A Hindu argues circles around Christianity

 

What Every Hindu Should Know about Christianity (Wilmington, Delaware, 2014) is a book by Kalavai Venkat, pen name of a computer scientist living in Silicon Valley but originating in Kanchipuram, India. To Hindus it might be meaningful to know that he is a “Tambram”, a Tamil Brahmin. His mother tongue is Tamil, but he is also at home in Sanskrit, Hindi and English. Having worked in Israel for years, he also knows some Hebrew, which is an unusual advantage over most Indians dabbling in Biblical Studies. But his chief competence is science, and this outlook contributes more and more to our understanding of how Christianity came about and why it still persists.

An important new contribution, already familiar to Western specialists but much less to the Hindu layman, is psychology. Many Christian beliefs and practises, as well as the reflexes of the Christian apologists, are explained by such concepts as “confirmation bias”, “cognitive dissonance” and “selective attention”, the findings of evolutionary biology (which finds traces of morality even among the higher animals, independent from any divine revelation of the Ten Commandments) and the notion “meme”. These factors explain the Christian superiority feeling and anti-Hindu animus a lot better than the imperialist conspiracies or the sheer money factor to which many argumentative Hindus reduce the missionary offensive. While some American Protestant missionaries can make a career by harvesting souls in India for some years, most missionaries in the past and even today have made a lot of sacrifices for the joy of converting Pagans to the true faith. Some belief in their minds is stronger than any longing for pleasure and comforts. Sentimental people might deduce from this self-abnegation and strength of conviction that this conviction must be true. But while this belief is strong, indeed calculated to grab people by the throat and retain their loyalty to the death, it is also false.

 

The reality of the Bible

Kalavai Venkat bases his analysis on a thorough knowledge of the relevant literature, but first of all on a close reading of the source material, starting with the Bible. Most Hindus would already be disabused of their illusions about Christianity if they simply read the Bible, rather than the syrupy pamphlets of the missionaries. Since the 18^th century, freethinkers have collected all the contradictions and absurdities in the Bible. Christian apologists tend to dismiss these sceptics as “village atheists” and pretend that there is a more sophisticated angle from which all these anomalies suddenly become logical. But this author clearly hasn’t found it, and isn’t convinced of its existence.

Thus, it is undeniable that Jesus predicted his own Second Coming in the End-Time for within the lifetime of his listeners. On this simple prediction, which in his case required nothing more than looking up this momentous date in his very own agenda, God Incarnate managed to get it wrong. Some people may call it unsportsmanlike and unreligious to bring up this obvious defect, but hey, it is there is the Gospel in cold print. Should we not believe in the Bible anymore? When so many human beings do make accurate predictions, should we not expect some reliability from God himself?

There are also elements in the Bible which modern sensibilities would find unpalatable. Thus, the Old Testament law requires a groom who finds that his bride is not a virgin anymore, to take her to her father’s doorstep and stone her to death. Similarly, a witch or a homosexual should be executed; God himself orders it. Now, Christians will tell you that this doesn’t apply anymore in the “Second Covenant”, i.e. Christianity (Judaism being the “First Covenant”), and that Jesus specifically prevented the stoning of an adulterous woman. Fine, but the author points out that Jesus explicitly professes his loyalty to the First Covenant and the totality of the Mosaic law. It is only with Saint Paul that a break with the Jewish law is effected. If Jesus prevented the stoning of a woman who by law deserved to be stoned, he was not law-observant and told a brazen-faced lie when he proclaimed his attachment to the totality of the law. Another possibility is that the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman was made up later as an illustration of the new Pauline view, which threw open the initially Jewish sect called Christianity to the Pagans. Paul did away with the law, and as an illustration of this reform, Jesus is posthumously turned into an enlightened skeptic of the law.

All this is on the assumption that Jesus and Paul existed at all. The author devotes a lot of pages to this question, which has occupied many scholars. Many motifs are just general and appear in the hagiographies of other divine or extraordinary persons. In Herod persecuting the infant Jesus and trying to kill him, Hindus will recognize a similar episode in the babe Krishna’s life. Indeed, religion-founding myths have a way of travelling. Thus, we know how Moses’ story of being found after surviving as an infant in a little boat was copied from a story about king Sargon of Akkad, nearly a thousand years older; or that Noah’s Flood story was copied from the Gilgamesh epic. The Bible is not unique, it is but an evolute of many existing stories, upon which a new theology was superimposed. But some elements in Jesus’ story point to the existence of an individual, a travelling healer who shared the apocalyptic beliefs of his environment. Elements like the delusion that he was the expected Messiah, or that he suffered the Roman punishment of execution, may well be true. So, most likely we have a historical core with a mythological overlay, adapted by the evolving Church depending on its changing political and theological interests. As for Paul, doubting his existence is much less common, but the author summarizing the scholarly arguments for both positions without really deciding. A problem here is that Biblical scholarship is still mostly practised by Christian institutes. A truly historical and scientific approach is still very minoritarian.        

The author advocates a straightforward attack on the Christian core beliefs. No diplomacy, no appeasement, no inculturation, as so many other Hindus practise and advocate. Ridiculing Hindu “idolatry” and “polytheism” in the colonial period made the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and informally numerous anglicized Hindus make the improbable claim that they were iconoclastic monotheists. If you hear these Hindus talk about “God”, you might think you are among Evangelicals, so deep has the imitation gone. This proves that ridicule really works. Similarly, but more truthfully: if the many absurdities and contradictions in Christianity become better known, Hindus will turn away from it and even born Christians will disown the typical beliefs of Christianity.

 

My own role

Among the sources of inspiration he lists, the writer mentions my own book, Psychology of Prophetism: a Secular Look at the Bible (Voice of India, Delhi 1995). I wrote that book because I was exasperated at seeing what silly myths numerous Hindus tend to cherish concerning Christianity and specifically concerning the person of Jesus: he was a guru, he had been to India, his “real” teaching included reincarnation, etc.  It was by no means comprehensive and had only modest ambitions, but it seemed to me that it was urgently needed to convey to the Hindu public a glimpse of the scholarly and psychological knowledge recently built up about Christianity’s founding myth. Of course, with a mere book, distributed by a marginal publisher, I could not hope to make much of a difference. But seeing that twenty years later it has contributed to the present book, more thorough and fully accounting for the advances that science has made since, I am happy at seeing my effort amply rewarded.

At the time I had befriended the late Dr. Herman Somers, an apostate ex-Jesuit known among Jesuits as “Doctor Triplex” because he had doctorates in Theology, Classical Studies and Psychology, besides an MA in Thomist Philosophy. He drew my attention to the work that psychologists had done about the Biblical prophets and the character of Jesus over the preceding century. He himself had written two books on the subject, in Dutch (given all his other knowledge, his active command of English was, like among most continental Europeans of his generation, rather poor). This line of research had led to the insight that Jesus had been a disturbed personality. In the middle of adapted myths and man’s natural tendency to religious imaginings, his own personal delusions had partly determined the specific contents of Christianity.

At this point, I can reveal that the book was purposely incomplete. I had intended to add a chapter on a subject quite unknown to Somers, viz. Mohammed. My venerated publisher Sita Ram Goel dissuaded me from going ahead with this, as it was likely to provoke Muslim violence, which would only be contained after it had already done its damage. Years later I did publish a paper on the psychopathology of Mohammed as known through the Islamic sources (i.e. putting in parenthesis the emerging theory that he hadn’t even existed), but because of its unassuming channel of publication and its scholarly title (Wahi, the Supernatural Basis of Islam), it didn’t ruffle any feathers. Meanwhile, the internet has made similar theories about the Prophet, often by ex-Muslims, readily accessible to the Muslim public, so it can be (optimistically) hoped that this type of research may henceforth be done in all freedom.

 

Other topics

The book would have been sizable enough if it had limited itself to its chosen subject. However, the author has chosen to add a lengthy appendix about a seemingly unrelated topic, viz. the caste system. The reader should know something about the polemical context in India, essentially the same that diaspora Hindus in the West face.

In the British period, the Hindus had to deal with attacks from the Churches on everything Hindu, including the caste system. Initially, neither the Churches nor the colonial authorities made a problem of the separateness and inequality inherent in caste. After all, both were familiar phenomena in Western society too, with the cleavage between noblemen and commoners, Christians and Jews, freemen and slaves, colonizers and natives, or the steep and compartmentalized class system in the British motherland.  After the abolition of slavery, the anti-caste line of discourse was only one among many, typically brought up when addressing low-caste audiences. Today, it has become a monotonous but omnipresent refrain. Hindu-Christian “dialogues”, which the Christians prepare as publicity exercises and as psychological warfare, and where their naïve Hindu partners show up confused and unprepared, usually result in the embarrassment of the Hindus, who becomes hopelessly defensive when the inevitable subject of caste is raised. 

To set the record straight, the author draws upon his own personal experience, on his knowledge of the so-called law books of Hinduism, and on writings in Tamil and Sanskrit which would be inaccessible to many readers including diaspora Hindus. He confirms the obvious with the latest data from genetics: castes are biologically distinct units, identifiable subgroups of the human species. He slips, however, when he notes that these are biological groups “and therefore not human creations”. I guess he was not being careful in choosing his terminology here, for even biological groups are the result of the idiosyncrasies of human history. At any rate, the relations between the caste are a lot more nuanced as well as susceptible to change through the centuries. Thus, some untouchable castes had a glorious history and became only “impure” recently, during the Muslim or even the British period. The author demonstrates how, as per the law books they themselves composed, the Brahmins were barred from many pleasures and occupations, not quite how one would imagine a privileged caste. He also shows how the Christian meddling with the caste system objectively demeans rather than uplifts the low castes.

    

 

Conclusion

This book is bound to reach the targeted Hindu public in substantial measure. That is has been written by one of their own, will certainly help, though the author’s American setting influences his take on the subject of Christianity. On the other hand, it is very much the need of the hour that Indian Hindus get to know the modern critique of Christianity rather than the silly syrupy views which secular politicians and moronic Babas feed them. This book is really “what every Hindu should know about Christianity”. 

 

 

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The San José Global Hindu Conference 2014

 

On 26-27 April 2014, the Global Hindu Conference took place at the Wyndham hotel San José CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. It was far less luxurious than most academic conferences, but contentswise it was unusually rich and focused. Most participants were amazed at the quality of not one gem here or there, but of all the papers. It gathered people for work, not leisure: sessions from 8h till 22h, with breaks of only ten minutes.

I apologize for a very uneven overview, particularly to the speakers whom I mention only cursorily. Given time constraints, I write this report in a hurry, but a book with all the full papers will come out later this year.

 

History

Papers by Sumeet Saxena, Mrs. Kamlesh Kapur, Sandeep Balakrishna and Vishal Agarwal detailed the different modern schools of historiography: British, Indian nationalist (ca. 1920-70), Marxist etc. Balakrishna presented his recently published book about Tipu Sultan, countering the false and laughable propaganda of the secularists. Vinay Deolikar cut the so-called Muslim period to size: it declined sharply after 1707, and by 1750, most of India was under the Hindu Pad Padashahi (“Hindu sovereignty”) established by the Marathas. The decisive hero was Peshwa Baji Rao, who in ca. 1720 changed the power equation in India decisively. William Dalrymple and the secularists falsify history by pretending that the Moghuls handed over their power to the British, who in fact had to wrest it from the Hindu kings.

Niraj Mohanka explained the Wendy Doniger affair, where her “banned” book had erred, and how Hindus have reacted. About this affair, Vishal Agarwal authored a list of errors in Wendy Doniger’s controversial book The Hindus, an Alternative History, shortly after the book appeared in 2007. Because of the commotion, his list has finally appeared in print. He presented the book and discussed the classes of errors. The hundreds of factual mistakes reflect poorly on her scholarship, but they are not the reason why Hindus are up in arms against it. The classes she claims to champion, women and low-castes, are systematically denied their proud role in history and reduced to mere victims of patriarchy and upper-caste domination.

Prof. Narahari Achar detailed the history of Parikhit and Janamejaya, grandson and great-grandson of Arjuna, who presided over the first narration which was to expand into the Mahabharata. He applied modern software to the astronomical data in the epic.

The paper by Shrikant Talageri, who could not physically be there, was read out by the undersigned. Talageri described the difficult challenge that a real historian of India has to face. On the one hand, there are the gross and shameless biases imposed by the Marxists and secularists, parroted by the world media and even by India-watching academics. On the other, any legitimate criticism or just factual portrayal of negative practices by some Hindu or other will be shot down by the affected sectional interest groups or lambasted by Hindu activists as “anti-Hindu”.  

The undersigned spoke about the failure of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” thesis and of the hyperfocus on the role of colonial historiography. I gave some feedback on the weaknesses and mistakes of the Hindu attempts at history-rewriting so far.

 

Christianity

Kandadai Rangachari and Kalavai Venkat discussed “Jesus in India”. This refers not just to Nicholas Notovich’s hoax, debunked more than a century ago, only years after it had been launched, but stlll widely believed by Ahmadiya Muslims, New-Agers, Ramakrishnaites and hundreds of millions of Hindus. It equally pertains to the equally mythical

Kalavai Venkat delivered the Sita Ram Goel memorial lecture, mercilessly pin-pricking the illusions about Christianity. He at once presented his new book, What Every Hindu Should Know about Christianity. The Sita Ram Goel memorial lecture was preceded by an overview of Goel’s life, with many rare pictures, by Paramacharya Sadasivanathaswami, the head of the Hawaii-based Shaiva Siddhanta order.  

A debate on how to deal with the challenge of Christianity took place between Prof.  Madan Lal Goel and Kalavai Venkat, with yours truly as the moderator. I fear the whole thing doesn’t look good on camera, for I was plagued by pain and dryness in my right eye, and the material circumstances were not exactly fit for a panel discussion: each time they spoke, the two opponents had to get up and speak through the microphone at the rostrum.  The organizers should think of these things beforehand, or rather, I should have thought of these things. Still it worked out well, as the antagonists were correct and friendly and held nicely balanced viewpoints. Kalavai was in favour of a robust stance, openly treating Christians as enemies because their adopted doctrine is unequivocally hostile to Hinduism. He advocated the use of science-based scepticism and ridicule. Goel, by contrast, was in favour of a more diplomatic attitude, as many Christians were coming out of this antagonistic worldview. Niraj Mohanka commented that both are right, since their attitudes fit the two faces of Christianity: on the offensive in India and the other frontline states of the mission, on the retreat and giving way to a more open-minded “spirituality” in the West.

Sundarsh Vedapureeswaran discussed the fundamental flaw in the Abrahamic outlook. Myself, I gave an overview of what Christianity is not. Some Hindus imagine that Christians should live up to the Hindus’ own fantasies about what Christianity is, e.g. “Jesus would be angry if he saw the spread of missions”. In reality, the Christians are only bound by Christian texts, chiefly the Nicean creed.

The paper that was perhaps most urgently needed by the Hindu community, was by Prof. Laul Jadusingh, targeting “god-talk”. He reiterated that non-theism was fully a part of Hinduism until Shankara. “Ishwara” meant something else for Patañjali than “God”. But when today’s Hindus so profusely mention “God”, it is heavily tainted with Christian theology. It is imperative that Hindus go back to their roots in this respect, and understand that (1) “God” means something very different in Hinduism than in Christianity; and (2) Hinduism can very well exist without a notion of “God”. Buddhism has been less confused about this. (I might mention the commotion in 2005 in Cambodia when planned school textbooks turned out to include the notion of “God”. The Buddhist clergy intervened to remind everyone that this was a Christian notion adroitly promoted by the missionaries, and that for many centuries, the Cambodians had proven their ability to do without this notion.) At any rate, the focused Buddhist mobilization against Christian proselytization contrasts favourably with the naïve and lazy Hindu attitude so far.

 

Education

The subjects of historiography and the defence against Christianity were each given half a day, the other sessions were shorter, but at least a start was made.

Acharya Arumuganathaswami presented the educational situation in the US, including the textbook selection and editing process, against which his monastic order had brought out an introductory textbook on Hinduism. He also presented the film version, The History of Hindu India, which evoked general admiration. The only critical note was by a professor who liked the film but saw a tinge op imitative apologetics in it, of the type: “Christians say they worship God, but we too…” I think that was unfair, as the Hawaii Shaivite order just happens to be theistic and genuinely see Hinduism as theistic, a Shaiva attitude long predating the Christian domination in the colonial and present periods. On the other hand, an alertness for the Hindu tendency to mimic Christianity is commendable.

Schoolchildren and young adults, whose religious education was discussed in papers by Ashutosh Gupta, Mona Rawal, Easan Katir and Tushar Pandya, need to be approached in a different way because of the specific sensitivities of their age group. One thing they have in common is regular exposure to the barrage of the ambient anti-Hindu propaganda. Young adults in America, however, are in a generally anti-religious mood and atmosphere. By contrast, younger pupils often react by feeling shame or by wanting to disown Hinduism in order to be more acceptable to the ambient Christians.

Katir also gave his testimony about the edits process starting the California textbook affair. As the Acharya diagnosed, the California parents, none of them education bureaucrats nor historians, had been naïve in their understand of the textbook-editing process as well as about the state of the art in certain topics of history. This failure should be no big deal provided they have learned their lesson and improve their performance next times around.

 

Miscellaneous

Far from complete was the treatment of another sore point: the legal and factual treatment of the temples. But at least a start was made with the case of Andhra Pradesh, presented by Prasad Yalamanchi. Scientist Yadu Moharir, author of books on Ganesha and Laksmi, tried to explain the scientific basis of Hindu rituals, an ambitious project but for skeptics his treatment may not fully have met their standards of rigorousness. He did elucidate the logic behind rituals, though, useful knowledge for someone of a non-ritualist background like myself.

Rahul Chandra documented the situation of the Hindus in Pakistan, mostly Sindh, and why many feel compelled to flee to India. Especially the vulnerability of girls to abduction by and forced marriage to Muslims forces them to flee. In a few districts they still form a high percentage, helped by a high birthrate, and this explains why many also don’t feel a pressing need to flee yet. But if they are not helped from abroad, they too will come to feel the heat. A complement to this was Vishal Agarwal’s description of the peculiar history of Sindh. For the audience these were novel topics full of surprising information. Rahul Chandra also presented a paper about the development of alternative media, a remedy to the decades-long painful absence of the articulately Hindu voice from the public debate.

Dilip Amin reported on the challenge of interfaith marriages and described the typical and foreseeable conduct of the non-Hindu spouses and their families. Though he did not say so outright, he seemed to see dissuasion from the marriage as the most  desirable course. At any rate, he countered the naivety of the Hindu youngsters and the cluelessness of their parents.

Similarly, Kamlesh Kapur, also the author of a hefty textbook on Hindu dharma, reported on her experience with interreligious dialogue, gathered over several decades. The piucture is almost uniformly dismal. Hindus come totally unprepared, have not been mandated or somehow sought representativeness, and improvise widely different responses to the three questions that they invariably have to answer: (1) the name of our God?, (2) our basic belief?, and (3) the name of our holy book? “They fumble, they feel trapped and remain on the defensive, and they look like losers”: that sums up the general picture. She outlined the essence of a remedy, but before we can really speak of a remedy, much remains to be done. At any rate, she correctly diagnosed a glaring problem. Here too, the failure should have been obvious years ago, yet Hindus have never laid their finger on this gaping wound.

 

Evaluation

In material details, a few things could have been better. Lack of manpower among the organizers accounts for that, and probably it is unavoidable in a truly pioneering venture. But in contents, this was the best Hindu conference I have ever attended. It was packed full of real and new information. Elsewhere, papers are passively accepted from whoever volunteers one, and the more Hindu a conference, the greater the likelihood that some worthless or downright embarrassing papers have only been programmed because their contributors had sponsored the conference. Here, every single paper was of remarkable or really very high quality. Some topics were handled for the first time ever. All praise to the main organizer, Rajiv Varma.

 

The greatest merit of this conference was that it had finally started to strategize. Secularists and the missionary lobby like to portray the Hindu movement as a big and dangerous monster. Big, perhaps, but dangerous? Maybe a few activists are dangerous the way a mad dog is dangerous: it has the ability of barking and once or twice even biting, but then it is driven into a cage or otherwise taken care of -- it may look formidable but it is after all only an animal. What is completely lacking that could make the movement effective (or "dangerous"), is knowledge: knowledge of what dharma stands for, knowledge of the enemies, and knowledge of the field of action. This movement has tremendous potential, but in the real world it is only stumbling from defeat to defeat. Even the expected BJP victory in the Indian elections may only be a Pyrrhic victory if the disappointing experience of BJP rule in 1998-2004 is anything to go by. Jobs and other perks for the BJP time-servers, but nothing at all for the Hindu cause. This is a brainless dinosaur, and what this conference set out to do, was to infuse a brain into the dinosaur. In this regard, it made great strides. Whether it will be successful in the long run, only depends on the follow-up.

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