christos as arsonists, did they? Arsonist is still a very descriptive and applicable term for Christos in Korea today ( http://freetruth.50webs.org/D4d.htm ).

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->St Thomas the apostle of Jesus - did he visit India?<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The question is not whether or not he came to India and died there.
St Thomas the Apostle never existed - <b><i>none</i> of the apostles, disciples ever existed</b>. Biblical scholars have <i>long</i> established that. Their martyrdom stories are all fiction too - so the fiction is not just limited to the version of the Thomas story which set his death in India.

http://freetruth.50webs.org/Overview2.htm (about Christianity's origins):
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Apostles
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The twelve disciples were a late addition to the Christ myth Link<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->- Even though both Matthew and Luke are known to have copied the narrative framework of Mark’s gospel, it is interesting to note that their lists of disciples (or apostles) do not match Mark’s exactly.
- the Twelve clearly serve a <b>zodiacal function</b> in the gospels, and the sun-god nature of Jesus
- The solarity of Jesus and the zodiacal nature of the Twelve is further underscored by the fact that the latter are related to the mythical Twelve Tribes of Israel
- It has long been known that the tribes are themselves zodiacal symbols, part of the solar development of the Yahweh cult that took place centuries before the turn of the era. The disciples both represent the twelve tribes and judge them. Link<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Late martyrdom fictions for fictional Twelve
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->the Twelve Apostles belong to the realm of mythology, and their alleged martyrdoms are pure inventions. In the significant words of the eminent Dutch theologians, Dr. Kuenen, Dr. Oort and Dr. Hooykaas,
"All the Apostles disappear without a trace."
-- The Christ, by John E. Remsberg<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In the time of Tertullian and Clemens of Alexandria [late 2nd - early 3rd centuries] the glory of martyrdom was confined to St Peter, St Paul and St James.
It was gradually bestowed on the rest of the apostles by the more recent Greeks, who prudently selected for the theatre of their preaching and sufferings some remote country beyond the limits of the Roman empire
-- Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon Link<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->the martyrdom of Peter is generally rejected, and is not claimed until about 170 [the year 170 CE]
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>The Legend of Saint Peter</i> by Arthur Drews (first version translated by Frank Zindler, available from American Atheists) shows how since Peter is a myth and:
the stories about him based on mere midrash, myth, dogmatism, and forgery, the alleged historical foundation of <b>apostolic succession via St. Peter is nothing but a joke</b>. Link<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Writing towards the end of the <b>second century of our era, Irenaeus says that there existed then only four genuine graves of the Apostles</b>, namely, those of Peter and Paul at Rome, that of John at Ephesus, and that of <b>Thomas at Edessa in Mesopotamia</b>.
-- The Twelve Apostles, published by Thomas Scott<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<span style='color:red'>Multiple death scenarios for many of the Apostles</span>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Ecclesiastical traditions</b> are much at variance with each other regarding the places where the Twelve Apostles died, or were put to death. Thus these traditions variously represent
Peter to have been put to death at Rome and at Edessa,
Philip at Athens and Scythia,
Bartholomew at Cyprus and at Milan,
Judas, the brother of James, in Phoenicia and in Persia,
Simon Zelotes in Egypt and in Mauritania,
Andrew in Scythia and at Patrae in Achaia,
Matthew in Ethiopia and in Persia,
<b>Thomas in Edessa, Scythia, and India.</b>
According to Matthew (xxvii. 5) Judas Iscariot hanged himself, but according to the writer of the Acts (i. 6) Judas fell headlong, and his bowels gushed out.

In reading these stories, any reader who knows that inversion of a story into its opposite is a characteristic of legendary history, must be struck by the numerous instances where the place where the death of one and the same apostle occurred is inverted north and south, east and west, V.C., Rome and Edessa --Scythia and India --Ethiopia and Persia!
-- The Twelve Apostles, published by Thomas Scott, 1870<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Much more on the fictive Apostles and their fictional multiple-martyrdoms<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->That last link contains a section with more info on the many fake martyrdom tales for the Apostles ( http://freetruth.50webs.org/B2c.htm#MartyrdomFictions )
"Ecclesiastical traditions" means "Church traditions" which of course means Church lies. The latest Church 'tradition' for Thomas was a death in India, it was never set there before. Long before that, they had incriminated Persia or Parthia for the murder of the imaginary Thomas. Syrian Christians and the Catholic converts among them are lying, like how <b>all of Christianity</b> is based on lies.

Peter's a myth, so whose bones are these <!--emo&:o--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ohmy.gif' /><!--endemo--> ( http://freetruth.50webs.org/Overview2.htm ) - who did they murder this time...
<b><i>Today:</i> Duplicated relics of St Peter at the Vatican:</b> two skulls of St Peter, bones belonging to more than 2 legs and bones of domestic animals including goats, sheep, cows, swine, and a chicken. Link

Holy saviours Batman!
Who knew that Thomas and those other holy dudes were <b><i>so miraculous</i> that they died over and over and over again in different countries</b>. Poor fictions, they must have been a hated lot. Sorry, 'persecuted' is the word. And the miraculously multiplying skeleton of Peter is not the only Christian 'miracle':
Seven churches had Jesus authentic umbilical cord, and a number of churches had his foreskin (removed at circumcision and kept as a souvenir by Mary), <b>six churches had the six heads cut off John the Baptist</b>
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe
It's but another Christian fraud. There's a whole page of them at http://freetruth.50webs.org/B3a.htm

[Guest]

This is very interesting: Nestorian Christians (this is what Syrian Christians in India were before some of then were converted to Catholicism) are not supposed to revere Mary or consider her mother of gawd:
( From http://freetruth.50webs.org/A4c.htm - section on China)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Mary was introduced with Catholicism in China</b>
It is to be noted that Nestorians, who were the early (non-Catholic) Syrian Christians, cannot have brought the concept of reverence for Mary to China or anywhere else.
<i>The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science</i> by John William Draper states that with regard to Mary, the Nestorians:
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->could never be brought to an acknowledgment of the perpetual virginity<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->and that they considered her:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->not as the Mother of God, but as the mother of the human portion of Christ<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->the Nestorians ... denied that God had "a mother."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->[St] Cyril was determined that the worship of the Virgin as the Mother of God should be recognized, Nestor was determined that it should not.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->See the section on Nestorius for more.
Therefore, they did not revere her nor did they waste time making images of her. It was only much later, <b>after Catholic missionaries converted many of the small Syrian Christian groups in Asia to Catholicism, that reverence for Mary as the Mother of God entered their now-Catholic beliefs.</b><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->So they are not only claiming Hindu traditions as having Christo origins, but also trying to appropriate Chinese religious beliefs by claiming they were influenced by or originated in Christianism.

That section on Nestorius which the paragraph above refers to ( http://freetruth.50webs.org/A2a.htm#Nestorius ) allows us to find the earliest date for the arrival of the Syrian Christians in India:
It says Nestorius was denounced in 431 and died in 451. So Syrian christians came to India around or after this time and not earlier. They have nothing to do with apostle thomas. They don't have anything to do with the gospel of thomas either, as is already known (the gospel of thomas was the book of the gnostic christians, not of India's Syrian christians who were Nestorians).
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Nestorian heresy: a closer look</b>
<b><i>Ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431):</i></b> denounced the teachings of Nestorius (d. 451), who argued that Christ had completely separate human and divine natures.
Link has more: the <i>Three Chapters</i> dispute, <i>Monophysitism</i> troubles and dealing with <i>Monotheletism</i>.
Like Arianism and Priscillian's followers, the Nestorian sects would in time be persecuted as heretics too.
<i>The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science</i> by John William Draper briefly recounts the argument about Mary between Nestor(ius), the Bishop of Antioch, and Bishop Cyril of Alexandria:
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Cyril was determined that the worship of the Virgin as the Mother of God should be recognized, Nestor was determined that it should not. In a sermon delivered in the metropolitan church at Constantinople, he vindicated the attributes of the Eternal, the Almighty God. "And can this God have a mother?" he exclaimed. In other sermons and writings, he set forth with more precision his ideas that the Virgin should be considered not as the Mother of God, but as the mother of the human portion of Christ, that portion being as essentially distinct from the divine...<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->For this, Nestor and his followers were persecuted and fled:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The overthrow and punishment of Nestor, however, by no means destroyed his opinions. He and his followers, insisting on the plain inference of the last verse of the first chapter of St. Matthew, together with the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth verses of the thirteenth of the same gospel, could never be brought to an acknowledgment of the perpetual virginity of the new queen of heaven. ...While their leader was tormented in an African oasis, many of them emigrated to the Euphrates, and established the Chaldean Church. Under their auspices the college of Edessa was founded. From the college of Nisibis issued those doctors who <b>spread Nestor's tenets through Syria, Arabia, India, Tartary, China, Egypt.</b><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->So only after their migration to the Euphrates (this is while Nestorius was being tormented for heresy, which is after 431 ce) and only after they had established the Chaldean Church and founded that college of Edessa, did Nestorians spread out and eventually reach India and those other places.
The words 'doctor' and 'college' above are not the same in meaning as the words we use today. The meaning here is 'doctor of the Church' - like the title of saint Thomas Aquinas. And a Christian college was a theological congregation, not a school of real studies.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i><b>"Ecumenical" Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431):</b></i> St. Cyril, the Pope of Alexandria, bribed enough bishops to be able to convene the Council before the arrival of the Patriarch of Antioch, whose opposition he feared. Without opposition from the delegation from Antioch it was a simple matter to condemn one Nestorius as a heretic, and to proclaim the Virgin Mary to be theotokos, or "mother of god."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->link
That means Mary first came to be officially considered mother of Christo-god in the early half of the 5th century, although some sects had already done so before (Collyridians and Marionites) whereas others had vehemently opposed it. The pro-Mary groups were from places which had formerly worshipped Hera, Cybele and other ancient Goddesses. (see Virgin birth and Reverence for Mary )

[Guest]

Visual proofs of the impact of Bauddha influence upon development of early Christianism.

Left: 100 BC Buddha from Gandhar; and Right: Christ from a 4th century sarcophagus:

<img src='http://instructional1.calstatela.edu/bevans/Art101/Art101B-0-India/WebPage-ImageF.00037.jpeg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />