THE DEFENCE OF HINDUISM ... 1

THE DEFENCE OF HINDUISM ... 1

How can a person become a Muslim or a Christian by conversion? One has to do so by conviction. And getting brainwashed is not being rationally convinced. 

Human beings are different from animals in that they can think rationally, experiment and experience. This is how science has developed and this is how religion ought to have developed as well. Faith plays no role whatsoever in the structuring of science and ought not to do so in the case of religion also. But the Abrahamic religions are faith all the way from origin to terminus. The Sanātan Dharma is not so. Its method is quite like the empirical sciences---rational, experimental and intuitive. 

The undue absolute insistence on faith in unique revelations of special personages called prophets is indicative of the fact that Abrahamic affirmations and injunctions are entirely matters of faith of little value in the light of reality as it is and cannot stand the test of reason which for them to be deemed true, they must undergo the rigour of. The Sanātan Dharma, on the other hand, right from early inception has been remarkably rational before it reached its highest heights in experiential transrationality which nonetheless was in harmony with enlightened reason free of fallacious counterargument. Centuries of rational inquiry, experimentation and introspection led to a vast mass of sensuous and supersensuous findings which became the body of the Vedas and the Vedāngas, reaching its summit of realisations in the Vedānta or the Upanishads. External analysis of Nature it began with but ended in the analysis internal of the mind before culminating in the discovery of the Spirit or the Self of man, in Sanskrit called the Ātman, which also is the foundational basis of all phenomena and is called Brahman. The most brilliant averment of the Upanishad 'Ayam Ātma Brahma' ('Ayamātma Brahma'---'This Ātman is Brahman') was no less brilliant an equation than E = mc², the equivalence of energy and mass.

Ignorance of the Dharma is causing Hindus to be trapped by the Abrahamic conversion network which sufficient training should surely teach them to stay clear of. We need elementary Sanskrit schools where the language in its rudimentary form will be taught along with some amount of scriptural study. Knowledge of one's own spiritual culture empowers one to defend one's cultural-civilisational status and not to forsake it at the drop of a hat, be it an Islamic hat, a Christian hat or a Communist hat. 

Self-hatred of the educated elite Hindus is a disease coming from the West and this must be effectively countered. This leftist orientation, this western modernity shorn of character and enduring civilisational substance, is eating into the vitals of the nation and ought to be intellectually and culturally fought off for the Sanātan culture to survive and flourish.

Another conversion trap is that of marriage. When a Hindu marries a Muslim, he/she is invariably converted to Islam as for a Muslim it is divinely mandated that he/she cannot marry a non-Muslim. In the case of a Hindu marrying a Christian, even if the Hindu is not converted to Christianity, more often than not the offspring are baptised into Christianity. That Hindus allow this ease of self-conversion into the Abrahamic fold is less out of liberalism and more out of loss of Hindu character owing to lack of dhārmic knowledge and sufficient affiliation to the Hindu fold. Does not Krishna exhort Arjun, "Svadharmey nidhanam shreya paradharma bhayāvaha" which in wider civilisational implication would also mean that it is better to die within the fold of one's own faith but terrible to accept another's, that is, conversion is terrible and worse than death, for unlike the death of the body in the former case, it is death of the soul?

Written by Sugata Bose

Photo: Ram Swarup (left) and Sitaram Goel (right), the two greatest defenders of the Hindus who are lirerally under siege in their own bastion.