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Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:51:36 +0530
From: "Dr. U. G. Barad" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
Conversion inevitably destroys a local culture and is fundamentally
subversive in content. Conversion, especially in tribal areas, leads to
demographic disturbances which in turn lead to resentment. Resentment leads
to violence. We condemn violence without trying to seek the reason behind it
because it does not serve the interests of our secularists.
>
Mario asks:
>
Dr. Barad,
>
To begin with, conversions in a free society are not subversive or harmful to
any intelligent, civilized culture UNLESS THEY ARE CONDUCTED UNDER DURESS
AGAINST A PERSON'S WILL.
>
How is it any business of yours if an individual or group decides to convert
based on convictions they may have gained in comparison with the religion they
were born into by pure accident? Your personal low self-esteem should not get
in their way if their choice was freely made. Thank goodness most of India's
800 million Hindus are far more broadminded and sensible than the small
percentage of paranoid Hindu extremists and supremacists, who want to force
people to stay as Hindus against their will.
>
Your hero, Francois Gautier, was "born in a conservative Catholic
family" but is apparently no longer a Catholic. Don't you find his conversion
to whatever he is right now ironic? How is it OK for him to convert from
Catholicism, and not for a Hindu to convert to Catholicism or Christianity?
>
Besides, just like Francois Gautier, you seem to be condoning violence, while
pretending to condemn it, by using "resentment" as an excuse, which comes from
low self-esteem and an inability to provide the converts with a viable or
satisfying alternative. Who are you to "resent" a choice made by someone else
in a free society?
>
Why don't you resent the Hindu-supremacists who are giving Hinduism and
Gandhigiri a bad name by taking the law into their own hands, and, unable to
provide any meeaningful alternative to those impoverished Hindus, are reduced
to uncivilized behavior based on violence and anarchy.
>
Dr. Barad wrote:
>
Christianity came to India even before it spread to Europe and it was
accepted ungrudgingly. If today Christian efforts at conversion are strongly
opposed it is because the loyalty of converts is turned towards Rome or to
Protestant evangelical centers.
>
Mario responds:
>
Christianity is reported to have come to India in A.D. 52. Yet, almost 2000
years later India's Christian population is only 2.5%. Is this sufficient
grounds for the kind of xenophobia and paranoia that we are seeing in your
highly emotional and barely lucid post?
>
You complain of the financial aid provided by the missionaries to some very
destitute Indians, who may have then converted out of gratitude to their
benefactors for helping them in their time of need. What alternative did you
offer those same destitute people? Would you have preferred to see them
continue to live like paupers in poverty and hunger? Obviously, no one else in
India had done anything to help them.
>
It is high time that paranoid Hindu-supremacists calm down and set a better
example for their fellow-Indians rather than displaying the current culture of
corruption, tax cheating, voting fraud, mob violence, urinating, defecating and
spitting in public and general civic carelessness that pervades India today.
>
Why don't you start a movement to set an example of charity and caring for your
fellow Hindus who may be poor and downtrodden, so that they take you as an
example rather than someone from another religion who has helped them survive
and given them hope.
>
