A glimpse into “Church-planting” in AP

Partial Comment moved here

@ Vivekam: Re. first cleaning up our own house, please read: “The Challenge Before Modern Day Hinduism” – Dr Ajai Singh

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@ AG, Amar, Kaffir, Indian: Thanks for the comments…

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@ Khandu: I will have a look at the link. Thanks.

A first-hand account from southern India. Excerpts The Conversion To Intolerance by Raju Peddada

[Author’s note: What I write here is controversial, perhaps even inflammatory, but unequivocally true. The daily incidents unfolding in south India, at the missionaries and churches had been verified thoroughly during my trip last year, in direct contact with the victims, re-converts, village and panchayat officers. More than anything, what
really prodded me to address this chilling milieu is a simple fact, I also, in my liberal and open mindedness have been the unfortunate and involuntary beneficiary of religious intolerance, especially the subversive conversion machinations through my two marriages and a relationship. It is eerily corroborative with the incidents presented here.]

July 27, 2009) Despite the decades that slipped by, I distinctly remember the smells and sounds of the remote south Indian villages. In the innocent years dissolved, you could hear mothers calling out to their kids to come home for supper at sunset. Sunsets demarcated life from slumber. Standing on the high verandahs you could hear the thunderous stampede of returning cattle from grazing, and smell and see the distant clouds of billowing dust permeated with the golden rays of the descending sun.

After a hot supper on the verandah, under the fading light, folding cots or reed mats were set up for the nights under the twinkling eternity and soothing convers! ation of leaves and the wind. It was peaceful and ethereal, almost therapeutic for the tired souls and revelatory for the young ones…All is lost now, assailed by the din of fervent missionaries.

Catapult over the decades and into our trip last year, these same villages, we enjoyed in the decades prior, have become battle zones for conversion, Christian missionaries converting the guileless Hindus right under the Hindu noses. The proselytizers have built huge incongruent whitewashed churches, that scream for attention, in every emerald village spewing out disquieting sermons in local dialects drowning the golden sunsets in their flood lights, obscuring and obfuscating the melodious soul soothing conversation of leaves and wind at bed time, and basically obliterating the natural rhythms of life with loud, presumptuous and boisterous religiosity polluting the very essence of
Hindu culture…an existence in silent reverence and in sync with nature.
Whether it is Annadaverapeta, Ragolapalli, Tallapudi or Velangi, all familiar comfort zones for us in the past have been reduced into circuses at night with large food lit assembles and amplified singing forced on the sleeping all night long. In the land of tolerance, intolerance is taking root with devastating results. Secularism, pluralism, diversity, and tolerance are being rapidly, insidiously, deviously and inexorably being supplanted with menacing dispassionate
monolithic intolerance.

The hair on my neck bristled up when I heard this one from a direct victim called in by my cousin, who happened to be a village officer for two villages. Mr. V. Rao had been hearing stories about the assemblies of “Miraculous Christian Healings” regularly. Believing that all are welcome, he took a close friend with a chronic illness that the local doctor could not diagnose, to one of these Christian healings. Once they arrived there, they were barred from entry into the church, the reason being that he and his friend were not Christians. That same evening a re-convert, who had reverted back to Hinduism, who knew these gentlemen and saw them being turned away, pulled these dejected friends aside into a tea shop, sat both of them down and told them his story.

The re-convert elaborated how he was called to the church one day and was instructed to act sick, and then pretend to be healed of the sickness once the priest chanted Christ’s name and touched the sick man’s head in front of 15 to 20 thousand naive converts. The clergy, after every healing, reiterated to these converts to desist from eating Hindu food, listening to them or visiting with them; and that their family now was the other members of the congregation.

The unfortunate who succumb to these exclusion dogmas are the innocent, illiterate and economically disadvantaged that are being systematically exploited into selling their own identity for temporary financial gains.

Hindus are being subjected to various types of desecrating reductionism in their own country, with no consequences for this subversion. The stress experienced by the new converts is quite excruciating, the abandonment and the alienation from loved ones, who have not given into these diabolical machinations of the proselytizers. The newly converted are ordered to assemble in the churches and are disallowed to mingle and commiserate with old relatives.

…

Here is a verified incident that illustrates their creed. This subversion has reached the sewer level with the proselytizers. This was a story that enraged every tolerant and decent pore on me. A school bus full of Hindu kids aged 6-9 are taken on field trip into the thick rain forest. The bus apparently stalls in a deep and dense part of the forest
with the sun already behind the forest canopy. The Christian chaperone and bus driver from the school inform the kids that “we are stuck here” and tell the kids to pray for help. They challenge all the Hindu kids to pray to their gods and wait to see if their god saves them from this ordeal. An hour later in the deafening darkness of the forest, with strange animal noises getting louder, almost half of the children start crying and urinating in their clothes. Then, these two men again board the bus, and chide the kids for believing all these Hindu gods who cannot save them: “see the gods you pray to, are really powerless.”

After setting the stage with fear, they tell the kids that the only one who can save them is Christ. After this little scrubbing they say: “now let us pray to Jesus and see if he helps us…Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name…” Voila, the bus starts up to the bewildered faces of the innocent kids, and the trip home is easy. What do you think takes place at home between the kids and parents? If this is not Child abuse, abuse of trust and the epitome of subversion, I don’t know what it is?

The Christians have been consistently getting their butts whipped in the Middle East and other regions competing for
membership and conversions. They have not been allowed to pursue their activities in Muslim dominated regions, as Muslims are fanatically dedicated to their faith and are violently protective against any encroaching faith. So, the Christians seek a less combative territory: the Indian subcontinent, where the majority of Hindus are not suspicious, rather welcoming, pliant and very tolerant. The Indian subcontinent has become a war zone not between Hindus and others; it is a war zone for Christians and Muslims…competing for conversion and membership.

Every man-made religion has skeletons in its proverbial closet. I am not an atheist, nor a fanatic. However, in my last trip I saw the signs everywhere in south India and for the most part could not avoid this explosive topic with my relatives and friends. We were actually joined in by western Christian tourists on the Katpadi train platform in Tamil
Nadu as well as in Agra, who were appalled and agreed with immense chagrin and embarrassment at the Christian missionary rampage in open desecration of an ancient culture.

Professor David Shulman of Humanistic Studies in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on a bus journey in southern India puts it this way: “A Christian boy, ‘Ben Zwi,’ no less, attaches himself to me and, glued for hours to the seat across from me, speaks of truth, a single truth, which must, I can clearly see,
by virtue of this claim alone, be untrue.”

I am not a flailing fanatic being martyred everyday by the infidels, nor am I a total atheist. I think religion is divisive, discursive, disruptive, devious and destructive. That is why atheism is on the rise with the erudite peoples. Poor, ignorant and illiterate ones always become the fodder for such faiths.
…
I am an ardent history buff, the love of ancient civilizations, romantic immersion in the cultures of antiquity, and ruins always evoked melancholic longing in me, as if the need to migrate into the past was a requisite for all history magnets. I always looked at the Qutb Minar, the Taj Mahal and the massive Red Fort of New Delhi as ethereal
monuments of beauty and humanity.

But after 9/11 my perspective was altered; these very monuments that awed me since my boyhood now stood in front of me as the repository of barbaric cruelty and forced labor in the blood of “infidel” slaves that were dragged in to construct these grand monuments for Muslims. Instead of marveling the magnificence of the monuments and the history that took shape, I became dazed in the visions of lost freedoms and cruelty the people were made to swallow for not being Muslims.

Similarly when I look at those magnificent churches built on the shoulders of apostates, non-believers, and slaves, all the grandiose visions of Christian history washes off in regret and disdain. History can be romanticized from a distance till it touches and grates you personally. Imagine what a Jew would say in Judea in 150AD if asked about the “great” Roman Empire. What would the Irish Catholics express if asked about the prosperous Elizabethan times?

…I am not interested in the final Judgment or the judgment day, I am interested in acknowledgement; the universal acknowledgement of natural diversity, multifarious paths to the one truth, and sanctity of identity and life.

Legend occasionally germinates around a grain of fact, and myth mostly serves a continuing need; faith then shores man up against adversity. If faiths are forced and changed, identities dissolve, and with that, all myths and legends that coddle humanity in comfort of the familiar are destroyed, leaving rootless pilgrims in search for the lost
familiarity and self.

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” -1 Samuel 15:3

This is from the Bible, which sounds like some merciless gangster two thousand years ago, and here is Sri Ramakrishna from the 19th century whose reasoning renders the heavily sold faiths like immature kids fighting over a toy, which is
actually you: This metaphysical and spiritual sage says:

“There is large round lake with three distinct flights of stairs leading to the water. The Hindus draw water from the lake and call it ‘Jal,’ the Muslims draw and carry their water from a different point on the lake in leather bags and call it ‘Pani’ and the Christians get their water from another end of the same lake in a Chalice and call it ‘water.’ Everyone wants the same substance, but give it different names…only the climate, temperament, and names create these differences. Why not let each man follow his own path?