Sppech by Sri. Suresh Desai-Opinion of M.B.Prasada Rao,Vizag

[Guest guest]

Respected Gopi Nair - You have done an excellent job

in quoting here Sri Suresh Desai views.

Really marvelous to read and educative - many

misconception of religion are answered in very lucid

& impressive style. Driving the point effectively but

Non-hurting. He is very free & frank. I hope all

readers in the modern age would carefully understand &

appreciate the efforts of Sri Suresh Desai.

I pray almighty to give him all strength in this

crusade and evolve many more on these lines.

M.B.Prasada Rao.

 

--- GOPI NAIR <gopi_nair37 wrote:

 

> A PERCEPTION OF CHRISTIAN

> MISSIONARY ACTIVITIES

> Suresh Desai

> Suresh Desai, writer and journalist was invited to

> speak on his perceptions of the Christian Missionary

> activities at St. Pius Seminary at Goregaon, Mumbai

> on 10th March 1997. The Seminary trains Christians

> in priesthood. The audience was composed of 70 to

> 80 trainee priests, Father Julian who teaches at the

> college, a couple of lecturers and Mr Arvind Singh

> from Hindu Vivek Kendra. Father Julian introduced

> Suresh Desai to the audience.

> Report on the speech by Suresh Desai at the St.

> Pius Seminary at Goregaon on 10th March 1997

> "Friends, Father Julian just said that it is a

> Christian practice to invite people of other

> religions and understand their views and

> perceptions. I am very happy about this practice

> because it fits in with the Hindu tradition of not

> only understanding the other people's views but also

> of appreciating, adapting and assimilating the best

> of them. I thank Mr Norbert DeSouza, National

> President of AICU and Father Julian for inviting me

> here to apprise you of my perceptions on the

> Missionary activities. As you are aware I am a

> Hindu and I am very deeply interested in the Hindu

> tradition and civilization which is the oldest

> surviving civilization in the world. What appeals

> to the most is that the content of Hindu thought is

> universal in nature and is not confined to or

> doesn't address itself to a particular geographical

> area or time or only to the people who are baptized

> in

> Hinduism or believe in Hindu pantheon. I am not a

> religious person, do not indulge in any worship of

> any deity, do not believe in rituals, do not go to

> any temple and still I confess that, I am a devout

> Hindu and am accepted as such by my Hindu milieu.

> My perceptions of missionary work are therefore,

> inevitably influenced by my attachment to the Hindu

> culture. I belong to Goa, where Christianity has a

> great deal of importance at the religious, cultural,

> political and social levels. It was here that the

> missionary activities gained momentum four centuries

> ago with the work of Francis Xavier and then Father

> Stevens. As students we freely mixed with our

> Christian friends whose ancestors were Hindus and

> were converted to Christianity only a few

> generations ago. In retrospect I find this span of

> their being Christians had not at all improved their

> spirituality nor their socio-economic status. The

> improvement came in the wake of the freedom from the

> Portuguese rule in 1962.

> Many of them now have bungalow type houses, own

> cars, give Hindu names to their children and profess

> to not being much interested in religion. In my

> mind, as in the mind of anybody who is conversant

> with the history of Europe, the missionary

> activities and Christianity are inseparably

> associated with Inquisition, with intolerance of

> science, with the fate of Galileo, Copernicus,

> Bruno, Joan of Ark, killing of lakhs of women on

> suspicion that they were witches, crusades and

> thousands of victims in the Goa Inquisition. There

> is something like Heresy and heretics in not only in

> Christianity but other semitic religions like Islam,

> and if I may say so, the dogma of Marxism, beside

> the book and a Prophet. When you are working in

> the a land of an ancient and dominant religion and

> try to preach the gospel of your faith and convert a

> large member of people who after conversion disown

> their cultural roots, it is inevitable and also

> justifiable that all your activities are

> viewed with suspicion and are attributed to one

> fundamental motive that is to convert people to your

> faith. Such cultural alienation in a country like

> India where nationalism is based on cultural and

> civilizational heritage creates piquant situations

> such as those on the North-east frontiers.

> Ultimately, what is the objective of conversions ?

> At the spiritual level conversions from one's

> religion to another are quite meaningless unless the

> motives are purely mundane. Those who work with

> ulterior motives have to adjust, readjust and

> reorient their strategies according to the change in

> times which have been moving very fast during the

> last couple of decades. Strategies change but not

> the motive. The change of strategies is very often

> projected as basic change in the outlook which is

> wrong. The basic change comes only with the

> reformulation of objectives. If the basic motive of

> the missionaries is still to bring Hindus to the

> fold of Christianity, no amount of change in

> strategies whether inculturation, acculturation or

> deculturation, will exonerate them from the eyes of

> their critics, despite liberal theology and

> acceptance of salvation through other religions but

> either in the ecciesiocentric or Christocentric or

> theocentric manner. These terms are hair-splitting,

> pure and simple. The inculturation is not a new

> concept. When Father Stevens wrote Christapurana in

> Marathi 400 years ago in the style of Dnyaneshwar,

> he gave an excellent example of inculturation. The

> objective was to promote Christianity among natives.

> The Hindu civilization is a movement of incredible

> continuities. In its march of over several millennia

> it has taken in its stride innumerable vicissitudes,

> changes in the sources of livelihood, pastoralism,

> agriculture and has entered the era of industrial

> development. Not all people have kept pace with the

> progress. Many of them are left behind either

> accidentally or of their own choice, so much so that

> pockets remained

> in the pre-agricultural, food gathering stages, and

> a large number of people remained agriculturists and

> a few urban areas have stepped into modernity.

> Nobody can readily say when it all started. The

> entire process is sanatan, without a definite

> beginning. I once again remind you that Hinduism is

> not a religion of the book in the semitic senses.

> Therefore, the supreme court has opined it is a

> comprehensive way if life. The uneven development

> of this process has left some people in agriculture,

> pre-agricultural, pastoral, nomadic and even the

> stage before that. That is why the existence of

> tribal pockets. However the underlying continuity

> of the process is such that they all belong to the

> same stream of Hinduism. The British imperialists

> had other ideas. They wanted to sow the seeds of

> division, dissension and separatism in the Hindu

> society to perpetuate their own rule. That's why the

> 1871 census described the tribals as animists.

> Animists means people who

> worship spirits and propitiate them. It is indeed

> very difficult to define where Hinduism ends and

> tribalism begins. I give my own instance. I read

> Gita and the Upanishads. I am a devotee of Hindu

> thought, I am well acquainted with the idea of the

> Absolute. But when I go to my village, I see there

> my own cousins doing yoga for meditation in the

> morning and indulging in worshipping the spirits of

> the ancestors, the Kuldaivata, the gram daivata, the

> Vetala and the Cobra in the evening. Would you say

> that they are Hindus in the morning and animists in

> the evening? Some of them are extremely well-versed

> in the subtlest nuances of the philosophies of

> Hinduism. Even Ramkrishna Paramahansa, Vivekananda

> and Mahatma Gandhi have been organically imbedded in

> this what you may call animist past. Hinduism is a

> continuous process of evolution over the last

> thousands or perhaps lakhs of years. Some people

> moved up by the elevator, some people are coming up

> the ladder rung by rung.

> But they are the same people. Hinduism has

> developed from animism to the subtle and

> scintillating philosophies of the Gita and the

> Upanishadas. Tribals are therefore unmistakably

> Hindus. There are many tribal Gods in the Hindu

> pantheon. Vetoba, Viroba, Giroba, Khandoba,

> Mhasoba, Satwai, Jokhai and many such Gods are still

> being worshipped. Hinduism doesn't reject anybody

> simply because he worships his own Gods. Gita

> specifically mentions that whatever deity a man may

> worship whether it is Rama, Shiva, Govinda, if he

> does it with single minded devotion, he ultimately

> reaches the Absolute. One question which continues

> to plague my mind; why missionaries want to expand

> Christianity in numbers? There is no evidence that

> the conversion to Christianity has improved the

> world spiritually. However the Christianity has

> helped colonialism and imperialism. From what I

> learn from NEFA States, I feel the aims of the

> missionaries are predominantly political. I would

> like to be

> proved wrong in my assessment. What happened in

> America in the wake of the assaults of conquistadors

> like Cortez, Pizarro and Balboa and the Portuguese

> in Goa and the Goa Inquisition reinforces my theory

> that their ulterior motive is political power and

> spirituality is used as means to achieve it. In

> Latin American countries, it is a well known fact

> that the Jesuits were involved in the game of power.

> Today Europe and America which were the bailiwicks

> of Christianity have spurned the religion in a large

> measure. I think missionaries and the church should

> turn their efforts to first bring them back to

> Christianity, instead of spending their precious

> efforts on evangelising the tribals in India. Why

> are they not doing it? At the same time there are

> movements like New Religion Movement (NRM) which are

> weaning the Catholics away from the orthodoxy in

> favour of Pentecostal churches. Catholics also don't

> like the sheep straying to Protestant fold. Trust

> you have not

> forgotten their massacre in Paris on the day of St.

> Bartholomew. If Catholic missionaries don't like

> Catholics moving away from their fold how do they

> expect Hindus to like their people being lured away

> to Christianity? Think over this in the context of

> the Pope saying during his visit to South America

> that he wanted to save Catholics from Protestant

> wolves.

=== message truncated ===