--- On Sun, 15/3/09, Kiran K Karthikeyan <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Kiran K Karthikeyan <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] What is "Indian culture"?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Sunday, 15 March, 2009, 6:32 AM
> Suresh,
>
> 2009/3/15 Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]>
>
> > Interesting bit of nonsense here. Quality reporting
> (!) to be sure.
>
>
> I wouldn't dismiss it so easily. Churches in Kerala have
> long ago adoped the
> "nila-vilakku", a bronze lamp used in Hindu homes and
> religious ceremonies.
> I've been to as many churches as temples so I'm not aware
> of any other
> practices they have borrwed.
>
> Though I do find it hard to believe that a priest would say
> something like
>
> <snip>
>
> “despite idol worship being prohibited in Bible, we have
> idol worship in
> churches.” “The duty of every Christian is to convert
> non-Christians to
> Christianity by any means,”
>
> </snip>
>
> so openly, especially where there is press access.
> Sure-fire way to get
> yourself excommunicated.
>
> But my experience with Christian missionaries as well as
> Christian who seek
> to spread the good Lord's word have been fairly abrasive -
> I've had to be
> particularly rude to get them off my back. Somehow the
> mention that my
> parents are Hindu and I'm an atheist heightens their
> enthusiasm. Once in a
> while I used to humour them and there are quite a few of
> them waiting to go
> to heaven for having converted me :)
>
> We've also once had to rudely refuse family friends of ours
> offering us a
> copy of the Bible. When we refused, they left it on the
> coffee table on
> their way out and had to be reminded to pick it up. When my
> father was
> hopitalised a year ago, our erstwhile neighbours who are
> Pentecostal
> Christians organized a prayer meeting at their home -
> ostensibly to pray for
> my father's health, but invited everybody non-Christian
> from the
> neighbourhood (Hindus and Muslims). Nil attendance at that
> event made them
> stick to "I'll pray for you". That said, we also have
> Christian family
> friends who seek astrological advice and have horscopes
> checked before
> marriage. It works both ways I guess.
>
> Kiran
I found some aspects of your reply interesting. It is surprising to read of
these aggressive methods of 'spreading the good Lord's word'; for a moment, I
thought you live in Southern Baptist country.
I don't see why being gifted a copy of the Bible represented such a major
theological defeat; it's a book.
Depending on which edition it is, and their quality and readability differs
wildly, it's quite a readable book, and a lot of English writing is
unintellligle without some knowledge of it. I have a King James version with
me, which I use all the time. Having said that, I loathe the Old Testament, and
use certain very specific bits in it only; Kings, of course, Genesis, Exodus,
parts of Samuel. There are parts of the New Testament which are constant
companions, especially in particularly difficult moments.
My wife and daughter attend either a Catholic Mass or an Episcopal (CoE) Mass
on two or three special occasions a year, and are happy to be there, short of
taking the Host, which seems blasphemous and intrusive both on their Hindu core
as well as to the host church. I don't, but have no problem driving them there
and staying in the car for the duration.
None of this is particularly obstructive of an essentially agnostic position.
On the other hand, the egregious intrusion into home life of evangelists was
shocking to read. I have heard from Malayali friends that this is a nuisance
(that includes the patrician disdain of Syrian Christians, to my well-concealed
- I hope - amusement) which has grown in recent years, particularly due to
fringe sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, and the
Pentecostal sects, too, and there is also the worry in most established
churches about Bible Christians, who take the word and text of the Bible
literally, with bizarre consequences.
It is a reminder that two out of three Abrahamic faiths have evangelical,
missionary elements; the third, like Hinduism (properly speaking, except for
some aberrations brought in by North Indian enthusiasts and their aggressive,
peculiar sect more than a century ago) and Zoroastrianism, is not a
conversionary religion. The exception is also a useful data point, not to
generalise about those faiths, nor to romanticise any of them, but to consider
them all, like all organised religion, with suspicion.
Having worked closely with Catholic organisations, I can say with confidence
that my faith was never a matter of discussion, only the matter at hand, and
what we sought to accomplish jointly. During that association, colleagues who
were Protestants had wildly defamatory opinions about the priests and their
sexual predilections, which I found bizarre; the individuals in question had
blind spots about women, but nothing that could not be addressed and overcome.
Maybe the enthusiasts, as CoE called Methodists and their ilk, are the ones
that give Christians in particular their 'unbridled' reputation. After the
nineteenth century, neither the Catholic church nor the Anglicans have been
aggressive missionaries in mainland India (most of the missionary activity in
the North-East was by the sects mentioned earlier, as well as Baptists from the
US).
I think an effort is needed to communicate to them that certain practices are
intrusive of privacy; while they have a right to practise their religion, it
cannot be done at the expense of another individual or differently-thinking
family's privacy.
At the end of the day, it boils down to the rule of law again.
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