From: "Santosh Helekar" <[email protected]>
A lot of the material in the post appended below has been selectively
lifted verbatim from a blogger named Siddhartha from Bangalore, without
giving him credit, without putting his text in quotation marks, and without
providing a link to one of his webpages containing
this text. Please see for example:
http://pipaltree.org.in/index.php?page=the-equality-of-religions
***This is absolutely wrong. The texts are from the Constitution of India,
from writings of Mahatma Gandhi (some of them are in the blog mentioned by
him, but they are quaotations, not texts of the author), and from the speech
of Swami Vivekananda in Chicago. Therefore it is wrong what Santosh is
saying, it is a calumny, it is a misunderstanding of what "plagiarims" is...
Once also he accused me of "plagiarism" when I quoted the Court's statement
(In re...).
Moreover, the funny thing is that what he has quoted from Gandhi
vindicates the secular pluralistic position of both Gandhi and the
Indian constitution, i.e. all religions are equal - equal before the
law and equally good.
***Absolutely wrong. First of all, Santosh said that I had written texts
without references. All references to Mahatma Gandhi's quotations have been
given. Secondly, Mahatma Gandhi speaks of his preference for monotheism and
refers to harmony. But just as men are all human in spite of their
different names and forms, just as leaves of a tree though different as
leaves are the same as the leaves of the same tree, all religions though
different are the same. We must treat all
religions as equals" (Harijanbandhu, July 22, 1934). Gandhi says that "they
are different, but we must treat all religions as equals". He does not say
that all religions are equally true and good. If any one says that all
religions are equally true and good, s/he is mistaken. Let Santosh give me
the right to interpret the right way, not the wrong way as he is
subreptitiously doing, although he claims to be a great scientist. He should
learn the meanings of plagiarism, contradiction, remission, cure, fact of
empirical observation (remember that Santosh attributed to the Cardinal
Cormack the statement that God is not real...).
Regards.
Fr.Ivo
--- On Wed, 8/18/10, Ivo <[email protected]> wrote:
***This is not a value judgment given by Manmohan Singh, it
is alien to his
speech. How can Manmohan Singh have a say on this topic?
<<<...Would he accept that Sikhism and polytheistic Hinduism are "equal",
equally
good, equally acceptable to him? Would you accept that
Hinduism, agnosticism and atheism (which is based on faith,
not in science) are equallly good?
> Great thinkers such as Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi
have also espoused the equality of all religions.
***You are absolutely wrong.
1. The Constitution of India does not says that "all
religions are equal", or equally good.
2. Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandi spoke always in the
context of communal harmony:
In his speech in Chicago, Swami Vivekananda said: "I will
quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I
remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day
repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having
their sources in different paths which men take through different
tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to
Thee."
3. Gandhi propagated the notion of Sarvadharma Samabhava,
the equality of all religions. >>
Gandhi insisted that, "The need of the moment is not one
religion but mutual respect and tolerance of the devotees
of different religions. We want to reach not the dead level
but unity in diversity. Any attempt to root out traditions, effects of
heredity, climate and other
surroundings is not only bound to fail but is a sacrilege. The soul of
religion is one but it is encased
in a multitude of forms. The latter will persist to the end of time. Wise
men will ignore the
outward crust and see the same soul living under a variety of crusts."
(Young India, Sept.25, 1925).
