SOURCE:
http://indiafacts.co.in/christians-must-embrace-ghar-wapsi/
https://snt148.mail.live.com/?tid=cm-VI_sODD5BGMvAAjfeRWUg2&fid=flinbox
Christians Must Embrace Ghar Wapsi
By
George Augustine
Commentary, Culture, Politics (?)
March 5, 2015
Leaving home and coming back to it defines human history in a nutshell, if one is alluding to the physical act of going home or away from it for whatever reasons. The going away (or taking one away) from one’s ancestral traditions and culture followed by an explicit expression of repudiation has also become a fixed feature in human history for the last 2000 years all over the earth. India along with few of its neighbours has become a singular and lone region on the planet, which still harbours ancestral traditions as they have been since time immemorial.
In the wake of the ghar wapsi of 57 Muslim families in Agra (8 December 2014) and the pseudo-secular ire in Parliament, the so-called mainstream media made it out as if ghar wapsi was the ultimate in inter-religious offence. In the side lines some routine conversions to Christianity that are not at all newsworthy in normal times also made news. Whereas ghar wapsi was generally reported as “conversion” of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism, the conversion to Christianity of Hindus was reported in some media as “adoption of Christianity”. Whether you call it conversion or adoption, ghar wapsi doesn’t happen without it. So, before we look at ghar wapsi,
It all started in the Bible with the god character, the protagonist of the book, making a covenant with one Abram, a biblically significant, archetypal human character who appears early in the narrative [Genesis 15 & 17]. Responding to a persistent appeal from the god and following instructions, Abram offers the first animal sacrifice for this god [Genesis 15:9-10] and also cuts his foreskin. By the covenant, in return of worship he gets a new name ‘Abraham’ and a promise of land and everything in it held by others.
Thus the covenants didn’t stop with Abraham and Moses, but extended through Jesus to Mohammed, who is proclaimed as the last prophet. The covenant with Abraham governs that the pact has to be made and confirmed by every descendant of Abraham by an act of conversion, presumably because the pact has no organic (genetic) basis. This is strictly observed by all of Abraham’s ideological descendants. Hence every child of a convert needs to be converted soon after its birth (8 days from birth originally).
Those who follow Abraham’s god have left no avenues unexplored to provide make-believe reasons for conversion to their god and religion. For Christians and Muslims, conversion to these faiths by baptism or circumcision is enough to secure the professed welfare in this life and afterlife. Whereas innocent children of converts are sitting ducks for the automatic conversion, non-Abrahamic people are natural prey for these predatory religions.
First and foremost,
Now only less than 45% of the world population stands between the biblically induced complete destruction of the planet and an escape from a virulent malady that is currently leading the world to this ill-prophesied destiny. This also means, albeit theoretically, only 45% of the world population presently carry the original human reasoning and have a natural comprehensive worldview that is not in conflict with our experience, our fellow living beings and the general environment. It also means that 45% of humans haven’t left their homes yet or have already returned home.
http://indiafacts.co.in/christians-must-embrace-ghar-wapsi/
https://snt148.mail.live.com/?tid=cm-VI_sODD5BGMvAAjfeRWUg2&fid=flinbox
Christians Must Embrace Ghar Wapsi
By
George Augustine
Commentary, Culture, Politics (?)
March 5, 2015
Christians Must Embrace Ghar Wapsi
Preamble
Leaving home and coming back to it defines human history in a nutshell, if one is alluding to the physical act of going home or away from it for whatever reasons. The going away (or taking one away) from one’s ancestral traditions and culture followed by an explicit expression of repudiation has also become a fixed feature in human history for the last 2000 years all over the earth. India along with few of its neighbours has become a singular and lone region on the planet, which still harbours ancestral traditions as they have been since time immemorial.
As the only nation with an unbroken heritage, India remains the only country with an ancient scientific, cultural and philosophical tradition that goes back a few thousand years. It is not because other regions and nations on earth did not have such knowledge or approach, but people in those countries came to be converted or annihilated, their cultural heritage spurned and spiritual icons shattered, and they had to leave their ancestral traditions, most of them under the pain of death, to join one or another “religious” sect. Upon obtaining a membership in the new community of converts, they also altered their dietary habits, methods of worship and above all their worldview. In ancient Hindu parlance, in their converted new worldview, reason and intuition gave way to stark superstition.
There is still nearly 80 percent of Indians who have not converted from their native traditions. Why didn’t India follow the rest of the world and get converted? Answering that question comprehensively necessitates a whole essay, or even a book, and will have to wait. However one obvious reason was the resilient fortress of the jati system that prevented people from becoming easy prey for conversions by the pain of excommunication from their jati, which also meant loss of trade, livelihood, property and a social base. The first vocational schools in Kerala were set up by missionaries from Europe, apparently to rehabilitate potential converts, without which apparatus, their efforts were proving to be too expensive and futile. The missionaries began to attack the caste system once they came to know what was holding the Hindus back from becoming their victims.
This was countered by Hindu leaders like Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Narayana Guru who challenged the conversions by undermining the caste system.
Today the caste system is in its final throes and legally propped up only for the wrong reasons. Efforts still continue in India, mostly financed by converts of other countries, to convert the remaining people of India who still follow their ancestral traditions.
And missionaries are finding new ways for conversions, such as “inter-religious dialogues”.
It is in these circumstances that the ghar wapsi (homecoming) movement was reintroduced by certain Hindu groups.
Conversion and ghar wapsi
In the wake of the ghar wapsi of 57 Muslim families in Agra (8 December 2014) and the pseudo-secular ire in Parliament, the so-called mainstream media made it out as if ghar wapsi was the ultimate in inter-religious offence. In the side lines some routine conversions to Christianity that are not at all newsworthy in normal times also made news. Whereas ghar wapsi was generally reported as “conversion” of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism, the conversion to Christianity of Hindus was reported in some media as “adoption of Christianity”. Whether you call it conversion or adoption, ghar wapsi doesn’t happen without it. So, before we look at ghar wapsi,
we have to first ask: what is conversion here and what activates it?
What is the motivation for conversion? How did it originate? Is it a natural phenomenon? Is it okay to convert? Once converted, is it okay to revert?
These issues don’t figure in the current debates about conversion or reversion, but are treated predominantly in the backdrop of vote-bank politics.
This essay goes into the details of conversion, on which the ghar wapsi is based.
In the final analysis, ghar wapsi is a more sensible, if not the only sensible response for converts, than continuing with the conversion. To begin with, if conversion is natural, reversion is also natural. Because it follows that if the objective of conversion is not achieved or satisfied by conversion, reversion is a natural response, just like a consumer item is returned or spurned if it doesn’t fulfil the promise at purchase. So, if conversion (adoption of a new worldview with simultaneous repudiation of the old) is a fundamental right, reversion (rejection of a subscribed worldview) is also a fundamental right. Even if a conversion is unnatural, it is all the more natural to revert, or as most poetically said, the homecoming, or ghar wapsi. Moreover this an inevitable phenomenon not only in India, but wherever conversions have taken place. It is only a natural phenomenon that those who have gone away from home will also want to come back home again.
India along with few of its neighbours has become a singular and lone region on the planet, which still harbours ancestral traditions as they have been since time immemorial.
To summarise, conversions are an aberrance in the biological scheme of human life so far as it is destructive to the individual, society and the planet. Conversions are the realisation of a fictitious enterprise by accident or design, which is particularly dangerous for the human species and in this way for the whole planet. As such, ghar wapsi is the only solution to save the species and the planet from certain destruction, which conversion triggers and propels as a necessary effect.
Origin of Conversion
It all started in the Bible with the god character, the protagonist of the book, making a covenant with one Abram, a biblically significant, archetypal human character who appears early in the narrative [Genesis 15 & 17]. Responding to a persistent appeal from the god and following instructions, Abram offers the first animal sacrifice for this god [Genesis 15:9-10] and also cuts his foreskin. By the covenant, in return of worship he gets a new name ‘Abraham’ and a promise of land and everything in it held by others.
In this way, the biblical god gained the first convert in the form of Abraham, in exchange of promised “everlasting”
material gains in the form of the ancient pastures of Palestine.
The god tells Abraham that the covenant extends for all time to all his descendants (whom he had earlier promised in profusion – Genesis 15:5). Time passes by in the narrative and Abraham is gone and several prophets arrive on the scene and the god makes covenants with some of them, the primary among them being Moses, who is supposed to have written the book.
In due course of time, some of Abraham’s conceptual descendants split from the historical folk (Jews) by proclaiming another intervention by Abraham’s god (through Virgin Mary), which is narrated in the New Testament of the so-called Christians.
Another offshoot emerged after few centuries from a group who claimed ancestry from the Bible, from the son of Abraham and Hagar, Ismail (Ishmael), and became manifest in the Quran and Islam.
For the Jews (who originally carried the book of Moses), the covenant with god was exclusively for their own kind. They had no mandate to extend the covenant to non-Jews.
Even according to part of the New Testament, Jesus the Jew preached exclusively to the Jews. The Jews had no evangelisation programmes or jihad against non-Jews. All the murder and mayhem were hitherto performed solely by the god and his prophets and confined to the book of Moses.
This changed with the advent of Christianity and Islam.
The covenant of Abraham’s god was now extended not only to Jews but for all “mankind” and Jesus became the “mediator of a new covenant” [Hebrews 12:24]. What was hitherto applicable only to Jews was extended to all others, with the god’s mandate expanding without limits to encompass all humanity, even at the pain of death. Christians have the “great commission” [Matthew 28:16-20] to convert the world into Christians.
The Quran tells in no uncertain terms that
“Muslims are commanded to fight unbelievers until they are either dead, converted to Islam, or in a permanent state of subjugation under Muslim domination. Allowing people of other faiths to live and worship independently of Islamic rule is not an option”.
Scriptural dynamics behind conversion
Thus the covenants didn’t stop with Abraham and Moses, but extended through Jesus to Mohammed, who is proclaimed as the last prophet. The covenant with Abraham governs that the pact has to be made and confirmed by every descendant of Abraham by an act of conversion, presumably because the pact has no organic (genetic) basis. This is strictly observed by all of Abraham’s ideological descendants. Hence every child of a convert needs to be converted soon after its birth (8 days from birth originally).
The conversion ceremony is very important for the children of Abraham because the ancestor’s conversion and his covenant with the god is NOT naturally transferred to his descendants through lineage. It has to be renewed by every new-born by the act of conversion (baptism or circumcision) undertaken when young, as young as possible, so that no questions are raised about the purpose and meaning of the conversion. The success in the number of converts to these two religions lies in the conversion of the very young before rationality develops.
Christians consider fulfilling the “great commission” of converting non-Christians the world over to Christianity as the true mandate from their god, and doing so is considered a great virtue that will be, according to Christian belief, rewarded greatly in the afterlife, if not in this life. For this reason, Christians have been extremely devious, deceptive and violent in propagating their faith and converting non-Christians all over the world and achieving success mostly through coercion and aggression.
The archetypal conversion of Abraham is being realised in history through mass conversions of Christians and Muslims worldwide. In reality, a fictitious covenant is being perpetuated by the ideological descendants of Abraham through the conversions, the success of which rests solely on the straightforward brainwashing of their captive victims at a tender age.
It would be virtually impossible for a modern adult human being with a sound mind to voluntarily accept the covenant of Abraham and perpetuate it himself or herself, and without coercion or unseemly persuasion from someone without ulterior motives. It ultimately means that for an adult human with a fully developed intellect, conversion to the Abrahamic faith would be no option without material gains in the background. The scriptural dynamics provides for the material benefit. It is symbolised in the book of Moses by the land of Canaan, the Promised Land, which is identified as Palestine.
Whether Abram would have converted without the promise of Palestine is a question that doesn’t bother Abraham’s children, because for them material benefits are at the forefront of religion, not only in this life but in the afterlife as well.
The only motivation behind the scriptural, archetypal conversion of Abraham is material. In the New Testament of the Christians, the Promised Land transforms into the “Kingdom of Heaven”, which is supposed to materialise after one’s death. And Jesus the Doomsday prophet of the New Testament preaches poverty, both material and spiritual, in this life in order to get material benefits in the afterlife [Matthew 5:3].
A parallel can also be found in the Quran,
promising ultimate material rewards in the afterlife [Quran 56:17-24 and 35-38].
The symbolic act of conversion, baptism or circumcision, is followed by the regular and constant brainwashing of the young victims in both religions. The Christians have a rite of initiation called “confirmation”, usually led by a bishop and carried out in a cathedral. For major sects like Catholics and Anglicans, the ritual signals the full membership of the convert in the church. Preceding the confirmation, each child has to learn by rote the basic tenets of their faith and prove its knowledge before a priest assigned for the purpose. Though none of the candidates fail the test, they are made to repeat by rote several times the Apostle’s Creed (Book of Common Prayer) or some such texts. In a young mind, the base and for the most part untrue statements uttered in rote form a foundational worldview that is difficult to overcome in adult life. Sticking to the irrational without relenting to common sense (that is, adhering to superstition) is glorified as the supreme virtue, which most of the brainwashed victims follow like nose-ringed cattle.
Another scriptural mechanism that additionally drives the Christian evangelisation is the prerequisite for the second coming of “Christ” or the Doomsday. Every true (active) Christian is looking forward to that day when every individual “soul” will stand before Abraham’s god to be judged and the earth completely destroyed.
But this day will come, according to the Christian Scripture, only when “all nations of the earth” have converted [Matthew 24:14].
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. – Lord Byron
Thus the biblical dynamics play a major role in the inorganic god portrayed in the book undergoing a seemingly organic evolution, prompting Abraham’s mutated descendants to work overtime century after century, converting every child of every convert before it could cogently question its rationale.
Thus the biblical dynamics play a major role in the inorganic god portrayed in the book undergoing a seemingly organic evolution, prompting Abraham’s mutated descendants to work overtime century after century, converting every child of every convert before it could cogently question its rationale.
