HEAR THE RUMBLE OF CHRISTIST HYPOCRISY. CHRISTISM IS AN ARTIFICE OF AGGRESSION

Subject:	HEAR THE RUMBLE OF CHRISTIST HYPOCRISY. CHRISTISM IS AN ARTIFICE OF AGGRESSION - SITARAM GOEL
Date:	Sun, 31 Jan 2010 05:51:17 GMT

Forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Hear the rumble of Christist hypocrisy. Christism is an artifice of
aggression: Sitaram Goel

Thanks to Bala for the link to Sitaram Goel's letter to the
evangelist.

The aatman of Haiti should have found the paramapadam uniting with
the paramaatman. Prayers of all Hindus are: om shanti, shanti,
shanti. May paramaatman show us the way to grieve with the families
of the bereaved aatman and to pray for the abhyudayam of the citizens
of Haiti. With the blessings of paramaatman, everything is possible.

dhanyavaadah.

S. Kalyanaraman

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7007065.ece

-From The Times
January 29, 2010

Hear the rumble of Christian hypocrisy The evangelist who says the
Haiti earthquake is retribution for sin is at least true to his
religion

Richard Dawkins

We know what caused the catastrophe in Haiti. It was the bumping and
grinding of the Caribbean Plate rubbing up against the North American
Plate:

a force of nature, sin-free and indifferent to sin, unpremeditated,
unmotivated, supremely unconcerned with human affairs or human
misery.

The religious mind, however, hubristically appropriates the blind
happenings of physics for petty moralistic purposes. As with the
Indonesian tsunami, which was blamed on loose sexual morals in
tourist nightclubs; as with Hurricane Katrina, which was attributed
to divine revenge on the entire city of New Orleans for organising a
gay rally; and as with other disasters going back to the famous
Lisbon earthquake and beyond, so Haiti's tragedy must be payback for
human "sin".

The Rev Pat Robertson, infamous American televangelist, sees the hand
of God in the earthquake, wreaking terrible retribution for a 1791
pact that the Haitians made with the Devil, to help to rid them of
their French masters. 1791? Ah, but don't forget "I the Lord thy God
am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me".

Needless to say, milder-mannered faith-heads fell over themselves to
disown Robertson, just as they disowned those other pastors,
evangelists, missionaries and mullahs at the time of the earlier
disasters.

What hypocrisy. Loathsome as Robertson's views undoubtedly are, he is
the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The
agonised theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable "mystery",
or who see God in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding
into Haiti, or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God
"suffering on the cross" in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-
anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own
theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian
here.

Where was God in Noah's flood? He was systematically drowning the
entire world, animal as well as human, as punishment for "sin". Where
was God when Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed with fire and
brimstone? He was deliberately barbecuing the citizenry, lock, stock
and barrel, as punishment for "sin".

"Oh but that's the Old Testament. No one believes those stories
literally any more. The New Testament is all about love." Dear
modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated, gentle Christian,
you cannot be serious. Your entire religion is founded on an
obsession with "sin", with punishment and with atonement. Where do
you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed
up to the odious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus's
incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the
"sins" of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the
"sin" of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even
existed?

Yes, I know you hate the word "scapegoat" (with good reason, because
it is a barbaric idea) but what other word would you use? The only
respect in which "scapegoat" falls short as a perfect epitome of
Christian theology is that the Christian atonement is even more
unpleasant. The goat of Jewish tradition was merely driven into the
wilderness with its cargo of symbolic sin. Jesus was supposedly
tortured and executed to atone for sins that, any rational person
might protest, he had it in his power simply to forgive, without the
agony. Among all the ideas ever to occur to a nasty human mind
(Paul's of course), the Christian "atonement" would win a prize for
pointless futility as well as moral depravity.

Even without the stark heartlessness of Pat Robertson, tragedies like
Haiti are meat and drink to the theological mind. To quote the
president of one theological seminary, writing in the On Faith blog
of the *Washington Post*: "The earthquake in Haiti, like every other
earthly disaster, reminds us that creation groans under the weight of
sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our
bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point on
the globe."

You nice, middle-of-the-road theologians and clergymen, be-frocked
and bleating in your pulpits, you disclaim Pat Robertson's suggestion
that the Haitians are paying for a pact with the Devil. But you
worship a god-man who -- as you tell your congregations, even if you
don't believe it yourself --"cast out devils". You even believe (or
you don't disabuse your flock when they believe) that Jesus cured a
madman by causing the "devils" in him to fly into a herd of pigs and
stampede them over a cliff. Charming story, well calculated to uplift
and inspire the Sunday School and the Infant Bible Class.

Robertson may spout evil nonsense, but he is a mere amateur at that
game. Just read your own New Testament. Pat Robertson is true to it.
But you?

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your
entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as
payback for "sin" -- or suffering as "atonement" for it? You may weep
for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick,
sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the
ugliness of Christian theology. You are nothing but a whited
sepulchre.

Richard Dawkins's latest book is The Greatest Show on Earth.

His charitable foundation, RDFRS, is co-ordinating Non-Believers
Giving Aid (NBGA)( givingaid.richarddawkins.net )

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

COMMENT:

EXTRACT FROM THE BOOK: "HISTORY OF HINDU -- CHRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS
(A.D. 304 TO 1996)" -- SITA RAM GOEL -- VOICE OF INDIA, NEW DELHI
110002

QUOTE:

On 23 March 1995, Pat Robertson appeared on the "700 Club" T.V. show,
which he controls, and started by saying that Hinduism was devil-
worship and despicable idolatry responsible for India's poverty and
other ills. ' Of all of India's problems', he proclaimed, 'one stands
out from the rest. That problem is idol worship. It is said that
there are hundreds of millions of Hindu deities. All this has put the
nation in bondage to spiritual forces that have deceived many for
thousands of years'. According to him, Hindus 'are out to kill other
human beings in the name of their God'. And he appealed to his
countrymen to keep Hindus and Hinduism out of the USA. 'We are
importing Hinduism into America', he mourned. 'We can't let that
stuff come into America', he warned. At the same time, he assured his
audience that Hindus were hungering for and in desperate need of
Jesus Christ". ( pp-486 )

UNQUOTE:

-FROM THE SAME BOOK: LETTER TO PAT ROBERSTSON FROM SITA RAM GOEL:

(pp- 486-488)

Dear Mr. Robertson,

Some friends in the USA -- the country of Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, and a land par excellence of
liberal humanism -have drawn my attention to your recent fulminations
against Hinduism, Hindus and India.

My first reaction was sheer amusement at this latest spectacle of
patent Christian tantrums. I am familiar with what Christian
theologians, missionaries and windbags have been saying about our
religion, our people, and our country since the days of St.
Hippolytus (230 A.D.), more particularly since 1542 A.D. when the
Patron Saint of Pirates, Francis Xavier, reached our shores.
Thousands of shelves in hundreds of Christian seminaries in India and
abroad are laden with the pornography which soldiers of the Only
Saviour have produced down the centuries.

I also know that you have to make a living for yourself, and collect
money for maintaining the giant missionary apparatus in this country
as well as keeping within your fold the RICE CHRISTIANS you have
managed to collect during the past four hundred years. I can see that
the only way you can do it is by selling to your gullible people the
BIG LIE that we are an accursed rabble hungering for Jesus Christ.
You are neither the first nor likely to be the last in this cynical
enterprise. I have witnessed how Mother Teresa has flourished and
become a world figure by plying the same trade with a straight face.

On second thoughts, however, I have decided to pen the lines that
follows.

Firstly, I plead that we are living in an age when sinners are coming
forward to apologize to the sinned against. I cannot believe that you
are unaware of how the Germans have apologized to the Jews and the
Japanese to the Koreans. And I think it is high time for Christians
to apologize to the Hindus. The crimes which Christian missionaries
have committed in this country since the days of Francis Xavier have
been documented by Christian scholars themselves.

Secondly, I wish to point out that you have got your priorities
wrong. Instead of trying to save the Hindus, you should better try to
save whatever has survived of the Totem by which you swear. I have
airmailed you a copy of my 'Jesus Christ: An Artifice of Aggression',
in which I have compiled the conclusions of Christological research
in the modern West. It is too late in the day for you to exercise
yourself about Hinduism and the Hindus. It may be more profitable for
you to address your own dwindling flock in what was once known as
Christendom.

Thirdly, I like to draw your attention to the fact that we Hindus are
an ancient people and have survived many storms including those
mounted by Islam and its elder blood brother -- Christianity. We were
here long before your Jehovah and Jesus were INVENTED by the
diabolical drives in human nature and hurled upon an unsuspecting
humanity. And we will be here long after the Bible starts selling as
waste paper on pavements around the world.Try to remember the fate of
Hitler's 'Mein Kempf' and the 'Collected Works' of Lenin / Stalin.

For, Hinduism is a spiritual culture which is intrinsic to the human
species, and has never been in need of big battalions, or big money,
or big media in order to back it up. Hinduism knows how to find its
way to human hearts, no matter how desperate the effort of CONTRIVED
CREEDS to shut them tight against all higher aspirations.

Hinduism is Sanatan Dharm, the Perennial Wisdom and Virtue. It is no
use spitting at the Sun.

Regards,

Yours Sincerley,

Sd./ - Sita Ram Goel

15 July 1995

TO -

Mr. Pat Robertson
CBN, 977 Centerville Turnpike,
VIRGINIA BEACH, VA 23463 -0001
U.S.A.

End of forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

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HEAR THE RUMBLE OF CHRISTIST HYPOCRISY. CHRISTISM IS AN ARTIFICE OF AGGRESSION - SITARAM GOEL