On Tuesday 20 Apr 2010 8:30:45 am Charles Haynes wrote: > So you may not want to be associated with that person, their actions, > or that religion. You may want to explicitly distance yourself from > such an association, whether it be in their mind, the minds of other > people, or the "minds" of the government. You do not want to be > counted as a co-religionist, nor used as statistical propaganda.
Absolutely true. Imagine a common or garden pagan who is otherwise called Hindu who is going about his sorry life in India. He discovers that his pagan beliefs and practices are all described as being wrong according to the holy books of some people. He then meets a missionary who explicitly tells him that his beliefs are wrong and that he needs to change all that to be saved. If he did not really want to make that change would your words be applicable to this person? I repeat them: > So you may not want to be associated with that person, their actions, > or that religion. You may want to explicitly distance yourself from > such an association, This pagan tells the missionary to keep off. But the missionary does not keep off. He keep reappearing, trying to make the change and trying to influence family members - perhaps minor children of the sorry pagan. What law protects the pagan from such interference? None in India anyway. If the missionary is physically stopped from doing his proselytisation it becomes a case of "minority discrimination" and lack of religious freedom. The missionary after all is only doing what is religion tells him to do in a country where there is religious freedom. While it is legal for some religious books to be critical of pagan practices and preachers to sell the idea that pagan pracices, (which are Hindu practices) are undesirable, there is no law that protects a pagan in India from the advances of a proselytizer. Any pagan/Hindu who who resists a persistent and painful pusher of religion gets dubbed a minority basher. This is clearly a political problem in India. On the ground it is often solved by violence. If the pagan gets sufficiently angry with the proselytizer who is dissing the pagan's beliefs he may thrash him, or worse, kill him. That of course becomes violent Hindutva. But the fact of birth as a pagan in India puts the pagan at risk of being told that his beliefs are bullshit and no law can protect him against "freedom of religion" being used against paganism. Someone else's religious rights trump the pagan's right to be a pagan without interference. This in fact is what the BJP and other Hindu organizations have been pointing out. They have widespread support despite the efforts to make them out to be murderers because one has to be a pagan first to see what it feels like to have half the world techinically following faiths whose books explicitly say that you, as a pagan, are to be disciminated against, destroyed, changed or saved. And the people who want to save you or destroy you are funded by religious charities abroad, and those people hide behind the "religious discrimination"/minority discrimination" excuse at the slightest provocation. That is one of the connections between religion and politics in India - in case anyone had not figured it out. Ideally it must be settled without killing. but since killing is easy it's not going to happen that way. shiv
