Quote:However, the key point of differentiation between Hinduism and these other faiths is not polytheism vs. monotheism. The key differentiation is that "Hinduism" is Open Source and most other faiths are Closed Source.



"Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software's source code."

Quote:Waylon Lewis

Founder of elephantjournal.com and the Walk the Talk Show

Posted: October 31, 2009 08:24 PM



Playboy Yoga?! Now We've Seen Everything



Now we've seen it all: Playboy Yoga videos with Sara Jean Underwood.



It was only a matter of time, the ultimate challenge to those "Yobo" fans who say that Yoga for Weight Loss, Disco Yoga, Bikram, Adidas Yoga with (my friend) Rainbeau Mars and Yoga without all that annoying granola, Chanting or Sanskrit may not be "traditional yoga" (a moving target in and of itself), but nevertheless may help open the door to those who might not ordinarily be interested in pure yoga, true yoga, quality yoga.

(Again: There *is* no yoga in the west. There's just exercise. And new agey sermonising which is but a diluted, cheap and meaningless shadow of stolen Hindu Yoga teachings.)



Well, Sara Jean Underwood, a young lady who won the 2007 Playmate of the Year award, has inaugurated a new series of yoga videos that are all over the Playboy.com site. Yup, there's a new url in town:



www.playboy.com/yoga



Just the url itself is enough to provoke convulsions, grimaces, grins, vomiting and/or ogling. Beauty -- or otherwise -- is in the eye of the beholder.



This is provocative stuff -- it raises some tough questions about the Future of Yoga (some of which are addressed by elephant, yogadork, itsallyogababy, and joellhahn in comments, by our readers in the links above).

(Neither the questions nor answers are up to the west/christos/whoever else to contemplate. Yoga never was nor shall ever be theirs to have a say in; no say about its past, present nor future. Like I said: what they do - what they know - isn't yoga.)



In any case, as the Buddhists say, it's our obstacles or enemies that are our best friends, provoking self-examination, questioning and growing pains.



Now we've seen everything.*

Quote:Death

In 1752, the original order of the King and his Dewan was to deport him from Travancore, into the Pandya country, at Aralvaimozhy. He was let off in the forested hills near Aralvaimozhy. There, he is believed to have begun deep meditations, and the people from the adjacent villages began visiting the holy man. According to Christian sources, at this time, high caste Hindus plotted to do away with Devasahayam.



Some people believe that the soldiers went up the forested hills and tried to shoot Devasahayam, but were unable to fire; after which he took the gun in his hands, blessed it and gave it back to the soldiers to shoot him to death, if they wished to. The soldiers took the gun back and fired at him five times.



Devasahayam Pillai died at Kattadimalai on 14 January 1752.[1]



[edit] Canonisation efforts and controversy

In 1780, Kariattil Ouseph Malpan submitted a petition for canonisation of Devasahayam to the Vatican. [3] In 1984, a group of laymen took the initiative to seek the beatification of Devasahayam. [5] This is unusual for a layman,[1] but he is regarded as one who was totally devoted to Christ.[4] Many Christian devotees have been offering prayers at his tomb.[4] The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) recommended his beatification, following scrutiny of available historical evidence.[4] Bishop Chrysostom said that the (CBCI) did not intend any controversy.[4]



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devasahayam_Pillai

Quote:Proposed beatification of Devasahayam Pillai

CBCI?s claim challenged



Dr Balram Misra

Conversion has often given shelter to those trying to justify their disproportionate property, or socially unacceptable marriage bonds. How does it help in cases of sedition, albeit retrospectively, will be evidenced by a decision of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) to recommend beatification of an 18th century Hindu turned Christian, Devasahayam Pillai (or Dev Sagayam Pillai). In its annual convention at Thrissur (Kerala), the CBCI has unanimously decided to recommend beatification for Devasahayam Pillai, said to be the army chief of Travancore, Hindu king Martanda Varma. According to Catholic sources, Devasahayam Pillai was executed by the king because the former had embraced Christianity. Catholics treat Pillai as a martyr on the basis of a story invented by historian Mackenzie. Prof. A. Sreedhara Menon, the noted historian and author of many books on the history of Travancore says: "Leave alone execution, not even a single case of persecution was recorded in the history of Travancore in the name of religious conversion. It is a concocted story and figment of imagination." According to Prof. Menon, during the 29-year regime beginning from 1729, Martanda Varma had executed several people, irrespective of caste, even some members of his royal family, not in the name of conversion but on charges of treason. He pointed out: "How can you say that the erstwhile Travancore rulers persecuted Christians when history records that they had even permitted the dewans like Colonel Munroe to take over the administration of Devaswoms?"



M.G.S. Narayanan, a former chairman of Indian Council of Historical Research, said that he had never come across anyone named either Neelakantan Pillai or Devasahayam Pillai as army chief of Martanda Varma in Kerala history. The head of Vivekananda Kendra, P. Parameswaran has rightly pointed out that the CBCI?s move is an attempt to hurt the Hindu sentiments. He says: "The CBCI?s act of unanimously passing a resolution to canonise a traitor to the state simply because he converted to Christianity shows a very low level of decency and patriotism. How can such an august body pass a resolution without fully ascertaining the facts?" Quoting from the Travancore State Manual, he said that Devasahayam was not an army chief of Martanda Varma, as CBCI claims. He was an employee of the royal Varma household. Parameswaran insisted that Devasahayam Pillai was executed because he had tampered with the official palace records and passed them on to De Lannoy, commander of the Dutch army. Raja Martanda Varma executed him only after confirmation of the act of sedition. The Raja had right over the life and property of his subjects?in terms of the then prevalent laws. "To attribute this punishment to religious vendetta or intolerance is the height of injustice", said Parmeswaran.



http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1&page=11

Quote:He was addressed as Dharma Raja on account of his strict adherence to Dharma Sastra, the principles of justice by providing asylum to thousands of Hindus and Christians fleeing Malabar during the religious and military onslaught of Tipu Sultan.



An interesting insight into the religious tolerance of the Maharajah is gained through a letter by Pope Clement XIV wherein His Holiness thanked the Maharajah for the kindness to the members of his church in Travancore and officially placed all the Christians in Travancore under the protection of the sovereign.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma_Raja

Quote:Captain de Lannoy and twenty-four other Dutchmen were taken prisoners, while the rest of the Dutchmen either retreated to their ships or were killed. Donadi, de Lannoy’s lieutenant was also captured.



[edit] Appointment as a Travancore Army Commander

The Dutch prisoners expressed their willingness to serve the Maharaja of Travancore. De Lannoy was entrusted with the job of training a Regiment of the army in European tactics of war and discipline. Captain de Lannoy performed this task to the entire satisfaction of Marthanda Varma and the Maharaja appointed him as one of his Generals. Donadi also was given a high military post.



As a Christian, de Lannoy was prohibited from entering the king’s palace at Padmanabhapuram and he resided primarily at Udayagiri Fort, or De Lannoy Kotta (de Lannoy’s Fort) as it is locally called, where he also built a small chapel for his family and other Christians.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustachius_De_Lannoy

Quote:



India's new Bible wears a bindi



When Mary and Joseph discovered a power-hungry king was hunting their son Jesus Christ, they escaped to the safety of Egypt. But before Christianity's first family fled, barefoot Mary slipped into a sari and put a bindi on her forehead, while Joseph tied tight his long loincloth and turban.



At least, that's how their flight is illustrated in a Bible produced for Indians.

"Conversion is a human right," he says, fiddling with a large crucifix around his neck.



"We cannot refuse to others our beautiful way of life."

http://www.thestar.com/living/religion/article/722554--westhead-india-s-new-bible-wears-a-bindi

Quote:It is like Christianity has to bend to the Indic traditions, values and customs.

Quote:At root, what it (Julian's work "Contra Galilaeos"/"Against the Galilaeans") expressed was [...] a revulsion at (christians') efforts to assimilate the literary and philosophic heritage of the Greeks without accepting the religious values voiced in it. To Julian's mind, that seemed [color="#FF0000"]wreckage, not assimilation.[/color] And acceptance of those values was not for him just a process of thought. It demanded practice on the familiar principle of do ut des: 'We must maintain such rituals of the temples (ta en tois hierois) as ancestral custom prescribes, and we must perform neither more nor less than that to appease the gods the better.'81 On this point Julian's stance was basic and [color="#FF0000"]closed to argument: 'Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.'[/color]

Quote:CHAPTER 14

The Third Dialogue



This dialogue developed around a letter which K.V. Ramakrishna Rao wrote to the Indian Express in protest against Christian missionaries masquerading as Hindu sannyasins.





INDIAN EXPRESS, 13 FEBRUARY 1989



Crucifying the 'Om'



[...]





INDIAN EXPRESS, 16 FEBRUARY 1989



The Pranava and the Cross

Quote:They read the Vedas, Upanishads and the Gita as well as Tamil classics and other scriptures. They sing Tamil songs (bhajans), accompanied by drums and cymbals. Aarati is taken in solemn grandeur. At the morning worship sandal paste is used, as it is a symbol of divinity. Its aroma stands for Divine Grace. At noon kumkum is placed between the eyebrows as a symbol of the Third Eye, the inner eye of wisdom, which perceives Christ. Psalm 118/68, 95, 105 and 157 point to the discernment of Truth through the wisdom of Christ in us.



The 'Om' is universally used. It points to Lord God Almighty. It is the primordial sound from which the whole creation proceeds. To Christians this word is the Cosmic Christ, made flesh on earth. Om has entered many citadels of Christian places of worship all over the world including the Vatican. Popes and Cardinals have not forbidden the use of Om by Indian Christians.



Prof. S. Radhakrishnan has observed: "If Europe has interpreted Christianity in terms of their own culture of Greek thought and Roman organisation, there is no reason why the Indian Christian should not relate the message of the salvation in Christ to the larger spiritual background of India. Cannot we have Vedantic tradition in Christianity?"

Quote:The term "indianization" implies that the problem with Islam is its un-Indianness. And this, in turn, would imply a nationalistically distorted view of religion: that a nation should only follow native traditions and shun foreign contributions in religion. By such standards, the adoption of Hinduism or Buddhism by the peoples of East and Southeast Asia would not be a matter of pride (as it seems to be for the Sangh) but a violation of the proper world order. The Khmers should have rejected Shiva and built their Angkor temple to some native deity; the Balinese should not enact the Ramayana but create an epic around a native hero instead. The "holyland" of many East-Asian Buddhists is not their own country, but India: the Mahabodhi temple was renovated in the 19th century by the king of Burma, and is now surrounded by guest-houses catering to many thousands of pilgrims from each Buddhist country every year. Should we deduce that these Thai or Japanese pilgrims are being "anti-national" by having such "extra-territorial" religious loyalty? And that the Mongolian and Chinese Communists were right to crack down on Buddhism? That would be the implication if we start reducing religions to their geographical provenance instead of studying their contents. In this case, patriotism is not the refuge of scoundrels, but of duffers.



This futile attempt to identify the Islam problem in terms of "Indian" vs. "foreign" implies a second similarity with certain undesirable xenophobic trends in the West. Semi-literate xenophobic ideologues in Europe identify Islam as "a foreign religion, fit for Asiatics but not for Europe". In their opinion, there is nothing wrong with Islam, as long as it remains in its country of origin. This is not too different from the applause given in Hindutva publications to Anwar Shaykh's thesis that "Islam is the Arab national movement". In his book Islam, the Arab National Movement, the Pakistan-born apostate author from Cardiff (with a death-warrant fatwa on his head since 1994) accurately documents how islamization has meant external arabization (names, clothes, script) for most converted populations, but wrongly infers that Islam is a form of Arab nationalism or Arab imperialism.



For the Sangh, this thesis was doubly welcome: it recast the Islam problem in the familiar, safely secular-sounding terms of nationalism, and it legitimized Islam ("See we're not against Islam?") all while limiting its legitimate geographical domain so as to exclude India from it. The implication is that Hinduism is Indian nationalism, and Islam is Arab nationalism. This is grossly unjust to the Arabs and the native Arab culture which Islam destroyed. There is nothing Arab about Islam, a doctrine confabulated by Mohammed from half-digested bits and pieces of Jewish and Christian lore, combined with his own extraordinary self-image and the hallucinations registered on his sensory nerves (the Quranic voice he "heard"). Except for a small minority of people attracted to Mohammed out of gullibility or lust for booty and power, the Arabs were only forced under the yoke of Islam after valiantly resisting it. For the sake of comparison, Communism was not the "Chinese national movement" just because Chairman Mao's Communists militarily wrested the country from the legitimate Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek. The genuine Arab national movement was the so-called Ridda ("return" to god-pluralism) uprising against the Islamic state after Mohammed's death, in which the Arabs tried to restore their pluralistic culture.[7]



The review of Anwar Shaykh's work in Organiser was titled "Muslim proud of his Aryan heritage". This was, first of all, an untruthful statement. It is true that Anwar Shaykh has rediscovered the "Aryan" (i.e. Vedic) heritage which his great-grandfather had abandoned by converting to Islam.[8] But the consequence of this rediscovery was precisely the opposite of what the Organiser title suggests: he quit Islam, becoming a "non-Muslim proud of his Aryan heritage". Secondly, this title sent the wrong message to Indian Muslims. The message which Organiser sought to convey was that Indian Muslims should follow Anwar Shaykh's example: remain Muslim all while rediscovering their Aryan heritage (or with an older term, "indianizing" themselves). This was a replay of the Gandhian myth of the "nationalist Muslim" for whom Islam and Indianness are not incompatible.[9] But the case of Anwar Shaykh proved just the opposite: by rediscovering his Hindu heritage, a Muslim loses his Muslim identity. Islamic fanatics are wholly aware of this phenomenon, which is why they try to nip it in the bud, e.g. by forbidding Hindu religious music on Pakistani radio. The message of the Organiser should have been: "Indian Muslims, follow Anwar Shaykh's example, rediscover your Vedic heritage, and abandon Islam."



A similar case is that of BJP office-bearer Sikander Bakht. Mr. Bakht is a thorough gentleman, but his main value for the BJP is that he is a born Muslim. He is often shown off as the party's token Muslim, but just as often, angry Muslims write letters to the editor to explain that Mr. Bakht is not a Muslim at all. They say that he actually converted to Hinduism on the occasion of his marriage to a Hindu lady, and that his children were raised as Hindus. Now, when I am to choose between the BJP version and the Muslim version, I tend to attribute more credibility to the latter. If it is true that Mr. Bakht is a convert, I certainly applaud the BJP policy of giving due prominence to him. Only, they should have the sincerity and the wisdom to add the correct message, which is not: "We have Muslims as well", but: "We welcome Indian Muslims seeking the way out of Islam back into their ancestral culture."



http://www.bharatvani.org/books/bjp/section14.html

Quote:Pottu/Bindi is deeply religious. As a Hindu you (ought to) know that, knowing what it means. And knowing it, your only reactions should be (a) anger at the christian theft and their misuse/profaning of something so sacred and hence (b ) resolve to prevent them.

Quote:Sorry I disagree on this business of "ought to know".

Quote:Husky,i have 2 questions

[...]

2. <blablabla "monotheism" blablabla "monotheism" blablabla>