The Wolf who cried Wolf

An abbreviated version of this comment was submitted on the Rajiv Malhotra forum


The Indian gov has let hundreds of missionaries into India over the years, but Indians does not get to hear the stories of the thousands of victims of child abuse by Church clergy around the world. In the US, victims are fighting back against the behemoth that has betrayed the trust they placed when they were kids, and filing lawsuits in court that are driving such churches to bankruptcy. In Barack Obama's own state of Illinois, which he so proudly represented, the statistics are quite shocking. We are now just beginning to see the same pattern being repeated in Indian churches with cases being reported in many parts of India. THIS list must be compiled and publicized. If the Indian government is sincere about protecting the rights of Christians in India, as Rajnath Singh ji tweeted today, it needs to start paying serious attention to the cases of abuse against church personnel cropping up worldwide, and study how it is unfolding in India.

The last 10 years under Congress rule has seen some of the more fundamentalist churches pretty much do their own thing in India, and one shudders to think how the faith of hoodwinked Dalits, Indian boys, girls, and prospective nuns who come to church looking for peace have been exploited. A lot of foolish Hindus signed up for Jesus (the original good cop) and Carol singing, but when they woke up, found themselves enlisted as servants of deadly multinational bad-cops. A survey of worldwide data would show that IF at all christians in India are on a hit list, the owner of such a list, with a high probability, is likely to be their own organizations. Like charity, abuse begins at home. Any attack on any place of worship, in any country, be it a Mandir, Gurudwara, Masjid, or Church must be condemned, and the culprits punished severely. But the comparative data regarding such attacks, and acts of vandalism in India and in the United States tells an entirely different story and so we must ask: is this a case of wolf crying wolf? Is the church trying to cover up its tracks in India like it has tried to in other countries, and divert attention by encouraging rabble rousers in India without proper fact checking? Is it trying to derail India's recovery under Modi? After all, it has been complicit in getting Narendra Modi's visa to the US cancelled in the past. Of course, not all churches are bad, and we are already reading about prominent patriotic Indian christians who are speaking out against nefarious conversion activities.

If Breaking India forces can organize a SHAM dalit conference in Washington with the help of 'sepoys', then surely, Indian organizations can organize genuine Church-victim conferences in India, bringing speakers from the west who have had tragic experiences with the churches there. Such conferences need not simply an exercise in generating counter atrocity literature, but can actually make a positive dharmic difference to Indian lives, while also educating India about the threat posed by these BI forces. An alternative perspective based on fact must to be provided to Indian public to compare with the totally one-sided Bollywood image of the 'cool' church-gown wedding, the wise Padre, and the kindly Mrs. Braganza upstairs who feeds and houses the homeless Hindu.

A Million Mandirs?

[edited briefly for content April 7]
This is a simple back-of-the-envelope approximate statistical exercise that took less than 10 minutes to do, using the "Sepoy" approach that generally looks at every Indian problem with a non-Indian (western) lens, and measures Indian performance on western metrics. Unlike the Amartya Sen humanities approach, we will not use some wild POTA ("pulled out of thin air") numbers to make up a case, and will try working with plausible approximations using data available in the public domain to make order-of-magnitude calculations.

In predominantly Christian USA (population 314 million) has approximately 450K churches.

Rate:  1433 churches per million of national population.

How many mosques are there in Saudi Arabia?
There appear to be 20K in Mecca alone (population 2 million). wow. But let us suppose than an average, "less-holy" Islamic city perhaps has a rate that is only half as much.

Rate: 5000 mosques per million of national population


Number of dharmic Mandirs in India?
South India has an estimated number of 110K temples. [I assume this number ignores the street-side deities and tiny shrines that doesn't allow more than a handful to congregate - there's probably a couple of million of those in India - and counts only the reasonably sized mandirs that allow public services]. Relatively speaking, this region suffered the least in terms of wholesale temple destruction by Islamic invaders. Still, let us conservatively assume about 100K mandirs per quadrant, which gives us about 400K temples in India (population 1237 million).

Rate: 323 mandirs per million of national population


If India is to achieve parity with just the US rate (forget the middle-eastern rate that is much higher), it roughly needs to increase the number of dharmic mandirs by a 4X factor. To achieve this target, India would need to construct:

(1433-323) * 1237 = approximately 1.37 million more mandirs have to be built. Given that these are rough calculations, we can conclude that an order of a million new mandirs have to be built in India to achieve some degree of "parity" with the US, and several million more to achieve parity with the middle east.


Perhaps more importantly, similar statistics can be compiled to calculate the additional number of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh seminaries and educational institutions, libraries, think-tanks, etc. that have to be built to achieve parity.

Modi's manifesto talked about one temple, and the sepoy media goes into shock. Let them take a look a this :)


The Lost Temples of India
What started off as a ten-minute trivia exercise turns interesting when we ask (assuming that the above calculations are not way off): Why is the Mandir number relatively small? After all. Hindus are/were pretty "religious" like anybody else, and Mandirs were the most important and popular public institutions in the past and its number in India must have been proportional to the size of the population served. My own line-of-thought is to ask: are these "lost temples" partly or largely attributable to the wholesale destruction of temples by Islamic invaders over the last millennium? Descriptions of these acts are available in rich detail via first-hand accounts. If we compare the Mandirs-per-million population in different geographical regions of India and segment these areas into those most affected and those least affected by foreign invasion, and statistically adjust for time, population-growth, and other factors, we may be able to get an order-of-magnitude estimate of the number of mandirs destroyed in this manner. This may help uncover a portion of that shocking era in Indian history that is being white-washed by Marxist historians. This important statistical analysis needs to be taken up by Indian engineers and scientists.

Digestion of Hinduism: Inside the American Veda

The first part of my notes-to-self covered my interpretation of digestion, a term coined by Rajiv Malhotra. This lead to an active twitter debate that led to many questions, mostly centered around Phil Goldberg's 'American Veda', which was previously critiqued elsewhere as facilitating digestion, and a stand which I support. I fact, I have found that AV does a lot more than that. It also directly digests and misrepresents Hinduism, and celebrates the digestion of Hinduism, perhaps unintentionally. This second set of notes will add more substance and take some of those follow-up questions as a starting point.

Throughout these posts, the emphasis in bold/underline/quotes are mine. Often direct quotes are italicized. Let me state upfront that I admire Goldberg's candid admissions. I believe he is Jewish, and therefore does not proselytize. This is my critique of his work, as well as the other interviews and articles he has written. There are places in the book AV where he even agrees that Indian methods and dharmic ideas have been misappropriated. But his disappointing response is to kick the can down the road to the Hindu advocacy groups to deal with the Hindu image issue, and washes his hands off, i.e. 'it is not my problem'. Fair enough. He is not Hindu, and this book is not about Hinduism. AV is a book written by the west, of the west, and for the west. Hindus and Hinduism are but props in the AV stage.

[update Dec 23: typos fixed]



Cover Page
American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West

American Veda and Indian spirituality implies that Hindu religious concepts are tied to a geography. There is no call-out in the book of the universal truth claims of Karma and Punar Janma of Hinduism and the universality of dharma - the latter is the single-most important thing, in my opinion, a Hindu reader should look for in such books: Ask what is the status of dharma in the book? It is totally ignored in the title. The title suggests that the book starts with some fuzzy "spirituality" from India toward building a new American Veda suitable for western consumption without the stench of Hinduism's caste, cows, and curry.

Strong words? read on and make up your own mind.

Foreword by Huston Smith
Who is this Huston Smith and why did Goldberg pick him to write the foreword?
He's described a 90+ year old "rock star of religions". My ignorance. I never heard of this chap, so I looked him up. Here are some interesting snippets.

"Smith was born in 1919 in China, where his parents were Christian missionaries...."

Smith: "... "I happen to be a Christian. I was brought up and drenched in that," he said. "I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life the way God would have acted if God had assumed human form... I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.""

Zero connection with dharma so far, but we see Mr. Smith clearly state where his roots are: History-centric Christianity.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on his religious practice that examines other religions (including, and in particular, Hindu Vedanta) for many years, he returning to his Christian roots to write this book:
"The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition"

 Here's an Amazon.com blurb on what this restored Christianity looks like:
"... "I have tried to describe a Christianity which is fully compatible with everything we now know, and to indicate why Christians feel privileged to give their lives to it."
—Huston Smith

.... In his most personal and passionate book on the spiritual life, renowned author, scholar, and teacher of world religions Huston Smith turns to his own life-long religion, Christianity....Smith cuts through these to describe Christianity's "Great Tradition," the common faith of the first millennium of believers, which is the trunk of the tree from which Christianity's many branches, twigs, and leaves have grown. This is not the exclusivist Christianity of strict fundamentalists, nor the liberal, watered-down Christianity practiced by many contemporary churchgoers..."


Right in the introductory pages available for free at Amazon.com, you can clearly see Smith states that he visited India may times and learnt of "dharma" before proceeding to digest Dharma into the Christian notion. His exact words on how he redefines dharma: "It is the duty that God has imposed on me". Being a Christian, he is of course referring to a monotheist God who is a task-master.  The meaning of dharma has been totally inverted. This is the abysmal level of scholarship and mis-translation of Sanskrit, which we see in other chapters of the AV book too.

In the first chapter of Smith's book, after the introduction, Smith talks of his new Christian world view, where the very first set of paragraphs attempts to mangle the dharmic idea of "Purna" made famous by the famous Shloka. Next, tackles at causation (related to Karma...), at which point I cried halt. The foreword to AV cites a single verse from the Christian bible where false equivalences for Bhakti, Jnana, and Karma is given! Rock star.


Foreword writers are deliberately and carefully chosen, and usually for deep reasons. AV's foreword writer is a famous and devout Christian, the son of two devoted missionaries who studied Vedanta for long, and visited India several times, and ultimately used this information, not to become Hindu or dharmic, but to repair and re-invent an improved Christianity for the west using digested versions of Hindu concepts.

This is how American Veda begins and ends. This is the template.

Theme of American Veda
Goldberg is sincere westerner who is looking to improving the condition of his country and repairing their society and religion. To achieve this task, he, like Huston Smith, uses Hinduism as a tool-box containing an useful assortment of nuts and bolts, from which the west can freely select compatible parts to plug the gaping holes in their systems. Chapter after chapter in this book is not about how Hinduism and India benefits from the interaction with the west, but the total opposite.  Which begs the question:

If AV is about utilizing bits and pieces of Hindu ideas deleted from their Indian context, and suitably modified to enhance Christianity, Judaism, and western health care, etc., why the heck are the useful Hindu idiots cheering, showcasing, and funding such works? What has India and dharmic systems got in return from the US for this? ZILCH.

Much of American Veda is a biographical celebration of who's who of U-turners and digesters:

Maslow, Bensen, Ken Wilber, Carl Jung, Father Keating, ....

and a bunch of opportunists like Deepak Chopra who have made a lot of money selling faux-Vedantic snake oil to a gullible western audience. This blogpost links to a video lecture of Rajiv Malhotra that walks through an entire list of U-turners and digesters. We won't go into these biographies, even though they make for fascinating and bewildering reading. In this remainder of this part of the self-study, I cover the introduction and the first chapter of AV, focusing on Goldberg's own words and annotations. I highlight just a few of the many gaping holes in this book that makes a mockery of dharmic concepts and try to point out how these mangled ideas facilitate digestion.

For more background and context on American Veda and Phil Goldberg, readers can read this blog: digestingveda.blogspot.in. We owe the writer a thanks.


Chapter - Introduction
1. Here, PG starts off providing a list of excuses about why he has not used Hinduism in the title. Clearly, he is aware this would become an issue. Some reasons include:
a.  "people will misconstrue the nature of this book". (Exactly how?)

b. [Opportunistic] gurus who came to the west said they were not preaching Hinduism (so?)

c. Yoga and Vedanta do not have to be viewed religiously at all ...

2. As far as Buddhism, he equates the Buddha to Jesus as a reformer. I would seriously contest this as another false equivalence, but some other day. This book does not credit Buddhism in the cover either. Of Jainism or Sikhism, I could find no mention.

3. He calls Yoga and Vedanta, India's major export. Despite that, India has not seen one dollar in returns yet!

4. He finds India's epic 'tales' of Ramayana and Mahabharata to be rich in 'magic and mystery', and makes the Iliad and Odyssey look like short stories.

5. Page 10:
Goldberg offers us this gem: infinite divine can be called Allah, Lord, or Brahman, which is justified citing 'Ekam sat Vipraha bahudha vadanti'.
 
Shockingly poor scholarship fills the American Veda. Goldberg is honest enough to concede that he is not confident about the completeness of the translation of the Vedantic principles he cites by adding caveats such as "does not pretend to do justice to Vedanta...". What can we be sure of in AV then?

The above reasoning is a distortion of Hinduism, designed to propagate the myth of sameness. Doing so allows him to move on to his next, and by far, most serious error, which opens the door to wholesale digestion.

6. On Page 11, Goldberg claims:
 "Vedantic principles are accompanied by Vedic concepts of Karma.... and reincarnation. Most applications of Vedanta-Yoga do not require these supplementary ideas, and ordinary practitioners in the west do not necessarily believe in them"

Supplementary ideas?!

Karma (cause and effect) and Punar Janma (Reincarnation) are central and fundamental truth-claims of dharmic thought system. Hinduism (and its pluralism of manifestations), Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists subscribe to this. These dharmic fundamentals are precisely the ones that the Judeo-Christian system is incompatible with, and this is also exactly why Goldberg has deliberately brushed them aside as unimportant waste material that can be rejected! Once we get rid of these crucial dharmic elements, the mutilated remainder of the Hindu concepts can be digested into JC systems, without hurting their history-centric dogma.  This is exactly what was stated in part-1. In Philip Goldberg's own words, we have clear evidence of digestion being facilitated.

7. On the same page, PG favorably compares Vedanta to perennialism. Rajiv Malhotra has previously stated that "The whole Perennial Philosophy is merely stage-2 of the uturn." AV systematically glorifies (as Rajiv Malhotra put it) these so-called western pioneers, who in reality, just reassembled and repackaged many of the original ideas from dharmic systems.

8. In Page 12, he says "whether it's a falafel or philosophy, Americans embrace foreign products when the circumstances are right, and conditions in the United States were right for Vedanta-Yoga from the start"

Falafel. Vedanta-Yoga. foreign product (!)

Wow, such reverence and seriousness.

This is the author that Ms. Nirmala Seetharaman's foundation found worthy enough to invite for a talk, and for RSS to promote? that certain Sanathana Dharma institutions showered money on?



These are just the first few pages. Toward the end of the book, there are sections where it appears like Goldberg is practically showing Padres/Rabbis how such digested Vedanta-Yoga' can improve the situation in their church and synagogue without impacting their central dogma. He also does this in a Huffington Post article. Indeed as early as page 23-24, Goldberg very honestly states his intentions. Indeed, AV is a very honest book. I'm sure PG believes in his mind that he's doing a lot of good.

9. In his own words, we can find the real reason for deleting Hinduism/Buddhism/Sikhism/Jainism from this book:

 "This [book] is not a threat to Western religions; Americans are not about to abandon their churches, synagogues, and mosques, for Hindu temples. Figures of Shiva and Krishna will not replace crosses in American homes."

It is very, very clear. Hinduism has NO role in this book, and he sees no role for Hinduism in American homes. He is seeking not to replace dogmatic Judeo-christian ideology with dharmic ideas as many gullible Hindus believe. Instead, he is seeking to complement and solidify the existing dogma with a digested Hindu layer. This is precisely what was mentioned in part 1. In his own words, we have the evidence of the outcome of digestion.  Once this happens, this enhanced Christianity can be re-exported to India. Conversion in India will be a piece of cake. This is what India gains from digestion.

Still not convinced? then read further ...
"Exposure to eastern spirituality is more likely to strengthen a person's relationship to his or her native religion than to destroy it".

Goldberg has gone out of his way to calm his western audience and his publishers. This book is not about bringing dharma to replace dogma. This is about making Judeo-Christianity stronger to stem the flow of disenchanted members out of their system.

I could go on. There are nearly 400 pages in this book, and I have covered less than 25 in this post since I do not have a digital copy to expedite this work. There are more fallacies and errors to point out, but that will take up a lot of space and is left as an exercise to the reader. I will however add one final point on the comments that Goldberg makes in page 292, to illustrate the kind of lame arguments used to justify digestion.

"One physician told me "But replacing the the orange robe with a white lab coat opens it up to a lot more people". So does calling meditation a stress-reduction technique, not a sadhana for achieving moksha. We will never know how many heart attacks were prevented, or how many millions of pills were not taken, because of that decision.

There is another place in the book where a false argument of "Indian philosophy versus Western science" argument is given. Digestion of Yoga into all these medical buzzwords is justified since it gives these methods the requisite "scientific legitimacy".  Mr. Goldberg: Indians, Tibetans, Sri Lankans, Indonesians, and many millions in Asia (not just India) for centuries benefited scientifically from Yoga, without having to mutilate Yoga and delete moksha, and did not require white lab coats to "make it look" scientific. It always was scientific, and dharmic religions have never been in conflict with science. This silly justification insults intelligence.
 

Conclusion and Summary
Based on my study, I personally find American Veda to be a mediocre and error-ridden piece of work that directly enables, and also (perhaps inadvertently) celebrates digestion while moving toward a goal of ensuring that western society derives maximum benefits from the Hindu toolbox, taking what it deems to be compatible and useful (dharma-nirpeksha stuff), and discarding the rest.

Digestion is not an end-goal. It is not easy to spot unless you examine the end-state of the Hindu concept being appropriated. It is merely a means to an end. Usually, that end-goal is to preserve and enhance Western religion. The primary goal is neither to harm or help the cause of dharma. Rather they are indifferent to it. Impact on Hinduism and dharma is collateral damage, which authors may express regret about, but is not really their concern.

It's time we stop celebrating every new and shiny piece of work that comes of the west just because it is superficially favorable to Hinduism. That's a symptom of mental colonization. Let's first fund and support those among our own who are busting their backs coming up with high-quality work. Being brown should not be a disqualification.

Crusades 2.0 and the Indian Sepoy

Some rambling thoughts that arose from informal discussions with some engineering and B-school professors from universities around the globe...

The crusades aren't really over. The skirmishes are quite clear. A Syria here, an Iraq there, a Pakistan somewhere else. In response, a 9-11 here, a Kenya mall quiz there... World domination is a ludicrous movie theme that never goes out of fashion.The contemporary crusade is couched in modern language and subterfuge, but at the end of the day, it is still a Pax Romana versus Dhimmicracy, where dharmic peoples are expendable. A Darwinian battle between two history-centric systems. China may seem to be making it a tri-cornered fight, but really, it is being digested by the former, what with their huge underground church movement.

Which really leaves us with the pluralistic, dharmic Indian systems as the only viable, scientific and sustainable alternatives. As it has invariably been since forever. As the battle between these two Tamassic park dinosaurs begins to overflow into India, enter: India's secularist sepoys. A bunch of English-speaking Desi Don Quixotes and Def Sufi poets. Conquering heroes in the battle of futility fought and won entirely against vast strawmen armies, sailing their battleships through storms in many a teacup. Oblivious to data-driven methods, unhindered by fact, these dharma-illiterates remain supremely confident in their theoretical ability to alter the center of mass from within a closed physical system, despite failing in every single experiment. The more opportunistic sepoys get rewarded and graduate into prize idiots, while their subalterns remain content as intellectual coolies for either side.  Satyam eva Jayate in the long run, but in the short term, secular Mithya rules the roost in India.

Updated October 28
The blasts in Bihar during the Hunkaar political rally that killed many innocent civilians, is a gentle reminder from sepoys for their fellow Indians to renew their membership of (Pax Romana + Dhimmicracy) and not strive for dharma based governance.

Review of Asimov's 'Nightfall' from a Dharmic Perspective

Introduction
Nightfall (NF) was written by Isaac Asimov in 1941, when the war that was burning down Europe would escalate into a global war. It remains one of the best science fiction stories ever written and won many awards. Reams have been written about this book in the western literature. The attempt here is to subject 'Nightfall' to a Purva Paksha, i.e., examine the ideas in the book from a native Indian (Dharmic) viewpoint, utilizing some key ideas in Rajiv Malhotra's book 'Being Different'. We will rely on the original version (about 20-odd pages) of NF that was published in 'Anthropology through Science Fiction', 1971. (The next post in the TQ blog will cover another Asimov story in this book). You can read 'Nightfall' online here.

(picture source link: ghostradio.files.wordpress.com)

Synopsis
NF visits the human-inhabited planet of Lagash at a most critical point in its civilization, when five of its six suns have fizzled out, and the sixth ("Beta") appears to be in danger of meeting the same fate, leaving its inhabitants to endure 'night' for the first time ever. Archaeologists determine that Lagash has gone through repeated cycles of birth and destruction. Physicists , after applying the laws of gravity and orbital motions, and centuries of analysis, calculate that each boom-bust cycle lasts 2049 years that ends with a solar eclipse of a sole remaining sun. Psychologists explain that the resulting onset of nightfall and its terrifying darkness brings about an extraordinary claustrophobia among the population. Driven insane by fear and chaos, the people will proceed to light up and eventually burn down Lagash to cinder. This fear drives a bunch of scientists to build and move into an artificially lit doomsday hide-out.

On the other hand, Lagash has a group of cultists who follow 'the book of revelations' that pretty much talks about all these effects, but attributing causality to some external divine force. Furthermore, the book talks about an appearance of many stars in the sky in the end, which cult followers have to view to achieve salvation. While the cult cares less about the cause ("they believe it because the book says so"), they share valuable data with the scientists, and in this bargain, the scientists will validate that the cultists were indeed prophetic.
The scientists proceed to provide rational explanations for the phenomena that coincide with that the cult says, but as a result of this scientific explanation, increasing number of Lagashians desert the cult since they do not need the book anymore for supernatural explanations, greatly annoying the cult that accuses the seculars of Blasphemy. The scientists reciprocate this dislike for the cultists and in the end, the cultists attempt to destroy their observatory that is trying to photograph and analyze the final scene, fearing that the scientists were interfering with their moment of salvation. As nightfall descends, the Lagashians go crazy and burn down their civilization, as predicted.

Asimov's introduction to Nightfall
Per Wikipedia, Asimov says that he wrote NF after being introduced to Emerson's quote by John Campbell:
"... If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, 
and preserve for many generations,
the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!
Campbell's opinion to the contrary was: "I think men would go mad." "

Asimov writes a two-page introduction to NF in this book and makes the following observations:

a. A cult that at it's core does not address the problems that cause the society's ills will hasten its disintegration.

b. Religion or science? (classical binary choice approach that characterizes the Western frame of reference). Science was successful in explaining why Lagash would burn down, and in that process were able to rescue many cultists from their dogmatic existence. But in the end, neither science, nor the cult were able to save the people from self-destructing, thereby indicating the inadequacy of the cult and science in providing timely and practical solutions for a critical problem.

Emerson's Quote
Emerson, whose quote inspired the book, was greatly influenced by Hinduism. Rajiv Malhotra writes in his book 'Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism': "... Europe's encounter with Sanskrit revolutionized the European study of linguistics, and its encounter with Hinduism and Buddhism deeply informed Western philosophy and challenged the Judeo-Christian traditions. Some westerners, such as the American transcendentalists: Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, broke away from Christian orthodoxy as a result. This process continues today ever more deeply in the mainstream of the West through yoga, meditation, healing sciences, the arts, eco-feminism, philosophy, and pop culture...".

Indeed, Emerson's aforementioned quote is taken from his work 'Nature'. Sanderson Beck notes:

".. In his essay on "Nature" Emerson reveals the essence of his philosophy: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." This has been stated before in the Sankhya philosophy of India ... Spirit, or the oversoul which includes all individual souls, is the eternal essence of an infinite absolute reality which creates all the transitory phenomena of Nature The Sanskrit terms are Purusha which means Person and Prakriti meaning Nature.."

Interestingly, Beck says "....the truth may be spoken in any language, and we must not hasten to conclude that he merely adopted the Hindu religion, but rather that he found there corresponding ideas to the illumination he received from his own soul and experience in life. In his essay "Compensation" which describes the spiritual law of karma, or cause and effect in human action, he indicates he discovered this principle himself although it has been known for millennia in India and is similar to Greek notions of justice and retribution .."

This paragraph can be recognized as yet another attempt to digest Hinduism into Western universalism, and amputate critical Hindu ideas from its original body of work. In fact, Emerson's text reads but like an English re-interpretation of the original Sanskrit texts of Hinduism.

Nightfall appears to depict Emerson as the cultists in NF who see the divine in the once-in-a-thousand-year stars but at the same time, also exposes the limitations of science in solving society's most difficult problems. In the end, the scientists of Lagash are shocked to see thousands of stars that they never expected would fit into such a small sky, and as they begin their descent into terror, lose their coherence, and remain unable to find a rational explanation for this final phenomenon. On the other hands, the cultists did have an explanation, however inadequate.

Dharmic point of view
Hinduism, like other Dharmic religions, does NOT see a contradiction between itself and science. Indeed, concepts of Hinduism have not come into conflict with science so far, be it Heliocentrism, Evolution, Quantum Mechanics, or the
Theory of Relativity. The Hindu belief of cyclical time is exemplified in NF by the creative-destructive cycles of Lagash. In contrast, NF's cultists accept their book-ordained fiery end without question and implicitly reject Karma - a mindset that could have potentially changed the end result for the population. They believe that the stars that show up on doomsday are a historically divine intervention from elsewhere (duality). These stars provide, at the risk of madness, a collective salvation for only the populace of Lagash that views them but not others, who will be damned, and is thus not linked to individual Karma or Sva-Dharma. It is clear that NF's cult is not based on a Dharmic thought system but is history-centric, and nearly exactly models any Abrahamic religion.


In the end, neither the cultists (who are not dharmic but dogmatic), nor the atheistic seculars (limited by their senses to incomplete understanding) are able to develop adhyatma vidya (inner sciences, self-realization techniques) required to transcend the limitation of the human sense and the primordial fear of darkness. Doing so would have also enabled them to get past the few hours of darkness due to a solar eclipse.

Nightfall on Earth
Clearly, all religions are NOT the same, not in 1941 when the global war began, not now on earth, or in some futuristic Lagash. Every year, there are many predictions of the end of the world. Every year, the primordial fear of nightfall drives many so-called rational and smart people to believe this may well be possible and call for a collective holding of hands to fight the terror of darkness. This is how cults operate.  Science merely laughs. Dharmic faiths like Hinduism, on the other hand that have no conflict with science by design, talk of timeless, cyclical time and empower you to overcome your fear of eternal darkness.

The Last Temptation of Christopher Hitchens

There was an interesting interview of Chris Hitchens' widow that was published in npr.org. The content has certainly been altered after I first read it today morning. The original version had this specific description of a conversation during Hitchens' last days:

"...In Hitch's words, the same demand was made of him as his eyes were closing. Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?"

Hitchens' widow recalls that he was essentially asked the same question that was posed to Tom Paine when he was dying. This text is missing in the article now. I googled and found a preview of WGBH News version of that same interview. Here is the snapshot:

1. Why would such a question be asked of a person who was an outspoken supporter of atheism all his life, and poured scorn on the church and its 'saints' like Theresa? What is at stake here?

Answer:  A fundamental Christian belief is that every human other than Jesus is born with a sexually-transmitted defect that renders him or her, along their soul, a sinner destined for eternal damnation. This situation can only be remedied by 'third party intervention' via an affirmative answer to the quoted question (the body and it's soul are the first two parties and quite helpless on their own in this regard).


 2. Does an affirmative answer to the quoted question instantly transform a non-believer into a permanent (until kingdom come, literally), bona-fide Christian?

Answer: Yes (getting Baptized is like getting a printed membership-card, perhaps).

Christianity, like other Abrahamic religions is history-centric', a term coined by Rajiv Malhotra in his book 'Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism". A history-centric belief is time-dependent. To become a member of the Christian history-centric system, it is both necessary and sufficient (in an overwhelming majority of its denominations) to believe in a divine historical prior that consists of a finite and unique set of frozen events in the past that can never ever reoccur in the future. Church membership demands unquestionable affirmation of the 'Nicene Creed' in which the 'Jesus immaculately conceived as the son of God' clause is the center-piece. This is a binary condition: If you accept and believe this, you are in, otherwise you are out. This condition is readily accepted by all members regardless of whether he/she is a mild-mannered, jovial, and moderate person or a fanatic and zealous believer. Everything else, such as celebrating Christmas, etc., is optional. Notice that almost every ritual in Christianity is directed toward solidifying and reinforcing the history-centric belief that is enshrined in the Nicene Creed. Thus, in such a system, to merely think of Christ as a wise, kind, and great human being and act upon his message of love is insufficient; to think that you and your soul on your own can find 'salvation,' is unacceptable.

In direct contrast, if Hitchens were a member of a Dharmic thought system (another term coined by Rajiv Malhotra), he probably would have found no conflict between that thought system and the way he lead most of his life in search of truth, by following his Dharma. There is no history exam required to qualify as a Dharmic person.

Hitch's last temptation was to abdicate responsibility for a lifetime time of activity that was based a certain ethical value system in exchange for a shot at eternal, history-centric heaven. All it took was a mouse-click, a push of a button, or a nod of the head to discard that brief period of time which was already in the past and book his ticket to everlasting future happiness in history-centric heaven. Even in death, he recognized and rejected what he identified as silliness and performed his duty on this earth to the end. He is a true hero. 

Virginia Tech and Oikos University Massacres: Was Difference Anxiety the Root Cause?

In this post, we uncover two eerily similar and horrific examples of the impact of difference anxiety that history-centric thought systems have injected into their captive followers minds. 'Difference Anxiety' is a powerful phrase introduced by Rajiv Malhotra in his recent book 'Being Different'.

April 16, 2012 will mark the five-year anniversary of the horrific massacre of innocent students and faculty at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. On this day in 2007, a deranged student walked around the idyllic VT campus and classrooms murdering 32 people (one of whom was a friend) and wounding 25 more before committing suicide.

April 2, 2012: Another deranged gunman, an ex-student of the Oikos University (OU) in West Oakland, California shot and killed seven and wounded more before being captured. These two attacks are numerically among the three worst campus massacres in the history of the United States. Here are the commonalities between these two April killers. Neither the American nor the international media have investigated these cases from this angle so far, to the best of my knowledge.

The VT Killer

Seung-Hui Cho, was born in South Korea in a family that seems to have disavowed the pluralist native philosophical traditions of Korea and embraced Christian Church Dogma and were zealous church goers after they emigrated to the United States. Based on the feedback from the community in Korea and his uneasy elationship with family and community in Virgnia, there are strong indicators that that his deracinated upbringing where his family discarded their age old Confucian beliefs and adopted an aggressive Evangelist Church dogma contributed toward maintaining this confused state of mind. We can conclude that he had issues with his name because it sounded like a girl's name based on the evidence of his uncle Kim in Korea who said "But when I heard that it happened in Virginia, where my sister lived, and the name was Seung Hui, I knew. He has a girl's name - Seung Hui is a rare name for a man". In the US, an evangelist pastor at a Korean church in Centerville, Virginia, where Cho grew up, told the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper he had once advised Cho's mother to take him to a doctor to check for autism. The mother disagreed, but prayed in church for her son to crawl out of his shell"

There is also first-hand evidence that suggests Seung's total disillusionment with Church dogma and the gender difference anxiety issues (in this case manifested via his 'girl's' name and his stalking of females in the campus) that afflict quite a few of its adherents.

The OU Killer

One L. Goh is also a native of South Korea. His family too uprooted him from his native place and immigrated to the United States when he was a kid, interestingly, to the same geographical area of the VT shooting, Southwest Virginia. He was extremely uncomfortable with his name because it sounded like a girl's name and actually went ahead and changed it. Sounds familiar?

OU is a private Korean Christian university in Oakland, California. It should be no surprise that it is affiliated with the Evangelical Praise God Korean Presbyterian Church in Oakland. OU is reported in the media as primarily a nursing school, but a deeper look shows that its curriculum includes a strong dose of Christian Dogma. Aside from the language anxiety problem that Goh faced, we perhaps see his gender anxiety issue surface once again: the local police chief indicates that "Goh went to Oikos with "the intent of locating a female administrator but when learning she was not there, he opened fire at random people". Another example is Goh extolling his masculinity by glorifying violence. Note the predominantly female population in OU (and his victims).  We also see that the reports mention that Goh was disillusioned and angry with the management of OU and had a score to settle with them, and appears to have picked on innocent women as an alternative target to vent his fury. After the event, we notice the local Korean church community "calling for unity" and closing ranks.


Main Culprit: Difference Anxiety?
These are glaring recent examples where the History-Centric Christian dogma in the west has failed to provide sustainable solutions to their youthful followers in dire need of scientifically uplifting and healing help and peace of mind. The Church response is typically dogmatic and the option is to simply to "pray" or ingest side-effects-filled drugs prescribed by doctors. Neither of these solutions address the fundamental issue of Difference Anxiety faced by people from non-western cultures as well as by some in the west toward these visitors. The conclusions of the official VT massacre report lays the final blame on the young killer for not seeking help. Furthermore, in history-centric populations where such anxious youth mingle, there is little or no scope for mutual respect and equality based on recognizing and accepting these differences, and the relationship is based more on the patronizing and unsustainable notion of tolerance, with the aim of eventually erasing such differences. In both cases, we see this occur. Informal conversations with friends in Singapore and other parts of East Asia indicate that the phenomenon of such a gender difference anxiety among some of their peoples there may be widespread, and as is well argued in the recent book 'Being Different', my postulate is that this gender anxiety was not prevalent when Confucianism and Buddhist Dharma dominated Korea, and is almost surely a recent product of History-Centric thought via the Evangelical church that has a dogmatic (western universal) and warped notion of masculinity and femininity. This condition seems to been reinforced at an early age in the killers minds and maybe worsened after immigration into a completely western society.

Cultural Genocide by the Evangelist Christian Church
The two above examples are emblematic of the failures of Church over many centuries in coming up with an uplifting self-realization and self-help methods like the Yoga and meditation of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism of Dharmic India and Asia for their followers, coupled with its disdain for such inner sciences, which they are now trying to misappropriate into their dogma given the increasing popularity of Yoga in the west. To make matters worse, the church is marketing this failed product to non-western cultures using their predatory and cynical practice of inculturation and digestion wherein they convert native populations to Christianity by deceitful incorporation of popular elements of local tradition (Korean example), but without ever getting rid of their dogma and History-Centrism. Korea is a prime example where Western Evangelists with tacit approval from their governments have destroyed the cultural fabric of South Korea and created a huge deracinated population. 43% of South Korea now follow Evangelist Christian dogma, where there were close to 0% just a couple of centuries back. This is nothing short of cultural genocide and these very same Evangelists are targeting India in exactly the same manner. How many Chos and Gohs will that produce?

We close this post by praying for the Dharmic Atmans of the victims of these horrific crimes. The Atman is infinite and eternal. Om, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti!