Aryan Invasion/migration Theories & Debates -2

[Husky]

[quote name='sumishi' date='12 September 2011 - 12:19 AM' timestamp='1315766473' post='112833']Here's a followup 2002 article to the one by David Lewis I posted a few posts above: The Enigma of India's Origins.



Written by Michael Cremo, who identifies himself as a "Vedic" creationist. Needless to say, the mainstream/propagandastream "scholars" are generally hammer and tongs after him.

[/quote]

Sumishi, maybe you're not yet aware of Cremo and gang. Michael Cremo - and some colleague of his - are ISKCONites, and who, like others, attempted cryptoism to peddle creationism. Fortunately, TalkOrigins long ago discussed their attempts to derail science. Unfortunately, TalkOrigins mistook ISKCON to be something Hindu (when ISKCON's founder explicitly said it was not <- a very lucky escape for Hindus, else Hindus would be forcibly saddled with even more of the uninvited: foreign "converts" :eek





Here:

1. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom/lepper.html

Hidden History, Hidden Agenda

A Review of The Hidden History of the Human Race, by Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson. Badger, CA: Govardhan Hill Publishing. 1994.

By Bradley T. Lepper



The Hidden History of the Human Race is a frustrating book. The motivation of the authors, "members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, a branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness" (p. xix), is to find support in the data of paleoanthropology and archaeology for the Vedic scriptures of India. Their methods are borrowed from fundamentalist Christian creationists (whom they assiduously avoid citing).

(ISKCON uses "Vedic" mostly for ISKCONism.)

And there's a very obvious reason why they plagiarise from (fundamental) christians - their methods in general are often aligned: the need they feel to peddle creationism (foist their view on the world - Pass), and the missionising and subsequent wails of "persecution" (as happens in E Europe/Russia) are but some shared features.





http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom/groves.html

But this time we get nearly a thousand pages! Gish, Bowden and Lubenow, the Christian creationists, can't raise even half of this between them. The difference is that Cremo and Thompson have read much, much more of the original literature than the other creationists, and their survey is correspondingly more complete. Yet I can't really say that their understanding is much greater, for all that; their tone of argument is as perverse, they are just as biased.

Sadly TalkOrigins mistakes them for representing Hindus on this page:

The letterhead is "Bhaktivedanta Institute, San Diego". Can this be a representative of that other fundamentalism, the Hindu variety? It can.

Remind ourselves what fundamentalist Hindus believe. Like fundamentalist Christians and Jews, they dismiss evolution.

Nonsense. ISKCONites do not represent Hindus, or therefore "fundamentalist Hindus" (whatever this new species may be).

And I don't know about others, but I've never encountered any Hindu bringing up say the diggajas, patalam and devalokam as objections to the planet's state. (Of course, the Hindu Gods are real; so even the Diggajas apparently - I wouldn't know - but all that's a different matter.)





2. http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-...nists.html

Information about the NBC Television Show "The Mysterious Origins of Man"

On Sunday February 25th, 1996, NBC broadcast "The Mysterious Origins of Man," narrated by Charlton Heston, purporting to be a documentary about scientific evidence that would overturn currently accepted theories of human history. In fact, it was little more than a pseudo-scientific propaganda piece with large contributions by people affiliated with the Krishna Consciousness movement.

At least TalkOrigins here didn't refer to this as Hindu, but called it the ISKCON movement. Phew.



http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom.html

What's it all about?



On Sunday February 25th 1996, NBC broadcast [b]"The Mysterious Origins of Man" (hereafter MOM)[/b], narrated by Charlton Heston, purporting to be a documentary about scientific evidence that would overturn currently accepted views of human history and evolution.



In late May 1996, NBC issued a press release announcing that MOM would be re-broadcast on Saturday, June 8, 1996.



The film was produced by B. C. Video Inc. (P.O. Box 97, Shelburne, VT 05482, Ph: 800-846-9682), which has set up a web site to publicize it [offsite].



Although MOM was anti-evolutionary, it was not advocating scientific creationism, even though some of the "experts" and arguments are familiar to readers of scientific creationist literature. Instead, just as scientific creationism is an attempt to use science to support fundamentalist Christianity, MOM is apparently an attempt to use science to support Hinduism. Much of the material in the program is based on the contents of two books, Forbidden Archeology [offsite] and The Hidden History of the Human Race [offsite] by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, both of whom appeared on the show and are members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, a branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Both books are published by Govardhan Hill Publishing [offsite].



Other material for MOM came from Graham Hancock's book Fingerprints of the Gods [offsite], Rand and Rose Flem-Ath's book When the Sky Fell [offsite], and Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert's book The Orion Mystery [offsite].



[...]



Reviews of The Mysterious Origins of Man:



[...]



Claims made on "Mysterious Origins of Man"



[...]

Hindus approving of - hence peddling - ISKCONism (or other such famous global movements): know *what* you're cheering first.

If you don't know, then don't promote things. Better yet: avoid.