ISKCON is getting weirder. Especially since it's been taken over by 'ex' christians from the west.
And if the Hare Krishna Ford is the grandson of anti-Semite Henry Ford (read that first paragraph if you haven't yet) and if the Ford Foundation is connected to him in any way, then can't he disband the anti-Dharmic Ford Foundation? I would have thought it an obvious thing to do for one whose publicly-declared Ishtadevam is Krishna, the champion of Dharma....
Hindus have never insisted on creationism. We've got several Puranas on how we came to be. One of them is that we came from monkeys (the pre-Darwin christobrits laughed at us... not laughing anymore, eh? See for instance Hinduwisdom.info which discusses it). Even the whole Dasavataram of Vishnu has always been seen as how Bhagavan helped us progress from fish to amphibian to mammal to half-animal ('intermediate' stage) to little man to man-with-axe to man-with-bow to agriculturalist to livestock domesticator to Kalki.
Meanwhile ISKCON has the presumption to speak for all Hindus, and that too while not too long ago they used to specifically say they were not Hindu.
And what is all this nonsense by openly-communist Meera Nanda about ISKCON and its opinions being "Vedic" anyhoo? (Then again, Meera Nanda being a communist would not know anything about Hinduism to distinguish.) Do ISKCON do any Homams or recite the Vedas. No they don't. Next to that, ISKCON literature regularly says something to demote the Vedas (even mis-interpreting and mis-presenting Gita's own words on the matter; all Krishna says is that the Vedas are not the <i>end</i> themselves). The Gita is indeed very central to Hindu Dharma, but so are the Vedas (and Ramayanam and Mahabharatam and various other core Hindu scriptures). Yet if one reads the ISKCON's Bhagavad Gita As It Is (I have it and don't know how I ever managed to read it through before), its sections giving the detailed "meaning" of the verses often have very little to do with the actual Bhagavad Gita. They just go off on a tangent, whereas the untampered verses of the Gita's verses are truly full of meaning even if not all of them were easy enough for me to understand them on the first few reads. (It took me many reads to start getting some of the less obvious stuff...., the VishwaRoopam bit was all I could follow on the first go.)
Just like their 'take' on the Gita, this whole creationism hobby seems to be another far-fetched weird thing they're into.
ISKCON looks more and more like its steering has been taken over by anti-Hindus doing very christian things. I wish they would go back to their famous public declarations that they're not Hindus. And why are they proselytising in India amongst <i>Hindus</i> anyway and making ISKCON converts from Hindus <!--emo&:blink:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='blink.gif' /><!--endemo--> ? (Others would have noticed too.) We are Hindus, leave us alone, stop stealing our religion and repackaging christianity in it in order to shove christoislamism down our throats that way. We are not confused about Krishna. Oh and Krishna has nothing to do with jeebusjehovallah.
Really, why is it only ISKCON that has gone so similar to christianism with its very christo-style monotheism and its open declarations of affinity to christoislamism's gawd? And the creationism. And the proselytising. And its strict scripturalism.
Why do western people who get into ISKCON always start debating to convert us to their point of view? They are supposedly reading and citing Hindu texts, but they make it sound like a western theological debate...
<b>ADDED:</b>
You can't see Michel Danino or Ishwar Sharan do this stuff: traditional Hinduism doesn't do it. So it's not the country of origin of the followers. And Arya Samaj, which converts (Indians) to Hinduism doesn't behave like ISKCON. Similarly, Ramakrishna Math too, going by those of its literature publications that I could get my hands on, is as traditionalist Hindu as the rest.
It's something else about ISKCON. I'm thinking it's the way it's set up that has enabled it to mutate into this, and others are certainly taking advantage of some of the western-style trappings inherent in it.
I don't admire ISKCON for exporting "Hinduism". I don't think Hinduism is an export-product or a product. People to whom Hinduism speaks will find their way to it, like Morales did. Others may find Shinto or something else the right tradition for them or find they are agnostic.
I don't think it right for Hinduism to be modified to appeal to people in the west. It then attracts people for the wrong reasons: precisely for the similarities it has with their previous religions of christianity and islam, instead of giving them freedom from those ideas. Rather than improving their states, they then nudge its form more toward their pattern of thinking. Which seems to me what's happened with ISKCON. (Though that still doesn't explain the case of the "BG As It Is" book.)
And if the Hare Krishna Ford is the grandson of anti-Semite Henry Ford (read that first paragraph if you haven't yet) and if the Ford Foundation is connected to him in any way, then can't he disband the anti-Dharmic Ford Foundation? I would have thought it an obvious thing to do for one whose publicly-declared Ishtadevam is Krishna, the champion of Dharma....
Hindus have never insisted on creationism. We've got several Puranas on how we came to be. One of them is that we came from monkeys (the pre-Darwin christobrits laughed at us... not laughing anymore, eh? See for instance Hinduwisdom.info which discusses it). Even the whole Dasavataram of Vishnu has always been seen as how Bhagavan helped us progress from fish to amphibian to mammal to half-animal ('intermediate' stage) to little man to man-with-axe to man-with-bow to agriculturalist to livestock domesticator to Kalki.
Meanwhile ISKCON has the presumption to speak for all Hindus, and that too while not too long ago they used to specifically say they were not Hindu.
And what is all this nonsense by openly-communist Meera Nanda about ISKCON and its opinions being "Vedic" anyhoo? (Then again, Meera Nanda being a communist would not know anything about Hinduism to distinguish.) Do ISKCON do any Homams or recite the Vedas. No they don't. Next to that, ISKCON literature regularly says something to demote the Vedas (even mis-interpreting and mis-presenting Gita's own words on the matter; all Krishna says is that the Vedas are not the <i>end</i> themselves). The Gita is indeed very central to Hindu Dharma, but so are the Vedas (and Ramayanam and Mahabharatam and various other core Hindu scriptures). Yet if one reads the ISKCON's Bhagavad Gita As It Is (I have it and don't know how I ever managed to read it through before), its sections giving the detailed "meaning" of the verses often have very little to do with the actual Bhagavad Gita. They just go off on a tangent, whereas the untampered verses of the Gita's verses are truly full of meaning even if not all of them were easy enough for me to understand them on the first few reads. (It took me many reads to start getting some of the less obvious stuff...., the VishwaRoopam bit was all I could follow on the first go.)
Just like their 'take' on the Gita, this whole creationism hobby seems to be another far-fetched weird thing they're into.
ISKCON looks more and more like its steering has been taken over by anti-Hindus doing very christian things. I wish they would go back to their famous public declarations that they're not Hindus. And why are they proselytising in India amongst <i>Hindus</i> anyway and making ISKCON converts from Hindus <!--emo&:blink:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='blink.gif' /><!--endemo--> ? (Others would have noticed too.) We are Hindus, leave us alone, stop stealing our religion and repackaging christianity in it in order to shove christoislamism down our throats that way. We are not confused about Krishna. Oh and Krishna has nothing to do with jeebusjehovallah.
Really, why is it only ISKCON that has gone so similar to christianism with its very christo-style monotheism and its open declarations of affinity to christoislamism's gawd? And the creationism. And the proselytising. And its strict scripturalism.
Why do western people who get into ISKCON always start debating to convert us to their point of view? They are supposedly reading and citing Hindu texts, but they make it sound like a western theological debate...
<b>ADDED:</b>
You can't see Michel Danino or Ishwar Sharan do this stuff: traditional Hinduism doesn't do it. So it's not the country of origin of the followers. And Arya Samaj, which converts (Indians) to Hinduism doesn't behave like ISKCON. Similarly, Ramakrishna Math too, going by those of its literature publications that I could get my hands on, is as traditionalist Hindu as the rest.
It's something else about ISKCON. I'm thinking it's the way it's set up that has enabled it to mutate into this, and others are certainly taking advantage of some of the western-style trappings inherent in it.
I don't admire ISKCON for exporting "Hinduism". I don't think Hinduism is an export-product or a product. People to whom Hinduism speaks will find their way to it, like Morales did. Others may find Shinto or something else the right tradition for them or find they are agnostic.
I don't think it right for Hinduism to be modified to appeal to people in the west. It then attracts people for the wrong reasons: precisely for the similarities it has with their previous religions of christianity and islam, instead of giving them freedom from those ideas. Rather than improving their states, they then nudge its form more toward their pattern of thinking. Which seems to me what's happened with ISKCON. (Though that still doesn't explain the case of the "BG As It Is" book.)
Death to traitors.