Following up on your recommendation, I tried to read the zealot's conclusion. I found it to be equally >problematic and lousy as the main body of the article. And its not just that the author has little sense of>history - lumping together the spread of christianity in Europe with that in the Americas or making the >absurd claim "The ancient Rome and Greek Civilisations have gone into the archives after the advent of >Christianity" (that alone is enough to show how blinded by zeal the author has even forgotten to revise
his facts - to distinguish between chronology and causality). Its more than that.
Yes. On second thoughts, it wasnot a very good piece at all: a whimpering at its best and fundamentalist at its worst. But that doesnot detract from the fact that conversions by means of FICA (force, inducement etc) should be discouraged.
Quite a few individuals decide to convert of their own accord and I see nothing bad in that: even my own family has converted Buddhists. Such things happen all the time and it is not only restricted to India or the people who have been "indoctrinated" by followers of another religion. But it is the duty of the law to prevent it from being an instrument in the hands of unscrupulous zealots. Every coin has a head-side and a tail-side and it is the tail-side of conversions that we should guard against.
Chandan-da, in his posts, excellently examins the problems that creep up in the implementation of such a law; it is indeed very insightful. However, every law worth its salt has problems of implementation.
For example, in India we have anti-corruption or anti-bribery laws: then the question is when does the law decide when a certain gift is to be considered a bribe and when is it to be considered a gift of appreciation??
Aren't we in a similar medley??
In certain cases I guess the law doesnot really know: the decision is to be left to the judiciary's "superior sense" :-) But even then, the law opined that bribery is INHERENTLY evil and should be curbed and the anti-bribery law is being implemented.
Especially in cases like individual conversions we can never be sure where to draw the line between "propagation" and "conversion". But there are certain cases in which the presence of a cunning element can be safely deduced. The law, I guess, should act against these obvious cases, while giving the benefit of doubt to the convertee and his peers.
Syamanta
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