If God Is One Why Are There Different Religions?

If God Is One,

Why Are There Different Religions?

Other Titles The Science of the Guru - Guru Tattva Paramatma-vaibhava – The Origin of the Conditioned Souls The Soul’s Origins - the Vedic Perspective Search for Our Meaningful Identity - The Soul’s Dharma

Coming Soon The Dynamics of Love Saving Jesus

IF GOD IS ONE, WHY ARE THERE DIFFERENT RELIGIONS? © 2020 KRISHNA MURALI MEDIA

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If God Is One,

Why Are There Different Religions?

Bhaktivedanta Suddhadvaiti Swami (Guy Bouchié de Belle)

KRISHNA MURALI MEDIA

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To my revered spiritual guides, my beloved students and all sincere seekers of the Truth.

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Table of Contents

Introduction I Chapter 1

Vedic Culture 1 God’s Various Aspects Buddha and Shankara

— Atheism in the Guise of Spirituality Sanatana Dharma Hinduism The Demigods Idol Worship

23 25 27 30 33 33

Chapter 2

About ‘God’ and ‘Religion’ 39 Search for God A False Problem Another Hint of God’s Existence The Limitations of Modern Science Atheistic Science Is Just Another Religion

Based on Blind Faith Religion Is an Innate Natural Tendency The Spiritual Principles of Freedom ‘Godless Religion’

44 46 48 49 51 53 54 57

Chapter 3

But Is God One? 67 Different Kinds of Scriptures New Non-Vedic Religions Teachings Tailored to the Audience Fanaticism and Intolerance Religions of Meat-Eaters Turn Within!

67 69 73 75 78 80

Chapter 4

The Jews, A Chosen Group of Desert-dwellers? 83 Human Sacrifices 84 Polytheism 88 Yahweh’s Wife 90 The Samaritans 91 The Rise of Yahweh 92 Zoroaster 94 Exclusive Monotheism 95 Destruction 95 Jesus in the Talmud 96 Another Judaism 101 Impersonalism Versus Personalism 103 The Illuminati 106 Chapter 5

Exploring Some Sacred Christian Myths 115 Saul Paul A Strange Doctrine Ignorance About the Soul

116 118 120

Dreams of Heaven 121 A Materialistic Utilitarian Approach 122 Scape Goat 124 A Formless Being 124 Calling a ‘Mystery’ a Concoction One Cannot Explain? 125 Those Savages 127 Was Jesus Predicted in the Old Testament?

129 The Gospels 131 Was Jesus’ Mother a Virgin?

137 Was She a Perpetual Virgin?

138 Was Jesus the Long-Awaited Jewish Messiah?

143 About Judas Iscariot 149 About Miracles 150 Did Herod Order

the Killing of all New-Born Babies?

154 Chapter 6

Justifying Genocide Because of

Belief in Biblical Inerrancy?

157

The Dreadful Consequences of a Wrong Belief Sanguinary Worshipers

161 166

Chapter 7

Islam - Another Incompatible Claim

of Religious Exclusivity

171

Origins 171 Two Korans?

173 More a Warlord than a Religious Prophet 177 Islam or Submission to Allah 178

Old Wine in a New Bottle False Prophecies Some Western Opinions Allah’s Paradise Militant Messianism Legalized Rape and Murder A Book of War An Eternal Book?

Double Standards Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses

and Jesus Were Muslims!?

Differences Between Jesus and Muhammad What We Should Know We, the ‘Vile Infidels’ Guilty Governments?

Sanctioned Deception ‘Religion of Peace’ and ‘Holy War’?

Islam Is Definitely in Dire Need of a Reformation A Bit of History Piracy Muslims in India

182 183 183 186 187 192 193 194 200 202 205 206 208 209 211 211 216 220 221 223

Chapter 8

Why Do I Write All These Horrible Details?

235

An Uninspiring Presentation of God 238 Sri Chaitanya 241 Conclusion 241

INTRODUCTION

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he question contained in the title of this book is pertinent and legitimate. However, one can observe that it is often asked in an argumentative way, since many of those who ask it have underlying doubts about God’s very existence, as well as about the validity of religion. These doubts seem to originate from six main roots: One, the deliberate attacks on theistic conceptions through the “rationality” which is supposed to have come with the Enlightenment, and mostly by atheistic pseudo-science and the Left. Two, the brainwashing that began a few decades ago by the adherents of relativism, who spread the so-called tolerant notion that there is no definite truth, and that all ideas have the same value. Three, the spreading of Godless Buddhist and monistic Hindu philosophies in the West. Four, the presence of suffering and evil in the world, which seems to be incompatible with an all-powerful, omniscient benevolent God. Five, the often uninspiring behavior of supposedly religious people, including the clergy; for instance, misogyny and the bitter murderous in-fighting of the followers of the three Semitic religions, as well as the forceful way those religions have typically spread historically. Six, many questionable and inconsistent things found in their scriptures. The last two reasons have given God and religion a really bad reputation and are contributing factors to making one vulnerable to agnostic or atheistic ideas, or Godless spiritualties.

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I propose to begin this book by answering the doubts about the very existence of God and the validity of religion with the help of common sense, logic, scholarly research; and especially in the light of the timeless knowledge found in the sacred Vedic literature, which belongs to a forgotten period of advanced humanity. As you will notice upon reading this book, one of the paradigms I subscribe to is that there was, from the very beginning of times, a single global, universal culture, called the Vedic culture. This is the original ancestor civilization of the human race. It was followed worldwide for eons upon eons of time, until about 5000 years ago, when it started to gradually decline, as man adopted a lower version of humanity both in behavior and intelligence. The field of influence of this culture, which is the oldest surviving one on earth, gradually reduced to India, where it is still followed to some extent today. One can, however, find traces of it in all countries and cultures, whether in rituals, architecture or writings. Moreover, there is currently a type of Renaissance of Vedic culture in the world at large as major texts of the Vedic literature have been translated and are being widely broadcast.

Most people lead lives engrossed in materialism; even today’s believers in God usually have a thin veneer of religiosity; few amongst them graduate to spirituality. However, the Vedas – the sacred writings of the original human civilization – give a complete spiritual orientation to life. They teach that the understanding and realization of one’s spiritual nature, what is called self-realization, and the subsequent liberation from material bondage and its inherent suffering, are the divinely-infused meaning, mission and ultimate objective of human life. For that purpose, they provide wisdom technologies with great transformative and liberating power.

Those who claim that there is no God should come up with more convincing arguments than the dubious ones presented by all atheistic people. Christianity may carry a heavy baggage due to its massive

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errors staining its past and greatly discrediting it. In that vacuum, first humanism then agnosticism and atheism have installed themselves and flourished. French philosopher Voltaire rightfully reproached in his time the religious authorities to fabricate atheists: “To whom can we attribute atheism except to the mercenaries and tyrants of the souls, whose duplicity is revolting and who push some weak minds to deny the God whom these monsters dishonor?”

But even if Christianity is flawed, atheism is not a decent positive alternative.

Above atheists in their development of consciousness are religious people, but of course we ought to distinguish between authentic religion, concocted religion and religious syncretism, as well as between genuinely following and fanaticism,1 and particularly between religion and spirituality, its essence. Those who have killed each other in the name of a religion, for instance, were not actually following that religion, even if they claimed to belong to it; or it may be that their religion is not genuine or has been distorted along the way.

Nowadays, the word ‘religion’ in the West usually refers to a particular historical, dogmatic faith, which one can adopt or abandon at will. Religious activity is commonly seen as some specialized action added to, but partitioned off from one’s life. The sacred Vedic texts, however, do not speak about religion in that sense but rather teach about dharma, which means literally “that function which sustains one’s existence and is inseparable from it, being its characteristic”.

Understanding that God is helping souls of various levels of consciousness to come closer to Him should make us less dogmatic and judgmental. We should be open to find out what other traditions 1. For instance, “To believe in Jesus Christ and to be of the elect is one and the same thing, just as not to believe in Jesus Christ and not to be of the elect is the same thing. There is no other selection than this.”

(Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God, Westminster 1950 p.320) III

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say about theological subject matters in their books, as well as their ethical values. We may condone or reject them, but it may inspire us, reinforce our faith in our own religious tradition if that is what corresponds to our present level of development of consciousness, or awaken us to new avenues of thinking. Dictators and intellectual terrorists may want us to be blind, mindless followers, but God certainly does not. The supreme Artist uses the whole gamut of colors, and even when He paints in black and white, He uses all shades of grey. It is not that only one religion is true and the followers of all the others are going to hell. God is not like that at all. Hell is not a permanent place anyway. People do not go to hell forever; once they have suffered down there the retribution of their sinful activities, they reincarnate like everyone else and get yet another chance to improve in School Earth. Someone who fanatically preaches that people who do not belong to his religion will go to hell may himself have to be taken there for a “visit” as a result. And someone who curses other people who do not believe in his conception of God may himself lose faith in God as a result.

In the First Chapter, I will begin with a presentation of Vedic culture, explaining among other things how it is not synonymous with Hinduism; then in the Second Chapter I will discuss the existence of God, the limitations of science, how religion is innate in man and why faith should not be blind, but reason-based. In the Third Chapter I will argue that different levels of consciousness correspond to people’s attraction to different levels of religious teachings and explain their behavior. In the Fourth and Fifth Chapters, I will critically survey Judaism and Christianity and some of their core beliefs, then in the Sixth Chapter argue against Bible inerrancy and its justification of genocide. In the Seventh Chapter I will survey Islam, and conclude by pleading in the Seventh Chapter for the necessity of developing knowledge about God and graduating from religion to spirituality.

IV

Chapter 1 h

Vedic Culture

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he word ‘Veda’ comes from the Sanskrit root vid, to know.

Sanskrit is a phonetically perfect language considered the mother of all languages, and its origin cannot be traced back to any particular point within human history. The script itself is called devanagari, the “language of the gods.” The main purpose of the Vedas is to impart knowledge about the Absolute, Brahman. Indeed, the subject of the Vedas is the Absolute Truth. That Absolute Truth, in its most beautiful, personal feature as God, the Supreme Brahman – who is the ultimate subject of Vedic knowledge – holds the initiative to reveal knowledge about Himself as He pleases. Through the spiritual part of the Vedas is how He chooses to reveal that knowledge. It can be said about God that He is personified knowledge. So the Vedas are God Himself, as the personification of knowledge, in the form of transcendental sound, sabda brahman, revealing complete knowledge about Himself and His various energies, among which are the souls and the world. The absolute authority of the Vedas is established by the fact that they emanate from the mouth of the supreme authority, God. They are described as apauruseya, which means that they do not originate from any conditioned, imperfect soul but from the Supreme Lord. Indeed, the Vedas are said to emanate from the breathing of God Himself. He first transmitted that knowledge to 1

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the first being, the demigod Brahma1. God is the highest being, the supreme one. His nature is described as sat-cid-ananda: His existence is eternal, beginning-less; He is ever full of all knowledge and He is ever supremely happy; He is the happiest person. The Vedas intend to elevate man beyond the material sphere and take him to the plane of God, which means the sphere of permanent happiness.

We now have a linear conception of time since the Christian western culture became the world’s most dominant one. All the previous cultures had kept the Vedic cyclic conception of time2, with smaller cycles or ages within larger cycles themselves contained in larger ones. The Vedic texts speak of tremendously long cycles of time, spanning millions, billions and even trillions of years. These cycles correspond to the divisions of the demigod Brahma’s life, which is the same as the duration of the life of the universe: 311 trillion years. According to Vedic astrological calculations, we are roughly at the middle of his life. This means that Brahma received Vedic knowledge about 155 trillion years ago from God! But the knowledge itself is anterior, since this is not the first creation but only one cycle amongst many. Indeed, can anyone say when knowledge itself began?

Vedic knowledge was only compiled in a written form on the eve of the fourth age of this cycle – our present era – called kali-yuga which lasts 432, 000 years and started about 5,120 years ago (3102 BC, according to Vedic astrology). It was written by the great sage Vyasadeva, when it became essential to record that ancient wisdom in order to preserve it. He first divided the original Veda into four, 1. Bhagavata Purana 1:1.1 2. We find a somewhat similar conception in the ‘theory of catastrophes’ of the French prehistorian Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), according to whom life on earth is eternally destroyed and recreated in an eternal cycle of destruction by natural catastrophes and then renaissance.

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IF GOD IS ONE, WHY ARE THERE DIFFERENT RELIGIONS?

the Rig, Sama, Yajur and Atharva - Vedas, which concentrate on the religious principle of sacrifice, detailing the various types of sacrifices and their benefits; then, assisted by his numerous disciples, he wrote their vast corollaries: Brahmanas, Samhitas, Aranyakas and finally the Upanisads, the most philosophical and spiritual part of the scriptures, along with the Itihasa and Puranas formed of historical narrations, traditionally called the Fifth Veda.

The Upanisads – the word literally means “to sit close to one’s teacher” – oppose the religion of sacrifice with an attitude of rupture, renouncing structured society and ritualistic sacrifice in order to go and live an ascetic life in the jungle, thus internalizing the sacrifice. Those texts are designed for renunciates or meant to evoke detachment from material things in someone. Their wisdom is not concerned with any worldly achievements, but rather teaches one to focus on the Absolute Truth and on the search for liberation by absorption in Brahman. Some of them seem to favour an impersonal approach of the Absolute, but it is only apparent. They first present what seems to be an impersonal aspect of the Absolute, but always conclude with His personal aspect. For instance, they may say that the Absolute has no hands or feet, which seems a negation of His personality, but they state that He has spiritual hands with which He accepts all offerings, and He moves faster than the wind. Thus they never contradict the clearly personal description of Brahman found in all Vedic literature, God as the Supreme Brahman. They never deny that the Absolute Truth is personal. They only establish it as nonmaterial, negating its material features.

Vyasadeva then entrusted these five Vedas and their corollaries to five great sages,3 his disciples, so that they could widely disseminate 3. These sages or rishis were Paila, Jaimini, Vaisampayana, Angira and Romarsana. (Bhagavata Purana 1:4.21-22) 3

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that knowledge throughout the whole world. Having in mind more simple people who could not dwell on so much philosophy and metaphysics, he then wrote a great epic of 100 000 verses – called the Mahabharata, which is the history of a greater India 5000 years ago. It contains, along with intrigue and romance which captivate the mind, a lot of ethical, moral and religious teachings and culminates in the Bhagavad-gita, a masterful discourse of 700 verses expressing the essence of dharma, yoga and spirituality. He finally summarized the Vedic philosophical knowledge in the Vedanta-sutra and wrote in explanatory commentary to it the Bhagavata-Purana also called the Srimad Bhagavatam, which contains the cream of the cream of all the Vedic spiritual knowledge. However, this is not academic knowledge acquired for a simple informative purpose; rather, it is meant to transform the consciousness of its reader and student. It aims at enabling him to ultimately achieve his highest potential. It is knowledge which must be lived from within.

The Vedas, I mentioned in the introduction, give a totally spiritual orientation to human life. They teach that God is the origin of everything and is therefore the supreme proprietor and legitimate enjoyer of everything. Indeed, someone’s property is made for that person’s enjoyment. God exists eternally along with His multifarious energies. His property has two parts: the spiritual world, His personal kingdom or place of residence, where He enjoys the loving service of His eternal associates in various relationships of pure love, and the material universe. Unlike in the Semitic view, God doesn’t create the latter ex nihilo. Material energy is one of His many potencies. As such it is co-existent with Him. According to gigantic cycles of time, it is sometimes manifested according to His desire, and sometimes it remains unmanifest, or latent.

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IF GOD IS ONE, WHY ARE THERE DIFFERENT RELIGIONS?

The sound of the Vedic mantras (powerful spiritual formulas) is considered sacred. Sacred sound has a great significance. It is considered the creative principle. There is indeed a creative power inherent in sound, which is not present in other elements. Matter responds to sound, which creates form in an ordered pattern. Sound is actually the basis of form. The sacred syllable Om is said to be the original sound representation of Divinity, through which the universe was “sung into creation” by God1, a conception one also finds in post-Vedic Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Biblical texts, which all relate that the agency of creation was God’s word. There were not the unproven pseudo-scientific myths that are scandalously taught as truths in colleges in the West of a Big Bang followed by slow evolution until man appeared, that we have been brainwashed to believe, but rather a very rapid succession of simultaneous acts of creation of all planets and all forms of life as symbolically alluded to in Genesis. If one wishes to reconcile things – one could say that the Big Bang was the effect of God vibrating the all-powerful transcendental Om vibration to manifest the Universe. But the dating of the Big Bang event given by the scientists – 13.8 billions of years – does not correspond to the Vedic dating of the manifestation of the universe (155 trillions of years).

There is little to no knowledge about the soul outside of the Vedic tradition, where education, or the cultivation of knowledge, begins with this most important subject – atma-tattva, the science of the soul. The souls are said to belong to another sort of energy of God – His marginal energy, therefore, they are His servants made for His enjoyment. They are not created; they are also co-existent with Him, which means eternal. It is a different conception than the biblical account, which does not teach anything about the spiritual world, God’s kingdom, but is only concerned with man. Genesis 1. In the Bhagavad-gita (7.8), Lord Krishna states that He is the syllable Om. 5

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thus depicts God creating mankind in the form of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, along with a talking snake tempting her, followed by disobedience and a fall, a casting out of the garden, a loss of immortality and the beginning of suffering in a world having become mortal. This allegory is probably a form of the Vedic version of creation which was distorted as it passed through ancient Mesopotamian cultures like Sumer, Assyria, Babylon or Egypt down to the Israelites. Other elements of Vedic cosmology are found in those cultures, but also distorted. For instance, the Vedas speak about the Causal Ocean situated beyond the coverings of the universe and in which it is floating, and of the immaterial Viraja River. They appear in Mesopotamian and Biblical cosmologies as “the cosmic ocean” and “the waters above the heavens”. The Vedas are actually the original source of all knowledge. It is the matrix from which all subsequent religions have borrowed since antiquity, knowingly or unknowingly. If one makes a systematic comparative study and analysis of the material available, one will find out that this is the oldest and most complete body of knowledge that human beings have at their disposal. This ancient literature contains a very rational and scientific explanation of life, fully resting on spiritual principles.

Its higher part is a very vast corpus composed of many philosophical and metaphysical treatises, a complete spiritual encyclopedia. In addition to philosophy, metaphysics and spirituality, through which one can eventually achieve liberation from material existence once one has learned the lessons it is meant to impart to all erring souls, Vedic literature encompasses countless treatises on all the other known branches of human activities. In other words, it contains all the knowledge needed to live within the material sphere. Vedic culture had a technology far more advanced and subtle than the one available to us. Some of it filtered westward from India then to Egypt and Greece and informed the first non-Indians scientists; some got lost with the spreading of Christianity; some reappeared in the Near6

IF GOD IS ONE, WHY ARE THERE DIFFERENT RELIGIONS?

East then the West with Muslim attempts to conquer India in the 8th century; over time some got lost again; some is being rediscovered.

The whole Vedic culture is based on the understanding that God is the Supreme Enjoyer and that everyone is His servant. The relationship of the souls to Him is like parts to the whole. The parts serve the whole, just like all the different parts of a machine serve the machine in different capacities. In addition to the souls who are His eternal loving servants in His abode, God has manifested another category of souls, to which we all belong. These souls are not created by God on planet Earth but manifested by Him at the border region between the material and the spiritual worlds. Well, maybe that’s where the Garden of Eden was… They know that they are His eternal servants. There they are given the choice between serving Him or being indifferent to His service, which means not serving Him. The souls who make the proper use of their free will by accepting their eternal function of loving service to Him are elevated to the spiritual dimension, His blissful abode. There they enjoy, in a spiritual body similar to God’s and His eternal associates’, the unlimited happiness coming from their personal sweet relationship of loving service to Him. Why is God lovable? Because He has all the qualities that attract us to another being to the superlative degree, beginning with the most stunning beauty. That owes Him the epithet “Bhagavan, or in Sanskrit, “He who possesses all the opulence, the greatness” – beauty, knowledge, power, wealth, fame and detachment. He is therefore most attractive, which owes Him His main name – “Krishna,” coming from the root ‘karsan’, to attract, and ‘na’, the most, meaning “The most attractive Being”. Why is the service of Bhagavan Shri Krishna so pleasing? Because, being full of bliss Himself, anyone who comes in contact with Him through loving service, which is 7

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one’s natural eternal function, participates in that bliss. Also, when you are in love with someone, you naturally want to do something for that person and that service gives you joy. And if you love and serve the greatest Being, that loving service gives you the greatest joy.

In God’s unfathomably unconditional love for those souls who neglect His service due to a separatist mentality, want to imitate His position – and misuse their free will by choosing to seek happiness independently from Him – He has created this material world to give them an opportunity to try to do so, along with a reformatory and emancipatory process revealed in the Vedas. Those who refuse to accept their natural function of service to God become automatically attracted by the prospect of separate enjoyment in the material sphere.

They fall from their pristine state of purity and become involved in matter. When we fell into that lower sphere, material energy, which has a tremendous power of illusion on our consciousness – made us forget our identity as eternal souls, as well as our relationship with wonderful God; it covered us with two envelopes, one gross and one subtle, a material body and a mind, and made us identify ourselves with them. Not functioning as souls, which means as loving servants of God, we therefore cannot enjoy the happiness coming from that relationship. Since we as souls have an inherent happy nature like God, of whom we are parts and parcels, we naturally look for happiness; but under the spell of illusion we look for it where it is not – outside of our relationship with God. Under that spell, we constantly try to unite our senses with their respective objects in order to bring some pleasure to our false inner self, the mind. The repeated relishing of the pleasing sensations titillating our senses, due to these activities of catering to them, makes our minds attached to these sensations and ever craving for them like addicts. We then engage in constant contemplation of the sense objects and our minds become their slaves.

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But this world is by its very nature temporary and therefore a place of suffering. Indeed, suffering is due to the time factor, because we, eternal souls, are identifying with what is always undergoing change and are therefore desirous to make a temporary thing last permanently. So material existence – to live in a material body in this world – is fraught with inevitable pain in the form of unwanted things, mostly due to the time factor. This world is comparable to a big sandbox in which the “disobedient children” of God – we, rebellious souls – are sent to play God, just like children are playing with toys which are small replicas of adults’ things like cars, trucks, ships, planes, weapons, tools or dolls, cooking ware, etc. Indeed, as the saying goes, “The difference between men and boys is just the price of the toys.” And we become so attached to this playground, although it is fraught with various miseries, that we mistakenly take it for our home.

In the Vedic tradition, time is regarded as an impersonal feature of God. Those who do not accept their relationship with God as His eternal loving servants cannot see His most enchanting form, nor enjoy His blissful company. To them, He appears in the form of time, which takes away all their “toys,” including their dearest ones, their very body and the body of their relatives, especially their spouse’s, until they finally wake up in one lifetime or another to reality – that they are not God but His servants. We thus take many births without being able to attain more than a few insignificant drops of happiness from our “toys.” Moreover, in search for happiness, we – “conditioned souls” – get involved in all kinds of activities; thereby, we are entangling ourselves in the maze of actions and their reactions – the karmic cycle. Due to our rebellious attitude towards God, we inevitably commit negative or sinful activities, and we suffer as a reaction, sometimes mild suffering and sometimes terrible, according to the severity of our transgressions.

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The Supreme Lord is a single principle without a second. If there were many Gods, this universe would have never been regulated so systematically. As per the various wills of different “Gods,” all the universal rules would have become controversial to each other and definitely destroyed the world. Any sane person will agree that this manifested universe has been created by the will of a single Supreme Personality. But He does not deal directly with this material world. He empowers beings of a higher level of consciousness than us called the demigods to manage the universal affairs, just like a king or president delegates the affairs of the state to different ministers. These great servitors of God are all very powerful and exalted personalities and should be highly respected. The demigod Brahma, the “minister of creation,” directly initiated, enlightened and empowered by God through Vedic knowledge, organized the material energy at the time of creation of the universe and created different types of bodies, which other souls then came to animate.

Here things and events are experienced within time, but its three phases of past, present and future are relative; different beings experience them differently. For instance, longevity-wise, it is said that in the heavenly planets – the heaven or paradise of Christianity and Islam – one day is like six of our months1. The Old Testament of the Bible, for whatever it is worth as far as true knowledge is concerned, says in the same vein that one day of the creator is equal to one thousand human years (Psalms 9:4). The Vedas, however, give the number 8 billion 640 million human years for one day of Brahma. Did everything start with a Big Bang?2 Which enlightened person will believe that something, including time and matter, 1. Their lifetime thus lasts a little over 18000 years. On higher planets, the longevity is even longer.

2. What the scientists call the Big Bang, the existence of which they infer by the observation of cosmic background radiation and its ripples, may be the fire of partial devastation which occurs at the end of each day of Brahma.

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came from nothing; and that a world governed by very precise laws came from an explosion, of which the alleged original conditions are irreconcilable with any presently known laws of physics? I was surprised to see Christian apologists affirming the peculiar belief that God created the universe from nothing through the Big Bang!? God is all-powerful. He could therefore create something from nothing, but that is not what the Vedic revelation teaches.

The deepest structures of the Vedic society rest on its natural division in four classes or varnas. The brahmanas are the intellectual class, the priests of the sacrifice and the recipients of the Vedic Revelation. They are teachers, astrologers, physicians and advisers to the ksatriyas, the royal order, the aristocrats, who are meant to protect their subjects and especially the brahmanas, the spiritual guides of society who guide it in the path of dharma. The vaisyas include the farmers, cattle-raisers and protectors and the merchants. The sudras are the manual workers and servants of all kinds.3 Those four classes or castes are found in every society: intellectuals and priestly men, martially-spirited people, business-minded men, farmers and manual workers. These different classes of men composing society are mentioned in the Vedas as having symbolically come, as everything else, from the divine body of God, the Original Person, or Purusha, an allegory often misunderstood by Western Indologists as meaning that the First Being had been sacrificed and literally cut into pieces!

As all the various parts of the body are indispensable and cooperate for the sake of the individual and by keeping God in the center as the main focus of attention and activities, the members of various classes could live in peaceful harmony. Everyone was supposed to do his duty according to his belonging to one of these divisions in 3. The sudras are not people vanquished, submitted and enslaved as the British claimed with their spurious theory of Aryan invaders of India. We are dealing with the most highly civilized people, not with Judaism, Greece, Rome or Islam.

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the social frame. In ancient Vedic society, the sacrifice which was the main religious activity and therefore the basis of life was possible due to the cooperation of the four classes. The prosperity engendered by their harmonious cooperation was shared by all. Everyone engaged somehow through his work in sacred activity, His divine service. Society that was centered around it was a sacred community.

Thus the social and the religious are indivisible and one cannot alter one without altering the other. When true God consciousness disappears, automatically struggle between classes arises. Classstruggles instigated by socialists and communists have tried to eliminate this natural division but it persists naturally. Communism has based its whole action on this class struggle, however, factually the only successful form of Communism ever seen demonstrated is that which is practiced in religious communities, where everyone has renounced mundane concerns, believes in God and considers Him – and not the State – as the proprietor of everything, and aspires for a spiritual hereafter.

The four classes are connected with a most important Vedic concept, that of the three gunas or modes of material nature. The word ‘guna’ means ‘quality’. Material energy is composed of three forces: goodness (sattva-guna), passion (raja-guna) and ignorance (tamo-guna). These three powers underpin and permeate all the products or manifestations of the material energy. They are like primary colors which are blending and tinting in diverse measures all its products. When the soul comes in contact with matter, he becomes conditioned by these three forces and acts under their spell.

The word ‘guna’ also means ‘rope’, so these are the three strands composing the binding rope of material energy, by which all living beings are said in the Vedas to be conditioned or fettered. The three gunas refer to material products or constituents of matter, but they also refer to the psychic states that they induce. They are always 12

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mixed, and therefore one can find traits and traces of the two other gunas in a person predominated by a particular one among the three.

Those three aspects of material energy found in everyone cannot be destroyed. They have to be balanced and harmonized by a healthy lifestyle and spiritual practices.

The brahmanas are supposed to be in the mode of goodness, sattva. They cultivate that mode and follow practices to develop it further to reach the transcendental level. The ksatriyas – or royal political rulers are traditionally situated in passion, rajas, needed for their particular occupation. The vaisyas – or merchant class, are said to be ordinarily in mixed passion and ignorance, while the sudras are generally in the mode of ignorance, tamas. In the original caste system established by God, although one usually takes birth in one class or another according to these qualities and tendencies, it is not a fixed principle and therefore is not a hereditary division of society as it has arbitrarily become designated as such with the degradation of consciousness brought about with the passage of the millennia, and as found in modern Hinduism. There are famous examples mentioned in the Mahabharata epic, for instance, of persons born in brahmana families but behaving as ksatriyas and of ksatriyas in the role of brahmana sages. The three gunas are described in detail by Shri Krishna in the fourteen and seventeen chapters of the Bhagavad-gita.1 Due to Vedic culture being spiritually-oriented, there is a parallel division of society in four asramas according to one’s stage in life: 1. Goodness (sattva) is characterized by lucidity, discrimination, proper knowledge, wisdom, detachment from material things, purity, cleanliness, peacefulness and happiness. Passion (rajas) is marked by intense endeavor, restlessness, uncontrollable hankering for sensual pleasures, creative activity, distress and pain.

Ignorance (tamas) has for symptoms delusion, lack of proper knowledge, disinterest in spiritual practices, lethargy, laziness, madness, foolishness, depression, sleep, intoxication, degradation and misery. These are the specific psychic aspects and psychological manifestations or effects of the gunas on consciousness.

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celibate life dedicated to studies of the Vedas and the cultivation of non-attachment; married life during which one can exercise one’s creativity and enjoy the world in a befitting way; then retirement from all social activities to dedicate to austerity and purge oneself from attachment in order to cultivate again the most important thing – one’s spiritual development; and finally complete renunciation and absorption in God consciousness.

Not much importance is given to history in Vedic culture.

Chronology is not stressed. The Indian vision rests on something other than dates on a historical calendar. We have seen that it has a cyclic conception of time, with huge such cycles. There is no official “political” history. Politics from the Vedic point of view is not meant to create history but to allow everyone to live a peaceful life dedicated to a gradual emancipation of bondage to matter. Vedic philosophy grants little value to any type of knowledge if it doesn’t help one in his attempt to cross over the ocean of repeated births and deaths.

What is important is to maintain a perennial harmonious order, rita, the cosmic order, by the accomplishment of dharma, one’s prescribed duties according to varna and asrama. The Indian collective memory is duly preserved and codified by the brahmana sages in the Vedic lore.

The spiritual part of Vedic knowledge aims at enabling man to achieve his highest potential, self-realization and emancipation from the bondage of matter; this is considered, as mentioned in the introduction, the ultimate goal and divinely-infused meaning of human life. To assimilate its revelation, one must approach it according to the method stipulated in the Vedic tradition itself – which is to receive it from a genuine spiritual master – and apply it under his guidance. Indeed, in all departments of knowledge we learn from a teacher, so why should it be different in the subtlest 14

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domain, spirituality, which deals with consciousness and Superconsciousness? According to the Vedic tradition – transcendental knowledge was transmitted orally in Sanskrit from masters to disciples in unbroken lines for the first three ages. An academic approach – the style favored in the West and the way all western scholars follow – is not appropriate and will give only incomplete and deficient knowledge. Without initiation – which means ‘to begin on a path’ – by a genuine spiritual guide, one remains on the theoretical level and cannot acquire real knowledge nor connect with the Absolute, especially with the personal aspect of the Absolute.

A spiritual master’s credentials are that he is himself a disciple of a master belonging to one of these lines, is self-realized and therefore free from all attachment to material things. In addition, he is scrupulously faithful in his practice and transmission of the knowledge he has received.

At first, when they started to study some of the sacred literature belonging to what they labeled “Brahmanism” or “Hinduism”, “several of the scholarly inclined British colonizers began to intuit that perhaps they had stumbled upon the primeval religion, predating anything from the Middle East…But the breezes of profound appreciation of the Vedas that swept the European continent did not last. After all, the British Crown had serious business to tend in India and trendy intellectual fascination was not to interfere…The enthrallment did not last, in the downpour of realpolitik. The British goal, stated and unstated, was to eradicate any notions that India had knowledge in remote antiquity, dismissing as empty boasting any notions that India had a glorious past, refuting its religious systems by showing their followers that their religious authorities were worthless, and proceeding with anti-heathen zeal in the conversion of the idolater natives of India to the Christian religion.”1 1. Devamrita Swami, Searching for Vedic India, BBT, 2002

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In other words, in order to maintain control over, and keep exploiting India, the crown jewel and most profitable part of their empire, the British envisioned to manipulate her religion. They hired western scholars like Max Muller to translate and then falsify the Vedic scriptures, and then teach back that falsified version to the Indians through the education system that they had completely overtaken and controlled. Their intent was deriding the original ancient culture, making it look like a barbaric ungodly bunch of superstitions, and its religious authorities as incompetent and exploitative, in order to weaken it. There was a secret plan to implant Christianity, convert India to it and thus solidify the British rule. That plan was revealed in correspondence from Max Muller to his relatives. The idea promoted by the British Christians in India, especially in the elite schools which were all run by them, was that Hinduism was a deeply flawed religion due to the concept of karma, which implies a predetermined destiny.

The way to demonize Hinduism was to harp on its philosophy being the reason why traditional Hindu society was oppressive – which in some ways it had become due to the caste system1 having degraded and become hereditary, which is indeed detestable. They invented a fake history (the Aryan invasion theory) which had the Brahmins not only being domineering exploiters, but also foreign invaders who brought their foreign Vedic religion into India after conquering and enslaving the native population. The British were trying to use a divide-and-conquer strategy by making the Brahmins the root cause of all of India’s problems. They believed that if they could convince the people that the concept of predestination and karma was created by foreign invader Brahmins in order to keep the people docile and under their control, it would be the key to their loss of faith in Hinduism and they could subsequently convert them to Christianity.

They thought they could avoid revolt if the people were on their side 1. Krishna explains to prince Arjuna that he has created the caste system not on the basis of birth but according to natural propensities and actions. (Bgita 4.13) 16

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by being adherents to the same faith. It was planned at the highest level of British power and the East India Company, in collusion with the Church of England. That was the monstrous enterprise they were planning: the deliberate falsification of a whole religious tradition, the overpowering and suppression of the oldest culture.

Indologist Sir Monier-Williams stated unabashedly that ominous shameful purpose, with typical envious intolerance, “Down with the Vedas, up with the Cross! When the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahmanism are encircled, undermined, and finally stormed by the soldiers of the cross, the victory of Christianity must be single and complete.”2 The Spanish and Portuguese Christian conquerors of Central and South America and the other Christian European conquerors of Africa, Australia, etc. had the same lack of scruples towards the native people. But instead of destroying entire storehouses of knowledge by burning all ancient scrolls, like the Spanish conquistadors did in Latin America and the Christians had done after they obtained political power in Rome, the British policy for India was: “Discrediting is the better part of valor.” Westerners are generally racists. But it is a special kind of racism, something like “religious racism”. They feel that, being Christians, they belong to the only true religion, and that all others are “pagans”, which automatically means ‘not as good, inferior’. It seems that the British had a mixed motivation: to keep on milking the “Indian cow” and, because of their conviction as Christians that all these unbaptized pagans were destined for hell, save them from themselves. Their wicked plan looks Machiavellian from the outside, from a non-Christian perspective, but laudable from a Christian one: “Save those hell-bound idolaters.” Thus gripped by their white-man complex of superiority, coupled with better-than-thou Christian fanaticism, British scholars could not believe nor tolerate that India – a country they had conquered and 2. Modern India and the Indians, 3rd edition. 1879, p.261 17

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deemed as backward if not outright savage – could have produced such amazing literature so long ago; so they arbitrarily ascribed to it a much more recent dating than the Vedic authorities do. They also speculatively attributed the authorship of the Vedic literature to various authors writing at vastly separated periods of history.

The modern scholars in general deem the Vedas to be mythological and ascribe themselves the “duty” to demythologize them. But their attempt to reconstruct their origin was downright unscientific and completely hypothetical. As a matter of fact, their whole picture of Vedic history is merely conjectural. They did not even hesitate to ludicrously accuse the Indian brahmanas to have plagiarized the Bible.

Anyone who knows the Vedic concept of pure and impure and the Indian brahmanas’ scrupulous rules of purity1, which may sometimes seem to the Westerners to be bordering on obsession, can only laugh at such an idea. Those brahmanas, who already possessed the highest and most ancient knowledge and were cultivating wisdom and virtue, would never even in dreams think of altering their sacred texts; especially by incorporating something from a book coming from cow-eaters who they consider to be untouchable barbarians.

And that very book, being deemed to be a compilation of very basic teachings originally coming from the Vedas but distorted through time and destined for somewhat uplifting the said barbarians. The Vedic texts contain prophecies about the coming of Mahatma (the great soul) Jesus,2 thousands of years before he was born! And about Buddha3and Muhammad4too. If someone has plagiarized the other one, it must be the younger faith. Indeed, John 1:1 sounds like the 1. Indians are concerned with purity, especially the brahmanas who are dealing with the Sacred: holy books and the puja or worship and offerings of food in the temples or in their home shrine, which has very high standards of cleanliness and purity, a tradition that we find also in the Bible, inherited from the Vedas, about the service of the Ark of Covenant.

2. Maha-bhavisya Purana 3. Bhagavata Purana, I, 3, 24 4. Bhavisya Purana and Atharva Veda 20,127,1-3

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ancient Rig Veda: “In the beginning there was the Word… and the Word was God.” Another British Indologist – John Bentley – wrote in 1823, “If we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, then the Mosaic account – the very foundation of our religion – is all fable or a fiction.”

That gentleman did not know how right he was! But why should the followers of Vedic culture allow Christian colonialists with a big personal agenda, or their modern followers, to tell them and the world what is the age of their sacred scriptures and what is inside?

Do they require someone foreign to their tradition to corroborate their facts and figures? However, ideas inherited from the forefathers are not easy to become free from, and in the Western mind academic knowledge of India is still largely the product of colonialism and its effects, so the massive errors of the colonial scholars still linger. The latter have dismissed as mythological the legacy of the most highly advanced “mother” civilization. What they consider non-historical fables, folklore, ancient fantasies, symbolic and mythic extravaganza are actually journals of very ancient history. If they want to call it a myth, then it is the primordial “myth” underlying all the world’s mythologies!

“Every state relies on a mythology that defines its special character and mission. The word ‘myth’ has lost its force in modern times and tends to mean something that is not true, that never happened. But in the pre-modern world mythology expressed a timeless rather than an historical reality and provided a blue-print for action in the present…a timeless truth underlying a people’s daily life…A myth is always about now…Mythology is not wholly about the heavenly realm but essentially about the here and now.”5 The Vedic sacred literature addresses all men, whatever their level of consciousness. It presents a path of gradual spiritual development, 5. Fields of blood 19

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offering various practices with different levels of commitment to God, a sort of pluralism corresponding to generic stages of spiritual evolution. It goes from a materialistic approach of Divinity – which is the usual field of religion, what most people are first eligible for – to an aspiration for liberation from the fetters of material existence, culminating in the purest spirituality, bhakti – selfless divine love.

The latter is stressed as the pinnacle of human achievements and the natural sanatana-dharma, “eternal religion or function of the soul”. Men’s various levels of consciousness account for those three different approaches or paths within the same tradition. People are strongly encouraged, however, to move on throughout this lifetime from one path to another in a dynamic manner. In the Bhagavad-gita, one of the fundamental Vedic texts, for instance, these various paths and their subdivisions and variations are presented and analyzed, but the last instruction is to absorb one’s mind in God and surrender to Him in love.

In the Vedic context, these three ways to relate to God are easily distinguished, but we can find them woven through all major world religions, beyond their specific historical and confessional aspects.

They may be seen as three steps on the same path, progressively, in a sort of thesis, antithesis and synthesis dynamics, karma, jnana and bhakti: self-motivated action, cultivation of philosophical knowledge and speculation,1and active devotion, respectively. Above power (action, karma) is knowledge (jnana) and above knowledge is love (bhakti).

Besides those three paths, there is also the school of mystic yoga.

The sage Patanjali presented thousands of years ago a compilation of earlier teachings about yoga that focused on the realization of the 1. Jnana in the sense of speculative philosophical knowledge is a parent of the gnosis of the Gnostics.

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purusha, the term favored by the yoga school to refer to the soul.

In early texts, yoga referred to a form of rigorous discipline and concentration for attaining the direct perception of the soul and gaining liberation. The Yoga tradition shares with the Sankhya school – a branch somewhat similar to jnana – the same dualistic metaphysics which conceives reality as containing two distinct principles: purusha, the innermost conscious self, and prakriti, the material world with all its variegatedness within which the purusha is embedded. The two schools have the common goal of liberating the purusha, but their methods differ. One aims at salvation through meditation and the other one aims at it by the cultivation of knowledge. Yoga focuses on the nature of mind and consciousness and on the techniques of concentration in order to isolate the purusha and extricate him from matter. Sankhya occupies itself with the path of reasoning to attain liberation, specifically concerning the analysis of the manifold ingredients of prakriti from which the purusha is to be extricated. Yoga seeks the vision of the purusha through practice and mind control, and Sankhya through knowledge and the intellect. Some schools of yoga have later adopted the monistic goal of unity of the individual purusha with the impersonal aspect of the Absolute called Brahman.

The path of karma, action, or karma-kanda, is this-worldly; it consists in the performance of ritualistic sacrifices in order to obtain enjoyment of material facilities in this birth, then elevation to the heavenly planets for prolonged enjoyment of a much higher standard in the next birth. We can see that tendency in all religions: to follow some sacrificial principles with the aim of obtaining facilities to lead a comfortable material life now – like the trendy “abundance Gospel” – and then going to “heaven.” It is a utilitarian approach of God, who is more or less seen and confined in the role of an order-supplier. For one who is on the preliminary level of religious consciousness, this path of pious enjoyment is a step forward from gross, animal-like Godless materialism.

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The next step, the path of jnana, knowledge, or jnana-kanda, by contrast is other-worldly. This trend is also found in various religions under the form of the theology of negation, or via negativa. It is considered better than the path of karma, which from this standpoint is considered undesirable. It is usually adopted after having enjoyed the world according to the latter and becoming dissatisfied. In it, the temporary, illusory nature of this world is stressed. This path aims at liberation from the cycle of repeated births and deaths brought about by karma. It is based on renunciation of material desires and activities, and cultivation of philosophical knowledge. It is quite often a monistic approach with an idea of self-deification. Thus, if one does not go further, it unfortunately tends to strongly check or stifle the natural spiritual evolution of the soul. For a few extraordinary, rare persons who have enough will to practice severe asceticism, and do this for many births, this path may culminate in the dissolution of one’s individual identity through merging into an undifferentiated Spirit called Brahman, – the impersonal aspect of God. In India what to speak of the West, it remains an ego-flattering theory for most people, for they get caught in ego trips in the name of spirituality.

Bhakti, the way of divine love, which belongs to the upper part of the higher section of the Vedic teachings, upasana-kanda, goes beyond these two paths because it is in no way artificial: devotional love is itself the natural and eternal movement of the soul in relation to his Lord, as previously mentioned, whereas karma and jnana are accessory functions. Bhakti synthesizes features of both. It does not reject action but gives up its selfish aim and offers it to God. It does not see the world as a place to enjoy, neither does it reject it as false, but uses its contents in loving service to God. To be considered pure, that devotional approach should be unmotivated by personal gain. Indeed, pure devotional service to God is the most refined manifestation of religious sentiment; it is its ultimate expression and 22

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therefore culminates in the most complete form of self-realization.

Examining the various religious traditions found in this world through this threefold division of karma, jnana and bhakti allows division of different practitioners not according to the particular historical faith they adhere to – which can give rise to sectarianism, this great enemy of spiritual progress – but according to the various stages of spiritual development.

God’s Various Aspects For the Absolute to be unlimited and perfectly complete, it must logically have both form and formlessness. Indeed, the Vedas describe the Absolute Truth, God, as both personal and impersonal, but they state that the personal aspect is superior to the impersonal one. Personalism is at the source, it is more inclusive. It can “do the job” of the impersonal but also much more. In fact, impersonalism has personalism at its basis. Beyond His impersonal incorporeal one, the impersonal Brahman or brahmajyoti, God has two other aspects.

He is immanent and omnipresent as the Supersoul, His Paramatma expansion (the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit) within each atom as well as in the heart of every living entity, whom He accompanies and guides internally. Throughout the Upanisads which describe Paramatma, the individual soul and the Supersoul always retain their individual identity. The oneness that is mentioned is only a oneness of interest, when the individual soul aligns himself with God as Paramatma in bhakti-yoga. God has a third aspect, the highest one; a personal, “corporeal” aspect as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the Supreme Brahman, Bhagavan Shri Krishna, the All-Attractive One. “Bhagavan is the theistic version of the Absolute Truth as the Supreme Person possessed of inconceivable attributes.”1

1. Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, Readings in Vedic literature. BBT. 1977. LA, Ca. 23

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God has no limitations. His form is limitless and does not restrict His divinity. His form, person and mode of existence are beyond ours but not beyond form, personhood and existence altogether.

These three aspects of God are respectively aimed at and realized by different classes of spiritualists through the Vedic paths of yoga (jnana-yoga, astanga-yoga or raja-yoga and bhakti-yoga).

Christians believe in the “Holy Trinity”. The three aspects of God cited above – Bhagavan, Paramatma and Brahman - are a kind of Trinity. The personal God is not limited to one form. While remaining single, He assumes various aspects by expanding Himself.

The Vedas speak of the first “Holy Duality”– God, Shri Krishna, and His transcendental personified internal energy, Shri Radha; then a second “Holy Duality”, Shri Krishna and His first expansion, Shri Balarama; then a first “Holy Four”, the first caturvyuha or quadruple expansion of Shri Krishna as Vasudeva, Sankarsana, Pradyumna and Aniruddha; then another quadruple expansion, the second caturvyuha; then another quadruple one – Shri Krishna and His three Vishnu expansions. There is a correspondence between two members of the Christian “Holy Trinity” and a third “Holy Duality” referring to God Himself and His manifestation as Paramatma (the Holy Ghost) in everyone’s heart. The members of the three Semitic religions do not have any knowledge, however, about those transcendental aspects of the Godhead, except for the last one, the Trinity, that the Jews and especially the Muslims do not even accept because they rightfully think that adding the person of Jesus in it compromises the unicity of God. Shri Krishna, God, exists eternally in the spiritual world, where He spends His eternal time enjoying sweet relationships of love with His eternal associates, as mentioned above. As also mentioned earlier, He does not deal directly with the material world. For the 24

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work of creation, He expands Himself in three Vishnu forms.1He also mercifully descends regularly in the material world in the form of His avatars, and sometimes even descends personally as He did around 5250 years ago. At that time, He remained on earth for about one hundred twenty-five years (3228 to 3102 BC), during which He manifested amazing activities (lila –, or pastimes) and taught the Bhagavad-gita in 3139 BC. He also regularly sends His messengers to reform religion when it deviates and becomes materialistic.

They become known as prophets or sons of God, one of the most famous being Mahatma Jesus. God’s last personal appearance on our planet was 534 years ago in Bengal in the guise of a great saint – Shri Chaitanya, to teach by His own example how to put into practice the teachings of the same Bhagavad-gita in our era. He created a whole devotional Renaissance in India. He stressed the timeless individual chanting of God’s names in the form of mantras on meditation rosary beads, and He inaugurated the joyful singing of these names in a group accompanied with musical instruments, which is called kirtan. This tradition was introduced in the West in the mid-60s and the chanting of the Hare Krishna maha-mantra 2is becoming more and more familiar.

Buddha and Shankara, Atheism in the Guise of Spirituality In Nepal, around 500 BC, Siddharta Gautama or Sakyamuni, better known as Buddha, rightfully observed, as the Vedas teach, that suffering is inherent to this world, that it is due to desire being confronted to the impermanence of all material phenomena, and that desire is coming from ignorance. His intellectual speculation, 1. He manifests the total material Universe as one of these expansions, named MahaVishnu, then enters into each of one the many universes composing that big Universe as Garbodakasayi Vishnu, then maintains it as Ksirodakasayi Vishnu 2. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare.

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however, made him come to a peculiar conclusion. He neglected the Vedas, rejecting their authority, and thought that matter itself is an illusion. Not only matter, he taught that in fact nothing exists, neither God, neither the world, nor everything we see in it; that our perception of it, of anything or anyone, is due to ignorance. He claimed that the self itself does not exist, that everything is just a cluster or aggregate of changing physical and mental processes, and that the very sense of existing as an individual is also an illusion!

He thus proposed a drastic method of negating everything, and, through a path of severe asceticism, of renouncing everything, try to become free from the chain of ignorance, desire and suffering, and merge into nothingness or the Void. He said that by attaining nirvana or the “cessation of illusory existence”, one would be free from ignorance, desire and suffering, and attain a neutral state of a happy nature. Buddha borrowed the word ‘dharma’ from the Vedas and called his path the “path of dharma”. That is not, however, the Vedic conception of dharma. The Vedas do not negate the reality of this world, nor of the self, what to speak of God’s existence. Due to the overdose of materialism one is subjected to and the unattractiveness of the meagre religious solutions offered, this atheistic philosophy is being popularized in the West among some people, having been rendered desperate and hopeless for a meaningful life, as well as prone to nihilism.

In the 8th century CE, Shankara, a powerful Indian brahmana philosopher, taught something quite similar to Buddha – that there is no God, no world, no living beings, no individual self – but not with the same totally nihilistic conclusion. Giving a monistic twist to the Vedic teachings, he claimed that there is ultimately not a void but a spiritual impersonal substance, Brahman, which is the only reality, and that we are one with that reality. He proposed that through severe renunciation, a process similar to Buddha’s, one could free oneself 26

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from illusion, realize that one is not an individual being but rather is non-different from that unique reality, Brahman, merge into it and experience real happiness. He purged India from Buddhism and reestablished the authority of the Vedas. Once the Vedic authority was reestablished, other great sages could popularize again on that authority the path of bhakti that Buddhism had covered and Shankara left untouched. Shankara’s atheistic philosophy has also unfortunately become familiar in the spiritually-bankrupt West in the garb of “Eastern wisdom”. “It’s all one”, “We’re all God.” These ideas appeal to those who crave a Godless form of spirituality and pervade the New Age movement. People dream about becoming one with God but overlook the complete detachment of anything material required by this monistic path; its various Indian teachers usually make sure to skip that aspect in order to gather followers, prestige, monies and often access to ladies that they could not have that easily in India.

“This philosophy, along with the pseudo-scientific theory of evolution, is responsible for the gradual depersonalization of attitudes in human society and its attendant deterioration.”1

Sanatana Dharma On the contrary, the Vedas do not negate the eternal existence of an individual self. They speak, as mentioned earlier, about sanatanadharma, “the eternal function of the self.” Each thing we know has a particular function, doesn’t it? If we make abstraction of unnatural reality-denying philosophies like Buddhism and Monism, we all know that we exist as individual selves. So what is the permanent activity of the individual self or soul which corresponds to his essential nature? The Vedas have taught from time immemorial that, yes, this world is a place of suffering, itself born from desire and ignorance; however, matter is not illusory but merely temporary. The 1. Swami B.S. Tridandi, Seeking the Essence, Associated Publishing Co. New Delhi 1990 27

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sense of being an individual self is also not an illusion; the illusion consists of identifying oneself with a false temporary self: the body and mind apparatus that we have in this particular birth. The real self, or soul, is an eternal individual part and parcel of the wonderful, all-attractive, all-loving, superior Being known as God, Shri Krishna, so to render loving service to Him is logically the innate, natural and eternal function, or dharma, of everyone. By learning to dedicate everything to the Supreme Person, including ourselves, with a devotional feeling, we can become free from illusion and realize that we are eternal individual souls, connected to Him by an eternal link of love, and eventually enjoy eternal, unlimited happiness. Thus, devotional service to God – bhakti in Sanskrit – is not a conviction or faith in some dogma but rather the eternal “religion of the soul”.

We can observe that everyone is constantly engaged in some kind of service: we serve our mind and senses, our family members, our bosses, customers, patients, country, etc. Service is the basis of all relationships, whether that service is done out of a sense of obligation, duty or affection. All beings are also observed to have the propensity to love someone. We cannot live without some form of love, and it is usually a type of love which pushes us to serve. At least, that is the type of service we prefer. And since we love ourselves more than anyone else, we therefore naturally tend to serve ourselves first of all, don’t we? And love, which is the greatest motivation to serve, is the source of happiness, which is our primary, instinctive concern.

Happiness is everyone’s goal, isn’t it? So the impetus for serving is actually the pleasure one derives from it. But if we analyze the nature of this world, we can see that everything is subject to time; that change is the inherent nature of all material phenomena, whether physical or psychic, which means that nothing material can give us a permanent satisfaction. Material pleasure and happiness born from even the most ideal relationship of love do not last. Death separates 28

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us sooner or later from our loved ones. However, the pleasure and happiness derived from serving God in a relationship of love is not subjected to the same law since it is eternal.

We already have a relationship with God. It is not something that we have to invent and build. We simply have neglected and forgotten it and our natural propensity to love and serve Him is now covered over, in a dormant condition, as we have reposed it on objects of this world. Bhakti, or devotional service to God, is the most natural type of activity. It is also the most pleasing type, and the pleasure it gives grows deeper and deeper in proportion to one’s reawakening and developing that natural propensity. Once established on the platform of love of God, one relishes boundless happiness. We usually experience only drops of flickering happiness in this world, but the Vedic texts advise us not to content ourselves with those.

They direct us to a whole ocean of happiness, bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, literally “the ocean of immortal blissful nectar born from one’s relationship of loving service to God.” The essential teaching of all the Vedic scriptures is therefore to serve the wonderful being called Sri Krishna. From the point of view of this pre-modern conception of religion, other religious activity other than this allabsorbing function, this multiform all-encompassing art of living which is aiming at the total re-sacralisation of one’s life, is considered superficial, temporary and related to the non-self, or the body-mind complex. The application of the universal principle of bhakti does not depend in any way upon allegiance to a particular faith, so one does not need to convert to any particular one to practice bhakti; it is religion corresponding to the very nature of the self, not religion as a confession; nor does one need to renounce one’s faith; rather, it will bring it to the higher level that faith is meant to be brought to: spirituality, which ultimately means cultivating a personal unselfish relationship of loving service with God; that is bhakti.

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Hinduism The Vedic revelation of transcendental knowledge by God was first transmitted from Him to Brahma, as we saw, and Brahma in turn transmitted it to all the sages and demigods, especially the leaders of each planet, down to ours. It should be noted that, although Vedic culture was thus imported from the higher planets to our earth and appeared in India, the Vedic texts are not Hindu scriptures, because that word ‘Hindu’ actually applies to a country and is like saying that my religion is French. It is the other way around: the main scriptures of Hinduism are the ancient Vedic texts. This word ‘Hindu’ is relatively recent and can be traced back not earlier than the 15th century. When the Mohammedans attacking India arrived upon the Sindhu River now flowing through Pakistan, they started to call the people living on her banks and beyond the “Hindus.” Later, when they conquered India, they distinguished themselves from them by dress. When the British in their turn overpowered the Muslim rulers, they kept that obvious distinction between Muslims and so-called Hindus. But there is no reference whatsoever to anything “Hindu” in the Vedic scriptures, nor is the word found in any Sanskrit dictionary.

The Vedic texts are dispensing a spiritual knowledge transcending all national, ethnic and religious identities, including the one called Hinduism, but most people do not know about Vedic culture.

They have only heard of Hinduism, which a big misnomer. It can be confusing for outsiders as it is not a precise spiritual tradition with a founder, a pyramidal hierarchical structure, but actually a decentralized loosely-knit collection of various theologies and philosophical systems, some very ancient and some more recent, and has therefore a great variety of manifestations. There is no Hindu Church nor Pope, so those who follow this culture have the tradition as guide, taught to them by their individual personal spiritual guides or gurus.

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The original culture of India is not Hinduism. What is called Hinduism is actually a descendent of Vedic culture, a distorted and impoverished form of various aspects of that culture mixed with many non-Vedic elements. It is a hodge-podge. For instance, the non-dual Advaita-vada conception of Shankara which I mentioned earlier, according to which the individual soul (or atman) is one with the Absolute (or Brahman) is also not Vedic. “To be considered Vedic, a text must strictly conform to the Vedic doctrines, maintaining the same purpose than the original Vedic literature, and, if expanding upon their conclusions, not changing their meaning.”1 This is not the case in Shankara’s so-called Vedic writings. This misinterpretation is very prominent in today’s Hinduism, so much so that due to lack of knowledge countless people, especially in the West, erroneously think that this monistic approach of the Divine is the original traditional wisdom of India. It appears universal due to its abstractions and nontheistic orientation and has even been dubbed the “perennial philosophy” by Western atheist philosophers. Secondly, the Hindu pantheist view of an impersonal Deity that literally is everything and is not different from the universe, is not what the Vedas teach.

Thirdly, the hereditary caste system is a gross distortion of the original, natural division of society in classes according to natural propensities and activities. It has been officially abolished since India won his independence from the British crown in 1947, but it still observed in practice. The Indians are very attached to their traditional system. To belong to a caste ensures that wherever you go you will be welcomed and helped by your fellow caste members. A lot has been written, usually in sensational language, about the outcastes.

It is a system we decry. But upon close analysis it is found in some form or another in every society. From the Vedic point of view, since human life is seen as destined to bring about liberation from 1. Readings in Vedic literature 31

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the bondage of matter, human society is systematically organized accordingly. People are supposed to follow the principles of dharma.

But there are some people, under the mode of ignorance, tamo-guna, who do not want or cannot follow proper rules of behavior. They will do anything they like: get intoxicated, eat meat unrestrictedly, not follow any rules concerning sexuality, behave indecently, gamble, cheat, steal, etc. For them not to disturb those who are peacefully trying to prosecute the path of dharma, those people who are usually much lower in consciousness than the sudras, deeply in ignorance, are required to live outside of the village or city, in the forest or next to it, among themselves. They form their own villages. Gradually it has become a hereditary system.

Fourthly, the worship of the various demigods which are all considered to be more or less on the same level as God, is also nonVedic but it has become a prominent feature of Hinduism. Since the sacred texts mention the existence of those demigods, or “minor deities,� and they are profusely worshipped in modern Hinduism (mainly Shiva, goddess Durga/Kali, their sons Ganesh and Skanda, and goddess Sarasvati), people understandably think that the Vedas teach polytheism. However, the Vedic spiritual tradition is not synonymous with Hindu religion. It is not limited to it. Studying its history will reveal that it actually means human culture and as such is our common legacy. A limited vision of the religious history of the world presents Judaism as the earliest culture to adopt monotheism.

Little do people know that the Vedas have been teaching monotheism and loving devotion to one unique supreme Being for countless millions of years. Although it has the monist philosophy of Advaitavada and demigod worship as competitors, the main religious and spiritual current in India is still from far what it has always been: The Vedic devotional worship of the Supreme Lord, Shri Krishna, or of His avatars like Shri Vishnu and especially Shri Rama, the hero of the 32

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wonderful Ramayana epic. A popular Indian saying is: “In this world, there are two most beautiful names, one is Krishna and the other is Rama.”

The Demigods The demigods are God’s ministers as mentioned earlier. They are the “gods” and “goddesses” who were worshipped in previous times in different places under various names. Their names are still present in our culture: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are respectively the days of the Norse gods Odin, Thor and Freya, the goddess of beauty, love, marriage and fertility. The demigods are viewed in the modern West as “personifications of natural forces,” but they are not fictitious beings. They are called the gods (Ex. 15:11; 18:11) or the “sons of God” in the Bible. Genesis 6 mentions that some of them were attracted by beautiful human women who conceived children by them named the “Nephilim,” called giants in Numbers (13:33).

The demigods are what the Jews, forgetting their own polytheistic past, call “false gods” or “pagan gods,” a conception shared by the Christians. What is called ‘paganism’ is usually the remnants of the most ancient Vedic culture which, when it declined – became gradually reduced outside of India – and partly in India, too – to the worship of these demigods divorced from that of their master, the one Supreme Lord. In addition to the authentic Vedic demigods, unauthorized man-made gods gradually began to be worshiped in the Middle-East. Confusion was created between the two categories; all were finally rejected and their worship labeled as idol worship.

(Jdg. 3:6; 5:8; Deut. 12:31; 32:17; 2 Kg.17:29; Jer.7:9).

Idol Worship Idol worship or idolatry means to worship a concocted, unauthorized image of God born from the worshiper’s imagination.

An idol is just a statue representing God with an invented form. It is

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worshipped by materialists for material purposes. But Vedic culture recommends the worship of authorized images of God, through which He kindly accepts service from man and man can more easily develop devotion to Him. They are sculpted according to the descriptions given in the sacred scriptures. It is highly regulated, with very strict rules of purity and cleanliness as I mentioned. We cannot perceive spiritual forms with our present material imperfect senses.

All that we can see is stone, metal or wood. Thus we cannot see God in His spiritual form. Therefore, out of kindness, He appears before us in such a form that we can see. He becomes the Deity.

These forms are called arca-avatara, the incarnation of God as a Deity. If you concentrate your attention on that statue and offer your devotion there, you will see that there will be a response, a reciprocation on the part of that statue or so-called idol. God is everywhere; that is accepted by all religions. So He is also in that statue. How can one say that He is not in His statue? If you put your letter inside a post box authorized by the Post Office, it will go to the destination because it is authorized. Similarly, the Deity is an authorized statue form of God established in a temple. In India, they still have this understanding and this faith and they worship the Deities in countless temples. Unfortunately, the worship of any form of God, whether concocted or genuine, has gradually become seen indifferently as idolatry in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Muslims followed suite. This is ironic since they are much younger traditions which admittedly contain no knowledge about God’s form. It is due to a gross misinterpretation of what the Bible actually prohibits. Yahweh said in Exodus, “You shall not have other gods before me. You shall not make any carved image of any likeness of anything that is in the sky, on the earth or in the water.

You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them, for I, your deity, am a jealous god” (20:3-5).

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We will see in chapter four that centuries prior to become elevated by the Hebrews to the position of supreme and only god, Yahweh was originally one god/demigod out of a large pantheon of gods/ demigods and that he had inherited the people of Israel from his father, the chief god/demigod, El or Elyon. In this passage of Exodus, he was simply expressing his desire that his people do not worship any other demigod than him and not carve and worship idols representing birds, animals or aquatic creatures as did the neighboring nations, especially the Egyptians. There is no injunction here whatsoever against carving and worshipping a form of God. At best it can be stretched to mean not to make a deity of a demigod “in the likeness of anything that is in the sky”- but God is beyond the sky. He is in the spiritual world. So this prohibition has nothing to do with Him. The worship of the biblical Ark of Covenant containing or symbolizing the presence of Yahweh in the Bible is a distorted example of the Vedic way of worship. If worshiping any form of God even authorized is considered idolatry, then the worship of that Ark was not less idolatrous, especially that it had two carved angels, which could be argued are “in the likeness of something that is in the sky”. The worship of the Muslim Kaaba and of its black stone is also not less idolatrous. God is everywhere. He can do anything. If He can appear in a burning bush or a dove, He can certainly appear in stone, wood, metal or paint. Why limit Him? One can remark how spiritually poor is a religion which, although it rightfully conceives that its god is one, thinks that he is so limited that he can only be living in one unique temple, and that he is pleased by animal sacrifice.

Well, it is certainly a progress in comparison with human sacrifices they previously practiced…

Yes, sacrificing and offering to God is the basic principle of Vedic culture, but the Jewish custom of “purifying” everything with the blood of animals constantly offered in sacrifice to the Ark was 35

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a gory thing. It must have also been a very smelly affair in a hot country with the blood and the entrails of the poor innocent animals being sacrificed. How can one think, except if he is completely under the influence of ignorance, that blood can purify anything? Sacred formulas or purified water purify, not blood. This animal sacrifice is reminding of the lowest type of worship in Vedic culture, the sacrificing of goats to goddess Kali by those who think they cannot live without meat-eating. Kali worship is actually higher because one is only allowed to offer her a goat once a month, to curb down one’s sinful meat-eating propensity. Moreover, one has to carry the goat outside of one’s village and kill it in the forest on a moonless night, whispering in its ear a mantra which means, “In this life I am killing you to eat you; you may do the same to me in our next life.” The idea is that the person is following an authorized process which gradually elevates his consciousness. He becomes more conscious of the twin laws of karma and transmigration, until it finally dawns on him that he is risking to lose the rare human form and come back as an animal just to indulge in his sinful desire to eat some piece of cadaver.

Later on, it was misconceived by the Semitic people that the acceptance of the existence of the demigods and any power attributed to them was a limitation of God’s own power and authority. However, respect, worship and sacrifice offered to them are in reality completely compatible with the one Supreme God if they are understood properly, which means not as independent deities rivaling God but rather functioning as His assistants. Such is the case in the Vedic culture. For people not ready to surrender to God, to sacrifice to demigods helps them developing faith in the principle of sacrifice, in its efficiency, in the sacred scriptures and the sages, and thus gradually elevates one’s consciousness. It is strange that those who claim to be monotheists can believe in Satan and recognize angels as powerful celestial beings but not the demigods 36

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which are actually none other than what the beings called angels are!? For instance, in Vedic culture we find the demigod Yamaraja, the minister of death; in Judaism they have an angel of death called Samael, in Christianity, he is called Apollyon (Rev.9:11), and the Koran also mentions an angel of death (32:11; 47:27).

But be reassured, the Vedas do not say that you go to hell if you do not believe their teachings.

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Chapter 2

About ‘God’ and ‘Religion’

I

n the title of this book, two words pregnant with deep meaning – ‘God’ and ‘religion’ – are considered especially annoying by the Western so-called intellectual elite. And I do not think that it is because the only “gods” people know in the West are the familiar monster of the Old Testament, Yahweh, the seemingly irrational Jesus from whom they borrowed the ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity, or the distant but similarly monstrous Allah they have heard about through his followers justifying their acts of barbarism by his alleged aggressive pronouncements in the Koran. In reality, the liberal pluralistic secularists of the postmodern relativistic culture challenge the idea of absolute truth. However, it should be noted that the hidden, maybe unconscious motive behind atheism is the sinful desire to occupy the place of God oneself!

The skeptics’ arguments that there is no absolute truth and that all truths are relative can simply be turned back on their heads: “Is that statement an absolute truth?”, “Is that a relative truth?”1 Nihilist relativism is actually the other side of the coin of absolutism. They 1. Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I don’t have enough faith to become an atheist, Ch.1 Crossway books, 2004 39

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make the preposterous claim that they are thinking with a mind fully freed from any dogma. What about their own dogma of materialistic relativism? Often, there is behind their arguments a reluctance to be bound by some moral standards. Indeed, relativism, the last avatar of atheism, is gnawing at man’s innate moral consciousness. The human form is said to have been made in God’s resemblance and, if one follows a genuine spiritual process, the higher consciousness available in this particular species of life allows one to realize one’s essential nature as being not a body-mind complex but a spiritual entity or soul; therefore, human life is inherently sacred; however, it is being increasingly desacralized nowadays in the permissive aphrodisiac society1 fostered by relativism. It is preposterous that the relativists relativize the idea of truth because everyone including them is preoccupied with the truth. People expect and demand it in all practical domains of their lives, from finance to medicine to love, but strangely enough, when it comes to higher levels of truth, like ethical, moral, religious and spiritual matters, so many of the same people suddenly shy away from the idea of truth and seem to live in denial. Truth is what is, what corresponds to a factual thing, to an actual fact of life, not to preferences, mental concoctions nor beliefs.

Beliefs are something else. One may believe something which is not true, but if something is really true, it is so for everyone, notwithstanding one’s personal beliefs.

Relativism seems to originate either from hedonism or as a reaction to authoritarian absolutism, like the Church’s despotic dominion for more than one thousand years and a billion tears. On the other hand, if they have in general an axe to grind with the Church, the rel1. When contraception was being debated in France in the early 70s, a deputy objected to the legalization of contraceptive methods, saying that, “It is an encouragement to what could be called an aphrodisiac society.” (M. Capelle) Another deputy said, “Fornication will be rationalized.

It is the exploitation of everything animal in the human soul.” (Jean Foyer) Another one said, “Anarchy of mores and easiness will multiply boundary-less appetites. It is opening the doors of licentiousness to the youth.” (Pierre Volumard) And yet another one, “Such a law can only favor degradation of human mores.” (B. Talon) 40

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ativists are fond of quoting Mahatma Jesus, who allegedly said that one should not judge. Yes, one should not judge, but that does not mean one should not discriminate, as everyone makes judgments in the sense of discriminating. That wise advice means that one should not condemn; that one should not be either a hypocrite who criticizes people’s faults but is lenient towards his own, as Jesus allegedly reproached some Pharisees for doing; nor should one accuse others of having blind unreasonable faith while being himself a blind irrational follower. One certainly ought to be tolerant and respect the right of people to have different beliefs, but it does not mean one should not question those beliefs and accept all of them as true.

Actually, people believe all kind of things for many various reasons, whether psychological, sociological, philosophical or religious ones, or a mixture of those, don’t they? One may not know the truth, but truth can be known through various processes such as revelation, education, evidence, logic and rationality, observation, induction and deduction. For instance, we cannot see space, but we can infer its existence because we see things and people and they cannot be just floating in the middle of nothing. Similarly, we cannot see the wind, but we can feel it and see its effects and conclude that it exists. Again, we cannot see the mind, but we can become conscious of it and see it effects. Effects logically point to a cause. Since one thing and its opposite cannot both be true according to the law of non-contradiction, truth is exclusive and undeniable, independent of people’s opinions and beliefs, and its opposite is automatically excluded. In Phaedo, Plato shared with us Socrates’ logical reasoning about the law of contraries: “No idea can coexist with its own contrary, neither can it become its own contrary. Snow is a manifestation of cold, and fire of heat. The incompatibility of cold and heat, which are contrary ideas, is also found in the objects they define: If snow was hot, it would not be snow anymore, and similarly if fire was cold, it would not be fire. The soul is what defines a living man; and just like fire cannot 41

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be a manifestation of cold, a living man cannot be a manifestation of death.

Therefore, as fire and cold, the soul and death are incompatible. In other words, the soul is a manifestation of immortality. It is therefore indestructible, since it could only be destroyed by its own death, which is incompatible with immortality.

Consequently, there is after death a journey towards another place.”

But above common sense and logic, the Vedic culture favors the method of divine revelation, sabda pramana, – “the evidence given by God in the form of transcendental sound recorded as the Vedas;” a timeless descending process of learning the truth. It is considered more reliable than the empirical ascending process based on the limited faculties of intelligence, mind and senses, through which we perceive and observe the world.

So, why God and why religion? Why should we include these two in our worldview? First of all, why God? Well, all dependence on religious scripture or dogma put aside, we are conscious that something exists – ourselves – and we can observe that we do not exist isolated in a bubble but that there are countless other beings and things. Where do we all come from? The nature of the human spirit is to investigate the unknown, to explore the secrets of life. Our real superiority over the animals is that we can ponder over existential questions, such as our identity, our origins, the tragic perplexity of our lives – the dynamics of which lead inexorably to death – the hereafter, and the ultimate reality. Socrates said that every philosophically-minded person is busy trying to understand what is happening after death, which is what leaves the body inanimate or separated from the soul, anima. He said that during our short earthly life we have the responsibility of our soul for eternity since it is immortal and indestructible. We are sort of hard-wired to try to get in touch with the deeper currents of life. This is actually our prerogative as human beings. According to Vedic culture, this inquiry about a higher dimension – the vertical dimension concerned with the spiritual self or the soul, and the Absolute – marks the real beginning of 42

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humanity in someone. To not inquire about it is considered to be under the spell of ignorance, avidya (literally “not knowledge”). It is limiting one’s field of knowledge to the lowest of God’s energies, matter. This knowledge is considered inferior in Vedic culture, so much so that it is described as valueless, like dust compared to spiritual knowledge, the most important of all the various types of knowledge, the only one which can grant everlasting peace of mind and happiness. Indeed, aren’t there more valuable concerns than the trivia of instinctive passions such as eating, fighting, conquering and mating? Truly, are there questions more important than the nature of the self, the mystery of our origins and the purpose of our lives?

Don’t we tend to get depressed if we cannot find a meaning to our existence?

No observable phenomenon is independent but rather is caused by another one; a chain of causality is visible in all contingent things, so if we go back far enough logically there must be an original cause of everything. It is as simple as that. Applied to the universe, that is called the cosmological argument in favor of the existence of God. Is that the “God of the gaps”? Who cares? God is God. The Vedic text called the Chandogya Upanisad sates, “Some say that there was originally nothing, non-being, and that from nothing, non-being, something came about, being was born. But how could it be so?

How could being be born from non-being? No! It was Being alone that existed in the beginning, One without a second. That Being thought, ‘May I grow forth!’”

(6.2).

Another Vedic text, the Aitareya Upanisad states similarly, “In the beginning, all that was verily was Being only, one and without a second. That Being thought in Himself, ‘Let me now create the worlds!’” (1.1) So the world is not left to itself as per the Epicureans, who did not believe that God was taking care of the affairs of the world, nor that the universe was governed, but said that it is carried along of its own accord without a ruler and a caretaker. However, it is actually 43

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under the control of a well-wishing superior agency. In other words, the eyes which look upon the world are full of concern and affection, not judgment nor indifference. Without God, the world would be like a ship without a pilot or a car without a driver.

Search for God Again, all religious scriptures notwithstanding, if we take the hypothesis that there may be a Supreme Being, who is the source of everything, including ourselves, doesn’t it make sense that one should thoroughly investigate that possibility and then cultivate this most important of all relationships? Some people claim that the greatness of God lies in the fact that He cannot be found. Well, for them He will definitely remain aloof! One cannot find Him nor conclude that He does not exist if one has not bothered to search for and understand Him, nor used a proper method to do so. The term ‘metaphysical’ suggests that the whole of reality is not here under our eyes but beyond what we perceive, and that what we have access to is only a portion of reality. We are very proud of the powers of our mind and intellect but there are things, or rather beings, beyond the sole powers of the mind and intelligence to comprehend. For example, as for the three material examples mentioned earlier, although we cannot see the soul, we can induct his presence due to his effects, life and consciousness. Similarly, although we cannot see God in our present state of consciousness, we can infer His existence by observing His effects, such as the world and us and everything, as well as His effects on the world and us and everything.

So we ought to investigate Him. Of course, one will find contradictory statements in different traditions, different people holding on with pride and attachment to whatever kind of faith they have been raised in or have accepted, including atheism, but the point is to know what one should be

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doing in order to find Him, which method, which technology. The Bhagavad-gita advises: Do not harbor a proud challenging attitude but rather a humble enquiring one; make a sincere loyal effort imbued with a service mood, which will correspond to God mercifully revealing Himself gradually. It is a descending process. We are infinitesimal so we cannot go up to Him, but He can come down to us if we have the right attitude. It is a universal axiom that higher personalities can only be approached through a humble service mood, what to speak of the greatest of all beings. We are conscious, we have consciousness, but we, small units of consciousness, are actually entirely dependent upon the supreme consciousness, God, who alone gives meaning to life. Without God consciousness, there cannot be an ultimate goal for the mind, and we become disturbed due to want of such a meaningful goal.

Unlike the Bible and the Koran, which are silent about God’s form and personality and focus mainly upon His commandments, the very specificity of the most ancient Vedic revelation is precisely an amazingly detailed wealth of knowledge about these topics. He is described not as an inconceivable and inaccessible Power or Spirit, not as an old bearded character, but as a most fascinating everyouthful Person. Love constitutes the internal law of His being. He has an unlimited capacity to love and wants to share it. He is love personified; the very form of love. He is hungry only for loving exchanges. The souls and God are very intimately related. In fact, they are inseparable. The souls exist in relationship with Him. They do not have an existence independently and separately from Him. The misconception that they, or that anything for that matter, exist separate and independent from Him is the very illusion that the Vedas attempt to free us from! God has natural love for the soul and the soul in his natural state has a spontaneous love for God.

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A False Problem One may ask, “But what about suffering? Isn’t it incompatible with the idea of an all-powerful, all-benevolent God?” As God is conscious, free and independent, so is the soul, who, being an individual fragmental part of Him, like a piece of gold is a fragment of a gold mine, has His attributes in small quantity.1God’s unique law is the law of love. As soon as we speak of love, that entails the existence of free will, because love implies a choice. God has given us, eternal souls, that jewel of free will which is inseparable from consciousness; through it we can choose to love Him or not.

Suffering is not imposed upon us by God. It is not created by Him but by ourselves. It is born from our misusing our free will and turning away from Him instead of loving Him. Having neglected His blissful service, we have come down here. Nonetheless, in spite of our rebellious attitude, He benevolently provides for all our needs. If we analyze them, those needs are actually few but the desires of the mind are unlimited. That is the problem. We only suffer due to our desire to control and enjoy God’s material energy unrestrictedly as if we were its proprietors and legitimate enjoyers. If we stop doing so, we will stop suffering. Therefore, if someone is to be blamed, it is us, not God. As far as He is concerned, He is always lovingly and mercifully trying in so many ways to wake us up to our real identity and bring us to our real home, the blissful spiritual world.

Suffering plays an important role: it is meant to be an impetus for us to question our situation, to inquire into the truth and the means to achieve liberation. Thus it is transformative if utilized properly.

One may still ask, “What about evil? How is it compatible with an all-powerful, all-loving God?” Truly, here we are confronted with various forms of evil and this issue can be quite perplexing. The Ve1. The Vedas teach that the soul’s nature is like God’s; it has 3 features: sat-cid-ananda, eternal existence, pure consciousness/knowledge and happiness.

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dic understanding is that evil, like suffering, is born from the soul’s misuse of his free will. What is called evil in the form of bad actions is our choice not to follow God’s natural laws of harmony. Darkness has no independent existence in itself, being simply the absence of light. Similarly, evil is born from the soul turning away from God, as understood by Albert Einstein.2And what is called evil in the form of suffering is a natural retribution of one’s bad actions through the karmic law of cause and effect. Without understanding this law and the concomitant one of transmigration, one cannot explain anything and ends up blaming God. The horrors found here are the way people receive the reactions of their own, horrible activities in this life or in a previous one. It is a judgment they bring upon themselves.

Cruelty towards man or animal never goes unpunished. Thus in the next life, if not in this very life, the killers get killed; similarly, the rapists take birth as girls and get raped, the child-abusers get abused as children, the slave-masters become slaves, the torturers get tortured, the meat-eaters become animals and get eaten in their turn.

There is no spiritual injustice. Pain is self-created; it is the reaction to one’s own negative activities and therefore it is self-imposed. It doesn’t mean, of course, that we should be indifferent observers of the sufferings of our fellow human beings, and not feel nor express empathy and compassion, coldly blaming people for what happens to them – “Well, too bad, but it’s your karma.” But why blame God? He never interferes with one’s margin of independence. There is therefore no reason why the existence of suffering and evil cannot co-exist with that of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. It is a false problem. We should extend help to people suffering, according to our capacities. However, the best help is spiritual education through which one will hopefully decide to follow a spiritual path, which 2. “In fact, cold doesn’t exist. According to the laws of physics, what we call cold is in reality the absence of heat. Darkness doesn’t exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light we can study, not darkness. Evil doesn’t exist. It’s like darkness and cold. God didn’t create evil. Evil is what happens when man doesn’t have God’s love present in his heart.”

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automatically includes proper non-violent behavior. I have written “spiritual”, not just “religious”, because if people remain just on the religious platform without graduating to the higher level, spirituality, they may behave in all kinds of improper ways, witness the bloody history of non-Vedic religions.

Another Hint of God’s Existence We all have a deep-seated intuitive knowledge and sense that we should do good rather than evil. Even if we do wrong things, we all know what is wrong, don’t we? But we could not know it unless we had a precise idea of what is right, could we? We all object to evil.

It is not a matter of personal opinion, of subjective preferences, as claimed by the relativists, nor is it genetically determined. That self-evident fundamental sense of good and bad, right and wrong, that natural moral consciousness of obligation, cannot be explained without a moral law. Logic dictates that no law exists without a legislator. Since there is obviously and undeniably a sense of binding core moral values upon all of us, someone must have established it.

Indeed, the assertion that evil exists automatically implies that there exists an ethical standard of good and evil, against which moral values are determined, and this implies the idea of an authority establishing such a standard. If there was no God to do so out of His own pure nature of love and justice, if only material chemical elements existed and everything had come about by chance, evolution and the survival of the fittest, there would not be such an absolute unchangeable standard of justice, nor such a shared sense of right and wrong. Material elements or their combination cannot account for moral sentiments nor why we all feel we should act upon them. The point is not that atheists cannot be moral and that they automatically behave more badly than believers; it is not that they do not share the sense of objective right and wrong, but atheism cannot support it with any evidence, because there cannot be any laws, moral or not, 48

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if matter is all that exists. Actually, many people find atheism more comfortable just because there is no moral accountability. Aldous Huxley wrote that he had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning, “For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality…We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”

Here you go!

The Limitations of Modern Science The word ‘science’ comes from the Latin ‘scientia’, which means to know, but modern science is based on ever-changing theories and the scientists are merely engaged in guesswork. It is unfortunately dominated by atheists, and they give it a strong materialistic bias. The biggest fault of mundane scientists is that they want to understand subject matters far beyond their qualifications. Mundane science has no jurisdiction in metaphysics – immaterial affairs or higher philosophical truths. Why is it forcibly interjecting itself into that realm, making worthless and false conclusions about it? It actually disconnects itself from that transcendental subject matter by concluding that there is no transcendental entity. Indeed, the modern scientific approach is usually characterized by the desire to explain everything without the God factor, as confessed by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the self-styled apostle of the “Gospel of evolution”, in his Memories. This divorce between religion and science is recent.

Prior to the 19th century, Natural Theology, or a rationalistic approach to spiritual knowledge deducted from observation that all natural phenomena follow highly structured plans, which imply the existence of an intelligent creator, dominated European thought.

But the Scottish philosopher Hume (1711-1776) and other critics started to deny that such observation led to the conclusion that 49

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there exists a transcendental Being, since features of this world such as suffering and death could not possibly have been created by a benevolent Supreme Being. They thought that the world should be different if created by God and concluded that He didn’t exist. This Negative Theology influenced Darwin and through him modern science. This had a tremendous influence on western society, which has become quite secularized and where science has more or less hijacked the position of authority previously enjoyed by the Bible as far as dispensing knowledge of the truth. Indeed, modern science has replaced religion in terms of explaining the natural world. However, its approach to understand the universe, its structure and origin, is empirical; it is mainly based on sense perception. Therefore, scientific knowledge is very limited and scientists can only grasp a tiny fraction of the observable reality, in fact around only five percent, but they resort to bluff and propaganda to cover over their ignorance. Do not become confused with the morass of scientific language disguising such deep ignorance, and often intellectual dishonesty as well.

Moreover, science cannot properly explain fundamental things like life, the complete function of the brain, the mind, desire, free will, or consciousness and its nature. In particular, consciousness happens to be something way beyond the scientists’ present understanding and tools, so much so that the British physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose stated, “In order to study consciousness we need a new science.”1 The Vedic version is that consciousness comes first and then matter, which is a mere effect of consciousness. Matter is the aftereffect of spirit. The gross is coming from the subtle. Consciousness and personality are the universal basis of reality. A material object is reflected within me, and the plane within me is conscious. I, the subject am conscious, and whatever the object may be, it casts its reflection 1. Science, spirituality and the nature of reality, a discussion with Dr T.D. Singh, Kolkata, 2005 50

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into the plane of my consciousness. We all conceive something first on the subtle level of the mind, which is endowed with consciousness, and then we manifest it on the gross, physical level, don’t we? Each and every thing which exists is the manifestation of an idea, which is the primary cause of the existence or the aspect of that thing.

So we find the element of consciousness in all living beings, from the demigods to the human beings and down to the animals, plants and even microbes2and single-cell entities, as indicated by biologists George Wald and Lynn Marguillis.3

Atheistic Science Is Just Another Religion Based on Blind Faith Moreover, science is not based merely on neutral observation.

A careful analysis will reveal that it involves instinct or intuition, thought – whether brainstorming sessions or sitting alone and thinking until a great insight or inspiration comes – as well as assumptions or postulates based on a sort of faith. Indeed, faith is common to both religion and science. Even if most scientists nowadays do not have religious faith, they do have scientific faith. Albert Einstein said, “We make the assumption that the universe is ordered as a matter of faith.”

Without belief in that order, in a law of consistency, scientists could not practice their art, which is based on axioms to build knowledge. Scientists have faith in these axioms and take them for granted, just like religious practitioners have faith in spiritual axioms. The atheists oppose religion. But religion is such a natural thing that even the atheists have one. It is called the Church of Materialism, both Methodological and Ontological. Since they accept material nature as the source of everything, the cause of all causes, it is actually just 2. Mark Buchanan, New Scientist, 2004, Vol. 184, Iss. 2474 pp34-37 3. Handbook of Protoctista. John and Bartlett, Boston, 1990, p 914 51

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another religion – a very ancient one at that – in which, instead of worshipping God, they unconsciously “worship” material energy or Nature as “Mother Nature”, a kind of Mother Goddess,1as so many people did throughout history and still do in India in the Shakta cult of Durga and Kali. And, as some deviant members of the latter’s cult did, they offer unauthorized human sacrifices to her: the lives of millions of babies aborted every year because pseudo scientists have brainwashed people into thinking that a fetus is nothing but a lump of matter like everything else, cheating them from the benefit of human life. Atheists attribute everything to chance. But “Chance is not a cause. Chance is a word that we use to describe mathematical possibilities.

It has no power of its own. Chance is nothing. It is what rocks dream about said Aristotle…We use the word ‘chance’ to cover our ignorance.”2 So they have invented a “goddess”, Chance, whom they “worship”. Henry M. Morris, director of the San Diego Institute for Creation Research wrote, “One of the greatest mysteries of human nature is the fact that intelligent scientists, familiar with these phenomena, can actually attribute them to blind chance and a random walk through natural processes acting on eternal matter.”

In their “secular religion” masquerading as science, they have Darwin as their main prophet, apostle or Messiah to “save them from the oppression of religion”, Chance as the holy Mother, the two descendants from monkeys Hawking and Dawkins as twin “saints”, and unflinching faith in mythic pseudo-scientific dogmas 1. “A human being has 2 kinds of propensities: one aiming at mundane gain and the other at a super-mundane ideal. Mundane aspirations must become subservient to the transcendental ones. When slight symptoms of spiritual aspiration become traceable in the life of a mundane gain-seeker, it is called the awakening of God consciousness. There are innumerable stages between the awakening state and the perfection of love of God. The soul’s first step towards transcendental realization is the quest for the fundamental cause of all causes and attributing the creation of the material world to female nature. People engrossed in sensual development and apathetic toward seeking the Absolute Truth may be enticed by this path and may be drawn closer to the highest aspect of life. It’s highly beneficial for that category of men.” (19th century Indian mystic Bhaktivinoda Thakura) 2. I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. p.125 52

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replacing faith in biblical myths. The true spirit of science is the search for the truth, not a dogmatic approach of life. Actually, for theistic scientists, science is spiritual and they pray for insight to see and understand what God telling is them through the richness and complexity of nature. Joseph Henry said, “What we are doing when we are doing a scientific experiment is asking God questions, then we pray to have enough insight and wisdom to understand the answer.”

Religion Is an Innate Natural Tendency To search for the meaning of existence and understand our human adventure is what actually distinguishes us from the animals.

Man is not only homo sapiens but also homo religiosus. There is in him an ontological pulling up toward the Supreme. He is that creature that has the capacity for infinity and that can only be filled by infinity.

Man is a worshipper by nature, which can be witnessed by the fact that religion is present in one form or another in the whole world, and that people literally render a cult to great personalities in different domains, whether art, music, cinema, sports, politics or science.

Religion is a most natural part of life. In the modern world, especially its Westernized sections, it has become a private and personal belief system, something divisible from life. It was not always the case.

Our modern idea of religion does not correspond to the ancient one. In the Greek and Roman world, for instance, religion was more a question of practice than of belief. Moreover, it was public and even political. The Latin ‘religio’ means “that which keeps us bound together” to the State and to the State’s gods.

“Pre-modern religion had no separate institutional existence; it was embedded in the political, social and domestic arrangements of society, providing it with an overarching system of meaning.”3 3. Karen Armstrong, Fields of blood, Ch. 1, Vintage, London 2014 53

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It permeated all its aspects and could not be conceived as something separate. It provided its template. It is still the case today in societies living more natural and traditional lives. In Latin, “religere” means also “to link with God” – a synonym of the word ‘yoga’, the science that teaches the method of joining the individual soul with God, of freeing the soul from the meshes of matter through divine union. In simple words, religion means to learn to know God, to connect with Him and to serve Him, which is the very source of happiness. The souls found here belong to the spiritual world, the world of God, but, as mentioned earlier, instead of going to that eternal world we have fallen here due to misuse of our free will. But we are not condemned to remain in our suffering condition. Religion is the process which teaches mankind the knowledge of how to connect again with God. That is why God compassionately gives the science of religion at the very beginning of the universe, in the form of Vedic spiritual knowledge. By receiving that higher knowledge, we can become acquainted with our origins, realize our mistake and decide to turn back towards God by following the rehabilitation program of religion, leading us out of our predicament. In this way, we can learn how to live in harmony while in this world, extricate ourselves from the maze of material existence, which is fraught with inevitable sufferings, and reestablish our natural loving relationship with Him. The idea of the various religious practices is to regulate the activities of man, connecting them to God, to gradually purify one’s rebellious materialistic mentality. Once purified from it and having developed our natural, dormant loving propensity towards Him, we are rehabilitated and can be elevated to His eternal abode.

The Spiritual Principles of Freedom God’s laws, mentioned in the scriptures are not meant to limit people’s liberty, but to protect them from their lower tendencies and

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allow them to develop their higher, spiritual consciousness through which they will be able to achieve liberation from material existence.

Therefore, they are called “the spiritual principles of freedom” in the Bhagavad-gita (2.64). A similar conception is found in the New Testament where James, Jesus’ brother, calls twice the law, “the law of liberty” (1:25; 2:12). Religion teaches those universal codes of living resting on morality and ethics; they help one to become free from illusion and subsequently from being materially embodied.

These codes are developed under the name yamas, or prescriptions – purity, contentment, austerity or sense control, self-introspection, study of revealed scriptures and taking shelter of God – and niyamas, or restrictions – non-violence, truthfulness, abstention from stealing, sexual restraint, non-covetousness – in the timeless Vedic yoga science. Such principles help to raise one’s consciousness to the higher platform of virtue or goodness, sattva-guna, from which one can further develop through spiritual dynamics. They are considered the four pillars of religious life, dharma, “what sustains life and is inherent to it.” The aim of most people nowadays is to pursue pleasure by all means, reasonable or foul. However, the four pillars of dharma – compassion, austerity, purity and truthfulness – are destroyed by indulgence in the four gigantic moneymakers which make the miserable world go’ round, four materialistic activities consisting of meat-eating, intoxication, illicit sex life and gambling, called the pillars of irreligion, adharma, “that which is harmful to life and unnatural”.

Some people complain about “organized religion.” It is true that one’s approach of God is an eminently personal step, but the group also plays a necessary role in assisting, supporting, encouraging and nourishing the individual. Religion is playing the role of representative of the Supreme Person on earth for the masses. In order to extend its benevolent influence to the largest number of people, reli55

gion had to organize and institutionalize itself. I think the complaint is due to the excesses of some religious institutions that have often deviated from this original and noble ideal. There has been indeed a corruption of religious hierarchies who have unfortunately used organized religion for centuries to take a simple set of beliefs and twist them into a tool to manipulate a group of people having these beliefs; they did so in order to control and exploit them for the selfish ambitions, greed, power and benefit of a select few. Organized religion in that sense has been nothing more than an attempt by some men to put their words into God’s mouth. They have used religion because of the possibility it offers for vested interests, as it can be a mega cash-cow as well as a powerful tool of political control.

Religious institutions are usually firmly embedded with the ruling elites in every religious country, Church and State mutually scratching each other’s back. It’s why the Founding Fathers of the United States wanted to keep church and state separate. Statements like “In God We Trust” and “One Nation Under God” were introduced by Christians long after the nation was founded. One cannot argue that this country was founded on Christianity, since the words “Christian” or “Christianity” do not appear even one single time within the Constitution. In the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli unanimously ratified by the U.S. Congress and signed by the President of the United States, it is stated, “The United States in no sense was founded on the Christian religion”.

That the Founding Fathers separated religion from state as a step towards an ulterior goal such as the New World Order project, and that the Illuminati/Masonic plan is now becoming more clear though it was born two hundred fifty years ago is another story.

All the abuse done through organized religion is undeniable, but it does not take away the value of religious organizations. We should not throw the baby out with the bath water. They may not all teach directly to serve God, but they point in His direction. Even though 56

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they may teach some speculative doctrines and dogmas, they do their job of trying to remind man of his connection with God through the various services they offer: they accompany him at every step from birth to death through the various purificatory rituals or sacraments, marriage, funerals, ritual ceremonies and religious teachings.

They usually run educational and charitable institutions as well. Welfare work is specific of the Jewish and Christian approaches due to the Torah and Jesus enjoining love of one’s neighbor.

True religion is God-given. Authentic religious principles are directly given by Him to guide mankind. God provides all the living beings with all necessities. Sacrificing to Him is the fundamental basis of human civilization. It is not just gratefulness towards divine generosity. Rather, it is concretely acknowledging Him as “Bhagavan”, the One who possesses all good qualities, the Creator and therefore Proprietor and legitimate Enjoyer of everything, to whom all glory is due and who is to be lovingly served. In the Vedic tradition, He is regularly offered during ceremonies tokens of grains and ghee in a sacrificial fire1ritual, along with sacred hymns or mantras. In the temples, where He dwells in His Deity form, as well as in every house, He is offered complete meals and that sacralized food is later honored as His grace, prasadam, which nourishes the body and cleanses the soul from karma. No one eats anything before offering it to Him. This principle filtered through Judaism to Christianity where it is found in a distorted way in the form of offering bread and wine during the Mass ceremony and then distributing it to the assembly.

‘Godless Religion’ Religion has only been a generalized object of debate and contestation since the age of Enlightenment which, in extreme reaction 1. Fire represents symbolically His mouth, and it is said that its presiding deity, Agni, transfers the offerings to His realm.

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to the extreme excesses of Christianity,1 has fostered among other things the erroneous conception of man having total independence from God and total dominion over matter. But Godless humanism which reigns today only emerged at the end of the process. [The first humanists who began during the Renaissance Era to promote the freedom of man and the importance of his reasoning power, were Christians. Giovanni Pic de la Mirandole tried to demonstrate that man’s dignity comes from the fact that he is the only creature which doesn’t have a determined nature pushing him towards a particular behavior. He is therefore both free to choose the good or the bad, and perfectible, as the creator of his own life. He saw this freedom as a gift of God, which it is. He inaugurated the modern conception of freedom without separating it from is divine source, remaining faithful to Jesus’ teachings about freedom and expanding upon it.

Christian humanism asserted the autonomy of man. Its natural consequence was necessarily demanding liberation from the religious authorities, who were interfering with this fundamental freedom. His theses were understandably condemned by the Pope.

There was a development of Reason under the influence of Aquinas, who rediscovered Aristotle and attempted to synthesize his thought in a Christian way. At that time none of the authors conceived that the idea of perfecting oneself through the use of Reason was opposed to Christianity. On the contrary, Jesus appeared as the most important educator of mankind, who revealed both man’s freedom and his dignity, inciting him to live a right life. Erasmus spoke of emulating the example of Jesus, imitating him by attempting to put in practice all his teachings about charity, simplicity, patience, 1. Forgetting its original spiritual mission, or making it a lesser of its concerns, Christianity, after becoming the official religion of the Roman empire, organized itself to exert secular power and control the masses, something it sometimes did more than the Emperors or kings themselves. It set up what amounted to a parallel government. It held absolute power, which unfortunately too often rhymes with absolute corruption. In some countries, the Church was the biggest landowner and tax collector. Its sway over the people was complete.

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purity, etc., not just worshipping him and organizing ceremonies in his honor. These requirements of Jesus in the Gospel are at the heart of the thought of the humanists, who are resting on them their criticism of the deviations of the clergy, “who are practicing tyranny under the pretext of justice and right, using religion just as an opportunity to obtain wealth, speaking of defending the Church but in reality aspiring to power, and prescribing as profitable to Christ’ interests things which are as far away from Christian doctrine as can be.”

Having failed in her mission of properly guiding the souls, the Catholic Church created a kind of religious hollow or void from which Protestantism was born. The Protestant Reform was facilitated by the printing press. It was the first major contestation which shook the very corrupted Church. Some members of the clergy from top to bottom were practicing all the vices they were hypocritically denouncing, so people started not only to doubt their holiness but also that of the Church itself. Trying to emancipate man from the grip of the Church, rejecting some of her superstitions, the Reform privileged a personal interpretation of the scriptures.]2 The guidance of the Pope was not adequate, but it maintained at least some unity, whereas the freedom of interpretation gave birth to almost unlimited speculations, which have produced in modern times around 40 000 different Protestant denominations. In its revolt against the Church, Protestantism did not want to imitate its tradition of renunciation exemplified by the monks and nuns – Luther was formerly a monk but he gave up his vows and married a nun – but tried to apply it in the lives of lay people, giving birth to Puritanism. It also gave up the Catholic tradition of devotion, but it is much more difficult to practice renunciation while married without having that devotional dimension. Protestantism unfortunately shared the fanaticism and violence of her parent institution.

2. Frédéric Lenoir, Le Christ philosophe, Plon, 2007 59

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[The reformers crystallized a movement of deep revolt which was hatching in huge parts of the Christian society. The straw which broke the camel’s back was the sale of indulgences. The Church was convinced it had received the power to forgive sins on behalf of God. (In replacement of the ancient understanding of reincarnation,) it had been preaching about Purgatory for centuries, a place where most Christians were supposed to go to expiate their sins before going to heaven. So the thought came: “Why not sell them a lessening of their sufferings in Purgatory?” It was an official sale with a certificate from the institution which, “because it is holy and infallible, can guarantee people to suffer less in the hereafter.” Blessed are the rich because the kingdom of God is theirs! In 1517, a 34 years old monk, Martin Luther, placarded on the door of the church of Wittenberg 95 theses, denouncing the scandal of the sale of indulgences. His criticism aimed directly at the so-called infallible authority which protected the institution from any radical criticism.

He was excommunicated in 1521. He and the Reformed wanted to go back to the scriptures as the only authority: Every follower must be able to apply his critical capacity and verify what is written in the scriptures to counteract the Church’s pretension to be the only interpreter of Jesus’ words. The religious institution as a mediator between man and God is not needed anymore; faith alone is the source of salvation. The Reformed were protected by princes who saw the opportunity to also escape from the temporal influence of the Church. The wars of Religion which followed had both religious and political motivations. Christianity did not disappear but the Roman Catholic Church lost the monopoly it had in Europe since Emperor Constantine. But, even though it had exploded, the Christian religion was still imposing itself on everyone.

In the beginning of Enlightenment, humanism radicalized itself with increasing criticism of the religious institutions. However, most of the thinkers and scientists were not atheists; they were just in 60

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conflict with the Church, from whose influence they were trying to free the society, still on the basis of the Gospel ethics. They believed in God but in a God foreign to the teachings of the Church and the catholic practices often seen as superstitions. They wanted a rational “natural religion” and saw the clergy’s attempt to speak in the name of God and formulate all kinds of dogmas as obscurantism which should be opposed in order to free Reason. Voltaire fought all his life against what he called the “infamous”, a vision of God having human passions and the institution with its theological discourse justifying the clergy’s tyranny. He promoted a natural religion resting on the belief in the Supreme Being and a universal ethic inspired from Jesus’ teachings. He pointed out again and again how the Church had deviated from the precepts of its founder and how “the catholic, apostolic, roman religion was actually in all its ceremonies and all its dogmas the opposite of Jesus’ religion.” The thinkers of the Enlightenment built their discourse on religious tolerance by constantly referring to Jesus’ message; they condemned the violent repression of religious opinions as completely contradictory to the Christian doctrine of brotherhood and love of one’s neighbor. John Locke, for instance, insisted that Jesus’ peaceful teachings opposed any idea of religious constraint and that the very principles of freedom of conscience and tolerance towards those having another religion were completely in accordance with the Gospel. (Indeed, the fact that no evidence was required by most believers to support their religious beliefs and claims was tragic for the truth as well as for peace.) By promoting a philosophical method of systematic questioning and critical analysis of all acquired knowledge, radically separating the domain of Reason and the domain of faith, Descartes (1596-1650) emancipated philosophy from theology and laid the foundations of modern science. The philosophers wanted to establish a lay moral and insisted more and more to separate Reason from a theological perspective without yet have them opposed to each other. They wanted to cre61

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ate a human society uniquely based on man’s power, not depending anymore on any external order, neither divine laws nor tradition unverified by critical reason. They pushed for the creation of a neutral State respecting and guaranteeing the diversity of the beliefs of its members, and the creation of a democratic society resting on individuals having free and equal rights. This was a big break from the past and its traditions. Man was not seeing himself anymore as a fallen creature but as perfectible being, and individual as well as social changes were seen as factors of progress in a society opened towards the future. The philosophers directly attacked and countered the claim of the Church to subordinate rational knowledge to her scriptures and authority. In their eyes, the case of Galileo justified the necessity to separate Reason from faith, to free philosophy and science from Christian theology, hence destroying the foundation of the Church’s authority.

They kept Jesus’ teachings on freedom, equality, fraternity and separation of powers but wanted to establish them in a humanistic perspective without any reference to God, reposing them on Reason instead of on faith: they thought that maybe Moses delivered the Ten Commandments and Jesus his teachings in the name of God, but they ultimately rested on Reason; for them, the Christian faith had only carried a message which is deeply rational in itself. God is the Supreme Reason who has not only created a world according to strict physical laws but has also written a universal moral law in the deepest core of human conscience. Just like scientists only discovered and explained the wonderful laws of Nature established by God, the philosophers’ mission was to make explicit the moral laws written in man; to exercise his reason allowed man to find again this moral law beyond the biblical revelation.

In 1785, Immanuel Kant substituted the categorical imperatives of Reason to the divine laws enjoined in the Bible. He was very influent in the construction of a European moral which sees itself 62

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as lay but, due to its similarity with the biblical message, can appeal to all citizens, whether Jews, Christians, agnostics or atheists. The republican motto of “freedom, equality and fraternity” is obviously Christ-based, but for the revolutionaries it was based on Reason and was a universal maxim. The concrete legal application of these great ethical principles translated into the separation of powers, the equality of all citizens in front of the law, abolition of slavery and torture, and freedom of belief. The philosophers wanted to radically change the organization of society in order to make it more just, to allow the individual to escape the arbitrary, the law of “might-is-right” and the tyranny of the leaders, to give him a position no longer according to his heredity but according to his personal merit.]1 The gigantic error of the Godless humanists was to argue that because there are certain evils attendant on religion, religion is wrong from the get-go, just like J.J. Rousseau erroneously concluded with civilization. [Professor Adam Weishaupt of Ingolstadt, Bavaria, the founder of the Order of the Illuminati in 1776, was inspired by a violent dislike for the Jesuits’ order due to his strict early education by them; nonetheless he later on modeled his secret society according to their organization. He turned to the French philosophers and anti-Christian doctrines. Like Rousseau he thought that civilization was a mistake, that it had developed along the wrong lines and, that man had fallen from the state of raw nature in which he enjoyed the fullest liberty and complete equality. Upon analysis, those two terms are actually mutually exclusive. Complete liberty and complete equality cannot coexist. If there is complete liberty to do as one pleases, complete equality is not possible, as this type of liberty degrades sooner or later into the rule of the strongest or anarchy, which is individualism run mad. And a system of absolute equality, as dreamed and imposed by the charlatans of the despotic and enslaving system known as Communism, can only work after violent appropriation 1. Le Christ philosophe 63

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of the wealth of the higher classes by brigandage through their destruction, and if every incentive to rise above others is crushed; then liberty does not exist there. It is serfdom without any of the advantages of the feudal system, and the replacement of the mostly benevolent aristocrats by a rigid bureaucracy. Weishaupt professed to share Rousseau’s belief in the inherent goodness of man’s nature; he claimed that through “universal love” the bond of union between men would expand and the human race could again be made into one good and happy family whose only law would be Reason. It would only be needed to inculcate in man a “just and steady morality”. He could easily be restored to his primitive virtue. Utopia of utopias! He wrote, “Men are not as bad as bilious moralists describe; they are bad because they are lead to be so by everything – Religion, the State, their surroundings and bad examples…

He conceived that all ideas of a hereafter and all fear of retribution for evil deeds should be rooted out of man’s mind and the religion of Reason to be substituted to these: “When at last Reason becomes the religion of man, then the problem will be solved”.

He understood, however, that this could not be revealed to new members of his secret society but only to those who had accessed the higher ranks, which rapidly included the rulers of several German states. Antagonism to religion should not be disclosed to them; on the contrary, neophytes should be taught that they are “the only real and true followers of Christ, who was the first author of Illuminism, and no one paved so sure a way to liberty as him, our Grand Master.” Saint Simon (1760-1825) also set out to prove that his socialist system was simply the fulfillment of Christ’s teachings on the brotherhood of man which had become perverted.1 Etienne Cabet (1788-1856) claimed the same thing, 1. Le Nouveau Christianisme 64

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“The present communists are the disciples, the imitators, the continuers of Jesus. Therefore, respect a doctrine preached by Jesus. Examine it. Study it.”] 2 It is simply not true. Is it another extreme reaction to a bad experience with a Christian institution? Then, due to the growing influence of the Illuminati order and its undermining secret action on society through the masonic lodges, there was in the mid-19th century a radical opposition between faith and reason. [Some thinkers, convinced that religion and faith in God are a major obstacle on the path of genuine individual and social progress, went further. Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, animated with the intention to free people from any religious belief, which they deemed alienating intellectually (Comte), humanly (Feuerbach), economically (Marx) and psychically (Freud) practiced a radical criticism of Christianity. Their atheism was based on humanism but freed not only from the Church but also from Jesus and God. Humanism and Christianity divorced completely.]3 It is really a great shame for Christianity that the ethical values of Jesus that the Church itself did not practice were introduced in society in a systematic way in opposition to the oppressive and corrupted Church. It is a scandal that the application of Jesus’ principles in social life was not made by the Church but in spite of it and by lay people.

The State socialists may have preached values enunciated by Jesus that the Church as an institution had taught but failed to practice, such as freedom, equality and fraternity, but they based them on reason and right and imposed them by the most ruthless violence.

In addition, they denied the very existence of God whereas Jesus always invoked Him and connected those values with Him. Moreover, to add insult to injury, they did not and are not practicing them either. Indeed, where was and is the freedom of the countless victims 2. Nesta Webster, World revolution, Veritas publishing Company, Cranbrook, Australia 1921 3. Le Christ philosophe 65

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of the communist wolves? Where was and is their equality except of the frightened powerless masses in front of the leaders of those regimes of Terror, with their cortege of imprisonment, forced labor, humiliation, torture, rape and murder?1 There is an old cynical joke – maybe Russian – “In communism, everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others” in reference to the nomenclature, which replaced the aristocracy it had murdered, and had its privileged stores, schools, etc.

Another cynical joke: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and communism the reverse of that.” Where was and is the fraternity of the communist leaders towards the exploited masses? It is a tragic farce.

It is a fact that Jesus has been grossly misrepresented by the Church, which has not applied his teachings, subverted the values he taught and perverted his message, but representing him as a socialist and preaching revolution carried out on the principles of Christian love and brotherhood in a godless humanist frame is an old deception.

The Christians including the clergy are maybe not genuine representatives of Jesus, but neither Godless humanism nor Communism are good alternatives to Christianity in spite of all is faults.

1. The same can be said about the Muslims. Like the Jews, they originally practiced a form of communism, in the sense of sharing among the warriors the booty and the captured ladies. Later on, after Muhammad’s demise, when they went beyond what seems to have been his original ambition of conquering and ruling only Arabia and Palestine, they forgot their ideal of classless equal brotherhood.

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Chapter 3

But Is God One?

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Different Kinds of Scriptures

pon asking various authorities of different religions about the principles of religion, the answers one receives are different from one to another. One can wonder why they differ in their views. Well, upon analysis, scriptures are found to be of three kinds, corresponding to three classes into which people are divided by their differences of eligibility due to their various levels of consciousness: ignorant materialism, passionate energy and spiritual goodness.

The disposition and faith of people differ according to their eligibility. Materialistic persons naturally have faith in materialistic scriptures, passionate people believe in scriptures that suit their passions, whereas spiritual persons naturally have faith in spiritual scriptures.

One easily believes the conclusions of the scripture for which one is eligible. Higher eligibility, which gives corresponding faith in higher scriptures, is brought about by performing sincerely the prescribed acts of one’s level and associating with more advanced souls of higher eligibility. In their wisdom, the authors of scripture wrote them so that by observing the duties prescribed in that scripture, one’s higher fitness is then evolved. Therefore, we find different levels of teachings about God in different scriptures. Materialistic scriptures accept the eternality of God but only prescribe temporary means to 67

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attain His mercy, and that mercy is conceived as blessings to enjoy this world and then go to enjoy even more in “heaven.” Spiritual scriptures recommend one to endeavor to serve God with pure love and devotion. Materialistic religion is that in which prayer for material facilities due to selfish interests is the form of worship, one identifies the body with the soul, neglects the latter’s eternal function and, blending erroneously the first and second Biblical commandments – to love God and to love one’s next – considers welfare work to mankind to be service to God. There are different religious teachers, different mentalities and realizations on the part of the worshipers, different methods of worship, different moods and actions in relating to the objects of worship, and religions with different names and languages. This is natural and quarrelling over these differences is improper, for if the intention of the religion is pure then everything about it is auspicious. That has to be ascertained, otherwise criticism can be cause of great loss. It is easy to see the intention of a religion according to its contents: Does it speak of fulfilling material desires or of selfless service to God? Are its followers cultivating their material attachments or love of God? Is its goal heavenly enjoyment or elevation to the spiritual world in order to render loving service to God? Upon seeing a religious ceremony of a different religion than one’s own, one should think that his Lord is being worshipped but in a different way that one may not completely understand due to one’s different education and impressions; one need not enter into useless arguments over the differences. A different constitutional function of the soul, which is to serve God (sanatana-dharma), cannot be created anyway. However, if there is fault or some genuine lacking of proper understanding in a particular system of worship, then one is not bound to offer respect to that. After all, there are so-called religious activities opposed to dharma, people making a show of following 68

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principles of dharma and practitioners of principles that only appear to be dharma.

One can also wonder why we find in some scriptures only praise of secondary material benefits without details about the primary effect, developing pure love of God. It is because most people will not perform any good deed until they perceive that it gives them immediate profit. It is for them that the scriptures praise those secondary material benefits. It is not the purpose of the scriptures that those persons should remain satisfied with those benefits; such praise is meant to thereby induce such people to perform good deeds; then they eventually become eligible to understand the eternal primary effect of religion. God desires that all classes of men be elevated and for this purpose He has empowered various advanced souls to deliver the processes by which various classes may make progress. The scriptures are laws meant for the ultimate good of the people in general. The goal of human life is to ultimately develop pure love for God, but different religious paths corresponding to different levels of consciousness present different levels of intimacy and depth of understanding of God.

New Non-Vedic Religions As we saw, the Vedic path of love of God, bhakti, is not to be counted as a religion as such. It is a spiritual science. Or, if you want to call it a religion, it is the “religion of the soul”. As mentioned earlier, there was originally only one human culture and civilization worldwide, the Vedic one, and therefore also only one nonsectarian monotheistic approach of God worldwide, which taught sanatana-dharma, or the eternal function of the soul. It consists in serving God and thereby developing one’s love for Him, as taught in the essence of the Vedas. Such was the case during the first three ages of our present cycle. Once we entered around 5000 years ago in ka69

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li-yuga – the 4th age, characterized by quarrel and hypocrisy – people living in cursed desert lands1in the Middle East, far from India, the hub of the Vedic culture, started to drift away from the Vedic tradition; gradually, over centuries, they became entirely separate nomadic, pastoralist communities and greatly degraded themselves.2 Different personalities usually referred to as prophets then offered some religious guidance to these barbaric wayward people outside the purview of Vedic culture (mlecchas), animal-killers and meat-eaters (yavanas). Thus, first Zoroastrianism then three other new, non-Vedic religions successively appeared: the three Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all in the arid lands of the Middle and Near East, and all only within the last three and a half millennia of the fourth age on the Vedic time-table. They are relative religions, not the eternal religion but degraded forms of it, or, from a positive point of view, they are incomplete, undeveloped steps on the way towards it and God. The allegiance of people to them at least allows them to accept the existence of God, bow down to Him and live by certain moral codes and ethical principles. They are usually considered the only monotheistic faiths, whereas they are very new in that field next to the Vedas that have an oral monotheistic tradition which dates back to prehistoric periods. We can trace the origin of these rather recent religious traditions: Judaism in its primitive polytheistic form began around three and a half thousand years ago. Christianity is two thousand years old, while Islam appeared fourteen hundred years ago. Next to the vast spiritual encyclopedia of Vedic literature, the few texts of the three Semitic traditions are comparable to pocket dictionaries. Judaism has only one book, the Torah, with a few 1. The Srimad Bhagavatam, a most essential Vedic text, mentions that deserts and their dwellers are sharing in an ancient cosmic curse.

2. In further lands, people still followed Vedic culture but it also became decadent over time and was also more or less reduced to demigod worship, becoming more and more degraded to the point of including also human sacrifice. Such was the case, for instance, when the Spanish and Portuguese Christian conquistadors invaded and plundered Central and South America.

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corollaries.3Christianity shares the Torah with the Jews, plus it has the New Testament. Islam has one Koran plus the hadiths or sayings of Muhammad. So, if one really wants to learn about God, he must turn to the huge storehouse of detailed knowledge about Him found in the Vedic literature.

If you talk with members of these different religions, you can see that their core values as human beings are basically identical. They all strive just living peacefully and happily as good pious people. This is what their faiths teach and promote. But as far as their religious leaders are concerned, religion means to promote the beliefs of their group while criticizing the views of others who believe differently.

Instead of offering genuine spiritual guidance, they use religion to manipulate the masses of their followers, based on their own interpretation of their particular faith, making them believe that the religion they have been raised with is the only true one. They turn them into religious radicals, convincing them that the best way to show the purity of their faith is by opposing those who believe differently and choose not to convert to their view of God. They use religion to say, “It’s not that we hate everyone who doesn’t think, believe and act like us - it’s just that God does.” Why is it that so many people care so much about the religious views of others? Is religion meant to be one group of human beings telling another group that they are wrong? Faith is a wonderful thing as long as you’re not forcing your particular beliefs on others, treating them as enemies just because they don’t believe what you do.

“To the Original, Supreme Being who is One, the sages give many names.”4 3. The Mishnah and is commentary, the Gemara, which constitute the 2 Talmuds, (the Jerusalem Talmud, composed in the 4th and 5th centuries in Northern Israel, and the Babylonian Talmud, composed roughly 200 years later in Iraq); the Kabballah, a speculative doctrine issued from the Talmud, transmitted orally for centuries until written in the Middle Ages in Provence; the Zohar, issued from the Kabballah and also transmitted orally for centuries until written in Spain around the same time. They all contain various subjective interpretations of the Torah by different rabbis.

4. Rig-Veda I:164, 46 71

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Are the followers of the various religions worshipping the same Supreme Person? The Christians in general do not think so, neither do the Mohammedans. The Christians call the non-Christians “pagans.” They believe that the Jewish deity Yahweh is God; they believe on the basis of the speculative ideas of the self-appointed apostle Paul that Jesus is also God. The Koran, rightfully opposed to this belief, honors Jesus as a great prophet but not as the Deity and drastically goes as far as condemning to hell those who worship him as God (5.72). The followers of the Vedic tradition also acknowledge Jesus as a great soul but do not attach unwarranted divinity to him either. All the avatars, or manifestations of the Lord on earth are listed in the Vedic scriptures with details of their place of appearance, entourage and mission. Jesus is not on that list. He is mentioned as a messenger of God, not as God. He himself never once claimed he is God. The self-appointed apostle Paul is the first one to have concocted and floated the idea of Jesus’ divinity, but he didn’t dare to do so openly as he would have immediately been rejected by all the Jews, denounced and killed by the Jewish religious authorities for blasphemy. He only hinted at it in some epistles: “In Christ, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col.2:8), for instance. The author of the Gospel of John wrote openly about it much later, when Christianity and Judaism had parted ways, and when the latter had been crushed by Rome and was powerless against him. So the speculative heretical doctrine that Jesus is God started to spread. There were various Christianities in the early centuries, but it is this particular brand of Christianity which surpassed the others, due to its unauthorized promise of redemption from sin; it unfortunately became the official religion of the Roman empire and spread worldwide. It became a dangerous cult responsible for the death of tens of millions of human beings in the following millennium.

Like the Christians in general, the Mohammedans are taught by their religious authorities to consider the followers of other religions 72

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than Islam as kaffirs or “infidels”, another name for “pagans”. However, those who claim their religion to be the only true one are possessed by prejudice and unable to find out the truth. Different sorts of religious practices pertain to different stages of consciousness.

No religion should fanatically claim to possess the monopoly of divine revelation. A person who is sincerely following a religious activity which corresponds to his eligibility deserves no condemnation.

God, who is situated in everyone’s heart as the Holy Spirit, sees and accepts that sincerity. He will help him from within to progress further; he will thereby be improved in due course of time. No religion can claim either to be the only one guaranteeing its followers the grace of God or elevation to “heaven”. Hardly anyone goes to heaven (higher planets) anyway, what to speak of the highest “heaven”, the spiritual world, beyond the coverings of the material universe.

You have to be a pure lover of God to reach there.

Teachings Tailored to the Audience It is said that different levels of teachings were given to different Semitic prophets: God allegedly spoke directly to Moses, Jesus was led by the Holy Ghost, and it is only an angel1 who supposedly spoke to Muhammad. They were given different processes. We find something similar in the Vedic literature: “Brahma engaged the sages headed by Marici in self-motivated pious work, those headed by Sanaka in renunciation, and Narada Muni in pure devotional service” 2 This corresponds to the triple division of karma, jnana and bhakti.

The prophets assessed the level of receptivity of their audience while teaching them; it is apparent from the content of their teachings that they presented their message according to the capacity of their audience to receive and digest the Truth. An impartial comparison 1. Angels are described as imperfect beings in the Koran itself. (2:31-32; 19:68; 78:38) 2. Narasimha Purana 4:4 73

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between the founding texts of the various traditions will reveal that when God gave His message directly in the form of the Vedas at the time of the creation of the world, or to spiritually advanced people like prince Arjuna, for instance, in the Bhagavad-gita over 5000 years ago, He gave it in an undiluted form. Lord Krishna told the prince, “I shall now declare unto in full this knowledge, both phenomenal and noumenal, by knowing which there shall remain nothing further to be known.”

(Bgita 7:2).

However, when their prophets addressed these morally and spiritually degraded people, could they do so? The divine message was suitably modified so that they could accept it and yet be able to make some moral and religious progress.

The Israelites, for instance, were originally a wild nomadic group of tribes. They often fought with the other tribes, killing them in the name of their local tutelary god. They were quite materialistic and did not believe in an afterlife until the times of the prophet Daniel or even later (see Ecclesiastes 8:14-15; Job 14:11-17). Jesus is said to have preached mostly to simple illiterate people like fishermen whom he addressed as, “O, you of little faith”, not giving them any elaborate philosophical knowledge. He told his disciples that there was much more he could teach them but that they were not ready to hear it: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now” (John 16:12).

In the 600s, before the coming of Muhammad, Arabs were not faring any better, if not perhaps worse. Except the Jews and Christians among them, their society was still tribal and barbaric; their religion did not go beyond fetishism, polytheism and idolatry, including human sacrifices to the “daughters of Allah”. It is said that Muhammad claimed that he had received two teachings from above but had only delivered one to his followers, since the other one “would have remained stuck across their throats.” When asked about the soul, for instance, he remained evasive. Indeed, how much theology can you 74

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teach to desert-dwellers who buried alive their daughters at birth so as not to have to feed another mouth, and to whom you had to specify that they were not supposed to have sex with their close relatives?

So he mainly spoke of submitting and surrendering to Allah – which is the beginning step of religion and is what the word ‘Islam’ means – without elaborating at all about Allah’s nature or form.

Fanaticism and Intolerance These “new” religions basically agree on essential principles: There is only one God, His commands should be obeyed, He should be loved1and one should refrain from sin. Service to God is hardly mentioned, if at all. The goal of their followers is the same: to go to “heaven”. This corresponds to the lowest section of the Vedic teachings, karma-kanda. Unfortunately, in the course of their relatively short history (compared to the most ancient Vedic culture), pride and ignorance have created hostility often resulting in religious segregation, conflicts, discrimination and confrontations culminating in wars. Their followers tend to blindly accept whatever they are taught without questioning its validity, and to argue by quoting words of scripture they have not deeply understood. Their narrow-minded display of hatred and prejudices have led many intelligent and sensitive people to consider rejecting religion as a whole as a bunch of absurd unacceptable superstitions.

One can observe an unfortunate phenomenon born out of sheer fanaticism and ignorance: They each claim that their religion, their holy book and their prophet are the best and that all others are lower and even more: false. When they at last became monotheists, the Jews condemned the worship of any other deity than Yahweh, their 1. The word ‘love’ in connection with God is found in the Torah, the New Testament and the Koran, but the followers of these scriptures usually interpret love as meaning believing in God, following religious precepts and being grateful. Except the Sufi mystics, the Muslims generally think that man cannot have a relationship of love with Allah as He is infinite and man is finite. Moreover, how to love someone about whom you hardly know anything?

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own tutelary deity. They rejected the existence of the demigods. They claim their Torah to be superior to everything. When the Christian religion created by Paul started to develop, the Christians accepted Yahweh, but condemned the Jews for not accepting their new “deity”, Jesus Christ. They also rejected the existence of the demigods.

They claim their New Testament, which is partly born from the Torah, to be better than anything else. When Islam appeared, the Mohammedans condemned both the Jews and the Christians for not accepting their tutelary deity, Allah, and his prophet, Muhammad.

They also rejected the existence of the demigods. And guess what?

They, of course, claim their Koran, which is partly born from both the Torah and the New Testament, to be superior to all scriptures.

As mentioned earlier, the leaders of those three traditions have often used religion as a political tool to raise people against each other and/or to conquer territory. They pushed them to engage in warfare, commit murders or other heinous acts. Thus genocides, beginning with that of the Canaanites narrated in the Old Testament, then the bloody spreading of Christianity, as well as the even-bloodier Muslim conquests, then the excesses committed during the Crusades and the so-called “wars of religion” have taken place in our age, kali-yuga. Religious people may conflict, spiritual people do not, as they see the unicity and purpose of all faiths beyond the superficial differences. One cannot find such a phenomenon in the Vedic culture before this age. There has never been a war of religion in the history of Vedic India.1 I do not wish to criticize and rather prefer to 1. It is only at the end of the British rule that the head of the Muslim League agitated people with the religious faith element, creating riots; he pushed for a division of India based on religion. It caused a massive bloodshed resulting in about 10 million casualties in 1947 at the time of the partition of India and the creation of an aberration, Pakistan, a new country which had two parts separated by more than one thousand miles! Such was Britain’s poisonous farewell “gift” to India, amputating her from her richest parts. The Muslims started killing the Hindu men fleeing this new country and kidnap a great amount of their womenfolk as sex-slaves. Later on, when the Eastern part of this new aberrant entity desired her independence from the Western part, war broke up, creating another bloodshed 76

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encourage any sincere believer to develop love for God whatever his confession may be but, as a religion without philosophy tends to be sentimental or fanatical, it is well-known that the followers of these three non-Vedic religious traditions unfortunately tend to claim that their respective path is the only valid one, and that they have a monopoly on salvation, don’t they? The Christians believe that God manifested himself only once historically on Earth, in the form of Jesus, who is therefore the unique Savior, and that salvation is only available to them, all others being doomed to hell. The Muslims also claim heaven to be reserved for them. There is a joke about this: a newcomer, neither Christian neither Muslim, arrives in heaven. He sees two enclosures surrounded by big walls and asks, “What are they?” He is answered, “Oh, behind this wall are Christians and behind that other one are Muslims, but don’t speak so loud, because they both think they are the only ones here”.

They thus tend to condescendingly scorn the followers of other religions, or even of their own internal subdivisions.2In other words, for them, respectively, if you are not a Jew, you are just a Goy or Gentile, a type of sub-human being; if you are not a Christian, you are a hell-bound heathen; and if you are not a Muhammadan, you are condemned as a kaffir or “infidel”. The Buddhists also tend to look down on non-Buddhists as being in illusion. But these are all beliefs, not the truth. Progress is not possible for one who is narrowminded; there is always the possibility of misconception. These traditions share some overlapping values and each have some beliefs and sending millions of refugees fleeing what is now Bangladesh into neighboring India. I remember seeing lines of thousands of such poor people waiting to get a meal freely served to them at a major Krishna temple in Mayapura, West Bengal, and collecting relief funds in France and Switzerland in my early twenties to send there.

2. The Shiite and Sunni Muhammadan hate each other and have been fighting for 14 centuries. Fratricidal conflicts have been opposing the Orthodox and Catholic branches of Christianity early on, and later the Catholic and Protestant branches; the reformed Russian Orthodox church also persecuted the “Old believers” from the 17th to 20th centuries.

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which are true; however, although they all claim that all their beliefs are true, they cannot all be true since some of those so-called truths are mutually exclusive. Indeed, they disagree on important points like the nature and identity of God, His commands, the nature of the thereafter, of salvation, and the ultimate goal of existence. But God is not concerned with our preconceived notions and prejudices or about the name of our religion. He wants us to practice dharma, go beyond the narrow boundaries of sectarian considerations and develop love for Him.

Religions of Meat-Eaters In addition, these traditions all have an element of adharma or irreligiosity in them: animal killing and meat-eating, which breaks one of the four pillars of dharma, compassion. Cow-killing is especially horrendous. The cow takes grass, which is useless for us, and transforms it into a miracle food product, milk, which nourishes not only the whole body, but specifically the finest tissues in the brain.

After our mother’s breast-milk, we all take milk from the cow, so she is considered like a mother in Vedic culture. She is highly respected, not “sacred� as some people misunderstand, and it is considered antithetical to kill a mother.

The diet prescribed for mankind in the Vedas is a vegetarian one.

Carnivorous people argue that dominion over the animals was given to man in the Bible (Genesis 1:26), but three verses later one can read that a vegetarian diet is recommended (Genesis 1:29), so the dominion mentioned means stewardship, not using the animals for food.

The Torah says that Adam, who allegedly lived around 5000 years ago, was the first man. Since kali-yuga, the 4th age of the Vedic cycle, started around the same time, the Bible is maybe a chronicle of that age only and Adam is the first known man of that yuga. Indeed, the Midrash states that many worlds were created and destroyed before 78

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ours (Genesis, rabbah, 3) and the Kabballah teaches that there were 974 generations of men created and destroyed before Adam, which pushes back creation to about 15 million years ago. The Talmudists say that for ten generations beginning with Adam men were vegetarians.

Then it is said that after the Flood, man was given as a concession to human weakness the permission to eat meat. But, as often, the concession became the standard. When the Jews allegedly left Egypt after four centuries of exile, it is said that Yahweh tried to give them again a vegetarian diet, in the form of the manna. But they were not satisfied and “lusted for meat” (Numbers 11:4-33). So he gave it to them in the form of quails, but chastised them with a plague as he was displeased. He finally permitted it but reluctantly, calling it the meat of lust (Deut.12:20). Although the injunction not to take blood clearly means not to kill, the Israelites turned it around to justify their attachment to meat-eating by inventing the kashrut: they claim that by killing and bleeding the animal, taking away the veins and arteries and washing the meat, one can eat “kosher” bloodless meat. The Muslims have something similar, hallal meat. A meat-eater can be a religious person but he cannot accede to the spiritual platform unless he gives up his sinful habit. As long as one breaks the principles of dharma, one cannot be spiritual. Meat-eating rests on exploitation of helpless animals. As such it is immoral and an immoral man can never be free; he can never find out what reality truly is.

Actually, these are quite materialistic religions because they only encourage people to enjoy the fruits of their actions. There are, of course, exceptions, but in their case, to follow one’s religious duties usually means simply to subscribe to a creed and dogmas without much inner life, with no other purpose than to enjoy a good earthly life, hoping to avail oneself of heavenly pleasures in the thereafter.

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sanatana-dharma, on the other hand, directs one to his inner world and teaches to link everything to a higher, divine reality. It stresses the importance of developing knowledge of the eternal self or soul, of searching what is the deep purpose of our existence. Presently, each and every one of us living in this world is under illusion, a false sense that one is the center of the world, is all powerful, independent from God and capable to be happy separately from Him. It makes us identify fully with our body and mind. Such a life confronts us to unpleasant unavoidable realities: samsara, the inescapable repeated cycle of suffering in its innumerable aspects in addition to its two most unpleasant forms, disease and old age, and between the two main ones: the trauma of birth and the dreadful agony of death, which is said to feel like the simultaneous stinging of one hundred scorpions.

Turn Within!

True religious practice aims at reestablishing one’s eternal relationship with God on a personal basis, realizing that we are is His loving servants and that true lasting happiness does not lie outside of that loving service, and subsequently freeing ourselves from illusion and suffering. The basis of Vedic spiritual teachings is the understanding that since we are bound by our own actions due to the stringent rules of karma, the law of cause and effect, we ought to elevate our consciousness beyond attraction to temporary things which goads us towards materialistic binding activities. We ought to turn within and focus, as taught especially in the Upanishads, on the inner core of our being, atman, the soul, our real self; we ought to aim at realizing that we actually belong to another dimension, another level of reality, that we are essentially of the same divine nature as God and are one in quality with Him. Knowledge and experience of that higher blissful dimension, where one connects with wonderful all-loving God, procures a higher taste, which gradually frees one

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from lower enslaving pursuits. It culminates in ecstatic loving communion with Him. As a by-product of that approach, the non-theoretical but realized understanding that all living beings share the same sacred higher nature gives a profound sense of unity; it is the only true basis for much-sought-after peace. There is no more ‘us and them’ mentality, but a sense of even-minded kinship. The impulse to compete, fight and harm others disappears and is replaced by humility, tolerance and compassion. One then has an attitude of respect, empathy and friendliness towards all living beings, not just the human ones, and not just one’s countrymen or coreligionists.

This is true non-violence. In order to help them free themselves from suffering, one benevolently tries to spiritually uplift one’s human brothers in a spirit of universal brotherhood. This is a higher type of welfare work. Every decent person wishes to serve others and there are many institutions to concretize that natural tendency, but most are geared towards serving the body only, not the soul within. That service to the soul is achieved by spreading knowledge about the soul and his relationship with God.

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Chapter 4

The Jews, A Chosen Group of Desert-dwellers?

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he Jews hold that they are a special, superior people, specifically chosen by God as His own. Possibly in order to reinforce their sentiment of unity as an ethnic religious group in a hostile environment, as well as in exile in Egypt, Assyria and Babylon, the Jewish scribes and prophets spread the idea that they were especially favored by their tutelary deity, Yahweh. This is exactly as the ancient traditions of other neighboring ethnic groups describe how those people felt favored by their respective tutelary deities (Ashtur Kemosh in Moab, Moloch or Milkom in Ammon, Kaus in Edom, Baal in Canaan and Lebanon, Bel/Marduk in Babylon, etc.). Why would the Supreme Lord present Himself to obscure desert tribes and adopt them more than others when they were as sinful as the others? The idea given is that they were supposed to be an example for the other nations, but Jewish Patriarchs are not admirable characters; their ethics are shocking. For instance, Abraham told Pharaoh that his wife was his sister in order not to get killed; Jacob was indifferent to the rape of his daughter; David lusted after the wife of one 83

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of his soldiers and arranged for the latter to be killed in battle so that he could enjoy his wife; Salomon built shrines for his “pagan” wives’ foreign gods, etc. What to speak of genocidal ethnic-cleansing of the so-called Promised Land.

Whereas the Bible simply says that Yahweh gave teachings only to the Israelites through Moses, the Kabbalists claim that when he gave them it was in seventy dialects with the hope that all nations would accept it (Talmud, Numeri Rabbah 14:10; Shabbat 88b), but that out of all nations the Jews alone accepted to follow those teachings while the other nations rejected them. We can see that Judaism has something very much like unwarranted sectarianism built in its mundane ethnicity. Actually, following the 613 mitzvoth or commandments of the Torah is what makes a Jew the “chosen of God”. The famous response of Rabbi Hillel (110BC-10AD) to a Gentile asking him to describe the essence of Judaism was, “Do not do to others what is offensive to you. That is the core of Judaism and the rest is commentary. Now, go and study the Torah.”1 That is a nice ethic. It is not particularly spiritual. It should be applied, though.

Human Sacrifices The ancient Israelites practiced human sacrifice. Those who may be skeptical about this assertion can remember how Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22: 1-10). This account depends upon the logic of human sacrifice, because Abraham is praised for his willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice: to kill his own son to appease Yahweh. The Leviticus also mentions human sacrifices (27:28-29). In Exodus (22:29) the Jewish deity even orders his people to sacrifice their first-born to him. King Manasseh is said to 1. Steven Rosen, Om Shalom, Folk Books, NY 1990

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have sacrificed his heir (2 Kings 21:6). It is also mentioned in Micah (6:6-8) where it is held as noble and the epitome of sacrifice, but considered useless, as other lower forms of sacrifice, without justice, loyalty and humility before God. Through careful historical reconstruction, it is argued that child sacrifice played a central role in ancient Judahite religious practice. In Judges (11:29-40) we read that one character named Jephthah made a vow to Yahweh that if he would give him victory over the Ammonites, then he would in return offer to him as a burnt sacrifice the first being that would come out from his house upon his return. As it was his daughter who came out, he sacrificed her. This account also depends upon the logic of human sacrifice. Kenneth E. Bailey suggests that when Jephthah made that vow he was thinking of an animal, not of a human being belonging to his household. He explains that in the houses of traditional Middle Eastern villages there was sometimes two rooms, one exclusively reserved for guests, but usually only one room, divided in two parts, one a few feet lower, used as a stable for the animals, and steps next to the door to access the higher part where the entire family would cook, eat, sleep and live, and where there would be mangers cut into the floor on the animals’ side Each night, the family cow, donkey and sheep would be driven in the lower part to provide heat in winter and be safe from theft, then taken out every morning. When Jephthah came back, most likely early in the morning, he expected to see one of his animals to come bonding out of the room in which they had been kept all night. It never crossed his mind that it would be a human being. Even in such a barbarian culture where a father could sell his daughters as slaves, he was not planning to murder any of the people living in his house. But as he had made a vow, he sacrificed his daughter. She did not protest, as human sacrifices were common and one’s promise to the deity was more important than a human life. The story is a tragedy because he obviously expected an

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animal.1 Notwithstanding this tragic outcome, making a vow to one’s tutelary deity to offer him a human holocaust in exchange for victory in battle was a common feature of some of the Semitic peoples, among which were the Moabites and the Israelites. Indeed, the earliest conception of holy war mentioned in the Torah was one where the noncombatants were slaughtered by Yahweh’s worshippers as sacrifices offered to the Jewish deity out of gratitude for giving them the victory over their enemies (Numbers 21:2-3; Deuteronomy 2:34, 3:6, 7:2; Joshua 6:21, 8:25, 10:28-40, etc.). This practice of killing every human and sometimes every living being in a conquered city is often referred to as herem or “the ban”: “The ban as sacrifice is an ideology of war in which the enemy is to be utterly destroyed as an offering to the deity who has made victory possible. Implicit in this ideology is a view of God who appreciates human sacrifice.”2 They had the erroneous conception that the gods were feeding on the essence of men, their blood, and that their tutelary deity was fighting on their behalf in exchange for human sacrifice. Belief in many gods and in the efficacy of human sacrifice is thus attested 1. Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes, SPCK, London, 2008. The author also explains that Jesus was born in a similar setting. When it says in the Gospel of Luke, 2:7, that “After the child Jesus was born he was laid in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn” the word ‘inn’ is a mistranslation. The proper reading is “guest room”. Joseph and his pregnant wife did not arrive in Bethlehem on the same evening that she gave birth, so he had time to make adequate arrangements. As he belonged to that village, where he had family members, they would have been welcome in most homes and they were welcomed in one; but because the guest room - not the village inn or hotel - in the private house where they were received was already full, they were accommodated in the family room. In every culture, a woman about to give birth is given special attention. Simple rural communities the world over always assist one of their own women in childbirth regardless of the circumstances, and Bethlehem was no exception. The family room must have naturally been cleared of men, and the village midwife and other women assisted Mary during the birth. Then the newborn Jesus was wrapped and put to bed in one of the mangers on fresh straw, which provided a nice cradle, and covered with a blanket. He was not born in a smelly dirty stable, otherwise the shepherds who visited him would have immediately taken the whole family into one of their homes. (p 26-35) 2. Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible, 151.

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in the Bible. During a battle, when the Moabite king Mesha saw he was losing, he offered his first-born son as a sacrifice to his deity Kemosh in exchange for victory. Apparently, Kemosh accepted and granted it to him, defeating Yahweh, as his “great wrath came against the Israelite army and its allies and made them all retreat” (2 Kings, 3:27).

The Bible did not drop down from heaven. It has been composed over centuries with many editions by many hands.

“In 1981, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the official arm of Reform Judaism, published its own Torah commentary. It flatly stated that the “tales” of Genesis were a mix of “myth, legend, distant memory and search for origins, bound together by the strands of a central theological concept.” The notion that the Bible is not literally true is more or less settled and understood among most Conservative rabbis. In 2002, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism has issued a new Torah and commentary, the first for Conservatives in more than 60 years. It represents one of the boldest efforts ever to introduce into the religious mainstream a view of the Bible as a human rather than divine document. Modern reconstructions of Israel’s religion have become much more circumspect in how they use the Old Testament, not least because comparative data (i.e. the comparison of ancient Israel with other cultures) and archaeology have led to the realization that the Bible is not a reliable witness to the religion of ancient Israel and Judah.”3 All of the biblical texts which oppose human sacrifices were written after that institution had been condemned by prophet Jeremiah in the seventh century BC. The monotheistic prophet tried to explain it away first by associating the worship of the deity Baal with “idol worship”, although before his times and the gradual insinuation by the religious elites that Baal was a distinct, false god, there is a long history of identifying Baal and Yahweh and of the common Israelites religiously sacrificing their children to him.

Jeremiah was rewriting history, trying to equate child sacrifice in 3. Stackert, Jeffrey A Prophet Like Moses: Prophecy, Law, and Israelite Religion 2014 87

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general with idolatry and to deny that it was ever done for Yahweh and that Yahweh had ever decreed it. Prophet Ezekiel, on the other hand, did not try to deny it like Jeremiah did since it was rooted in the law of Moses. His strategy to oppose it was to claim that Yahweh had intentionally given bad commands to his “chosen people” and decreed it as a punishment for their unfaithfulness, in order to “make them desolate (without first-born sons) and to reveal to them who he was!” (Ezekiel 20:18-26) Well, I hope this was just a theodicy on the prophet’s part, otherwise I’d rather not belong to that deity’s “chosen” tribe. Anyway, if one considers the history of the Jewish people, one may wonder what exactly their alleged election consisted of; rather, what terrible weight of karma makes one take birth in such a nation, given its repeated systematic sufferings? One may not wish to take part in that collective karma. How many other such bad commands did Yahweh give the Israelites? But could he do worse than order such an absolutely heinous morally depraved act? Yes, indeed, genocide, as we shall see later. Nonetheless, the Jews believe that this world has been created by God for man’s enjoyment and that we can earn His grace if we enjoy it without sinful motive and collect piety through pious activities. However, given the various sources of misery which make it such an imperfect place, it can be questioned if God has truly created this world for our enjoyment. If that was actually His purpose, He could actually be blamed for all its imperfections.

Polytheism From all the material available, it is known that ancient Israel was polytheistic; it originated as a component of and was existing within a polytheistic cultural context. Their worshipable god was a tribal deity, the type all local ethnic groups used to worship. Archaeological

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evidence regarding ancient Israelite religion, including inscriptions, amulets, figurines and ancient texts, as well as details in the Bible, indicates that the Jews initially accepted the common Semitic belief that there was a pantheon of gods. (Gen.6:1-4). Such a Canaanite pantheon of deities were worshipped in ancient Israel (before 600 BC) during the tribal confederation period of Israel’s history. Its religion was, as its neighbors’ a “national god” religion, with a main deity, El, along with his consort, as the central point of worship of the state. The oldest manuscript reads, “When Elyon (literally ‘the highest’) established the inheritance of each nation, when he divided mankind, He established the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of his sons. Yahweh’s share was Israel” (Deut. 32:8-9).

In other words, the chief deity, El, or Elyon – formerly represented in the form of a bull – divided the world (maybe just the Near and Middle East?) into seventy nations according to the number of his sons, seen as younger deities of the pantheon. Yahweh was one of those sons/second-tier deities and he received the small nation of Israel as his inheritance. He had not yet assumed the status of head of the pantheon ascribed to him in later texts. He only gradually rose in importance, from a young warrior deity claiming that no other god equaled him (Deut.32:39) and whose prowess in battle are described in detail: “His sword devours flesh; his arrows are drunk with the blood of his enemies he is taking vengeance upon” (Deut.32:42). In Psalm 82, he has ascended the throne as head of the divine council and scolds the other gods, warning them that they will die like men despite their ancestry as a consequence of their injustice. He began to be seen as creator-god (Exodus 3), the “ancient of days”. There was thus a merging of El and Yahweh (Psalm 87). But in this period, Israelites still believed in other gods and goddesses.

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Yahweh’s Wife El was coupled with a powerful Canaanite fertility goddess named Asherah,1who somehow in time became identified as the queen consort of Yahweh, making him part of a “divine pair”, a Vedic concept. Due to the patriarchal nature of Israelite society, she was often worshipped in the form of a sacred pole or tree, as repeatedly mentioned in the Bible. She was worshipped alongside him in his temple in Jerusalem. In the Book of Kings (2,23), we are told that she was housed in that temple and that female temple personnel wove ritual textiles for her. Some say that her worship dates from the conquest of Israel by Assyria in 722 BC. Whatever the case may be, that worship was acceptable orthodoxy until the 7th century BCE. In 622 BC, King Josiah made extensive repairs to the temple built by Solomon. Meanwhile, a group of priests were planning a big reform.

During the renovation work, the high priest claimed to have discovered the sefer torah, the words allegedly dictated to Moses by Yahweh himself to supplement his oral teachings.2The reformers started to preach that Yahweh demanded exclusivity, saying that the Hebrews had been forbidden by Yahweh to worship any other god because they owed their allegiance to him, their “jealous” patron deity, and that such worship was punishable by death. Yahweh was claimed to be the only one “true” god. Josiah agreed with the reformers and launched a campaign against the worship of other gods, destroying their shrines and killing their priests. Asherah was officially discarded…

1. Also called Ashtoreth, Ishtar, Anat-Yahu, or simply Elat, “Goddess”, the feminine form of El. She was worshipped as Innana in Sumer, Astarte or Aphrodite in Greece and is probably a form of the Vedic goddess Durga, like Kali. The Book of Jeremiah ((7:16-18; 44:17-19, 25.) refers to her when it uses the title “Queen of Heaven” In modern times, this same ancient “pagan” title is still used by contemporary “pagans” to refer to the Great Goddess, while Catholics and Orthodox Christians now apply it to Mary, the mother of Jesus and his siblings.

2. William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, Cambridege 2004 90

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But why intolerantly kill worshippers of other deities or demigods? People worship according to their level of consciousness. The demigods assist the Supreme Lord in the management of universal affairs. To sacrifice to them is acceptable for people in lower consciousness, to gradually purify them until they are eligible to worship the Lord. In the Bhagavad gita (7.20-23) the worshippers of the demigods are said to be less intelligent, because they think the demigods bestow blessings independently from God and do not know that He is the ultimate enjoyer of all sacrifices. They are said to be worshipping God indirectly. But they are not condemned, what to speak of putting them to death. This is gross barbarism and it is amazing that some cultures pride themselves of it even in modern times and justify killing people because they worship the demigods or worship God in a different manner… The reform was cut short when Josiah found his death in 609 BC. Ten years later, Babylon conquered Judah and deported its elite; ten years later, another batch was deported and the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BC. It contained the “house of God”, where Yahweh was served like a king. After its destruction, the Hebrews lost the center of their faith, sacrifices and liturgy. God became gradually regarded as beyond the power of human conception and took an impersonal dimension; the demigods, too, disappeared from his entourage. The minor demigods who played the part of messengers became too known as “angels”, angelos in Greek, from the Persian angaros.

The Samaritans The Samaritans say they are Israelite descendants of the Northern Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh that survived the destruction of the kingdom of Israel (Samaria) by the Assyrians and were taken into Assyrian captivity. They state that their worship, which is based on the Samaritan Pentateuch – claimed by them as the original – is the true religion of the ancient Israelites from before 91

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the Babylonian captivity; they claim it was preserved by those who remained in the Land of Israel, as opposed to Judaism, which they see as a related but altered and amended religion, brought back by those returning from the Babylonian captivity and having a falsified Pentateuch text produced by Ezra during the Babylonian exile. Indeed, in Babylon, the Jewish scribes had access to Babylonian, Sumerian, Assyrian and Persian texts, which they translated and through which their own culture was influenced. It was in exile that much of Judaism came into being. The idea of Sheol, the place of the dead, for instance, evolved during exile into a rudimentary concept of heaven and hell. There was not yet a fixed Torah at the time, just a collection of scrolls.1It was edited and revised into something like its current form at the beginning of the Second Temple period, when Cyrus conquered Babylon and allowed the exiled Jews to go back to Jerusalem and build a new temple. The Chronicles, a new history written at this time, reflects the concerns of the exiles in its almost-exclusive focus on Judah and the temple. The older prophetic works were edited and reinterpreted. Some date the split between the Samaritans and the Jews to the time of Nehemiah and Ezra and the building of the second temple in Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. The Samaritans offered their help to build it but the returning exiles refused, considered the Samaritans to be non-Israelites.

The Rise of Yahweh By the time of Second Temple Judaism, Yahweh, the Israelites’ tribal deity, had become the “sole true” God. The other deities worshipped in the early Israelite religion were later considered to have been false gods or at best “angels”2, although “sons of God” does not mean “false gods” nor “angels” in the original texts before their 1. Peter Watson, A history, Weindenfeld &Nicolson 2005 2. The Bible mentions many encounters with angels, the existence of whom is a belief coming from Zoroastrianism and Babylon. Angels, malakim or messengers, were also seen as divine beings in the ancient Hebrew world, but of lesser status: messenger-gods.

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edition by monotheist scribes.3 In a polemical nationalistic agenda, the deities4 worshiped by the neighboring nations were claimed to have perished (Jeremiah 10:1-16) or their divinity was satirically denied (2 Isaiah 44:9-20). We can thus detect an evolution of the status of Yahweh within the frame of the ancient Israelite religion, and an evolution of the religion itself, from polytheism to monotheism.

Much of the Bible was assembled, revised and edited in the 5th century BC to reflect the realities and challenges of the era. Thus, biblical monotheism is a product of the priestly and intellectual class during the Babylonian exile and subsequently became enforced in the homeland when the exiles went back there.5 So the present biblical text describes the theological ideal of the elites of that particular epoch, which was not the reality in the religious lives of most of the people.6 Scholars have been debating since more than a century and a half as to what are the sources of the Bible? They favor three hypotheses or some different combinations of them.7 The period of Persian rule saw the development of expectation of a messiah – an ancient Zoroastrian concept – a future human

3. See C.A. Rollston, The rise of monotheism in ancient Israel, Stone Campbell Journal 6, 2003 4. The Jews were not the only one claiming that their deity was the foremost one. In Sumer and Babylonia (bab-ilani, gate of the gods) in Mesopotamia, Enuma Elish, the hymn glorifying Marduk, the sun-god, exalted him as the greatest of the Annunaki or higher gods.

5. W.G. Dever. Did God have a wife?

6. The Elephantine papyri – the records of a Jewish colony in Egypt dating from the last quarter of the 5th century BCE, whose religion has been described as nearly identical to Iron Age II Judahite religion – suggest that, “Even in exile and beyond, the veneration of a female deity endured.” The papyri describe the Jews as worshiping Anat-Yahu (Asherah) the wife or sacred consort of Yahweh.

7. The Documentary hypothesis: There were 4 documents with differing emphases designed to further the theological and political agendas of their authors, linked to an evolutionary framework of the Jewish religion and combined by Ezra upon the return from the Babylonian exile. The Supplementary hypothesis: The Torah is a single core document supplemented by fragments taken from many sources. The Fragmentary hypothesis: The Torah is a collection of small fragments of varying lengths, rather than continuous documents, accounting for the Torah’s diversity. It is the product of a single author, at some time in the 6th century BC, a national historian writing with the aim of extending the existing Deuteronomist history backwards in time to create a mythical history of the Israelites going back to the creation of the world.

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king who would rule a purified Israel as Yahweh’s representative at the end of times. Zechariah, a prophet of the early Persian period, wrote of two messiahs, one royal and the other priestly. The royal messiah was identified by him as Zerubbabel, a descendant of the House of David, and the priestly one in Joshua, a High Priest. However, these early hopes were dashed and thereafter there are merely general references to a messiah descending from David. From these ideas, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism would emerge.

Zoroaster Long before Judaism, back in India, the philosopher Zarathustra imagined that there were two Gods, one holy, the other one unholy.

He advocated this dualistic philosophy in the Zendavesta. After a conflict with sage Vasistha (Rig Veda 1.24.14), he presented his religion as a rival to the ritualistic religion of the Vedas, where the demigods were offered propitiatory rites but with the clear understanding that they are God’s servants and like limbs of His body. Their two traditions were closely related. Zarathustra only accepted the sun god, that was renamed Ahura-mazda in Persian, along with Varuna, without acknowledging the supremacy of God. He later began to despise the Vedic demigods and reversed their position and the demons’. He was the first to present the idea of a principle of evil personified.

Since he could not find any followers in India, deeply steeped in Vedic teachings, he travelled to Iran, where he preached it successfully.

It became so contagious that under its influence the Jews created an entity called Satan as a rival of God.1Thus his world of angels and demons entered Jewish culture. This false concept of Satan is now also found in Christianity and Islam.

Exclusive Monotheism 1. Bhaktivinoda Thakura, Tattva-viveka 94

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The Torah was fully formed around 200 BC.2The concept of the resurrection of the dead, another ancient Zoroastrian idea which is a distortion of the misunderstood Vedic teaching of reincarnation, was developed gradually in Judaism, particularly around 160 BC during the time of religious martyrdom, with the idea and hope that the martyrs were surely not dying forever. The Sadducees, the descendants of the high priests since Aaron and his son Elazar through Zadok, had no such beliefs since they confirmed their Torah to the Pentateuch, but the Pharisees, the Hebrew sect closest to Zoroastrian religion did. The Jews only very gradually became monotheists from polytheists and henotheists. Judaism did not become stabilized until roughly AD 200. The Jews claim to have the first monotheism, whereas it is quite young compared to the timeless Vedic monotheism. Moreover, their monotheism is not universal but exclusive, as the Jewish deity Yahweh is claimed by the Jews to be their exclusive god, not the god of other people. Their covenant is exclusive and entails hostility towards all non-Jews, as clearly expressed in the Bible. Judaism has never been a unified religion; it is a mostly mundane, ethnic tradition with different currents. Alongside an idealistic part somewhat enlightened by the input of various prophets, many of whom were rejected and even killed, there is a very materialistic part.

Destruction At the outcome of the first Jewish war, Jerusalem was destroyed and her temple was again demolished in 70 CE. A group of surviving Pharisees had to adapt a tradition based on worship in the temple to one without temple. The focus changed from the temple to the Torah. Emperor Hadrian decided to build a new city on the ruins of Jerusalem, Aelia Capitolina, and a temple to Jupiter, the Ka2. It represents the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of the god Yahweh. (Wright, J. Edward. The Early History of Heaven. Oxford University Press 2002) 95

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pitolion. He took measures to suppress Judaism. During the revolt which broke out of protest and the second war which followed, the Jews were massacred again; the “Promised Land” was left a charnel-house; its survivors were expelled and it was renamed Syria Palestine in 123 CE. Jews were only allowed to visit Jerusalem once a year on the anniversary of its destruction to wail at the only wall left of the temple. But they maintained an invincible confidence that the temple would one day rise again. Later, Christian emperors turned the Temple Mount into a refuse dump, to impress everyone that the Jews were no longer the chosen people, and they built splendid and massive churches. The rabbis taught that Titus, the general whose legions had torched the temple, now shared a corner of hell with Jesus, where he was destined to be consumed by fire, reassembled and then burned to ashes again for all eternity. The philosopher Celsus, writing circa 150 to 200 AD, wrote a narrative describing a Jew who discounts the story of the Virgin Birth of Jesus.

“Jesus came from a Jewish village and from a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. He says that she was driven out by her husband, who was a carpenter by trade, as she was convicted of adultery with a certain soldier named Panthera. Then he says that after she had been driven out by her husband and while she was wandering about in a disgraceful way, she secretly gave birth to Jesus. He states that because he was poor he hired himself out as a workman in Egypt, and there tried his hand at certain magical powers on which the Egyptians pride themselves.”1

Jesus in the Talmud Talmudic narratives give striking parallels, though the alleged father, Pandera, is not a Roman in the Talmud but a Jew: “In 3651 (c 90 BC), a man of the tribe of Judah, Joseph Pandera, lived 1. Translation by Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud Princeton University Press, 2007. p18-19 96

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near a widow who had a daughter called Miriam. This virgin was betrothed to Yohanan, a Torah-learned and God-fearing man of the house of David. Before the end of a certain Sabbath, Joseph looked lustfully at Miriam, knocked on her door and pretended to be her husband, but she only submitted against her will…

Miriam gave birth to Yehoshua, whose name later depreciated to Yeshu. When old enough, she took him to study the Jewish tradition. One day he walked with his head uncovered, showing disrespect, in front of the sages. This betrayed his illegitimacy and Miriam admitted him as Pandera’s son. Scandalized, he fled to Upper Galilee. Yeshu later went to the Jerusalem Temple...On a day before the Passover, they hanged him on a tree… and he was buried. His followers on Sunday told that he was not in his grave, that he ascended to heaven as he had prophesied. As a gardener took him from the grave, they searched it and could not find him. But the gardener confessed he had taken it to prevent his followers from stealing his body and claiming his ascension to heaven.”2 This story was apparently known before the resurrection stories were incorporated into the canonical gospels,3as these gospels are keen to explain away the story by the improbable claim that guards were bribed to claim that the body had been stolen while they slept (Matt. 28:11-15). It is not difficult to see how the Virgin Birth story might have arisen. In the Hellenic world, where gods often impregnated human women, an obvious solution for any illegitimate putative leader was that a deity was the father. This had the dual advantage of explaining the illegitimacy and introducing an element of the divine.4 Some elements of that Talmudic story resemble what is written in the Gospels. The dating, though – c 90BC – does not fit. Jesus, from what we know or believe, lived much later. Are we in front of an edited Talmud in which the date has been changed? Jews 2. Van Voorst Robert E. Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence. Wm B Eerdmans Publishing. 2000 p 123-6.

3. There is no mention of the resurrection in the oldest manuscripts of Mark. They only appear in it around 200AD. 4. www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com 97

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are very secretive about their religion. One rabbi allegedly says in the Talmud, “The communication to Gentiles (non-Jews) about our religion would be to the equal of the killing of all Jews, for if they knew what we taught about them, they would kill us openly.”

The Talmud mentions another Jesus as the illegitimate child of a Miriam, a hairdresser, who was viewed as an adulteress, and a Roman centurion called Pandera or Panthera. He was subsequently known as Ben Pantera or Ben Stada (son of an unchaste woman). The mention is made by Rabbi Akivah who said he saw this Jesus in the marketplace. But Rabbi Akivah was put to death after the Bar Kokhbah revolt of 136 AD, which means he was only born around 50AD, long after the time Jesus supposedly lived. In the Babylonian Talmud, it is written, “On the eve of the Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Anyone who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.’ But since nothing was brought forward in his favor he was hanged on the eve of the Passover.” (Sanhedrin 43a) This did not happen in the case of Jesus-Christ according to the Gospel narrations…The question as to which references to ‘Yeshu’ in the Talmud specifically indicate ‘Jesus-Christ’ has been actively debated for at least the last 800 years. And during some of that time it is said that the text of the Talmud was corrupted; it was censored and for a time banned by the Christian church because they found some of those references deeply offensive, like after the Disputation of Tortosa (1413); it was edited by the Jews themselves to escape censorship. Modern critical scholars debate whether ‘Yeshu’ does or 98

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does not refer to the historical Jesus. Some have the understanding that the term refers to Jesus. They agree that the accounts offer little independent or accurate historical evidence about Jesus, and that the writers of the Talmud had only vague knowledge of Jesus that they got from the Christians and embellished to discredit him while disregarding chronology. Due to the Gospel parallels, the Yeshu narratives are typically viewed as a derogatory account of the life of Jesus resulting from Jewish reaction to persecution by Christians. After all, there is a lot of passages in the New Testament badmouthing the Jews, like, “You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do.

He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44). “You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom you have been now the betrayers and murderers” (Acts 7:51-52). “For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake” (Titus 1:10-11). “For you, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for you also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins always, for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost” (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16). “Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before your feet, and to know that I have loved you” (Revelation 3:9).

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Some argue that the dating and the contrived denials are subterfuges on the part of the Jews, and that the Talmud does contain hostile stories about Yeshua and uses horrible terms in relation with him, his mother and the Christians. For example, far from accepting Jesus as messiah, adding insult to injury, the Rabbis say that he was the son of a harlot, a failed student dismissed by his rabbi for assorted sexual misdemeanors and who had, out of pique, fallen to worship a brick. Far from reigning in heaven, as the Christians claim, he was consigned to hell boiling in a cauldron of stool (Talmud b Gittin 57 a). That it is why Church authorities had every copy of the Talmud they could find burnt at the stake, like in 1242 after the Disputation of Paris brought about by Nicholas Donin, a former Jew having converted to Christianity and denouncing the Talmud’s offensive language (10 000 copies burnt); by Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada (1420-1498), Inquisitor-General Cardinal Caraffa in 1550, etc. The Talmudic sources alluding to Jesus are very brief, sometimes vague and mutually contradicting. There are different stories, different possible “Jesus,” different chronologies and different versions of the same text; this is because the Talmud is a collection of statements from different Rabbis living in different time periods. The Jews in general say that the Talmud does not mention Jesus nor his mother but a few characters with the same name. Another Jewish argument is that the survival of the Jewish nation throughout the ages was based specifically on self-actualization and self-differentiation from the Gentiles, so the Torah itself prescribes the Jews to take measures not to befriend them too much so Jews will not learn from their traditions and eventually come to intermarry which will reduce the Jewish population.

They say that the Talmud is often negative about the Gentiles but that it is understandable given the times of persecution in which it was written. Whatever allusions to Jesus are found in the Talmud may also have been colored in response to the missionary attempts of 100

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Christian sects. Some Jews complain that Christianity purposefully created the first “religious enemy” in history in order to justify persecuting them and spoiling them of their properties.1But other Jews say that both Talmuds claim responsibility for the death of Jesus, that to have turned him to the Romans and have him crucified by them was not bad nor shameful; they claim full responsibility for it as they consider him an imposter and a blasphemer.2 Jews feel they do not need to justify themselves to the Christians, whom they consider a bunch of hypocrites, guilty of the worst abominations in history. To this sort of people, they deem that the words put in Jesus’ mouth by the author of Matthew fit best: “You hypocrite! First cast out the beam out of your own eye: and then shall you see clearly to cast out the mote out of your brother’s eye” (Matt 7:5).

Another Judaism Rabbinical Judaism, which replaced the Second Temple religion, revisited the texts of the Torah and rewrote them, putting an end to political activism for centuries. It rests mostly on Midrash exegesis, the speculations of the rabbis from the time of the Babylonian exile until the compilation of the Talmud and the Kabbalah, which exacerbate the idea of superiority of the Jews over other people as well as contempt towards them. The Kabbalah, about which it is said that one can only try to understand it after having studied the Torah and the Talmud for forty years, states that there are 600 000 “Jewish” souls, having six hundred thirteen parts each. They were those men who witnessed the revelation on Mount Sinai. They are those who 1. We can now best appreciate the great contribution to religion made by the United States: the separation of ‘Church’ and ‘State’. It is, first and foremost, a repudiation of the alliance bargained by the ecclesiastic authorities with Roman emperor Constantine. It is also a solemn promise by the political authorities not to use religious institutions as a political tool, and by the religious authorities not to use political institutions as a religious tool.

2. Peter Schafer. Jesus in the Talmud, p73-74 101

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take birth today from a Jewish mother. They are reborn until they achieve perfection in following the Torah. They go to God at that time – whatever that means – but there is a Kabbalistic doctrine according to which the Jewish souls are fragmented or expanded to accommodate more Jewish human births. In its section called Sefer Ha Gilgulim, they are said to expand or fragment to accommodate future growing Jewish generations, one part going to God and one staying here to allow Jewish births!?1The other human beings are just goyim, animal-like human beings with an impure soul, meant to serve the Jews, especially after the advent of the Jewish messiah. But publications in English intentionally obscure many such things, as explained by professors Shahak and Mekzvinsky: “The role of Satan, whose earthly embodiment according to the Kabbalah is every non-Jew, has been minimized or is not mentioned by authors who have not written about the Kabbalah in Hebrew…According to the Lurianic Kabbalah, the world was created solely for the sake of the Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”2 Today the religious Jews in general do not see Judaism as “the one path to God”. They consider that other nations and peoples are not required to obey the law of Moses. However, they believe that the Seven Laws of Noah3 are automatically binding on other nations in order to be assured of prosperity and a place in heaven. Thus, as a 1. Om Shalom 2. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel Pluto, London, 1999 3. According to a literal reading of Genesis, since the Great Flood is said to have killed all human beings except Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives, all modern humans are descendants of Noah. So the seven laws he received from God apply to all of humanity.

Actually, the story of the Great Flood, Noah and the Ark comes from the 1000 years older Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, itself inspired by the 500-year older story of Atra-hasis, itself inspired by the older story of Ziusudra, itself inspired by the original, oldest Vedic story of Manu. The ancient Vedic writings mention that such floods are recurrent events in the history of the world. The Bhavisya Purana, for instance, describes the story of Noah (Nyuha) and his sons, but differently: “A big flood came, covering the whole earth, up to Badarikasrama in the Himalayas. Nyuha made a huge boat in which all living entities could easily enter. There were 80 000 sages with him” (Pratisarga, ch.7).

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mostly ethnic religion Judaism holds that others may have their own different religious paths, as long as they are consistent with these seven laws.4 They are concerned with their own group and individual salvation is not an issue as they think that they are saved just by being part of the “chosen people”. Judaism is mostly concerned with this world and is not very other-worldly focused. The blessings of God mentioned in the Torah and promised to the faithful Jews are land and progeny, which consists of nothing spiritual.

Impersonalism Versus Personalism The images and concepts one may have of God vary among people, whether individually or collectively, philosophically or religiously.

The ways various traditions see Him is of a paramount importance as they condition the outlook of their believers towards self, others and Him. The three Semitic religions are quite silent about His form.

It does not seem to be part of the revelations they have received.

The Book of Ezekiel (I.28) in the Torah describes God’s complexion as being dark like a mass of clouds on a rainy day, but Judaism hardly speaks of God’s form. Paradoxically, the Jews usually have an impersonal idea of God. They speak of His living presence on Earth as the Shekinah, a mystical principle. The Deuteronomy states that He does not have a body (4.12) In Exodus, it is said that no one can see Him (33.10) Isaiah said that man cannot conceive how God is.

The later Jewish tradition presents Him essentially in an impersonal way, as an abstract, distant divine principle, as Judaism sees God as an ineffable, undefinable Being. It stresses His laws and precepts.

Paradoxically, the Torah clearly mentions a few encounters between men and God. It states, for instance, that the Israelite deity appeared to Abraham (Genesis 18). Jacob is also said to have seen Him face 4. They are: Do not deny God. Do not blaspheme God. Do not kill. Do not engage in illicit sexual relations. Do not steal. Do not eat the blood of animals. Establish courts to ensure obedience to the law.

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to face (Genesis 32.30), Isaiah too (Isaiah 6.1) and Moses, along with seventy-three elder men of Israel also saw Him (Exodus 24.9-10). So, if on one hand He is said to be invisible, what does the Torah mean when it says someone saw God? The Hebrew word ‘Elohim’ seems to be the source of the confusion in this regard. How? Well, it is a plural name meaning “the gods”; it is only with time that it came to mean the singular “God”. As we saw earlier, Judaism is a faith that gradually evolved from a polytheistic model, first considering their god to be one of many,1 then seeing him as being the most important and powerful one, to a doctrine claiming him to be the only one in existence, a monotheism maybe inspired by Akhenaton’s in Egypt (1375-1358 BC). Elohim means “the gods” (the demigods or devas), so when the Torah says that “people saw God”, it most probably means that they had a vision or revelation of Yahweh, their tutelary deity, a demigod.

Although they speak of love of God, besides a few exceptions, the Jews do not accept that He is a person. The famous medieval rabbi Moses Maimonides, considered by most Jews to be the greatest Jewish philosopher of all times, wrote in the 12th century that no physical concepts apply to incorporeal God, whose essence cannot be fathomed. He said that the Jewish faith rests on 13 principles: belief in the existence of God, in His unity, in His incorporeality, in His eternity, and that He alone is to be worshiped. Next, belief in the prophets, that Moses is the greatest among them, that the Torah is from heaven, that it is unchanging, that God knows the deeds of men, rewards the good and punishes the wicked; belief in the coming of the messiah and in the resurrection of the dead. According 1. Despite Yahweh’s assertion in the Ten Commandments that, “You shall have no other gods before me”, implying the existence of others gods, it appears these gods were worshipped alongside Him, and the Bible acknowledges this. Also, we find in Genesis, “If they (Adam and Eve) eat of the fruit of life, they will become like us (the gods)” and in Exodus, “Who among the gods is like you?” (Ex. 15.11) 104

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to the Torah, God is in the heaven above and on the earth beneath.

Maimonides reasoned that therefore He cannot have a form, because it is illogical for a form to be in two places at once, so He must be formless. But that logic applies only to our limited sense of form.

Maimonides projected his limitations on God. God can certainly with one unlimited form be present both in heaven and on earth.

There are many anthropomorphic references to Yahweh in the Torah and everyone, especially the mystics, originally understood God’s personal aspect. But later commentators gave up that personal aspect, taking it as metaphorical or symbolic, and they replaced it with their speculation of a formless, impersonal God, who is alone and has no attributes. However, the injunction to love God with all one’s heart found in the Torah cannot logically apply to anything but a person. You cannot love an impersonal light. Maimonides was in his day a controversial philosopher. There were major Jewish philosophers who opposed him and stressed God’s corporeality and a literal interpretation of the biblical texts. There was a schism on this issue. But, as Judaism “evolved”, since most non-Jewish religions were highly anthropomorphic, the Jews established their difference by saying that God was formless; it became synonymous with Judaism, which has now a kind of aversion to any plastic representation of God. Spinoza challenged Maimonides in the 17th century, claiming, too, that scriptural anthropomorphisms were originally meant to be taken literally. This corporeality was the focal point for the meditation of the mystics. There is even a mystic book called the Shi’ur Komah (the measure of the body) attributed to two famous rabbis Ishmael and Akiva, directly referring to God’s body and giving enormous dimensions to it. Each limb is given huge proportions. It could refer to God’s gigantic aspect as Maha-Vishnu in Vedic culture.2The idealistic part of Judaism has been deviated. The personal conception of God, as envisioned by Moses and the mystics, has gradually 2. Om Shalom 105

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given way to an impersonal one, a kind of universal moral force. One of the main Kabbalistic ideas is even different. It describes Ein Sof, the infinite Absolute, as an attribute-less essence of nature, which cannot know neither be known. It seems to be a combination of ancient forms of non-Vedic paganism, pantheism or monism and atheism.

The Illuminati This Kabbalistic idea is followed by the Jewish Illuminati bankers, based in the City of London and in Wall Street in New York, who are unlimitedly powerful and wealthy due to their clever monopoly on credit, along with their high aristocratic European accomplices, partners and/or compromised victims. Although mostly Jews, the Illuminati hate the regular Jews due to their own subscribing to the 17th century totally materialistic Sabbatean Frankist Kabbalistic doctrine, which developed after Shabbataï Tsevi claimed to be the Messiah and was condemned as a heresy by the orthodox rabbis. Its goal is a world with all nations melted and all distinct races and religions abolished and subjugated by them. They thus have a plan of world government towards which they have been steadily working for two and half centuries; to that effect they have been organizing financial crises, revolutions – beginning with the 1789 French one. [In 1782, the Order of the Illuminati, founded in 1776, and Freemasonry were amalgamated. That same year saw the emancipation of the Jews in Europe, and it became official in 1791 by a decree of the French National Assembly. The Masons decided not to exclude them anymore from the lodges but soon enough, the Jews took over Freemasonry. The headquarters of the illuminated Freemasonry was moved to Frankfurt, the stronghold of Jewish finance. It is there that the sinister gigantic plot for world revolution, destruction of civilization and world domination through every possible method was decided.

The end justifying the means, nothing could be scrupled at. Women 106

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of two classes – the virtuous and the dissolute – could also be enlisted by being given hints of emancipation. “They should not know of each other and must be under the direction of men, but without knowing it, the first one through good books and the latter class through the indulging of their passions in concealment.” Feasts of Reason were celebrated in 1793 in the churches of Paris, where women of easy morals were enthroned as goddesses of “love”.

Whenever reforms were planned to ameliorate people’ conditions by abolishing injustices, the plan of the revolutionaries during the French revolutions of 1789, 1848 and 1871 was not to accelerate them but on the contrary to arrest them and to engineer agitation by creating grievances in order to increase popular discontent and bring themselves in power. The same was done in Russia by the so-called Communists, the monstrous Bolsheviks. The plan of all those State Socialists – because that is what they actually were – was their own supremacy: They themselves were to represent and govern the State.

The revolutions were actually made for the benefit of the so-called democrat bourgeoisie with the manipulated populace as instruments.

The leaders planned to inflame the masses and make sure that all reflection on their part be avoided, driving them into committing acts of such violence that it would prevent them from turning back.

But, after establishing State Capitalism, the bourgeoisie was then supposed to be disposed of, as it was done in the Soviet Union. Robespierre, this consistent Socialist who had a singleness of aim and an entire lack of moral scruples, knew that revolution was never peaceful, that it implied onslaught met with resistance, which could only be overcome with an absolute disregard for human life. The Reign of Terror was the logical outcome. All those revolutionaries were against official religion, mainly Christianity. Thus we can read in the Sozialdemokrat in May 27th 1880,

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“It must be candidly avowed that Christianity is the bitterest enemy of Social Democracy…When God is driven out of the brains of men, the whole system of privilege by the grace of God comes to the ground, and when Heaven hereafter is recognized as big lie, men will attempt to establish Heaven here. Therefore, whoever assails Christianity assails at the same time monarchy and capitalism.”]1 But they were worshippers anyway, as it is an innate human feature as previously mentioned. Their objects of worship, however were trivial and not uncommon at all: money, sex and especially power.

The Illuminati have organized the genocides and wars, the two sides of which they often finance, taking down empires and sovereign nations, and manipulating elections and politicians. For instance, in exchange for a favorable declaration of the British towards the creation of a home for the Jews in Palestine – the 1917 Balfour declaration – through the Zionist movement they dragged the USA into the first world war,2which they had instigated through their puppets in the British government, and they then instigated the second world war.3They first declared war on Germany,4and lobbied to drag the USA into it. They even went up to utilizing the suffering of their “inferior” non-Zionist Jewish brothers of Europe during that war to push for the creation of the state of Israel to extend their control of the world and their profit;5to that effect, they sabotaged any offer 1. World revolution 2. Alison Weir Against our better judgment 2014 3. Nick Kollerstom How Britain initiated both world wars. 2019 4. The headline of the March 24, 1933 British Daily Express stated, “Judea Declares War on Germany. Jews of all the world unite!” The headline followed with: “The Israelite people of the world declare an economic war on Germany. It is not sufficient that we should buy no goods made in Germany.

We must refuse to deal with any shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods. What we are proposing is to bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends”.

5. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust Hill and Wang, NY, 1993

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of welcoming Jewish refugees6under the pretext that these offers did not include their plan of a Jewish land in Palestine. They actually never intended to content themselves with a part of Palestine but planned from the beginning to colonize her and take her away from the Palestinians.7These unfortunate ones seem to be the new Canaanites, guilty of occupying the so-called promised Jewish land for more than eighteen centuries!

The Illuminati Jews have total control of all media, including the powerful Hollywood movie industry. They are expert in psychological warfare and social engineering.8They have been infiltrating and/ or creating smokescreens and tools of enslavement in the form of movements of mass control they manipulate, as diverse as Masonry and other secret societies like the Skull & Bones order, Enlightenment, Secularity, Humanism, Democracy, Zionism and some other Jewish organizations, Anarchism, Socialism, Bolshevism, Communism,9 Syndicalism, the United Nations, Modernism, Libertarianism and Liberalism with birth control and promiscuous sex, Neo-con6. Alfred M. Lilienthal What price Israel? Infinity publishing, Haverford, PA, 2004 7. John W. Mulhall America and the founding of Israel Deshon, LA 1995 8. Henry Makow, Illuminati 9. It is a common belief that the Jews, beginning with Karl Marx, have created communism and engineered the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. They were prominent in leadership positions in the early days of the USSR. Hitler, for instance, saw communism as a plot by Jews to overtake the masses, starting with Russia, and control them for their own ends, namely world domination. Back then, this was not an extreme view. Winston Churchill himself believed this as evidenced by a piece he wrote in the Illustrated Sunday Herald of Feb 8th, 1920: “There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews.

It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders…The influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of Petrograd, or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet institutions, the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combatting Counter-Revolution [the Cheka] has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.”

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servatism, Multiculturalism, Relativism, Terrorism, Feminism (with its most virulent claim for legalizing murder through abortion), Gay rights movements (including gay marriage and adoption), Pornography with STDs, erotomania and pedophilia in its wake. One of their tools, the CIA, has been controlling, including through narcotics, various social currents like the Anti-war movements, the Hippy, Pacifist and New Age movements, as well as the Civil rights and Students rights movements, enticing and using so many “useful idiots”.

Through all these, they are steadily destroying Western civilization with its Christian1altruistic, moral and religious values, using as well Freudism and Darwinism to that effect. They are systematically destroying the four pillars of dharma as well as the four usual shelters of men: family, religion, motherland and race.

If we analyze just one sample of the movements they create and/ or manipulate, we can have an idea of the terrible damage they inflict on society. Let us take Feminism. The same thing that happened to Humanism happened to the Feminism movement. First the ladies legitimately started to ask for an improvement of their condition, with more respect and justice, as misogyny was rampant in the socalled Christian world. (Aquinas had a lot of confusion about the soul. He conceived that there were vegetable souls, animal souls and rational souls and that women were not counted among the beings having a rational soul. It is only in a 1545 Council that women were considered to have a soul.) Feminism gradually degraded in radicalism, fight against patriarchy, competition with man, this “exploiter enemy”, and in its wake lesbianism where we can detect the system1. The Jews usually detest anything connected with Christianity, which they see as being their competitor in the claim of being God’s people, due to the Christian doctrine of Supersession (the ideas that the Christians have become the chosen people of God over the Jews since the latter did not accept Jesus as the messiah and God incarnate but had him killed by the Romans; and that the old covenant of Yahweh with the Jews through Abraham has been rendered obsolete, being replaced by a new covenant with the Christians through Jesus).

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atically planned destruction of the family. In the name of “gender studies”, Judith Butler, an American Jew wrote in the early 90s, “The so-called heterosexual standard is a cultural construction. Sexual identity is actually unstable and changing. Not trying any longer to correspond to the demands of gender that society wants to impose upon us, one must become definitely free from it, so be neither heterosexual nor homosexual but bi-sexual.

Since sexuality is the main place of masculine oppression, it must be the place of woman’s liberation; so Feminism is the theory and lesbianism is the practice.”2 For French Monique Witting, “Lesbianism is a political choice, a way out of patriarchy which turns women into slaves. Woman only makes sense in heterosexual thought and economical systems. Lesbians are not women in that sense. In other words, they are the true free women.”

Along with natural and legitimate requests were demands for the right to contraception and finally the demoniac demand for the right to legalize murder in the form of abortion, causing within its wake irreparable trauma for the mother, who realizes sooner or later that she killed her own child. It is not a coincidence that the MLAC, Movement for liberation of abortion and contraception, regrouped the Family Planning movement, the Women’s lib movement and Left Wing political parties in 1973.

For a woman, abortion is the abortion of her feminine essence.

A significant part of her dies with the unborn child, beginning with her self-esteem.

“Feminism has built itself against man, against patriarchy, against the established order of society but also against the feminine and therefore against the 2. Troubles dans le genre 111

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deep identity of woman. It wanted to bring woman up to the position of man. In order to demand all masculine acquisitions, it has modelled the values of woman on man’s. In its desire to defend the rights of women, he has accomplished the strange paradox to imitate the one it has posited as its enemy, man. Women become all what men are. Feminism has brought about a masculinization of feminine values. The theoretical error of Feminism is that man and woman are similar therefore they must be equals. But woman doesn’t have the same needs and aspirations than men. Feminism has built itself against man, while taking him as model. Feminism is based on a denial, the denial of woman. The female identity is not a construction of society as it claims. Biologically a woman is born a woman. The brain is sexed. ‘Anatomy makes one’s destiny’ (Charles Melman). Woman is therefore the first victim of Feminism. Because Feminism has conceived the evolution of woman on the pattern of man, woman finds herself confronted to the difficulty of having to lead two lives: a woman’s life with all the household chores and a man’s life working outside. The compounding of both roles is too heavy a charge for her. Feminism is the advent of the exhausted woman.1 Now it seems that the Illuminati are preparing the next world war, utilizing the pretext of Islam to involve, exhaust and crush both the Muslim and Western countries to better exploit and control them. It looks like they first exploit a society by capitalist means up until the point that they make the citizens of the host society so poor, miserable and divided that they are ready to rally to a fever pitch of revolt. Second, they lead these people to revolt and to overthrow the existing power structure, resulting in their usurping power to rule the society by default as leaders of the revolt. Besides for its Christian motivation due to the accusation of deicide, antisemitism unfortunately tends to lump all Jews together. But analysis shows that it is not wholly undeserved. For instance, I have read that for a 1. Eliette Abécassis, Caroline Bongrand Le corset invisible, Albin Michel, 2007

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Jew an unknown non-Jew is by default guilty of sinful acts deserving the death penalty, so a Jew shouldn’t get involved and help him even in case of need...

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Chapter 5

Exploring Some Sacred

Christian Myths

E

veryone knows more or less about the life of Jesus narrated in the four gospels of the New Testament. Everything we know about him is coming from that source. But, for a non-Christian, what is its authority? Upon analysis, these texts are far from being historical. They were written between 40 and 100 years or more after the crucifixion of the Galilean preacher and contain various inconsistencies. After Jesus exited the scene, his Jewish followers – his direct disciples and close associates – were based in Jerusalem and kept on preaching boldly, led by Jesus’ brother James, called “the Just.” As Jesus’ close brother, James was considered by many early Christians as his successor. The Church Father Clement of Alexandria wrote in Hypostases, in the early 3rd century, “After the savior’s ascension, Peter, James [the son of Zebedee] and John did not claimed pre-eminence because the savior had specifically honored them but chose James the Just as bishop of Jerusalem.”

He uses the Christian word ‘bishop’, although at that time, the “Jesus movement” was a purely Jewish phenomenon and they retained their Jewish roots and beliefs. James was the head of the

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group, not Peter as per the Catholic tradition. Peter and the other brothers of Jesus were apparently preachers travelling with their wives like many apostles if we are to believe the New Testament.1 When he was arrested and escaped from jail, Peter told Mary, Mark’s mother, “tell this to James and the brethren”, clearly deferring to him as the leader (Acts12:15).2 James was highly respected of all in Jerusalem. Eusebius wrote that, “the more sensible even of the Jews were of the opinion that James’ death was the cause of the siege of Jerusalem, which happened to them immediately after his martyrdom.”3

Saul Paul It is said that one Saul from Tarsus was very opposed to that young “Jesus Jewish movement” and was persecuting them, even participating in murder by the stoning of Stephen, a zealous preacher, claimed by the Church as its first martyr. Then, on the way to Damascus, he changed his mind, and, strangely enough, became a self-appointed apostle and started to preach in favor of Jesus. However, his teachings were not at all the same as that of Jesus’ disciples, with whom he did not associate. He claimed to have had a specific, direct revelation from Jesus. He mixed his preaching about him with some foreign elements coming from the Orphic style of mystery cults and called that his “gospel”, literally “the good news”.

He preached that the whole universe had for its only purpose the coming of Jesus. He invented a doctrine, “the mystery of the Messiah or Christ”: “according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages” (Rom.16:25 “This mystery of Christ had not been brought to the knowledge of 1. Paul wrote of “James, the Lord’s brother” (Galatians1:19) and of his other brothers as well, “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Peter?” (1 Cor.9:5) 2. James, the Brother of Jesus, Penguin, New York, 1997 3. That would place James’s death in 69AD, not in 62 as is usually believed by scholars.

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the sons of men in previous generations…the mystery hidden in God since centuries” (Ephes. 3:4-9); “the mystery which had become hidden since generations and centuries…Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:26-27); “to know the mystery of God, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and science” (Col. 2:2).

He started to tell new converts and even the Jews of the diaspora that there was no need to follow the Mosaic law anymore. He was based in Antioch then travelled extensively. He changed his name to Paul. He founded many small communities. While travelling, he would write to the members of these new groups of converts.

Somehow some of those letters were gathered, some authentic, some forged later, and they were incorporated in the New Testament under the name of Epistles. In these writings, he started to float his “ideas”, among which was the heretical one that Jesus was not just the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, but also God4 and that he had died for the sins of all mankind. He got in trouble with the Jerusalem movement who bore with him at first, then sent preachers to warn his followers that he was a deviant whose preaching was unauthorized. They more or less excommunicated him. Paul did not preach all his “ideas” to the Jews but to the Gentiles, because he knew that they were unacceptable to the Jews. After some attempt to preach to those outside of the Jewish section, he realized that it was also difficult for the Gentiles to swallow. That is why, in defense of his weird doctrine, he had to write to his new converts an inane apology, “It is scandal to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles”. He ended his life in Rome. By the time of the first Jewish war, most of the original disciples, apostles and followers of Jesus were already dead, or died during the war and a few had fled. There were many different groups of Christians, with many different views about Jesus. Through his preaching, Paul had built a very well organized movement, which grew bigger than the other groups and unfortunately became the official representa4. “Christ is the image of God.” (2 Cor. 4:4) 117

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tive of Jesus, later called the “Catholic” Church, imposing by force Paul’s heretical ideas. I develop more this whole issue in my next book, Saving Jesus.

A Strange Doctrine We have seen that the Jews believe that this world has been created by God for their enjoyment, and that they can earn His grace if they enjoy it in a befitting way while simultaneously collecting pious credits through acting in a pious manner. You read the counter-argument that if that was God’s purpose, He should be blamed because He created the world with so many imperfections in it. Influenced by Judaism, which is not otherworldly as seen above, the early Christians shared the Jews misunderstanding about the purpose of the world, but, due to Jesus’ teachings, they also developed the understanding that this world is obviously not a place of unalloyed happiness, but that it is rather filled with only a bit of pleasure and so much sorrow, so much so that it seems to be a punitive abode.

Since the true purpose of Jesus’ ministry has been obscured beyond recognition by Paul and his followers, and subsequent concocted dogmas have encumbered the original simple path of love of God preached by him, we have to paradoxically approach saintly persons from other traditions to find out the truth. Bhaktivinoda Thakura, a very exalted self-realized Indian mystic wrote a masterful analysis of various Western and Eastern philosophies. I am including in this part of the chapter snippets of what he wrote about Christianity in the late 1800s, “This world appears as a punitive place. Penalty is only the result of an offence; what else may necessitate a penalty? So what is the offence committed by the souls? Being unable to arrive at a proper answer to this question, a strange doctrine has been accepted by some people.”1 We can read in the Bible the allegory that after creating a first 1. Bhaktivinoda Thakura Tattva-viveka, Sri Gaudiya Math, Madras, 1979 118

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being, God allowed him to live in a blissful garden in some unknown realm along with his consort. However, God warned them against eating the fruit of the “tree of knowledge” – whatever that means – which grew in this garden, along with the “tree of life” – whatever that other one means too. Due to the bad advice of some wretched being in the form of a talking snake (!?), the couple ate the forbidden fruit anyway, and as a result, by losing their merit due to the offence of having disobeyed God, they fell down to this miserable world. Because of that offence committed by the first couple, which he called the “original sin”, Paul decreed – although no Jew ever believed nor taught such a thing – that all subsequent souls, even if not guilty of that offence themselves, are born as offenders anyway, sharing by their very birth as human beings in that ancestral offense!

“Since that offence could not be washed away by the fallen souls themselves, he invented the idea that a portion of God was born in the same form as the human beings – Jesus – and, carrying away the offences of the souls, accepted death as vicarious atonement for them. Those souls who were obedient to him easily secured salvation in that way whereas those who were not obedient to him were thrown away in an eternal hell.”

At first, it was believed that only the souls obedient to Jesus were saved – without specifying as to what that salvation constituted – but later on the salvation was believed to have been extended to all pious human beings, even those from the past – but only to the Jews, because followers of other religions, however pious they may be, were just hell-bound pagans. After his crucifixion, Jesus is believed to have gone down to a special section of hell – the bosom of Abraham – to deliver these pious Jews. There are differences in the beliefs of the Catholics and those of the Protestants about that and so many differences are there too among the latter, but in general they believe that all the Christians of the present and future are saved – but no longer the Jews because, having rejected and moreover had Jesus killed by the Romans, they are now a deicide cursed people.

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Well, although he was said to have saved all human beings, now it is preached that only those who personally acknowledge him as their savior are saved!? So, are they saved or not saved? Did he die for all men or not? These are all various beliefs which developed over time on the basis of Paul’s speculations.

“This doctrine of the salvation of the souls effected by penalizing the portion of God born among human beings is not intelligible nor acceptable to the normal reason.”

Ignorance About the Soul There is no clear knowledge whatsoever about the soul given in Christianity, so such a doctrine does not meet with philosophical counter-arguments from Christians and thus can be accepted by them, but not by any person educated in the science of the soul, atma-tattva. That is why Christianity was never accepted in India by the higher classes, and the missionaries quickly gave up and approached the lowest uneducated section of society. Indeed, “To believe in this dogmatic religion, some irrelevant elements are to be believed: First, that the principle of the soul exists only between life and death; that the soul did not exist before birth and will not come back to a new field of activity – a body – after death. Second, that apart from the human beings, other creatures do not ‘have’ souls. This faith is an outcome of a narrow intelligence.

Why the animals are not considered among souls cannot be answered. Third, that the soul is not a transcendental principle, that its creation should be therefore imagined as being ex nihilo, or out of matter, due to the will of God. It cannot be explained why different souls are born in different conditions, some destitute, some rich, some in pious families and others in the houses of demoniac impious people. It seems then that God is not very judicious or that He is unjust, because it is generally according to the various conditions in which human beings are born that they become liable to carry on their lives piously or impiously. It is a fact that the Western intellect is usually quite materialistic, so, they are incapable of realizing the distinction in man between the soul and the body, thinking 120

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man is both; neither do they understand the subtle distinction between spirit and non-spirit, so they ascertain the material mind or subtle body itself as being the spirit or soul. In other words, they are unable to distinguish between the mind and the soul. Both the knowledge and the science of their religion are defective and biased. Therefore, within their tradition, they can in no way understand the sacred confidential knowledge about the soul and his real relationship with matter. Fourth, one also has to believe that the resultant actions of one single birth will be rewarded by either eternal heaven or eternal hell. This opinion is quite unacceptable to the devotees of the all-merciful Lord.” 1

Dreams of Heaven Paul only mentions in his Epistles that Jesus was crucified then resurrected. He doesn’t say anything at all about Jesus’ life nor about his teachings. It seems that all he cared about in regard to Jesus was his death. His whole preaching is based on it. The Christians have indeed a very peculiar utilitarian conception of God. Why do people like the “Christian god”, Jesus, so much? Because they worry about their sinful activities that they cannot stop; and they are coaxed by preachers into believing Paul’s sugar story that they don’t need to worry because Jesus died for their sins, and if they simply accept him as their personal savior, they’ll be saved, meaning they will go to “heaven”. For modern Christians, the most important fact about Jesus is that he died for their sins, so if they believe in him, they can hope to spend eternity in heaven. His teachings are de-emphasized.

They just worry about “being saved” from hell.

“The story of Christianity is the story of the beliefs that Jesus professed developing into the religion that professes Jesus. In other words, dogma. It is pure folly to believe that Simon Peter, Thomas, Mary Magdalene etc. followed Jesus because, when he died, they would be able to absolve their sins by believing in him.

This later theological construction was created by believers who were searching for a meaning to the seemingly pointless execution of their leader and teacher. Those 1. Tattva-viveka 121

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who originally followed Jesus did so because of his life – because he was an exemplary teacher who radically reinterpreted the Law in favor of inclusion rather than exclusion. Those who now follow Jesus do so because of his death. They turn a man’s poignant teachings – his life’s work – into a secondary and near meaningless preface to the panacea of his death. We primarily have Paul and John the evangelist (two people who did not know Jesus in his life) to thank for this inexcusable dumbing-down of Jesus’ life. With Paul and John’s help, what Christianity would become is embodied in the Nicene Creed. Take a look at it.

Dogmatic fiat has expurgated everything the man stood for.”1 Heaven is not described in Christian scripture, but people fancy that everything there is superfine and they will meet again with all the people they love. So they like Jesus because they imagine that he died for them and they don’t have to pay for their sins. But doesn’t the Old Testament, for whatever its’s worth, says that everyone has to pay for his own sins? Ah, yes, sorry, Paul decreed – with God knows which authority but certainly not Jesus’ who always held up the validity of the Mosaic Law – that now they are under grace, not under that law any longer. Otherwise you can bet your bottom dollar that they wouldn’t give a hoot about Jesus. The proof ? When they become convinced and realize at last that they were sold a bill of goods, that he didn’t die for their sins – as if God could die (!?) – that he is not God but simply a prophet of God, or they feel that he let them down when they felt he should have helped them, then most of them become angry and frustrated and become atheists instead of investigating more deeply in their tradition or another one.

A Materialistic Utilitarian Approach That’s why the Vedic Srimad Bhagavatam predicting this type of religion called them kaitava-dharma, “cheating religions”, because they only hope from God material blessings. Although they say they love 1. http://trevorburrus.newsvine.com/_news/2008/03/05/1345329- 10-reasons-why-christianity-is-wrong 122

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God, it’s not a love they care to develop because it’s actually not love – doing something for the beloved – but a kind of business deal assorted with a mere sense of duty or at best gratefulness. It is all about them. As Turgot, Condorcet, Feuerbach, Comte and Freud said – God knows I do not like to quote these kind of people, especially the last one, that fraud of a man – it is quite infantile, and they should mature and wake up to reality. This doctrine is quite materialistic.

“Those who follow this religion are not able to render selfless service to God. In reality, they are striving for worldly development, but they imagine that thereby they are gratifying God because they have a sense of dutifulness. They think that if the auspiciousness of the world is achieved by mundane welfare work, then God will be pleased with them in return. Cultivation of material activities and material knowledge are strongly prevalent in them, but unalloyed devotion is something unknown to them. God’s service done out of dutifulness cannot become natural and unselfish. ‘God has helped us and therefore we should worship Him’: this is the result of a low level of consciousness, because on the other hand God would not have received any service nor worship from them if he had not showed them His ‘kindness’. They maintain the evil motivation to continue to worship Him only because of hope that He will also help them in the future. If they would mean by ‘kindness’ or ‘help’ from God” His bestowing upon them unalloyed devotion for Him, then this desire would be considered sinless. But this is not what they mean by God’s kindness or help; they mean by that worldly facilities and happiness. These people are almost exclusively self-centered.”2 They may officially promote the idea of love of God but they do not propose a practical method to develop it because they do not have one. I am generalizing, of course, speaking for the run-of-themill Christian, not including here the monks and nuns and the great mystics who strived to develop devotional love for God. They just misdirected that love to Jesus, who they mistook for God, thanks to Paul and the author of John and the Founding Fathers and all Chris2. Tattva-viveka 123

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tian religious authorities ever since, who perpetuated the heresy or misunderstanding.

Scape Goat Some people say that if a Buddhist can make the vow of bodhisattva – not to dissociate his salvation from suffering, entry into nirvana, from all other beings’ – certainly Jesus could. Granted. We can even conceive that he may have wished to sacrifice himself in order that his death would atone for his disciples’ sins, but God does not deal with sin in that way. Why would the death of an innocent person atone for the sins of many, what to speak of the countless heaps of sins of all mankind as it has come to be believed? This is totally illogical! It is obviously a remnant of the old Jewish superstitious belief that releasing a scape goat from the town into the desert would take away the people’ sins. It has been accepted with blind faith. A spiritual master or guru – and Jesus seems to have been of the genuine type – relieves only his disciples from the burden of their sinful reactions. He does so not by dying but through his teachings and the sacred mantra he imparts to them at the time of initiation, along with the mercy of God that he invokes and which descends on them subsequently. He does not relieve all sinful souls, although his compassionate nature would like to do so in order that God, whom he loves, be not deprived of the love of all His wayward children. But God does not allow him to do so, what to speak of making him die for it, as God alone can purify one of all sins.

A Formless Being?

As mentioned earlier about idol worship, the three Semitic religions do not have any conception nor knowledge of God’s form.

They are groping in the darkness of ignorance about Him.

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“In the doctrine we’re now discussing, and in other modern ones following this, God is without form and all-pervading. [Although the Church condemned Gnosticism,] the cultivation of Gnosticism is a main feature in Christianity, albeit unconsciously. They always maintain the erroneous Gnostic idea that if any form is attributed to God then it will be a lowering of His position. They cannot entertain any higher views than this regarding the personality of God. In this way, the Divinity imagined by them becomes the object of quite a materialistic idolatry. The sky is an inert object of this world; it is also formless and all-pervading. The God conceived by these people is also of that kind. This is called material worship. God has a transcendental distinctive personal form and He is simultaneously existing in an omnipresent way, as He is the master of all congenial and opposed qualities which are fully reconciled and harmonized in Him alone. That all-merciful and eternal Beloved of all the souls can never be realized by these dogmatic people, encumbered as they are with the mixture of their conditioned, speculative thoughts. Even their so-called worship of God is quite defective and imperfect. Prayer and adoration only constitute worship, but the wordings used in their prayers and their adoration are also quite worldly. Being under the strong influence of Gnosticism, they are quite afraid of the worship of the transcendental Deities of the Lord. The adoption of a sacred Image for them is tantamount to idol worship, the worship of matter. Due to this wicked idea, they remain quite incapable of conceiving, what to speak of experiencing, the supra-mundane Transcendental principle in the genuine Deity form of God.”1 We do not have the experience of a formless being. So how can the supreme Being be devoid of form?

Calling A “Mystery” A Concoction One Cannot Explain?

Then the wise author of these lines points at the biggest problem, the absence of a line of self-realized masters to transmit spiritual knowledge. Jesus apparently tried to establish a line of transmission of his teachings, and it manifested in the Papal Institution, but any 1. Tattva-viveka 125

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study of the history of Christianity pulverizes the idea of authenticity of such a line.

“Moreover, they don’t follow the timeless process of accepting the shelter of a self-realized spiritual preceptor. Some say that since the reality is inherent in the soul, it can be realized by one’s own effort and therefore it’s not necessary to take shelter of a preceptor. All say that it is sufficient to accept the guidance of the chief prophet. They say that the prophet himself is the God, the preceptor and the deliverer, that he enters into them and destroys the root of their sins, so there is no need of any other human being as preceptor.”

Even though they accept a single God, to end up fratricidal fights bloodying the early Christianities who had different ideas about Jesus, the Christians have ended up dividing God into three, by erroneously including Jesus, a saintly preceptor, into the Godhead. They have thus embraced as their core dogma the Paulinian heresy and, to add insult to injury, have compromised and declared that Jesus was both fully human and fully God, an oxymoron if there was ever one!

They cannot really explain that Triade; opinions about it are various, so they have called it the “Mystery of the Holy Trinity”. (We have seen in Chapter One how Vedic culture has no problem with a single God having various aspects, among which, the “Holy Duality”).

“Moreover, their God is filled with defective, repulsive discriminations and partiality, and this is a drawback for the souls who want to develop devotion for Him. Although in that tradition God is only one, another sinful, hugely powerful entity named Satan, who is independent of God’s will, has been accepted by them, [inherited as we have seen from Zoroastrianism via Judaism.]

Some have discarded the existence of that sinful entity, but due to being unable to understand the power of illusion of God’s material energy, [and how under its influence the natural propensity of loving God has turned into lust,] they observe with perplexity the manifestation of sin due to the weakness of the souls. Sins are no doubt incurred due to the souls’ weakness, but since they don’t accept the principle of karma and reincarnation, unless they accept the 126

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theory that sin and virtue are beginning-less, then God alone is to be blamed for the creation of such weakness in the soul… Their knowledge of transcendental subject matters becomes quite contracted in the middle of their huge pride in their material scientific developments, and as a result their religious activities are also insignificant. The highest end covetable by them is the heavenly realm pertaining to the subtle body.”1

Those Savages The western civilization is quite young compared to the Vedic one, but the western world has a peculiar superiority complex over the rest of the planet and claims that it can judge and measure everything according to its own yardstick and lord it over everyone else.

The Westerners thought that evangelization was the perfect justification for conquest. “Who says it is not legitimate to conquer? Might is right! Anyway, they are just savages, they do not have souls. And we are bringing those savages Christianity to save them, anyway.” Is that the fruit of Jesus’ teachings? Never! It is a gross distortion. His teachings were never intended to justify racism, conquest, pillage of other cultures, slavery and genocide. But the first Puritan Christian settlers in the United States of America had a peculiar sense of entitlement; they believed they had a special commission from God to take the land from the Native Indians “who kept it vacant and unused” and mixed that belief with a humanist doctrine of natural human rights. They considered God “an excellent Man of war” and the Bible “the best handbook on war”2– an opinion which can indeed be easily derived from reading about the various individual or mass killings attributed to the Jewish deity or allegedly ordered by him all along its pages(roughly 22 million, without considering the innumerable innocent animals). To these Puritans, genocide of the Amerindians was perfectly in line with the biblical narrations of Joshua conquering 1. Tattva-viveka 2. Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith. New York and Toronto, 2012 127

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Canaan and slaughtering its inhabitants. It has been mercilessly executed in a systematic way all along the history of the United States through all kinds of foul means, including forced sterilization.

The Christians claim that in contrast to the limited Canaanite conquest by the Israelites, Islam’s conquests were universal in aspiration.

Well, in 1452 – in a very Muhammadan style, you could say – Pope Nicholas V issued a bull, Romanus Pontifex, in which he declared war against all non-Christian nations, specifically promoting their invasion, conquest, enslavement, and sanctioning to appropriate their territories and possessions and convert them! In 1493, Pope Alexander IV reinforced this doctrine of appropriation and colonization of all discovered lands by another bull, Inter caetera, legitimizing Portuguese and Spanish conquests of the West Indies and Americas! With time, the North Americans, have also developed a strange belief in their so-called special destiny and imagine themselves having a “sacred duty” to impose their values upon the world. I don’t know, however, what is so holy about their dollar, their fraudulently named Federal Reserve Bank, their huge greedy and deadly military-industrial complex, their moral collapse spinning out of control (rampant sexually transmitted diseases – one teen girl out of four – same-sex marriage, unmatched level of crime, drug-addiction and porn-addiction), their Hollywood, Coca cola, chewing-gum, KFC and Mac Donald…

Try to imagine Jesus coming back and having to deal with all the mess done in his name, with all the internal and fratricidal fights from the past and the present, all the blood poured out of hatred for Christian “brothers”; what to speak of Mark Twain’s statement that “the ocean of blood spilled during wars between Christian nations and against non-Christians was such that all the fleets of the world could easily navigate upon it”. Then the horrendous inexcusable scandals of Church-encouraged anti-Semitism, the Inquisition, torture, slavery, genocides, witch-hunting and the ocean of tears poured from countless eyes…Each party would be assuring him of their 128

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devotion to him and their purely good and noble intentions, each trying to get his backing to supplant the others, due to their inability to follow his message of love of God, non-competition, humility and brotherly love. You bet he would unleash his anger and make another whip to chase away all these merchants! And he would also curse Paul to remain in hell – where he certainly still is – for a long, long time for having started this whole mess!

Was Jesus Predicted in the Old Testament?

Since Jesus was a Jew, the first Christians naturally interpreted his life in connection with the Jewish Scripture, the Torah. Since the Jews had given up the ancient Vedic conception of cyclic time, they inherited the metanarrative found in Amos (5:18) that time was like an arrow aiming at the “Day of Yahweh,” renamed “the Kingdom of God” in the New Testament, and about which Jesus was regularly speaking. Being convinced that they were living in apocalyptic times, and misled as they were by Paul’s ideas, they believed that the whole purpose of creation was aiming at and fulfilled by Jesus’ coming, that it was the completion of what they labeled the Old Testament. Being heirs to this early misconception, the Christians in general assume that most of their basic beliefs are spelled out clearly in that scripture from ancient times. Actually the Bible does not contain any such detailed and systematic teachings. It is not a doctrinal treatise and does not spell out any of the creeds people assume it does. Some were developed later by the rabbis descending from the Pharisees and incorporated into Christianity – like the beliefs in Angels, in Satan, in the Last Judgment and the Resurrection of the dead – and others were developed by Paul, Justin, Tertullian, the Christian theologians (Origen, Augustine, and much later Aquinas) and voted in the early Councils, like the dogma of the Trinity.1 It took hundreds of years, 1. The word ‘Trinity’ does not appear anywhere in the Old Testament. It is strictly a later Christian concept, rightfully denied by the Jews and later by the Muslims. The doctrine 129

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creative imaginative interpretations, many arguments and fierce debates to figure out exactly what is official doctrine today.

We have seen in the last chapter that Yahweh was originally the tribal deity of the Hebrews, who was gradually raised by the prophets, priests and scribes to the position of the only one true God. However, having heard since the times of Paul the erroneous idea that Israel had been chosen by God to be His people specifically in order to prepare the coming of his supposed unique son, Jesus, Christians assume today that there are prophecies in the Old Testament which predict his coming, that his birth, life and crucifixion are foretold in it. This is however not the case. There are no prophecies about Jesus, only passages which the gospel writers have taken out of their original context and applied to Jesus.1 Someone doing that today would be accused of deceptively “milking” the ancient texts and misinterpreting them, but this is not how ancient Jewish hermeneutics worked, explains Thom Stark.2The Jews in general and the apocalyptic ones in particular, like the Essenes and those of the Qumran community, did not limit their exegesis to a historical and grammatical approach. They saw in the ancient texts, specifically the prophetic ones, not only a historical meaning but also and especially a hidden eschatological one: they strongly believed, as I just mentioned, that they were living in the end times and that those texts were speaking directly about their generation, their personal experience. They made “inspired interpretations”, to identify and unlock the revelations they believed were encrypted in the prophecies for their edification and their understanding of contemporary events.

Paul and later the gospel writers also used that method of ascribing to a text a meaning not intended by its author in an effort to condid not develop until more than 300 years after Jesus died. So its mention in the Gospel (Mat.28:19) must be a later interpolation.

1. Mark Roncace, Raw Revelation 2. The Human Faces of God. Wipf & Stock, Eugene, Or, 2011 130

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vince other Jews that Jesus was the messiah, or convert a Gentile public. Some Christian scholars believe and have written that Jesus identified himself during the last part of his short ministry with the “suffering servant” mentioned by Isaiah. Jesus may have done so, or he may have been compared to that suffering servant, but that does not mean that he was predicted by the prophet Isaiah.

The Gospels We only know Jesus as an oral teacher since no writing has been attributed to him except some alleged correspondence with the king of Edessa. He may not have wanted to write anything lest it would be later turned into a rigid religious dogma, as it usually happens. He is reported to have spoken mainly of social ethics and of love of God and man and especially of the mysterious soon-to-come “Kingdom of God” which has, however, not manifested yet two thousand years later. He did not elaborate any special or new religious doctrine. He apparently did not teach much philosophy, or if he did, we do not know as it has not been reported in the New Testament. Most people think that the gospels were written by the direct disciples of Jesus whose names they bear, but these apostles were in fact not the authors. For instance, the author of Luke says at the beginning that he collated the work of many persons as “many have undertaken to compile a narrative” (1:1). Similarly, the author of Mark is said to have written what he remembered hearing from Peter. These books were assembled together and attributed a name of one of the direct disciples of Jesus only after Marcion de Sinope ((c 85-c160), later on declared a heretic, compiled a book containing a different version of Luke and some letters of Paul. It was to counteract his book that the New Testament was compiled. Someone born and raised in Christianity usually accepts as truth whatever is written in that New Testament, but a detailed analysis gives rise to many questions and revelations, especially for someone not “indoctrinated” from birth, or who has 131

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decided to deepen his understanding by studying systematically that Scripture in a scholarly way.

Elaine Pagels explains in one of her books, The Gnostic Gospels, that each gospel is a product of a particular historical moment and “political” perspective, clearly written for and against someone in particular and therefore influenced by the rival or enemy of the day.

In other words, the theology found in each of them has more to do with the particular understanding of the community to which their author belonged than with the historical Jesus, in whose mouth they put different things fitting their own specific theological agendas.

First, the author of Mark, usually considered the oldest Gospel – the original form of which is said to rest on his remembrances of events he heard related by Peter, and is thus based on disconnected and fragmentary spoken discourses put together and giving an impression of a coherent history, although not an historical chronology – quarrels with the Sanhedrin council of elders, along with the Sadducees and Pharisees who had all denied the Messiahship of Jesus. It is a “Christianity” which is a dispute between Jews. It has a conciliatory attitude towards the Romans. It is still relatively friendly to the Jews because there had not yet been a “divorce” from them.

By the time the author of Matthew wrote his gospel, a lot of Gentiles had converted to “Christian Judaism”, which formed a distinct community with an identity quite different from the majority of Jews.

(He mentions “the church” in 18:17): Those who had rejected the “gospel” or good news of Jesus who was supposed to have brought forth the “Kingdom of heaven” were seen by the writer as having forfeited their legacy,1which explains why he is more hostile towards them. There was persecution and no more hope of reconciliation.

Paul, as we saw, had mixed things up with his spurious interpretation of Judaism and of Jesus’ crucifixion and had been preaching that 1. The origin of Satan, Random House, NY, 1995 p.10

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the Mosaic law was obsolete. The author of Matthew, who disagreed, makes Jesus say something about the permanent validity of the Mosaic law (5:17-18) to the extent that it should never be disobeyed. He also stresses the second coming of Jesus. The author of Luke, the only Gentile evangelist and a Pauline – Paul, the evil genius of early Christianity, the distorter of Jesus’ message, is said by some scholars to have participated in the writing of the earliest version of that text as he possibly alludes to it in Romans 2:16; 11:28; 16:25; 2 Corinthians 11:4; Galatians 1: 6-11 – makes Jesus say the opposite in the very same circumstances as seen earlier (16:17). He makes comparative peace with the Jewish leadership. By the time of the late redaction of John, an exclusive Christian community with different branches had already emerged quite some time ago. They were commanded to love each other, “while regarding their Jewish adversaries as born from Satan.” The writer of John does not set forth a picture of Jesus based on the latter’s teachings as found in other gospels, but a theological doctrine of his own conception of Christ, deeply influenced

by Hellenistic speculative thought, which transpires in the probably non-historic diatribes he attributes to Jesus. He supplemented the spurious Christology of Paul with the ancient Logos conception of Heraclitus of Ephesus (6th century BC, considered the father of philosophy by the German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel) – the Logos is Reason creating meaning or creating reality itself and ruling it – reinterpreted by Philo of Alexandria in the light of Jewish monotheism as both God’s creative power and His intermediate with man. He applied it to Jesus, thus making things more complex and mixed up.

The gospels were apparently written for various purposes. It seems that they are first and foremost propaganda material, destined to non-Christians to convert them to Christianity, and maybe also to Christian communities of that time to nourish their faith. In addition to what seem to be embellishments and legends, they contain polemics, arguing in favor or against precise people and ideas 133

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as just mentioned. It is improbable that their authors thought that they would become regarded in the future as holy scriptures. They may have been also written to provide for the Christian communities and preserve for those of the future a biography of Jesus, or at least everything the authors knew about his life. But how reliable are these so-called biographies? The use of typology is quite visibly at work in them. Typology means to ascribe to the life of someone elements of the life of a previous great personality in order to bring about a natural comparison between them and identification of the latter with the former. This literary device is common to both Testaments but is more obvious in the New Testament: the authors are not really giving a true biographical account of Jesus’ life. Rather, they are modeling his history upon the deeds of famous biblical personalities, events from their lives, as well as prophetic pronouncements.

Their authors may also have written only what they wanted their readers or audience to know, or what they knew. They are the products of the assembling of various elements, mostly oral traditions.

They obviously went through many editors as time went by. How much has been added or taken off ? We don’t know. A text, for instance, may have been created from various written and oral traditions, with a fabricated storyline as coherent and consistent as possible, and as much data as the writer knew or deemed necessary for his preaching purpose. Then on top of that “original” basis, another layer with a different purpose may have been added, whether fact or legend, with another editor putting into Jesus’ mouth something he wanted to say and for which he harnessed the weight of Jesus’ authority. It seems clearly to me that John, for instance, had been composed from revelations made by the apostle John, then later reworked or supplemented with Pauline ideas, then with Gnostic ideas as well as with elaborate Hellenizing philosophical ideas. I consider that the sources of the Synoptic Gospels are a primitive form of Mark along with a collection of sayings or logia. To me, the great 134

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discourses of Jesus are not historical; they are composed of these sayings put together to meet the needs of the Christian community in later times.

Like the Jewish scribes, Christian authors had apparently no scruples reworking a text by deleting and adding. To us it seems unacceptable to alter a text, but their hermeneutics were different as mentioned. So it is quite difficult to know exactly what Jesus said. It is a commonly accepted theory among scholars that words attributed to Jesus in the gospels were retroactively placed in his mouth from a post resurrection perspective. Not all of them, of course. For instance, Matthew 7:21-27 makes salvation dependent upon acting in accordance with the words of Jesus and not upon having faith in him, as later preached by Paul. So, not everything Jesus is purported to have said is a forgery, but it is obvious that it was done in many cases; otherwise there are too many inconsistencies. The authors of Matthew and Luke, for instance, make Jesus say opposite things in the same event as seen above. All historical exegetes agree on that point.

And it is very doubtful that Jesus told his disciples that he would be put to death and then would resuscitate after three days, otherwise they would obviously have reacted differently after the crucifixion.

So words were definitely put in Jesus’ mouth retroactively. This is typical of Jewish culture. It is equally difficult to know exactly what Jesus did. We don’t know, for instance, if Jesus really made miracles, whether any or many, or as many as claimed, nor if it is true that he was regularly followed by crowds of enthusiastic people, nor if evil spirits possessing people really called him, “Son of David”. The Synoptic Gospels say so, but reading John gives a very different picture.

So who is right?

Contemporary scholar James D.G. Dunn proposes in The oral gospel tradition that in order to understand how the gospels developed, we have to stop thinking with a literary mindset. He says that we 135

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have to give up the idea that if we strip away layers and layers of added material we will find an ideal and original gospel. To him there is no such gospel because the source of the gospels we have in the New Testament are oral traditions transmitted simultaneously by a number of different persons in different settings. Dunn also suggests that Jesus himself may have taught the same thing more than once in a different setting and in a different context, with different words. Therefore, each oral tradition itself is an original version of what people remembered. The variations of the same story and the contradictions found in different gospels are thus not automatically the result of textual editing but are due to the variations in oral performances passed down to different communities by different narrators. Indeed, after Jesus’ burial, it is said in John 20 that Mary Magdalena came very early while it was still dark, but the four Gospels describe the same event in different ways, making Mary Magdalena arrive at four different times, with different people, touching and not touching Jesus, telling and not telling the disciples that she found the tomb empty! Jesus is also described as having a group of disciples with different names, as being crucified on the day before Passover and on the day of Passover itself, to have ascended on the same day in Jerusalem and forty days later in Galilea!

Although the modern liberal quest for the historical Jesus floated the idea that the Christ of faith is a perversion of the historical Jesus, Dunn points out that Jesus had a profound and life changing impact on his disciples. The fact that the disciples left everything behind to follow him indicates that Jesus compelled them to have faith in him from the very beginning. “A Jesus who did not inspire faith cannot be found.� Yes, he definitely inspired faith in his early followers, but there is also definitely a great distinction between the Jesus of history and faith and the Jesus of dogmas and doctrines.

Dunn says that there is another false assumption that there was

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a connection between Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. His opinion is that the Scrolls give valuable insights into apocalyptic ideas which may have inspired John the Baptist and Jesus, but there is hardly any direct connection. The community that produced them was a closed community which was probably well educated due to the number of scribes needed to produce the Scrolls. Their traditions were not transmitted to people outside of their community. Apparently even Jewish people did not know of their existence until they were discovered in modern times. In stark contrast, Jesus and his original followers preached openly to communal gatherings. His Galilean followers were for the most part illiterate and could not have read anything written on a scroll. Ignoring the reality that 1st century Israel was a society having an oral tradition will always lead to flaws when trying to figure out why the synoptic gospels are not identical in data, as researchers use the literary cultural paradigm we are engulfed with and projecting it onto these 1st century Jewish/Christian documents. In another book, Jesus remembered, Dunn comments about the birth stories that the heavy use of typology (Herod as Pharaoh, Jesus as Israel in Egypt) leaves it very uncertain whether we can discern any historical events underlying the present story. The whole Egyptian episode, including Joseph and Mary’s return to settle in Nazareth, does seem somewhat contrived.

Was Jesus’ Mother a Virgin?

Is it important or necessary in order to appreciate Jesus’ contribution to believe that his mother’s hymen remained intact despite becoming pregnant and giving birth to him? The state of that small piece of skin in her intimacy does not really add or subtract anything to his personal valor, does it? What is the importance of the dogma of a virgin birth? Actually, such a birth seems to have been attributed to him later because that was the hallmark of some of the gods

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of the “competitive” religions of his times during the formation of the new Christian religion. This is a theme found in the Vedic Mahabharata where it is narrated that a princess named Kunti-devi became the mother of the progeny of the gods while remaining a virgin. The cult of a virgin goddess was something widespread at the time of Jesus. The virginity of his mother is not mentioned in the early texts. It is a later concoction, to make her as good as the ever-virgin goddesses like Artemis worshipped in Ephesus, or Athena-Parthena in Athens, or Isis. The first official mention of the idea of her being a virgin does not come until 374 CE from the Christian theologian Epiphanes (310-403), who wrote in his Panarion about the cult of that pre-Christian virgin goddess Isis giving birth to God’s unique son, “On this same night of Epiphany, at Alexandria, in the temple of Kore [Isis, the World-Maiden] – an immense temple called the Precinct of the Virgin – after they have kept all-night vigil with songs and music, chanting to their idol, when the vigil is over, at cockcrow, they descend with lights into an underground crypt, and carry up a wooden image lying naked on a litter, with the seal of a cross made in gold on its forehead, and on either hand two other similar seals, and on both knees two others, all five seals being similarly made in gold. And they carry the image itself, circumambulating seven times the innermost temple, to the accompaniment of pipes, tambours and hymns, and with merry-making they carry it down again underground. And if they are asked the meaning of this mystery, they answer: ‘To-day at this hour the Maiden (Kore), that is, the Virgin, gave birth to the aeon.’ In the city of Petra also – the metropolis of Arabia which is called Edom in the Scriptures –the same is done, and they sing the praises of the Virgin in the Arab tongue, calling her in Arabic Chaamou, that is, Maiden (Kore), and the Virgin, and him who is born from her Dusares, that is, Alone-begotten (monogenes) of the Lord.”

Was She a Perpetual Virgin?

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have children after him? No one in the early church even imagined such an idea, since the family of Jesus played such a visible and pivotal role in his life and that of his early followers. In spite of the Catholic and Orthodox dogma of an ever-virgin Mary, the New Testament clearly says in its four gospels and in Paul’s writings that Jesus had siblings and that they were an essential part of his following from the start. In Luke Jesus is mentioned as Mary’s first-born (2 :7), In Matthew it speaks of Joseph and Mary’s coming together, a classical biblical euphemism for conjugal relationships. (1.18, 25) In John Jesus is going to Capernaum after the wedding banquet at Cana, along with his mother, brothers and apostles. (2:12) The teaching of Mary’s perpetual virginity is simply not found in the New Testament and it is not part of the earliest Christian creeds. It all has to do with Mary being totally removed from the historical reality of who she truly was as a 1st century married Jewish woman. The early Christian writings take for granted that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the naturally born children of Joseph and Mary.

There was later an emerging view, referred to by scholars as “ascetic dualism”, quite common in Greco-Roman culture, that anything to do with the body was low and of no value, that human sexuality was degraded and unholy. However, it is said that good history never needs to be the enemy of devoted faith. The conflict arises when later forms of ascetic piety and assumptions about “holiness” are imposed on a culture for dogmatic reasons. We can thus see that although Jesus had many women followers whom we hear he treated affectionately, Christianity developed an attitude of rejection of women early on. Some scholars have expressed the opinion that Paul may have been gay. He spoke of a mysterious “thorn in his flesh”.

“Paul, a neurotic misogynist, not only falsified the teachings of Jesus but spread a phobic aversion of the flesh, identified with evil. Augustin had similar obsessional phobias, what to speak of Tertullian, who claimed, ‘Woman! You 139

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are the gate of the Devil! It is because of you that the son of God had to die!’ Since they couldn’t decently make Jesus born from a rib of Joseph, it was made so that the ‘mother of God’ become a model that other women could never follow, a kind of living reproach. She was made into a physiological monster, the only woman who could claim she was pregnant from the Holy Ghost and get away with it and become holy for it. Escaping feminine destiny, denied in her flesh, it is only by remaining a virgin even after giving birth that she could redeem the defect to be born a woman. But for all other women, the stain, the sin, the maculate birth remained.”1 If the Old Testament genuinely foretold events of the New one, then we might expect that the prophecies would have been clearly acknowledged as prophecies, and in view of their supposed divine provenance they would be free from error. Again, genuine predictions concerning the life of Jesus would not have been fulfilled already before his time. Since the New Testament authors were familiar with the Jewish writings only in their Greek translation (the Septuagint), they could not realize that these Old Testament texts contained mistranslations which could have been copied and incorporated into the New Testament by anyone fabricating retrospective prophecies.2 Let’s look at a famous example. The author of Matthew, who frequently notes that Jesus did things “in order to fulfil the scriptures”, mentions Mary’s virginity only once, indirectly in 1:22-3: “Now all this was done so that what was spoken of the Lord by the prophet might be fulfilled – ‘Behold, a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a 1. Benoîte Groult Ansi soit-elle, Grasset 2000 2. Vaticinia ex eventu — retrospective prophecy — is an ancient technique for gaining credibility. It involves generating a prediction that appears to predate the event that it foretells.

The event therefore appears to confirm the miraculous prediction. One way to do the trick is to fabricate a document purportedly written in the past that foretells later events. Biblical scholars generally accept that the Old Testament Book of Daniel is an example of this type, written centuries after it was purported to have been written. Another way is to take a genuine old text and look for passages that can be interpreted as foretelling aspects of later times, tweaking facts about later times, up to the present, as required.

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son, and they shall call him Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us’.”

This is a reference to a passage of Isaiah (7:14) The problem is that the original Hebrew word “almah” in Isaiah, which does not mean “virgin” but “nubile young woman” – and is applied elsewhere in the Old Testament to harem girls and young widows (Joel 1:8) – had been inaccurately translated into Greek in the Septuagint as parthenos, which does mean “virgin”. The Hebrew word conveying the idea of virginity is “bethulah” but parthenos was the erroneous term that the author of Matthew found in the Septuagint. His error has been known since the 2nd century AD.3In fact, Isaiah’s original prophecy had been made to King Ahaz of Judah when he was having some local difficulties with the neighboring kingdoms of Syria and Israel.

What it meant was that before a certain newly conceived child called Immanuel (a name meaning “God is with us”) would be old enough to distinguish right from wrong, the King’s troubles would be over. Sure enough, within a few years the Assyrians conquered the kingdoms of Damascus and Northern Israel, thus relieving King Ahaz of his difficulties. The prophecy was thus fulfilled some 732 years before the birth of Jesus, who, by the way, was never called Emmanuel.

In The Revised Standard Version and other Bibles, it is now written that this misinterpretation was “a pious fraud”, a well-intentioned error. Luke drew from Matthew, but Mary and Joseph are explicitly mentioned as Jesus’ parents in Luke 2:41. In any case, the two nativity stories are widely acknowledged by Biblical scholars to have been later additions to the texts of these two gospels. Moreover, there are a number of textual variants in surviving manuscripts, pointing at interpolations and amendments, not only in the genealogies but also throughout the texts, in order to avoid mentioning that Joseph was the real father. Significantly, the earliest surviving Semitic version of Matthew, an old Syriac Gospel, retains Joseph as the father. There is 3. St Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, 43ff., 67.

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no suggestion of Jesus being born the son of God in Mark. Instead he seems to have been adopted as a son of God at his baptism (Mark 1:9-12), a conception which will be later labeled a heresy. Echoes of this event are still to be found in the other gospels. The author of Matthew, for example, had taken great trouble to trace Jesus’ ancestry through Joseph to King David because the messiah mentioned in the Torah was necessarily a descendant of David. But the Jews rightfully say that Jesus’ relation to David is non-existent because of the dogma of the virgin birth which claims that Joseph, allegedly of Davidic descent, was not his father. Indeed, you cannot have both.

Moreover, in Judaism, one’s ancestry is calculated on the mother’s side, but nothing is mentioned about her ancestry beyond her mother Anna. Jesus is also explicitly identified as the son of Joseph in John 1:45 and 6:42. If we look at the beliefs of other early Christians such as the original Jewish followers of Jesus known as Nazarenes, who later divided and a group of whom was known later as Ebionites, we find that they denied the Virgin Birth and regarded Jesus as the child of a normal union between a man and Mary. The Jews never expected the Messiah to be born of a virgin, what to speak of him being divine as concocted by Paul.

Since the 4th century, theologians have thought of possible means by which Mary could have remained virgo intacta. During the Middle Ages, it was widely believed that she had been inseminated by the Holy Ghost through her ear. However, her ear would have hardly served for the delivery, so one possibility was that Jesus had exited her womb through a sort of door in her abdomen; some alternative possibilities were that he appeared through her side, or that he emerged as a ray of light from her intact genitals, or that he dematerialized in the womb and then re-materialized again outside of her body. The gospels, however make no suggestion that the birth was carried out in other than the usual way. Purification was required un-

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der Jewish law for women after childbirth primarily because of the blood involved and Mary undoubtedly underwent purification. Luke confirms it as well as the fact that Jesus was born in the conventional manner: “And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord, as it is written in the law of the Lord that every male that opens the womb (a specific term for conventional childbirth) shall be called holy to the Lord. (2:2223) Many modern theologians accept that the story of the virgin birth is a myth designed to emphasize Mary’s purity. Despite all the evidence, Mary still purports to retain her virginity. The trick is done by tampering with the original texts, retaining known errors of translation, inserting suitable confirmatory material into sacred texts, rejecting the intrinsic meaning of words in favor of contrived meanings, and glossing over contradictions and inconsistencies. None of this is a secret. No Church scholar of any standing denies it. On the other hand, none openly advertises it either, so the faithful masses remain in ignorance. Anyway it is quite difficult for people to give up long cherished beliefs, due to their strong emotional involvement and deep commitment which makes the rational mind reject evidence and reasons challenging those beliefs. Upon noticing the tendency of the early Christians to ignore logic and evidence contradicting their beliefs, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (55-135AD) mocked, “So tenaciously should we cling to the word revealed by the Gospel that were I to see all the angels of heaven coming down to tell me something different, not only would I not be tempted to doubt a single syllable, but I would shut my eyes and close my ears, for they would not deserve to be either seen or heard.”1 1. Discourses, I,2 143

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Was Jesus the Long-Awaited Jewish Messiah?

We can blindly accept the incoherent version of Jesus’ life given in the New Testament, or we can turn to historical critical exegesis, but when it comes to what Jesus himself thought and how he saw himself, we are left with conjectures. Since he is said to have referred to himself as the “Son of Man”, an expression used by prophet Daniel in connection with the Messiah, we can surmise that he apparently thought he was the Jewish Messiah, in the Jewish sense of the term, meaning a liberator from the Roman yoke who would re-establish the “Kingdom of God” on earth. But he did not free his people from the Romans! Did he really refer to himself as the “Son of Man” or was it interpolated later on in order to support Paul’s theories? The coming of the Messiah is a belief. How do we know that the mass of the Jews in Jesus’ times were expecting a Messiah?

Do we simply assume they did because the Christian tradition has been claiming he was the Messiah? The Gospels are full of elements of propaganda. Jesus preached and healed the sick. Maybe he performed unusual feats (miracles) to instill in people faith in him and his message. Maybe some people saw him as the Messiah if it is actually true that the masses expected one to appear at any time, and he may have accepted that role if he thought that could enhance his preaching. But this whole Messiah thing is maybe just a preaching tool of the early Jewish Christian preachers to bring new converts to the fold.

Through their systematic detailed research and analysis, the 18th and 19th centuries German historian scholars of the Gospels could detect various currents of thoughts, anomalies, contradictions, discrepancies and inconsistencies due to the texts having been edited and rewritten with additions and omissions. Each scholar speculated some meaning, trying to interpret Jesus’ mind, each according to

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his particular personal mood. Heinrich E.G. Paulus wrote in 1835 that in view of the use of the title the “Son of Man”, the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus must be interpreted in accordance with the passage in Daniel. In 1828, Karl A. Hase offered another interpretation. He wrote that there were two periods in the Messianic activity of Jesus. In the first, he accepted almost without reservation the popular ideas regarding the Messianic age. However, in consequence of his personal experience of the practical results of these ideas, he was led to abandon this error, and in the second period he developed his own distinctive views. But his disciples did not understand this development of thought on his part. They remained wedded to the eschatological view. After the crucifixion, this view prevailed so strongly in their primitive community that they interpolated their expectations into Jesus’ last discourses. The Messiahship of Jesus played no part in his preaching, at least at first, and before the incident at Caesarea Philippi where he acknowledged Peter calling him the Messiah; it was only in moments of enthusiastic admiration rather than with settled conviction that even his disciples looked on him as such. In 1865, Strauss wrote extensively about the development of consciousness in Jesus, while admitting that the Gospels do not provide any clues about it.

By allowing his disciples to accept him as the Messiah, if he actually did, Jesus implicitly laid claim on the throne of Israel. This was a highly revolutionary claim. This does not limit his mission to a mundane political purpose because pre-modern people did not dissociate anything from the religious dimension, a mentioned, so politics and religion were inextricable in his mission. The Messiah was expected to be something like a raja-rishi, the ideal ancient Vedic king, a pious and saintly ruler, like David is made out to be in the Bible. (David, his son Salomon and other Hebrew kings also bore the title of ‘Messiah’). The Christians assert that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.

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The Jews never accepted that. They even allegedly protested when the sign “INRI” – Ieshua of Nazareth, King of the Jews” – was affixed on the top part of the cross. During the Disputation of Barcelona (1263) arranged by the Dominicans, Nachmanides, the Jewish spokesman responded to the Christian argument that the Messiah had already appeared in the form of Jesus by saying that prophetic promises of the Messianic Age – a reign of universal peace and justice – had not yet been fulfilled, because since the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth the world has still been full of violence and injustice, and among all religions the Christians were the most warlike.

He showed that the Biblical prophets regarded the future Messiah as a human, a person of flesh and blood, without ascribing him divine attributes: “It seems most strange that the Creator of Heaven and Earth resorted to the womb of a certain Jewish lady, grew there for nine months and was born as an infant, and afterwards grew up and was betrayed into the hands of his enemies who sentenced him to death and executed him, and that afterwards... he came back to life and returned to his original place. The mind of a Jew, or any other person, simply cannot tolerate these assertions. If you have listened all your life to the priests who have filled your brain and the marrow of your bones with this doctrine, and it has settled into you because of that accustomed habit, I would argue that if you were hearing these ideas for the first time, now, as a grown adult you would never have accepted them.”

At the end of the disputation, the Christian king James I awarded Nachmanides a prize of 300 gold coins and declared that never before had he heard “an unjust cause so nobly defended.”1 When the Christians are challenged that Jesus did not perform what was expected of the Jewish Messiah, they answer that he came, 1. Slater, Elinor & Robert. Great Moments in Jewish History. Jonathan David Company Inc. 1999, p.168 146

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accomplished part of his mission by being killed, and that he will come back once again to complete his task. The Jews rightfully object to that claim and deny that he was the Messiah, saying that it is a purely Christian contrivance, since nowhere does the Bible say anything close to that about the Messiah. So he was maybe a messiah claimant but not the expected Messiah, as he did not fulfill the definition and expectations of such a Messiah. He was crucified and was apparently seen after his burial, but he did not come back to usher in the “Kingdom of God”2 on earth, restoring the glory of Israel and ruling it – which would have made him truly the expected Messiah. Maybe, because they were prisoners of the rigidity of their culture and the mundaneness of their Messianic expectations, the Jews could not recognize in Jesus the Messiah because he did not come in the expected “package”? Later, the self-appointed apostle Paul created a completely different idea of Messiah, divorced from its original Jewish meaning and background. The Jews first tolerated the Jewish converts to Christianity. Finally, although those, whom they considered deviants, practiced some aspects of Judaism, the rabbis decided to expel them from the Synagogue as members of a break away sect. With this purpose in mind, they instituted a special petition in the Daily Prayer (ca. 140 C.E.). In the standard Sephardic Prayer-Book, the petition reads as follows: “May the sectarians (minim) and collaborators find no hope, and the merciless all swiftly disappear. May all your enemies and those who hate you be speedily cut down. May the Empire of Evil [Rome] quickly be uprooted, and broken, and humbled, rapidly, in our days! Blessed are you, Lord that breaks the enemies [of Israel] and humbles the merciless.” It is a 19th century blessing consist-

2. Jesus was always talking about the “Kingdom of God”, or “Kingdom of heaven” in Matthew. In Pharisaic thinking, the kingdom of God had 2 meanings: it meant the present kingdom or reign of God, or it could mean the future reign of God all over the world in the Messianic age. Jesus allegedly used frequently the same expression with the same twofold meaning: sometimes a present kingdom “The kingdom of God is among you”, sometimes a future kingdom, “Repent for the kingdom of God is near.”

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ing actually of a curse.

It seems that Jesus did not share the aggressive militaristic spirit of the Zealots, unless it has been completely stamped out by later Gospel editors. There is maybe some hint of that spirit when he said that he had not come to bring peace on earth but a sword1 – although that can be understood allegorically as meaning to teach men the inner struggle needed to uplift themselves spiritually – but especially when he told his disciples that if they did not have a sword, they should sell their coat to buy one.2Just after that statement, he asked Peter how many swords his disciples had, which does not tally with the image of a non-violent religious leader which the Christian Church wants to limit him to. But it can also be seen that although Jesus seems to have thought of himself as the Messiah by that time, his apocalyptic worldview of living in the last days made him envision a very imminent divine reversal of the tide of events; in this apocalyptic mood, he seems to have taken a passive and quietist political stance in the expectation of a divinely wrought deliverance from the oppressors, and establishment of a utopian “Kingdom of God” on earth, a typical feature of apocalyptic or millenarian groups according to Dale Allison in her book Jesus of Nazareth. When Peter answered that they had only two swords, he replied that it would be sufficient. Sufficient for what? Apparently for what he thought would be some kind of a symbolic fight, in the middle of which God would have performed a miracle, as prophesied by prophet Zechariah, defeating his opponents and establishing him as the Messiah king ushering in the “Kingdom of God”. When Judas Iscariot, one of his twelve close disciples, who had betrayed him for thirty silver coins arrived with a group of soldiers, the other disciples asked Jesus if they should use their swords; one did without waiting for his 1. Mat. 10:34 2. Luke 22:36 148

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answer and cut the ear of the High Priest’s servant. Jesus then said, “No more of this” and he is said to have even healed the wounded ear (Luke 22:51). But no miracle came and he was arrested. His complaint to God on the cross for being abandoned, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, is perfectly understandable under this angle.

He seems to have thought that God would intervene. Maybe Judas did too…

About Judas Iscariot By the way, this story is fraught with inconsistency. To make some sense of it, one has to assume that it was written to fit a narrative destined to a Roman audience, which placed blame on the Jews for the crucifixion. Through Judas, Christianity took its distance with the Jewish people. He became a scape-goat, the first object of Christian anti-Semitism, and, by association, the Jews became the cursed people guilty of “deicide”. Scholars have been wondering about his real role in the Jesus drama. Why has he gone down in history as the very emblem of betrayal whereas Peter who allegedly denied Jesus thrice became glorified as the foundational rock of the Church? Was he a Zealot or Sicarii disappointed with Jesus’ pacifist mood? Did he think God would perform a miracle in the Gethsemane garden and establish Jesus as the Messiah when he brought the guards to him?

Karl A. Hase explained the betrayal of Judas on rationalistic lines, “He was a purely intellectual, worldly and unscrupulous character. He desired to compel the hesitating Messiah to found his kingdom upon popular violence…It is possible that in his terrible blindness he took the last word addressed to him by Jesus – ‘What you do, do it quickly’ – as giving consent to his plan.”

A German Christian mystic visionary, Anna Katharina Emmerich, is said to have had daily visions from 1820 to 1824 about the life of Jesus, which she shared with a man called Clement Brentano, that published them in 1834. She revealed – for whatever that is worth – that, 149

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“Judas was twenty-five years old and had squandered all his possessions when he became a disciple of Jesus. He had black hair and sported a red beard but could not be called really ugly. He was born out of wedlock from a dancing girl and a military tribune of Damascus and was raised by his uncle, a tanner at Iscariot. He had a stormy path. The disciples at first liked him because of his readiness to make himself useful. He even cleaned the shoes.”

Paulus wrote, “How did Judas come to play the traitor? He believed in the Messiahship of Jesus and wanted to force him to declare himself; To bring about his arrest seemed to him the best means of rousing the people to take his side openly. But the course of events was too rapid for him. Owing to the Feast the news of the arrest spread but slowly. In the night, when people were sleeping off the effects of the Passover supper, Jesus was condemned; in the morning, before they were well awake, he was hurried away to be crucified. Then Judas was overcome with despair and went and hanged himself.”

With the discovery of the Gnostic apocryphal “Gospel of Judas”, the cursed apostle comes out as the most intimate disciple of the Nazarene preacher, sacrificing himself for his master’s glory!

Why would he betray him for a mere thirty silver coins when he was the treasurer of the group? Or has this sum, the price of a slave, a symbolic meaning? This Gospel is dated between 280 and 330 AD. It contains criticism of some leaders of the early Church with their tendency to want to control everything and gain position and power.

For the German scholar Friedrich W. Ghillany, writing in 1863, “Judas, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was a man of much resource who helped Jesus to avoid being arrested as a disturber of the peace by arranging that the ‘betrayal’ should take place on the evening before the Passover, in order that Jesus might die, as he desired, on the day of the Passover. For this service of love, he was, in the second tradition, torn from the bosom of Jesus and branded as a traitor.”

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About Miracles According to the Vedas, the substratum or underlying substance of everything found in this world besides the souls is matter. All manifest material reality is simply a transformation of its underlying cause, material energy. That energy, which underpins all material reality, is constantly in motion. It does not change, but it takes at different times various forms, having specific distinctive natures, functions, states and conditions. It is just like gold, which can be made into various objects that have different forms, such as cups, vases, ornaments, etc., which can be of different sizes and age, etc. Whatever the object, its shape, condition and function, it is the same gold, simply with a change in the arrangements of the atoms composing it. And if a gold cup is melted and made into bangles, it does not cease to be gold and also has the potential to be turned into another object. All objects can thus be conceived of as undergoing constant change according to characteristics, state and condition. Therefore, in one sense, the past and the future are latent in the present, and everything is ultimately made of the same stuff. It is important to know the underlying operative principles that are inherent in material reality, in order to understand the mechanics underpinning the mystic powers through which one can perform extraordinary feats that people usually call miracles. God, as well as advanced yogis who have mastered the appropriate techniques, can remove what we might call the laws of nature that causes things to act according to what is considered to be their expected natures. Thus, since everything exists in potential form in material energy, by manipulating or rearranging the subtle structure of physical reality and the normal conditions that operate on it, a yogi can cause matter to behave in what appears to be supernatural or miraculous ways.1 1. Edwin F. Bryant, The yoga-sutras of Patanjali, North point press, NY, 2009, Ch.3

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It is an axiom in Vedic science that the performance of austerities creates in one a special power, or tejas. The simple fact to observe complete celibacy, for instance, is an austerity which definitely gives one a spiritual potency. Therefore, great importance was given in antiquity to virginity, and various spiritualists, be they devotees of God, yogis, members of the Christian clergy, monks or nuns, observe celibacy or strive for it. A yogi can desire to achieve specific powers, called siddhis, or mystic powers, in order to achieve different goals; he must then pursue the path of asceticism needed to develop them.

The Vedic literature mentions many such powerful yogis. The places where these great yogis and sages of yore have practiced austerities are also surcharged with a special power and often become places of pilgrimage. Even today one can see ascetic yogis in India. When they have developed some of those mystic powers, they display extraordinary feats. I have personally been a witness to some of those.

But it goes without saying that in our day and age hardly any yogi can perform the strenuous prolonged austerities, nor achieve the perfect mental concentration, needed to achieve these mystic perfections, so, they only attain a small degree of any of them.

These powers are extraordinary and their performance may seem to be legendary feats; they are, however, described in the ancient texts pertaining to yoga as being eight in number: One can become so small that he can enter into a stone, or so light that he can float in the air or on water. One can enter into another planet. One can even create or destroy one entire planet.

By prapti-siddhi, or the power of acquisition, one can extend one’s hand anywhere and take whatever he likes, for instance pick up a fruit in a garden situated very far away. One can bring anyone under his control; it is a kind of hypnotism which is almost irresistible. By prakamya-siddhi, or magic, one can achieve anything he likes, but still 152

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within the scope of nature. However, by kamavasayita-siddhi, one can contradict nature; in other words, one can do the impossible.1 These powers are described in greater detail in the 5000 years old yoga-sutras of Patanjali, which contain an entire section dedicated to them and the special practices needed to develop them. They are: Having knowledge of past and future, of the language of all creatures, of previous births, of the mind, of other people’ minds, of the moment of one’s death, of subtle, concealed and remote things, of the different planets of the universe, of the solar system, of the movement of the stars, of the inner functions of the body, of everything; making oneself invisible, strong like an elephant, free from hunger and thirst; seeing the perfected beings; having one’s mind enter into the bodies of others, levitate, manifesting radiance, developing greater capacities of all one’s senses, surpassing bodily limitations; attaining lightness permitting to travel through the sky, speed like that of the mind, mastery of the material elements and primordial matter, perfection of the body in beauty and charm, the power of a thunderbolt, full mastery of one’s senses, omniscience and omnipotence. The list concludes with the words, “By detachment even from the attainment of those last two and upon the destruction of all faults, kaivalya, or liberation ensues” (3.50).

The amazing manifestations of these “supernatural” powers are dismissed by the Christians in general as being Satanic signs. They say that they are being accomplished by the power of the “Devil,” because they naively think that only Jesus performed miracles and that his performing them is a proof of his divine nature. But the Vedas teach that a very spiritually advanced person can also develop those powers even without desiring them and without practicing this type of ascetic yoga. They are like a byproduct of his higher spiritual achievements. He can thus also perform extraordinary things. We do 1. A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, The nectar of devotion, BBT, NY, 1970, Ch. 1 153

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not know if the writers of the Gospels mentioned that Jesus performed many miracles as a form of propaganda to convince people to convert to Christianity or if he actually performed miracles. Being a powerful spiritual personality, Jesus naturally had some of the powers mentioned above, and he may have used them, either out of compassion, or to authenticate his spiritual mission in the eyes of people who needed these external manifestations of spiritual power to believe in his message, as mentioned earlier.1 But his performance of miracles – if he indeed did perform them – is not a sign that he was God, neither the Messiah. In the Synoptic gospels, there is not anything which suggests that the miracles have a Messianic significance. They never mention the Messiah as a miracle-worker. That would require the pre-supposition that the Messiah was expected to be some kind of an earthly man who would perform miracles. Some scholars presupposed it, but it is at variance with eschatology which pictured the Messiah as a heavenly being in a world already transformed into something supra-mundane. The miracles are connected with the Kingdom of God and its nearness, not with the Messiah. In Mat.24:24, Jesus warned his disciples against false messiahs, saying that they would perform miracles, so if someone is able to perform some, it is not the mark that one is the Messiah. Examples of both Christian mystics and ascetics displaying spiritual potency abound in history. They used it in general for healing people. But rationalism crept in the West and, along with it, a deep disbelief in anything looking supernatural.

The German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) acknowledged the existence of mythical elements in Jesus’ life. According to him, the belief in Jesus as God-made-man only arose after his death.

He saw the miracles as being allegories of Jesus’ teachings.

1. There are also ancient traditions according to which Jesus travelled to India before beginning his ministry and learned the yogic practices permitting to develop those powers.

Indeed, there is not a word about him in the Gospels from 12 to 30 or 33 years of age.

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Did Herod Order the Killing of all New-Born Babies?

In Matthew 2:13-23, the author claims that Herod ordered the murder of all infant children up to the age of two in Bethlehem and the surrounding districts as a means of ensuring that the prodigious child would die. There are many reasons to conclude that this is a fictional story. Firstly, it is only documented in Matthew but left out of the other three gospels. An event as heinous and memorable as this most certainly would not have escaped the attention of the writers of the other gospels. Secondly, the historian Josephus, who was tireless in his criticisms of Herod the Great, would almost certainly have documented what would have been this tyrant’s most barbaric crime; but he made no mention of it. Thirdly, it is apparent that the author of Matthew was fabricating a story to add fulfillment to passages in the Old Testament Books of Hosea and Jeremiah or it is inspired from the story found in Jasher of Nimrod killing all children because he had heard from a soothsayer that Abraham who had just taken birth would conquer the world. Fourth, Mark Roncace in Raw revelation, the Bible they never tell you about, suggests, “The theological (not historical) truth that Matthew expresses with his story is that Jesus is a new type of Moses. That is Matthew’s point; he’s not trying to tell you what actually happened when Jesus was born. He’s conveying a message about the meaning, purpose and identity of Jesus. After all, would a sensible governor like Herod – or even a totally stupid one – whose job it was to keep order and peace really command the massacre of countless innocent babies…?

No. But that’s how Matthew tells the story, not because it really happened, but because Matthew is announcing to his audience the arrival of a new Moses.

This is called typology. Another explanation is that the author of Matthew set the life of Jesus in a cruel, violent world and wrote of a tragic event of unspeakable brutality both at the beginning of his life and at the end, presenting pictures of the depth of evil that Jesus 155

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came to redeem.1 Lastly, it may also have been plagiarized from the Vedic scriptures and the description of Lord Shri Krishna’s birth.

“The description of Jesus’ birth seems to originate from the older Sanskrit narration of the birth of Krishna. Krishna, for example, was born in Mathura but taken to a pastoral setting just after birth. Jesus was ready to be born in the city of Nazareth but taken to a pastoral setting just before he was born. At birth, the demigods sang hymns in glorification of the baby Krishna, just as it is related in relation to the angels and Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. After His birth, Krishna was visited by a wise man, the sage Narada Muni, who foretold His future according to the alignment of stars at the time. This is similar to the way in which Jesus was visited by the Magi who had followed a star in the heavens in order to find him, and who also foretold of his future glory. In the natal story of both Krishna and Jesus, it is told that the regent ordered the death of all male children born during that period- in the birth story of Krishna, the regent’s name was Kamsa. In the birth story of Jesus, it was Herod.”2 Sir William Jones said in this regard, “That the name of Krishna and the general outline of His story were long anterior to the birth of our Savior, and probably to the time of Homer, we know very certainly.”

For J.M. Robertson, writing in 1900, the Christ myth is merely a form of the story of Krishna and the Gospel tradition is to be entirely interpreted in a symbolical way3.

1. Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes p 58,62 2. Raymond Bernard, From Christ to Chrishna, Health Research,1961 3. Christianity and Mythology. London.

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here are often neglected but disturbing inconsistencies in the historic biblical narrative. I suggest not accepting exclusively literal interpretations of those narratives as the truth. According to the Bible, Abraham was living in Ur, Chaldea, one of the most important city-states of Mesopotamia, around 1750 BC and was commanded by a deity to journey south (Gen 11:31) until he would reach Canaan. There, the Jewish scribes claim that the deity made a covenant with him and told him he was giving him… the land of other people! How convenient to have old scrolls rewritten God knows how many times to justify one’s conquests! The deity is supposed to have said, according to Genesis, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates – the land of the Kenite, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites”(15:18-21). They say that the promise was confirmed by the deity to Jacob, though the borders of that land are still vague and are in terms of “the land on which you are lying”. (Genesis 28:13) Other geographical borders are given in Exodus 23:31 which describes those borders as marked by the Red Sea, the “Sea of the Philistines” i.e.

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the Mediterranean, and the “River” (the Euphrates). The Israelites are said to have gone in exile to Egypt due to famine for more than four hundred years, including a period of slavery, then to have come out of the Pharaoh’s land and wandered forty years in the desert.

The promise is said to have been fulfilled at that time, the end of their exodus from Egypt: “See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land that the Lord swore he would give to your fathers – to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob –and to their descendants after them.” (Deuteronomy 1.8) They slaughtered most of the people who had been living on “their” land in the meanwhile, including women, children and babies…The deity chose to minister and support only the Israelites, ignoring all others; he is praised by the scribes for having assisted them in conquering and wiping out the neighboring Gentile populations. It is made clear in the Deuteronomy that he wanted to destroy Canaanite culture and identity.

But is belief in biblical inerrancy1 necessary for a Christian to believe in God and Jesus, or even reasonable? How absolute is the Bible’s authority? Is the Bible without error in all historical details and ethical teachings? What should thoughtful believers do with texts that propose God was pleased by human sacrifice, that He rejoiced in women being raped if they disobeyed Him, or that He commanded “His people”, the Israelites, to commit acts of genocide? Belief in biblical inerrancy makes such issues, as well as that of slavery, worse. Why? Because there has to be some kind of justification for the destruction of the Canaanites, for instance, if the Bible really is inerrant. There is indeed a big problem here. And it is even bigger because the Christians do not even realize it exists, or if they do, its extent. Everyone is partly a product of his upbringing, culture and environment, so much so that one takes some things for granted 1. Biblical inerrancy means: There are no mistakes in the Bible. If it is in it, then it must be true.

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without questioning them just because one is born in a particular culture and religious tradition where certain things are a given. Indeed, why does a Christian accept the old tribal Israelite Yahweh as God? He does not ask himself that question because he believes in Jesus, and Jesus referred to the Bible in which Yahweh is the name given to God. Haven’t Christians adopted the Jewish Bible or Torah simply because their leader, Jesus, was a Jew? They rejected the Jews in general because they are held responsible for Jesus’ death, but they did not reject their religious tradition, did they? Why? Just because Jesus is issued from it. That is how the Western world has inherited this compilation of texts. Otherwise, it was only the religious book of a small, insignificant, ethnic group, the Israelites. By accepting Jesus, the West has bought his whole cultural background, hook, line and sinker, unquestioningly accepting the Jews’ sanguinary deity – Yahweh – as God, and unconsciously accepting as the genuine history of the origins of the world and man the myths of the Jewish tribes, themselves partly borrowed from older sources like Chaldean, Sumerian and Babylonian texts2, themselves partly deriving from older texts from the Vedic tradition. Many sincere Christians have agonized over their own private doubts about the Old Testament that they have accepted as part of their Scripture, some of them being led to such disillusionment and despair that they abandoned their faith rather than being intellectually dishonest and accept a literal interpretation of the monstrously violent passages of the Bible.

The most obvious and intelligent solution is to accept that the Bible is not the word of God but only of men, and fallible at that, and that it has been edited by many hands over centuries. For instance, the books of Samuel and Kings narrate the history of Israel. The books of Chronicles, written later, records the same events, but in an edited way. In 2 Samuel 24, we read that the Lord’s anger was again raised 2. The biblical 10 Commandments resemble a lot the codes of Hammurabi (c 1790-1750 BC). Babylon received its laws from its tutelary deity Marduk, a name under which they worshipped the sun-god.

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against Israel and he incited David against them, ordering him to make a census of the people of Israel and Judah. David obeyed and then, oddly enough, the Lord severely punished them by sending a plague which killed 70 000 Israelites. Why would God act in such a way? No problem! The writer of 1 Chronicles 21 rewrote the beginning of that story replacing God by Satan who ordered the census!

Inerrancy, you said?

Actually, as demonstrated brilliantly by the Christian scholar Thom Stark in The Human Faces of God, there are no real inerrantists who accept 100% everything written in the Bible. It would be difficult indeed to find an inerrantist who believes that the gods mentioned in the Bible in the ancient Near East exist; or that it is morally acceptable to own a slave; or that Yahweh commanded the Israelites to sacrifice their first born children to him; that children should suffer for their parents’ sins; that it is okay to punish parents by dashing their infants’ heads against rocks, or to force-feed them their own children; or that since Eve was born from a rib of Adam, woman are obviously inferior; and that since she ate the fruit first, all women are inherently more susceptible to deception than men and Paul was right to forbid them to teach doctrine in the church. Stark adds humor with a footnote I partially quote here, “Admittedly, some find this perspective amenable to their tastes, such as a pastor who wrote, ‘While many irate women have disagreed with Paul’s assessment through the years, it does appear that some women are much like their mother Eve and are well-intended but ill-informed…Before you get all emotional like a woman in hearing this, please consider the content of the women’s magazines at your local grocery store that encourage liberated women in our day to watch porn with their boyfriends, master oral sex for men who have no intention of marrying them, pay for their own dates in the name of equality, spend an average of 3/4of their childbearing years having sex but trying not to get pregnant, and abort 1/3 of all babies – and ask yourself if it doesn’t look like the 160

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Serpent is still strolling the garden and that the daughters of Eve aren’t gullible in pronouncing progress liberation and equality.’” 1

The Dreadful Consequences of a Wrong Belief If the Bible is accepted literally as history and not as myth, it is filled with hundreds of contradictions and inconsistencies. For example, if Adam and Eve were really the first human beings, then with whom did Cain (and Abel?) marry? With girls born from their parents, which means their sisters?! Or did they have incestuous relationships with their mother? A disproportionate importance has been given to the Jewish Bible. The Christians’ literal reading of it has caused untold violence. Beliefs have concrete consequences as they shape our worldview, behavior and destiny. We can observe here again the powerful and dreadful consequences of a belief: Because the Christians accept the Old Testament as a holy scripture – notwithstanding the fact that their world was a rough and tough one – for centuries, when they were confronted with “pagans” and “heretics”, they felt justified to deal with them the way they believed God did in ancient times in Canaan. And in their wars to impose Islam and conquer land, the Muslims sadly emulated the example of the Christians. But at least the Muslims do not claim to spread a message of love but rather of submission to Allah. Due to their blind belief in biblical inerrancy, in a desperate attempt to justify the unconscionable, modern Christian apologists like Paul Copan in his book Is God a moral monster? and in his book co-written with Matt Flanagan Did God really command genocide? try to justify this ancient ethnic cleansing if not outright genocide. In order to do so, he writes that the numbers of victims are inflated in the Torah due to the typical hyperbolic warfare rhetoric of these times, explaining that ancient 1. Mark Driscoll, Church leadership, P. 43

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standards for relaying history were highly stylized and included many literary motifs which are not germane to history-writing today. But on the other hand, it is really shocking to read that, “This was justified because the Canaanites were indulging in very sinful activities, like human sacrifices”. The real motivations for the conquests were land and the consolidation of political power, but throughout those two books Copan seeks to explain why the divine commands for holy war recorded in the Deuteronomy and in Jeremiah are not really genocidal and, more broadly, how they could be morally defensible. Really? Read!

“I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together, says the Lord: I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them... A curse on him who is lax in doing the Lord’s work! A curse on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed. You are My war-club... with you I shatter old man and youth... young man and virgin” (Jeremiah 13:14; 48:10; 51:20,22).

Such verses perversely take away all responsibility from the Israelite warriors, who are only acting on behalf of God. They are pregnant with so much future violence enacted supposedly on behalf of God and will be used by the Christians and the Muslims later on! While noting that scholar Philip Jenkins describes the Canaanite invasion as a form of ethnic cleansing, Copan retorts in the second book p.277 that, “it would be better termed ‘moral cleansing’, or more specifically, long-awaited moral judgment on a wicked people whose time had finally come” (Gen. 15:16).

So it seems clear that he approves of killing “pagan” babies as a way to make sure to rid the land of the alleged iniquity, and he just sees that as necessary collateral damage to achieve the greater good.

So, according to Canadian writer Randal Rauser, Paul Copan and co-writer Matt Flanagan are actually justifying ethnic cleansing, and their answer to the book’s central question should be, “Yes, God did command genocide.”

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In his otherwise very good book to defeat atheists – Stealing from God – another Christian apologist, Frank Turek, also justifies Yahweh’s order of genocide by saying that the Canaanites were very foul people, “sacrificing their children to their god Moloch, champions of incest, bestiality, temple prostitution and several other flagrant sins. So finally God ordered Israel to stop them and clear the land for the immigrating Israelites. God’s judgment was also intended to prevent the Canaanites from corrupting the Israelites through whom the Savior of the world was to come…It was so the promised people would get into the Promised Land and bring forth the promised Messiah to save the world.”

He uses the same argument than Copan about the descriptions of the conquests using hyperbole: “After commanding the Canaanites be destroyed completely (Deut. 7:2), the very next verse says, ‘You shall not intermarry with them.’ How could you intermarry with people who were to be completely wiped out.?”

He is minimizing the number of victims by stating that, “Moreover, after other passages say certain people groups have been ‘utterly destroyed’, we see the same people groups popping up again and again in the Bible. Obviously, many were not quite dead yet. They lived because the actual intent of the command was to expel the Canaanites from the land, not obliterate everyone.”

He downplays the killing or women and kids by writing, “There’s no evidence that women and children were near battles or were targeted.”

Actually, the Israelites were not less sinful than their neighbors.

They also practiced temple prostitution as well as human sacrifices in the past, as we saw earlier. So by justifying the ancient ethnic cleansing of the Canaanites as being ordered by God to wipe out sinful people, these Christian apologists reveal their mentality. They justify 163

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their own bloody history of dealing with “pagans” and “heretics”1, and show that if they still had the power to do so they would probably be ready to commit genocide provided God ordered it, as they believe He did in those days of Canaan history, alas. Indeed, we can measure here the mighty power of beliefs!

“Speaking of the non-sin of godly genocide it is interesting to reflect on the case of Puritan colonists in America who arrived at the Biblical conclusion that God had led them to their new home in America which was to them, typologically speaking, a new land of Canaan, and the native Americans were like the Canaanites of old, worshippers of false gods and hence, if the natives refused to convert they were worthy of extermination.”2 It takes courageous Christians like Thom Stark and Randal Rauser to challenge a fundamentalist approach of the Old Testament, which has defamed God. Exposing the deadly contradictions of such untenable approach and refusing to sacrifice moral decency on the altar of inerrantist dogma, Stark3 said that, “Taking the Bible seriously means taking all of the conflicting voices within the Bible seriously…The Bible consists of a spectrum of competing stories…

There are several different authors trying to make sense of the same basic material, but each of them arranges it in different ways, and none of them do it just 1. Echoing Marc Twain, John Riches, professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow, provides the following view of the diverse historical influences of the Bible: “It has inspired some of the great monuments of human thought, literature, and art; it has equally fueled some of the worst excesses of human savagery, self-interest, and narrow-mindedness. It has inspired men and women to acts of great service and courage, to fight for liberation and human development; and it has provided the ideological fuel for societies which have enslaved their fellow human beings and reduced them to abject poverty. ... It has, perhaps above all, provided a source of religious and moral norms which have enabled communities to hold together, to care for, and to protect one another; yet precisely this strong sense of belonging has in turn fueled ethnic, racial, and international tension and conflict.” (The Bible: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Oxford: p. 134) 2. http://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2015/01/israelites-and-canaanites-how-different.html 3. He wrote The human faces of God (Wipf & Stock, Eugene, Or, 2011) and composed a thorough rejoinder to Paul Copan’s work, titled, Is God a Moral Compromiser? http://thomstark. net/copan/stark_copan-review.pdf

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right. The royal historians declared that the Davidic dynasty would last forever, but it didn’t. The prophets predicted the restoration of Israel’s national sovereignty, but Israel wasn’t restored. Jesus predicted the end of the world as we know it, but the world as we know it didn’t end… Sometimes what our predecessors have said is dead wrong. Christians need to understand that it’s OK to disagree with the Bible...The idea that biblical critics are motivated by a need to prove the Bible wrong is pure fantasy. Conceptions of the ‘hostile liberal’ who is out to ‘attack scripture’ and ‘rebel against the God of the Bible’ are purely the imaginings of conspiracy theorists…The fear that drives us to look to the Bible as an infallible authority is ultimately the fear of being adrift at sea without an anchor. If there are no foundations, what mechanisms for self-correction still exists? What can guarantee that we have got things right? The answer, of course, is that nothing can offer such guarantee, and neither can an inerrant Bible.”

Indeed, unless one receives knowledge transmitted by a line of self-realized liberated masters, one cannot be sure of the validity and authenticity of that knowledge.

Another approach thus raised by Rauser is: Why believe at all that God could do such things? There are examples of exaggeration in the Bible, accepted as such by scholars, the imprecatory psalms, for instance: Psalm 137 is a psalm written while in exile in Babylon which ends with the following statement: “Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (8-9).

The Christian apologist scholar William Lane Craig states about it, “There are also elements in Scripture that express the emotions and anxieties and the depression of the human authors, and it seems implausible to attribute those to God’s dictation. These seem rather to be genuine human emotions that are being expressed.”

One can also prefer to read the descriptions of strange, so-called divine command ethics as the Jewish scribes trying to justify their 165

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ancestors’ mass murder in cold blood of the Canaanites by saying that God ordered it or did it, and their justifying their enslaving the Midianite virgins by saying the same. These are actually Israelite tales that generally resemble other ancient tales, mostly involving gods leading their people into battle, like the Mesha Stele, or Moabite Stone, which relays an account of the god Kemosh commanding the Moabites to go into battle against the Israelites. So the Jews acted on their own, no God ordered any genocide or rape. You need to diabolize and dehumanize1your enemy to hate him, fight him and then justify your war crimes. We are thus in front of a rewriting of history centuries later, when the Jews were becoming monotheistic; they then retrospectively justified killing the Canaanites, including the most vulnerable, by saying that those were sinful “pagans” and claiming that it was God who ordered it and did it. Don’t these barbaric claims sound familiar? Yes, of course. The Christians put them forward in the distant past. And, as we will see in another chapter, the Muslims also, but unfortunately not just in the past.

Sanguinary Worshipers Other ways to look at it are that what is written about Yahweh in the Old Testament is what his sanguinary worshipers thought true about him; or they were a bellicose bunch who tried to justify the war crimes they committed during so-called territory re-appropriation by writing that God ordered, condoned or did it Himself, as other local ethnic groups claimed about their patron deities; or it may be a combination of the above two. Or, were those things written to instill fear in those who worshipped other deities than Yahweh, whom they were pushing as the only true one at that time whereas he was previously just one out of many? Or, maybe we have to consider Marcion of Sinope’s idea that the God spoken about by Jesus 1. See David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others. St. Martin Press, New York, 2012) 166

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is not the same as the Jewish deity; in other words that they did not worship the one true God. Or they may have worshiped a powerful demigod, like Shiva for instance, but in their ignorance offered to him animal and even human sacrifices like some demoniac persons are reported in ancient Vedic history to have offered Shiva. The mention of a column of clouds, fire, thunder, etc. mentioned in the Bible, would however rather indicate the demigod Indra, equivalent to Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, or Tlaloc in Mexico. There may be a basis of authentic Vedic teachings covered over by later speculations ascribed to the deity by the scribes.

Or worse, they were actually worshipping a demoniac entity. That would explain a lot of things: the request for blood, in the form of animal and human sacrifice, especially the holocaust of first-born children, the genocide, the horrible chastisements met upon them for worshipping any other deity, their way to communicate with him through some kind of magic way, the killing of anyone making the slightest mistake...After all, why accept Yahweh as God? How does such a character who is not at all loving, good, holy and perfect, but shows himself as vindictive, cruel, immoral, unjust, misogynistic, childish, maniacal genocidal and remorseless, fit with the position of God? In any case, by writing as they did, the Jewish scribes presented a revolting image of God, and their younger brothers, the Christians, inherited this idea, although Jesus tried to paint Him otherwise. Since his first followers were Jews, it was maybe not a revolting idea for them but a normal thing, a part of the culture they grew up in.

But were the early non-Jewish Christians so naĂŻve as to believe God did such terrible things? Did they just accept unquestioningly what they heard or read as being His nature? Or is it just us judging their world from the point of view of our modern Western sensitivities? Well, since a literal reading of violent Biblical texts such as those describing the genocidal Canaan conquests is morally repugnant and unacceptable, some of the early Church Fathers had already chosen 167

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to see those descriptions as allegorical, as explained by Thom Stark.

Thus, Origen wrote that these wars were symbols of spiritual wars, “As for the command given to the Jews to slay their enemies, it may be answered that anyone who looks carefully into the meaning of the passage will find that it is impossible to interpret it literally.” (Cels.7.19) Origen thought that those texts could not be maintained as scripture if they were to be read as true history. He saw them as allegories of Christ’s conquest of the individual Christian’s soul, with the seven Canaanite nations as symbols of the vices one is commanded to wage war against. Another orthodox theologian, John Cassian, adopted the same strategy. He wrote that, “The reason that these seven nations to be destroyed are said to be more numerous is that there are more vices than there are virtues.” (Conf. 5.16) Similarly, the Cappadocian Father Gregory of Nyssa issued an incisive critique of the immorality of the tenth plague of Egypt, where Egyptian children were indiscriminately slaughtered, by demonstrating that a literal reading of its description would be nothing short of monstrous; he too resorted to an allegorical instructive reading: “When through virtue one comes to grips with any evil, he must completely destroy the first beginnings of evil.” (Life of Moses 2.92) But Stark writes that such allegorical hermeneutics are “hermeneutics of convenience”: “When it comes to problematic texts such as the conquest narratives, it is very convenient to be able to transform dead Canaanite children into conquered vices such as lust and greed, or to render those texts innocuous by reference to an undisclosed inner truth known only to the Spirit-filled interpreter.”

If Jesus did not say openly that he did not believe the Jewish scribes justifying the war crimes of Israel by claiming that God ordered them or did them Himself, it was not because he condoned those atrocities. He was operating within the context of a culture, so it was probably because that would have ruined his preaching and the young faith of his disciples. Thom Stark writes that, 168

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“Since Jesus sometimes referred to biblical stories, fundamentalists claim that it constitutes evidence that he taught the inerrancy of such texts and the accuracy of the Old Testament. But it is quite possible that by alluding to these traditions he was simply conceding to standard assumptions. He may have known better; he may not have. He may simply have been working within these traditional assumptions even if he knew better. In all likelihood, he assumed the traditions with which he was raised…But Job and Ecclesiastes deny the possibility of the afterlife and there is no doubt that Jesus disagreed with them on that point.”

And since Jesus was also fully human according to Christian dogma, Stark continues, “The claim that if he assumed traditions that were wrong, then himself would have been wrong, and the whole religion (apparently) collapses on itself, essentially denies him the right to be human, and if he is to be human, then he must be allowed to operate under faulty assumptions until the point at which they are corrected, either by experience or by instruction. An indispensable part of being human is being a product of one’s own time and place. At what point exactly did he cease to be human and became omniscient? It is absurd to posit any such point in time.”

So, the Christians can remain locked in a childish vision of the Bible and continue to blindly accept the mythology of the Old Testament. In that case, as a result of their blind belief, they must then consider as true that God ordered human sacrifice and enjoyed it, condoned or ordered a genocide or ethnic cleansing and mass rape and said He would delight in blood and Jewish women being raped if Israel broke their Covenant with Him.1 Either they mature and accept that these terrible descriptions are just the Jewish scribes trying to justify their ancestors’ crimes; or they open to Marcion de Sinope’s idea that this deity is not the same that Jesus referred to as his 1. In many texts of Deuteronomy 28 (15-63), the Jewish deity says that it is he himself who is inflicting all the horrors he threatens those who disobey him with. He takes personal responsibility for all murder in Deut. 32:39. In 28:63, he is credited with saying he will “delight” to inflict all these horrors, including rape, (“You will be pledged to a woman but another will take her and rape her”) just as much as he “delights” to bless those who obey him.

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father, but a local tribal deity which gradually became claimed and accepted by the Jews as the only one true God. Contrast this genocide of Canaanites – including what Kenneth Kitchen, a Christian apologist, calls the “less mobile elements” to distance the reader from the reality that word covers (old men, women, children and babies) as it is done by calling abortion “a removal of uterine tissues” – with a parallel situation in the Vedic Mahabharata: Sri Krishna tried by all means, including going personally as a peace messenger, to prevent the war of Kurukshetra, a battle where only warriors fought, and where all souls, very sinful people (demoniac) included, were liberated as they left their bodies in His divine presence. He Himself did not fight. Although the prince Arjuna, his brothers and family had been insulted and dishonored by their vicious adversaries, he was even ready not to fight when he thought with compassion about all the women the battle would leave as unprotected widows. (Bhagavad-gita 1.39-40)

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Islam Another Incompatible Claim of Religious Exclusivity Origins In 610 CE in Mecca, his hometown in Arabia, an Arab called Muhammad born in a “pagan” family around 570 proclaimed himself a prophet of Allah, the “only one true God.” One should know that Allah was not a new god in Arabia; his name was not revealed for the first time in the Koran. It had been used by polytheistic Arabs for centuries in pre-Islamic times to refer to a god of their pantheon, the Moon-god, whom they looked upon as the creator of the world and the giver of rain and to whom they built temples of cubic form, ka’ba, that one finds in different parts of Arabia, from Petra in the North to Najran in the South. The presently Muhammadan Kaaba shrine of Mecca was dedicated to him, the Moon-god, called Hubal or Al-ilah, which literally means “the god”, shortened to ‘Allah’, a designation that consecrated the superiority of that deity over the other gods; it was thus the “house of the Moon-god, whose statue used to be on top of it. The Kaaba then hosted in addition to Allah/ Hubal the 360 gods and goddesses (Ishtar, Atangatis, Dushara, Ner-

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gal, Shamagh, Sin,1etc.) of the tribal federation called the Qurayshites after their coming to power in Mecca a couple of centuries before the time of Muhammad. The polytheist Arabs used ‘Allah’ in the names they gave to their children. For example, both Muhammad’s father and uncle had ‘Allah’ as part of their names.

The South-Arabian pantheon is not properly known. As in most contemporary Semitic cults, the southern Arabs worshipped stars and planets, chief among whom were the Sun, Moon and Ashtar, Venus. The concept of State was expressed through the national god, sovereign of the people. Each of the South Arabian kingdoms had its own national god. In Sheba, it was Almaqah in the temple of the federation of the Sabaean tribes in Marib. In Qataban, the national god ‘Amm, seen as the protector of the Qatabanite dynasty, was the patron of the principal temple in the capital Timna. In Ma‘in, the national god was Wadd (‘love’), sometimes invoked as Wadd-Abb. Allah, the Moon god, was married to the sun goddess. Together they produced three goddesses, al-Lat, al-Uzza2 (names which are feminine forms of Allah) and Manat, who were called the daughters of Allah. Their worship played a significant role in the Kaaba temple in Mecca. Thousands of inscriptions from walls and rocks in Northern Arabia have been collected, along with reliefs and votive bowls used in worship of these three daughters, who are sometimes depicted in the form of stars, or together with Allah, represented by a crescent moon above them – ancient “pagan” symbols Muhammad kept when he created Islam. The Koran at one point enjoined Muslims to worship them3, but those verses – the so-called “Satanic verses of the Koran” – were later abrogated out of it. Muhammad was raised in the religion of that moon-god Allah and used to partic1. Some say that different Arab tribes gave the Moon-god different names or titles such as Sin, Al-ilah (Allah), Hubul, Ilumquh.

2. In 527, Mundhir, a Lakhmid Arab king, sacrificed 400 Christian virgins in her honor, in Hira, plus a Ghassanid prince, the son of his rival, king Arethas.

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ipate in the religious rites the “pagans” observed in connection with the worship of their gods. Muhammad commanded his followers to participate in these ceremonies while the “pagans” were still in control of Mecca4, and Islam went on to adopt these religious rites.5 But Muhammad went one step further than his fellow “pagan” Arabs.

While they believed that Allah was the greatest of all gods and the supreme deity in their pantheon, Muhammad claimed that he was not only the greatest god but the only God. In effect he said, “Look, you already believe that Allah is the greatest of all gods. All I want you to do is accept the idea that he is the only god. I am not taking away the Allah you already worship. I am only taking away his wife and his daughters and all the other gods.” Thus the first point of the Muslim creed is not “Allah is great” but “Allah is the greatest”. The Arabic word is used to contrast the greater from the lesser, so it implies a polytheistic context. Therefore, the “pagan” Arabs never accused Muhammad of preaching a different Allah than the one they already worshiped. So, he did not create a new god or a new religion, he just upgraded an old belief. Allah thus was a local deity who gradually assumed preeminence and, like the polytheist Jews’ tribal war deity Yahweh, became “the only true God”. Most Muslims do not know the pagan sources of the symbols and rites of their religion.

Two Korans?

Muhammad stated that there had been one hundred scriptures revealed in the world but that they had all been distorted by men and that the Koran was the last revelation, confirming, completing and correcting all the previous scriptures, giving their essence.

Unfortunately, the Koran is not written in chronological order, but mostly according to the length of the different suras. Still, one can distinguish two main different periods reflected in the Koran, during 4. Yusuf Ali, fn.214, p.78 5. Yusuf Ali: fn.223 p. 80 173

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which different rules apply. In the beginning, in Mecca, the first Koran or the first part of the Koran made of ninety suras shows religious tolerance This is the “peaceful” Islam that ignorant or devious people like to refer to. In 622, after twelve years of unsuccessful preaching – he had only around one hundred forty followers, mostly relatives and slaves – and the opposition of most tribes who were polytheistic and saw Muhammad as an ambitious impostor trying to get a monopoly on religion, he had to flee Mecca so as not to be killed and went to Yathrib/Medina, where there was a large Jewish community. He appealed to them, calling them the “people of the Book”, recommending peaceful discussion (16:125), writing placating verses like, “There is no compulsion in religion” (Sura Byra 2:256); “To each one of you, we have opened an access, an avenue. If God had wanted it, He would have made of you only one community, but He wanted to test you through His gifts.

Compete in performing good acts towards God. In Him, all of you will return.

He will inform you of the meaning of your differences” (5:48); “We believe in the revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you.

Our Allah and your God is one; and it is to Him we bow.” (29:46) Another sura quoted as showing tolerance is: “O disbelievers! I don’t worship what you worship and you don’t worship what I worship. And I shall not worship what you worship neither will you worship what I worship. Your religion is with you, my religion is with me”.1 However, the Jews did not recognize him as a prophet and did not convert to his new faith. However, he made an alliance, eight brief 1. Sura Kariroon 109:6. Some scholars, like Al-Wahidi explain that this sura was actually Muhammad’s response to the Quraysh “pagans” who had invited him to follow their religion for one year and they would follow his religion the next year and in this way “if what you have brought is better than what we have, then we will share it, and if what we have is better than what you brought, then you will partake of it.” So it was a request for tolerance from them, not a granting of tolerance to non-Muslims.

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treaties between him and his followers and the natives of Yathrib, called the Constitution of Medina. He drastically changed his policy and he did not aim any longer to simply propose a new or reformed religious orientation, but at building a state, based on the forging of his Muhajirun followers and the local tribes, including at least three Jewish tribes of warriors,2into a single community or Umma. He thus started to seek alliances with other tribes to confederate them to “fight in the path of God”.

He allured them to follow his teachings and help him in his conquests of the “enemies of Allah” – all those who did not want to accept him as a prophet nor adopt his newly-founded “religion” – not by performing any miracles to prove that he was an authentic and powerful reformer authorized by God, but with promises of booty and sex with the women of the conquered people3and unlimited sexual enjoyment in the next world. So, between 622 and 630, his popularity grew when he led raids on rich Meccan caravans and divided the booty and the captured women with his followers. This attack and plundering of caravans, the easy availability of women and successful military conquests attracted a large following to Islam – which looks like a sanitized version of ancient polytheistic moon worship, one of the ancient “pagan” fertility cults, mixed with Biblical elements – which he seems to have created to exercise military control in order to impose his religious views to unreceptive people.

The “conversion” of the barbarian Bedouin tribes with their savage instincts and hereditary ferociousness was actually effected with the prospect of fighting and killing, pillage and free access to many women. Conversion to what, actually? Seen from the outside, Islam 2. The Christians have always accused the Jews of being the tutors of Muhammad and to have joined forces with him in the conquest of Palestine.

3. Maybe he was just following the Jewish model, since the Jewish scribes write in the Torah that their deity told them to kill all the Canaanites, but keep the virgins for themselves, particularly in the case of the Midianites.

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seems to be something monstrous, almost demoniac, just about sex and violence with a thin veneer of religiosity.

“And it is Allah himself who is acting: Allah terrorizes the people of the Book.” (9) Allah allegedly exonerates the Muslim fighters of any remorse since it is not them but himself who is killing the non-believers (8.17) that he supposedly hates (40.10) A Muslim can thus consider himself completely innocent and irresponsible of the crimes he commits since it is not him who is acting but Allah, his Lord, who acts through him. Allah is said to fully take responsibility for the murderous acts of his worshipers. How much perversity and danger are contained in such verses, probably inspired directly from the statements of Yahweh in the Bible, as mentioned in the last chapter!

All guilt is denied de facto for the murder of a non-Muslim!?

“Muhammad gave his followers a religion without deep morals and with a few external practices that do not touch one’s conscience. Later, the theologians of Islam, who are actually simply jurists and casuists, made all the followers of the prophet lose the sense of moral responsibility. Conscience has been suppressed.

That is why Muslims can commit crimes with unbelievable ferocity without any anxiety and without being blamed by their fellow Muslims... It is an easy religion indeed since it does not impose on its followers any deep moral constraint. Sins are counterbalanced by good actions.”1 Indeed, Muhammad flattered his followers, saying that Allah had revealed that they are “the best creatures” (98.7) and the Arab race promoting Islam “the best community that has been raised up for mankind” (3:110), giving them a complex of racial and religious superiority over all non-Muslims, whom they treat with contemptuous pride.

One may consider that, like Jesus, Muhammad wanted to reform his society, establish equality, justice, freedom for the slaves, improv1. José Castano Le Péril Islamique 1986 176

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ing the feminine condition, and moreover turn people to one God. He could not directly make women equal to men in a primitive society where they killed baby girls at birth. He gave them as much dignity as possible in a rigid patriarchal context. The ‘might is right’ tribal mentality made it hard to establish equality and justice. He tried for twelve years then saw it could not be done with the barbarians he was dealing with. He then attracted them by sex allurement, as in the lowest section of the Vedas, which mentions association with damsels of angelic beauty in the heavenly planets, or the Scandinavian lore describing the warriors’ heaven, the Walhalla, where they drink hydromel served by the celestial beauties called Valkyries. He made the wild Bedouins follow some basic rules and pray five times a day, which is exceptional, even if they pray for mundane things.

But it is hard, at least for Western minds, to accept him as a genuine representative of God unless one supposes that it is after his demise that his followers quickly subverted his message, like the Church did for Jesus’, and interpolated in the Koran verses to justify their desires for fight and conquest.

More a Warlord than a Religious Prophet When he raised to power and became strong enough, Muhammad created the second Koran or the second part of the Koran, made of twenty-four suras, the “political” Koran. He (or his followers later) wrote other verses abrogating the previous tolerant verses.

It seems quite convenient!2 Thus this part of the Koran commands 2. The Islamic doctrine of abrogation is the idea that Allah can change or cancel whatever he told previously. The 9th sura, the Verse of the Sword, is the last section of the Koran to have been supposedly revealed, and it is believed to abrogate 124 previous verses. Its name is quite eloquent! Michel Cuypers, a French Dominican monk specialist of the Koran in Cairo, gives a surprising sound alternative understanding of this abrogation phenomenon.

He explains that it rests on one verse - “We don’t abrogate a verse, nor relinquish it to forgetfulness, without bringing a better or analogous one” (2.106) – and that according to its larger context, this verse refers to the abrogation of some verses of the Bible by the Koran, and not of the Koran by the Koran! The latter method has no scriptural basis. It is an invention of the 177

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Mohammedans to make war on the Jews and also on the Christians.

The latter were allegedly told by Jesus about Muhammad’s coming, as the Muslims misinterpret the Gospel of John, where Jesus is saying that he will send his disciples “another Counselor” (14:16-17), meaning the Holy Spirit, but they did not accept him (61:6). Muhammad declared war against them and all non-believers. He got back at the Jews – whom the Koran repeatedly calls “prophet killers” like in 2:61, 2:87, 2:91 etc., that Allah transforms into apes and pigs (2:6366; 5:59-60; 7:166) – and slaughtered them under the plea that they had plotted with “Allah’s enemies.” He had signed a ten-year peace treaty with them in order to buy time to build his military strength; he then broke that treaty after two years to conquer them and he seized Mecca by force, destroying the idols worshipped there according to tradition, although it is not mentioned in the Koran. The Arabs converted to Islam based not on the religious first Koran, but on the political second Koran after he allegedly exterminated all Jews in Medina. He had the reluctant Arabs killed and the others submit and convert, “Well, if I will be beheaded for not being a Muslim, then I might as well join them.”

Islam or Submission to Allah Just as Christianity is based on the sole principle of love – even if the Church has not always applied it and ruthlessly imposed its rule – Islam rests on the sole principle of submission to God. The word ‘Islam’ means ‘submission’, and ‘Muslim’ means ‘one who has submitted’. Why this term ‘submitted’? Because, at the beginning of jurists to put in order Koranic legalistic verses apparently contradictory. Those contradictions could be solved in a different way: by admitting that there is a hierarchy of meaning in the Koran, that all verses are not to be put on the same level. Many refer to a cultural and historical context totally obsolete today, corresponding to the advent of Islam. No need to abrogate them, only to ‘situate’ them. Other verses, like those dealing with theology, ethics or wisdom, or those envisioning a lasting coexistence of Judaism and Christianity with Islam have a permanent, universal value. (Philosophie magazine. Le Coran)

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the Muslim conquest one had only the choice between submitting to the “new religion” or being beheaded.

“Before to be a submission to Allah, it was most often during centuries a submission to the invasions of fanatical Muslim hordes, in order to save one’s dear life.”1 And this “new religion” constituted only of “submitted people” could only be called Islam, the religion of “those who have submitted”. Thus the very names ‘Islam” and ‘Muslim’ are in themselves bad omens about any role and room that this religion can assign to freedom. The submission being supposedly to Allah through the caliph, which means through the political leadership, the latter had to be made simultaneously firmer by giving it a basis with a religious tint. This is what will be seen to develop with time, giving birth to the Koran and the Sunna, a compilation of all kinds of injunctions, rules and laws, all “confirmed” by “divine words” received and transmitted by the prophet and this submission will be presented to the submitted ones as coming from Allah himself. One is taught only to memorize the Koran. Whoever dares to argue or question it is threatened to be taken to hell and severely admonished by religious authorities. One must therefore follow unconditionally the “orders” of Allah “revealed” by the prophet and contained in the Koran. The said “orders of Allah” consist essentially in fighting against the “infidels” in order to establish the “Muslim paradise” on earth. According to the Muslim leaders, this paradise will be the kingdom of peace on earth. Well, when you look at what is going on in those parts of the world where this so-called paradise has been established, you wonder how bad can hell really be!

Whereas the name ‘Islam’ means ‘submission’, there is an attempt nowadays to impose the idea that it means ‘peace’. Submission to Allah being non-distinct from submission to the Muslim authorities, “Islamic peace” is actually tyrannical slavery, not peaceful freedom.

1. Petit tour politiquement incorrect de l’Islam, by an anonymous Lebanese author.

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One needs only observe the Islamic regimes, these wonderful peaceful shelters. And as far as the means of instauration of such peace is concerned, 14 centuries of Muslim history and the news speak for themselves. We are not talking of voluntary submission, of free consent, but of servile permanent fear of Allah and of his ever so terrible judgement towards his ‘slaves’ (abd’Allah), because if one does not obey strictly he will be a victim first of the fate reserved to the infidels and then of damnation to eternal hell. Everything in Islam is based on that fear of eternal damnation. It is an unreasoned fear, cultivated by the repeated hearing or reading of the Koran and its threats of Allah’s anger expressed in more than one hundred verses describing the terrible fate of the non-Muslims. It is a fear more alienating than any other since it is a fear of God Himself, from whom the soul naturally expects love and compassion, not an unforgiving mercy, an arbitrary judgment which makes it impossible to know if you have obtained the divine forgiveness, especially at the time of death, even if you have sincerely repented and expiated your sins. Allah’s mercy means support granted to those who practice Islam, and therefore rejection of those who don’t practice it. The latter do not deserve any forgiveness nor mercy because their sin is too great: They dare to refuse to adhere to Islam, meaning they refuse to submit to the Muslim authorities, to believe in the “revelation”.

The Muslims are the first victims of Islam. They have no idea of God’s real mercy, of His love, of His forgiving nature, nor of the free will that He has granted to the souls. Islam is religious enslaving disguised in so-called voluntary submission to divine will. It therefore breeds fear, constantly nourished by the Muslim authorities in order to maintain themselves, in an atmosphere of intimidation of its followers and of obnoxious persecution of the non-Muslims. It is fear to be punished, to be killed if you want to escape this totalitarian system, the civil condemnation being disguised as Allah’s and being applied by the Muslim authorities representing Allah’s law. When you 180

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study the application of ‘justice’ in the dictatorial Muslim regimes, you can only shudder if you think about Allah’s. Without this constant pressure, maintaining fear with perfidy under the plea of religious injunctions, Islam and the regimes who support it could not subsist. They subject their people to daily fanatical indoctrination, threaten them with hell, and do not allow their minds to operate by thinking and comparing, nor use their God-given intelligence to choose for themselves which path to follow.

Muhammad is described as a man who was kind, hospitable, generous, loving, patient and forgiving toward the Muslims, those who submitted completely and unquestioningly to his rule. Toward unbelievers, on the other hand, he was mercilessly cruel. He would threaten, intimidate, deceive, rob, enslave, torture, execute and slaughter them by the hundreds! On one occasion, he sat all day long watching literally hundreds of Jews who had surrendered to him being beheaded at his command. Then he ordered their wives and children into slavery after keeping the most beautiful one as a new wife for himself.1We can observe that Islam was originally unsuccessful as long as Muhammad attempted to propagate it peacefully through preaching. It did not spread until he took to military strength and enforced it with the sword. The sword is the very symbol of power.

He allegedly declared, “The sword is the key of Paradise” and “I have been sent with a sword in my hand so that God be worshipped without associates” and “I have been made victorious through terror.”

‘Victorious’ and ‘terror’ are political terms, not religious ones, especially ‘terror’! And the religious leaders unanimously exclaim, “If the Prophet did not have a sword, who would have followed him? When the sword is dropped, Islam dies…”

That is the major way it grew and still grows. That is the reason why some people say he seems to have been more of a warlord than a prophet. He then submitted the Arab tribes to his political authori1. From the earliest biography of Mohammed by Ibn Ishaq.

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ty under the cloak of religion. Like Christianity before it, Islam could be accused of using religion as a pretext to conquer.

Old Wine in a New Bottle Islam claims to bring a new Revelation, but upon scrutiny none of its traditions, except a few former “pagan” ones, come from any other sources but Judaism and Christianity, which means plagiarized from the Bible, including – oops – the injunctions to conquer, kill, enslave and rape. Too bad it does not contain anything coming close to the Golden Rule of Jesus! It makes reference to Judaism through its Prophets and Patriarchs, their psalms and proverbs, their dietary rules (no pork, nor camel), their religious and ritualistic codes of ablutions, circumcision, bowing down, wearing a veil, festivals, Talien law. It refers to Christianity through Jesus and Mary, he as the greatest prophet (after Muhammad, of course), her as having conceived him as a virgin; the waiting for Jesus’ glorious Second Coming – He is supposed to land on the minaret of the biggest Damascus mosque and lead the prayer, then rule the world, destroying all other religions than Islam – the rosary of ninety-nine beads like the Christians of the Orient (representing three times thirty-three, the supposed age of Jesus when he was crucified). Its five pillars also come from these two traditions: the profession of faith (el chahada) in the unicity of God, a dogma professed by Abraham since the origin of Judaism and constituting the specificity of the Jewish religion, its very identity, found in Deut.6:4. The Christians also have this profession of faith, expressed in the Credo, but of a unique God in three aspects or persons. Ritual prayer (el salat) five daily prayers, a rhythm copied from the Christian monks of the Orient and the five services of the Christian priests. Legalized charity (el zakat) inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition of giving alms. Fasting (sawm) for Ramadan corresponding to the Christian tradition of Lent before Easter.

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Wednesday of Ashes, to remind one that “Thou art dust and to dust thou shall return.” Pilgrimage (el hajj) inspired from the Jewish tradition of pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Christian one of visiting the grave of Jesus.

False Prophecies Like many prophets before him, including Jesus, Muhammad made prophecies which were not confirmed by the facts. He said, for instance, “The Antichrist or Dajjal will appear seven months after the conquest of Constantinople.”1 The said conquest was in May 1453. His favorite wife Aisha narrated that a group of desert Arabs asked Muhammad about the end of the world, the last hour. Muhammad looked at the youngest among them and said, “He won’t live very old. He will see the last hour; he will see you die.”2 Abdullah reported that one evening, after the prayer, Muhammad declared, “Nobody will be present on the surface of the earth after one hundred years.”3

Some Western Opinions The Middle Age Christians saw Muhammad as a false prophet, a blood-thirsty warlord, or even the Antichrist, as no prophet before him ever preached with a sword in hand. He was believed to have been taught about the Bible by Jews and “heretic” Christians4, and to have plagiarized and perverted biblical texts in the form of the Koran while claiming divine inspiration. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) 1. Sunan Abu Dawud 37.4282 2. Sahih Muslim 41-7050 3. Sahid al Bukhari 1.10-53a 4. It is mentioned in two biographies of Muhammad, El khalabia and El Makia that it was the Jews who taught him through a Judeo-Christian monk.

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was highly critical of Muhammad’s character and ethics. He wrote, “Muhammad seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teachings also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure.

In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men. As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom... Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law. It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly.”1 Voltaire’s opinion is not better. He referred to Muhammad in a 1740 letter to Frederick II of Prussia, “But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to make this book respected, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him…Whoever wages war against his own country, and dares to wage it in the name of God, is capable of anything…the most atrocious things that duplicity can invent, and the most horrible things fanaticism can engender.”2 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) wrote about the Koran, “This evil book was sufficient to inspire in millions of people an enthusiasm for bloody wars and unlimited conquests. We find in it the saddest and most deplorable face of theism. I could not find in it any valuable thought.”3 1. Summa Contra Gentiles 2. Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Vol. 7, 1869, edited by Georges Avenel, p.105 3. Le monde comme volonté et comme représentation, Gallimard 2009 p.1398 184

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John Mason Neale (1818-1866) accused Muhammad of pandering to his followers, arguing that he constructed Islam out of a mixture of beliefs that provided something for everyone: “In Mahomet is evident the ingenuity with which, while he panders to the passions of his followers, he also infuses into his religion so much of each of those tenets to which the varying sects of his countrymen were addicted, as to enable each and all to please themselves by the belief that the new doctrine was only a reform of, and improvement on, that to which they had been accustomed. The Christians were conciliated by the acknowledgment of our Lord as the Greatest of Prophets; the Jews by the respectful mention of Moses and their other Lawgivers; the idolaters by the veneration which the Impostor professed for the Temple of Mecca and the black stone which it contained; and the Chaldeans by the pre-eminence which he gives to the ministrations of the Angel Gabriel, and his whole scheme of the Seven Heavens. To a people devoted to the gratification of their passions and addicted to Oriental luxury, he appealed, not unsuccessfully, by the promise of a Paradise whose sensual delights were unbounded, and the permission of a free exercise of pleasures in this world.”

Alexis de Tocqueville saw the Koran not as a tool for liberation but rather as a manual of psychology of crowds with which Muhammad manipulated the most powerful human passions in order to rule over his people. He wrote to his cousin in 1838 that he saw in it “all the threads through which the prophet held and is still holding the members of his cult…It is only a clever compromise between materialism and spirituality…The violent and sensual tendencies in it are so striking that I don’t see how they cannot be detected by anyone with common sense…It represents a progress compared with polytheism, but I don’t know if it has not done more harm to men than polytheism…Muhammad has exercised on mankind a huge influence which I believe was ultimately more noxious than helpful.”4 Ernest Renan (1823-1892) declared a similar thing in 1883 in a lecture at the Sorbonne University in Paris, 4. Notes sur le Coran et autres textes sur les religions, Bayard 2007, p.35-37 185

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“Islam is the indiscernible union of spirituality and materialism, it is the reign of a dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind ever carried…Islamism has crushed the spirit of the countries it has conquered…It was only nefarious for human reason.”1 Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) wrote in 1955, “In front of the universal benevolence of Buddhism and the Christian desire for dialogue, the Muslim intolerance takes an unconscious form in those guilty of it; because, if they don’t always try in a brutal way to bring others to share their beliefs, they are incapable to tolerate the existence of others as they are, and that is worse.”2

Allah’s Paradise In the Koran, there are many verses describing many heavens (7 or 8), all filled with “enchanting gardens with underground streams, fountains, wine, fine horses, and beautiful virgin girls.” Muhammad had the harem of a chieftain, twelve chief wives plus concubines, but he allowed his followers to have only four wives.3However, he frequently promised male believers unlimited erotic pleasures in “heaven” in an “open sex market with bashful, beautiful virgin maidens with fair skin, full-raised breasts, wide lovely dark eyes, for each man, who will have the sexual power of seventy or one hundred men.” In Islam, women, who are considered deficient in intelligence (2:282) and sinful by nature, are usually considered not eligible for heaven. Muhammad claimed to have had a vision of hell in which, he said, most dwellers were women.4In these days where Islamic terror is raising again its ghastly face, everyone has 1. L’Islamisme et la Science Calmann-Lévy 1883 2. Tristes tropiques, “Taxila” Pocket 2007, p.484 3. “Why the same latitude has not been given to women? The determinant biological reason for the sexual urge in both genders is procreation. And whereas a woman can, at one time, conceive a child from one man only and has to wait at least 9 months before she can conceive another one, a man can beget a child every time he cohabits with a woman. Thus, while nature would have been merely wasteful if it had produced a polygamous instinct in women, man’s polygamous inclination is biologically justified.” (M. Asad The message of the Quran. 118) 4. Hadith of Bukhari, 1,4,184) 186

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heard of the seventy two virgins supposedly waiting to welcome the martyrs dying for the cause of their faith – or what they believe is that cause. Violence and sex! The pious Muslims will not only get back their wife, but she will be accompanied by seventy-two virgins, and, according to some preachers, each of those will be assisted by seventy-two more… It is clearly a description of gross material enjoyment so it obviously cannot refer to the spiritual world, God’s abode. During a recent interfaith encounter, I asked a Muslim lady what was waiting in heaven for pious female Muslims. She answered with a resigned face that they will only get their husband back, that’s all. The eternal erotic enjoyment promised in the Koran and hadiths is what all “pious” male Muhammadans aspire after; it may very well also be what motivates countless candidates to jihad and so-called “martyrdom”. They might be in for a surprise upon arriving in heaven; the least of it could be a sign with “Sorry. Virgins out of stock”.

Militant Messianism As Christianity, Islam is a syncretistic religion, fabricated on the basis of preexisting data which was modified. It was thought by Christians of that time to be a Judeo-Christian heresy, because it is so much based on the Bible as their religion is but has what they deemed heretical elements.5Analysis shows that there were two general tendencies among the dissidents or deviants of Judeo-Christianity, one spiritualist or gnostic, the other one conquering or messianic, trying to establish the “kingdom of God” on earth, by force if needed. The second one justified war, calling it “holy” due to is “noble” aim of inaugurating “in the name of God” a new era of peace on earth. One can note the paradox, characterizing totalitarian 5. Some of those are likely to be actually truths since Muhammad’s sources about Jesus were not Trinitarian Christians but Ebionites, the successors of the early Jewish disciples of the Nazarene preacher, or that kind of Jewish Christians, with the original understanding about Jesus, even if maybe somewhat mixed with Gnosticism. His ideas of Jesus are similar to theirs.

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ideologies, of making war to impose peace! The Catholic Church had its sad period of that kind of deviation and the Protestants followed suite…Islam represents an exacerbated Messianism, or maybe a pseudo-Messianism concealing an ideology of conquest. Islam has a double opposition to the Jews and Christians. I want to believe that the violent Medina suras were temporary injunctions given in the historical circumstances of a conflict with the local Jewish community.

But what about the injunctions against Christians? Was the Koran tampered with after Muhammad’s death by his disciples to avenge the offense made to him by the Christians for not having recognized him, or to justify conquest as I suggested above? Otherwise, who but an ignorant barbarian fanatic can accept Muhammad as a genuine messenger of God? Or did Muhammad think he was commissioned

by God to punish the Jews for not having accepted Jesus? Or because they arranged his crucifixion? But that was centuries earlier and it was a restricted number of them and of that one generation…

Or to punish the Trinitarian Christians for the blasphemy of having turned the man Jesus into God and claiming that Almighty God was born from a woman’s womb like an ordinary mortal and suffered the infamy of crucifixion? Or for having imposed Christianity and persecuted the “pagans”? Can we believe that it was God’s arrangement for these various people to pay for their sinful activities, in the sense that Attila – the “scourge of God” – said, “You must be really greatly sinful people that God sent someone like me to punish you”?

Islam wants to repair the double injustice it considers was done to it and it continues nowadays to oppose both religions. Its messianic projects have not changed from its origins; neither have the principles which still govern its foundation: to establish Allah’s kingdom on earth by force. One finds institutionalized violence like in pre-Christian Judaism and Christianity until the Enlightenment – the mass killing of Jews by Muhammad, attacks of caravans, slaughter, persecution of Christians (from 610 to 762, 20 000 Churches were 188

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destroyed). After he had control of most of the Arabian Peninsula and he died in 632, poisoned by a woman whose husband he had killed – as per the inexorable law of karma no one is exempted from – his followers continued military conquests in the name of Islam.

However, Muhammad himself never ordered to conquer the world in the name of Islam. He only said that God would give his followers a “good abode”. It seems that his ambitions were limited to parts of Arabia and Palestine, as God had promised the latter to the descendants of Abraham, and Muhammad claimed that right of inheritance through Ismael. The Fertile Crescent (Iraq and Syria) were beyond his and his companions’ dreams. At best they aspired to topple the Ghassanid and Lakhmid Arabs and achieve mastery of the Syrian desert. The second caliph, Umar, conquered Palestine, which was easy as it was not defended, the big plague having devastated the Roman empire and army, so he simply crossed the undefended border between Arabia and her. The Jews praised Umar and hailed him as the Messiah. The Muslims followed suite and called him al Faruq, the Redeemer. But that first easy conquest only whetted the appetite of the ferocious desert warriors. They started to lust after Mesopotamia, which fell as easily after a couple of battles at the Ghassanid Arab mercenary camp of Jabiya and nearby on the Golan Heights above the river Yarmuk. Emperor Heraclius did not have any more soldiers to defend the border states. Most of them were Arab mercenaries anyway. From Palestine, a small war band entered Egypt, conquered as easily with nonresistance from the local population happy to be freed from the Roman oppressors and those evacuating all their exhausted forces after an eleven months’ armistice. Umar then turned to Persia, which was another case and the capital of which, Istakhr, he only conquered after a five years’ campaign. He slaughtered the 40 000 survivors, burnt down their fire temples, and started to extort tribute. But himself is said to have completely scorned the fabulous wealth made available through his conquests. He and the successive 189

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Caliphs were assassinated one after the other because it is a religious leadership fused with a despotic political post, a theocratic system – pope and king at the same time – which ambitious people were politically motivated to occupy. It started right after the death of Muhammad, as everyone wanted his share of the pie. Othman, Umar’ successor, hailed from one the powerful dynasty of the confederated tribes called Quraishis who had enriched themselves through trading with the Romans and/or working as mercenaries. Muhammad himself had traded for years with the Romans or the Persians. Othman’s two brothers had helped Umar in the conquest of Syria and one of them had become governor of the country. Othman, breaking with the old Arab tradition of sharing the plundered booty after a successful raid, appointed his family members to all lucrative posts and established a centralized administration. As he went back on his words after having pretended to agree to the grievances of warriors from Egypt complaining about his appointed representative who saw the country as his inherited fiefdom, a growing tendency among the conquerors, he was assassinated in his turn, which naturally provoked a blood feud. Ali, both cousin and son in law of Muhammad succeeded him. He fought against the rebels and apparently reestablished unity, but he was criticized by some of his own people who broke away, the Karijites, and was assassinated by one of them. Such wars of conquests and fratricidal fighting, real civil wars, broke out regularly, the first within a generation of the prophet’s death and the other one when the Abbasids took over from the first dynasty of caliphs, the Umayyad’s, who had ruled Damascus from 661 to 750 (and Cordoue from 929 to 1031), and slaughtered almost a million of them. As just retribution per the law of karma, they were themselves conquered and slaughtered by the Mongols in 1258. The original Muhammadan conquests were not about spreading their religion as claimed; it was all about domination, power and sensual enjoyment.

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fighting between Muhammadans. Among all that intestine fighting, Caliph Abd al-Malik, to consolidate his position against his rival who was holding the holy city of Mecca, as well as to challenge Christianity, had a mosque built on the temple mount of Jerusalem rivaling the Church of Resurrection. He claimed that God after creating the universe had gone back to heaven from there, leaving his footprint1on the rock. He also furnished it with supposed relics from Abraham’s times, such as the desiccated horns of the ram that he claimed he sacrificed there to God instead of his son. Then he attacked his rival in Mecca and killed him and his followers…2 By the time of the advent of Islam, Christianity was well implanted in the Middle East. Islam forcibly converted or killed the majority of the Christians from that area over the centuries. Only in Lebanon do they remain relatively safe, but for how long due to the battery ram blows of Islam against their community and its institutions?

There was commonly genocide of conquered people, especially in India because the Indians worship Deities in the temples and Islam has a ban on any worship of any sculpted form of God and a particular hatred of polytheism – like early Judaism and Christianity, but to the point of the most extreme ignorance and fanaticism. One of the first things the Muhammadans did when they invaded Spain was to send thirty thousand young Spanish virgins to Damascus for the harems of the Caliph and his entourage. Violence and sex! After the conquest of Constantinople, Muslim armies spread the reign of terror through pillaging, rape, slavery and slaughter to all neighboring Christian countries until their advance towards the heart of Europe was providentially stopped under the walls of Vienna. The Armenian genocide took place as late as the 20th century when the Turks declared jihad against their Christian subjects and killed one and a 1. Islam does not believe in a corporeal God, but this claim establishes that He has a body, so in the 11th century this footprint was changed into the footprint of Muhammad who landed there after his miraculous transportation from Mecca.

2. Tony Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, Anchor books, NY, 2013 191

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half million of them through atrocious methods, among which was crucifying women and impaling young girls on small crosses after having raped them, and starvation…Violence and sex! There is nothing spiritual in this list. If the Shiites had not developed a mystical reading of the Koran to try to discover a hidden meaning beyond its literal meaning, which is only superficial and symbolical according to them, and if the Sufis had not started in the 9th century to dig deeper into the Koran and had not been influenced by Vedic ideas coming from India, it would be easy to call Islam just a demoniac cult based on sex and violence.

Legalized Rape and Murder Indeed, Islam is where rape and violence against women are normal, but ladies cannot defend themselves because the cruel hypocritical man-made law requires her to provide male witnesses of the rape, as if this is the way it happens! And the lady who complains of having been raped can be prosecuted for adultery and jailed! Or she has to marry her aggressor! This, they say, is to diminish violence between clans and tribes. Yes, this is a tribal, backward culture, but they want to impose it on the whole world. The world of Islam is where a woman of one clan may be condemned by the elders of another clan to be gang-raped by their men under the pretext that her twelve-year-old brother has looked or spoken with a girl of their clan, like in the famous case of a Pakistani lady,1 whose brother was also raped by the way! The world of Islam is where a girl can be doused with kerosene and then set on fire, for having talked or slept with a boy who took advantage of her sentiments, pushed for sex by promising her marriage but who let her down, like a Jordanian girl in Brûlée vive.2 As per Muhammad, women are crooked because 1. Mai Mukhtar Déshonorée Éd. De Noyelles-France Loisirs (2005) 2. Souad, Oh Editions, 2003.

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they are born from one of Adam’s ribs and cannot be straightened;3 they are inferior (2:228), can be beaten (4:34) and are just for reproduction and sexual satisfaction (2:223). He didn’t oppose the ancient barbaric custom of female genital mutilation born from men’ fears of infidelity4 on the part of their wives, still practiced in Africa, part of the Near-East and among the immigrants in Western countries.

He is quoted in a hadith as having said, “Don’t be too radical [don’t cut too much], it is preferable for the girl.” The great mufti of Mecca brings the caution of Islam to this inhuman primitive practice, saying, “Excision pleases Allah.” Well, the Muslim definition of marriage is “purchasing a genital field” so does anyone feel compassion for a field?5 Some clerics show relative mercy on underage girls by advocating a process known as “thighing” (considered as a form of child molestation in the West). A prominent member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council said in 2012 that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle”. Since Muhammad married a six years old girl when he was fifty and consummated the marriage when she was nine, and he is considered the “excellent example of conduct” (33:21), the cleric then went on to explain that “intercourse may occur whenever they are capable of being placed beneath and bearing the weight of the man.” This imitation of the “excellent example of conduct” has caused untold miseries to millions of Muslim girls, among which rampant fistula and death by inner hemorrhage due to perforation.

A Book of War It is clear that Islam is mixed with a political ideology, as were Judaism and Christianity at some time. Some people object to it being called a religion, saying that is a misnomer and that it is a theocracy or a cult that hides behind the mask of religion in order to achieve its 3. Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, Sahi Muslim, book 8, n°3467 4. What a tragic irony on the part of men who consider normal to rape non-Muslim women! Let them worry about their own infidelity!

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aim of world domination. Indeed, their politically militant “religion” involves converting non-Mohammedans at the point of the sword or gun, or killing them off, or reducing them to the state of dhimmis,1 and taking sex-slaves. The Koran – or that book as misinterpreted by Muslims as I want to believe – is above all a book of war, enjoining all Muslims to fight, torture and butcher all non-Muslims. Peaceful coexistence as equals in a pluralistic society is not one of the choices.

Anyone who would write such a book as the Koran today, inciting people to hatred, oppression, persecution and violence in the form of torture and murder, would be prosecuted, and his book banned.

Winston Churchill called Hitler’s Mein kampf “the new Koran of faith and war.” And the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci called the Koran “the Mein Kampf of a religion which has always aimed at eliminating the others.”2 Islam is very rigid, orthodox, not allowing one to explore the domain of faith. Exegesis stopped in the 11th century with what was called the official “closing of the doors of the idjtihad (or attempt at personal interpretation) by the fanatical Acharites who eliminated the liberal Mutazilite current born around 730.

An Eternal Book?

According to the American historian John Wansbrough, the fragmentary character of the Koran and the differences of structure and formulation in its variants, which show different epochs of literary elaboration, are irreconcilable with the official idea of an original text elaborated or received by a unique author or carefully edited by a committee; they are much better explained if we admit that the 1. A dhimmi is an “infidel” living under Muhammadan rule as a humiliated, right-less, second class citizen in his own native country, with no open expressions of one’s religious faith allowed, and paying a special tax as a non-Muhammadan. And that only if they are “people of the Book”, meaning Jews and Christians; others like atheists, Buddhists and Hindus must convert or die. The Muslim rulers did not apply that to India though, otherwise they would have had to kill the whole population.

2. Robert Spencer. The complete infidel’s guide to the Koran, Ch.1 Regnery publishing, Washington DC 2009 194

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book has been created from different regional traditions originally independent from each other and integrated more or less as they were or with some modifications. According to the German theologian Günter Lüling, the book even contains a pre-Islamic Christian text as its primitive background. Fragments of that original Christian text corresponding to a liturgical work used by early Jewish Christian dissidents is found dispersed in the whole book; they can be reconstituted and their original meaning found. They were written by those Christian theologians at least one century before Muhammad, in a highly elevated literary poetic style which is different from the language of pre-Islamic Arab poetry and show similarities with ancient Christian Arab language. According to this theory, the Koran contains two types of texts: passages with a double meaning because they originally belonged to a document of archaic Christology but were refashioned and given a new Islamic meaning – the distortions and transformations which followed were only done to adapt to a nascent ideology – and passages which are originally Islamic which were added to the first ones. The Koran is thus the end result of different stages of edition of the text.

From another angle of vision, the Koran, upon detailed analysis, is the mirror of a slow and gradual elaboration, showing opposition to Judaism and Christianity that Islam encountered at its beginnings.

It has thus clearly been created by stages, by gradual additions to a Biblical substratum to respond to Muhammad’s “adversaries”, as a doctrine of fighting to oppose Christian doctrine and also to respond to the Jewish and Christian opposition to the errors of Islam. It contains therefore a system of structured theological defense more than a theology, in the sense that it forms an organized structure aimed at combatting already existing theories rather than constructing a real doctrine. It is retracing the history of Muhammad’s opposition to these two communities he was confronted to in addition to the local “pagans”. Due to this fighting apologetics, there were many refor195

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mulations bringing about important distortions to the Biblical substratum and consequently stupendous contradictions. For instance, Miriam, the sister of Moses, becomes Jesus’ mother twelve centuries later; Isaac, son of Sarah, becomes Ismael, the son of her maid Agar; the latter is exiled 800 km south of Jerusalem in the Arabian desert where a miraculous spring (Zam-zam) saves her and her son; Abraham visits his son there and builds the Kaaba; Jesus doesn’t die on the Cross but it is Judas, or Barabbas, or a double of substitution, according to the different versions – an echo of the ancient claim of the Gospel of Basilides that Jesus was not crucified but a substitute died on the Cross – etc., etc. The sources are distorted in order to obtain a new meaning, thereby creating confusion. The Holy Spirit becomes the angel Gabriel, who visits Muhammad and announces to him he will “give birth” to the Word of God, the Koran, just like the same angel allegedly announced Mary she would give birth to the son of God. The book is apparently ever so self-serving! In Vivre avec l’Islam, Mrs Laurent, a specialist of Islam writes, “The Koran in reality espouses Muhammad’s life, answers his enquiries, solves his relationship problems, his conjugal life, confirms his choices and attitudes. Can one then really speak of a divine work?”1 1. For instance, Muhammad would stay one night with each of his two wives, Aisha and Hafsa. One day, the latter, on her scheduled night, caught Muhammad in bed with a concubine, Mary, a Copt. Muhammad promised to stay away from Mary and asked Hafsa to keep the matter secret. But Hafsa told Aicha who confronted Muhammad. Then ‘Allah’ stepped in and revealed sura 66: ‘O prophet! Why do you hold to be forbidden what Allah has made lawful to you?’ Then ‘Allah’ warned the two wives that ‘Muhammad could divorce them and He would give him better wives than them’. With this threat of divorce, Muhammad was conveniently freed from his oath to stay away from Mary the Copt. Another example: Muhammad’s adopted son, Zayd, married a beautiful girl, Zaynab. One day, looking for Zayd, Muhammad came to their house and, seeing her in revealing clothing, lusted after her. Zayd was absent. When he came back, he went to Muhammad and told him that maybe his wife had excited his admiration and that he would separate from her. Muhammad told him to keep his wife. But, a few days later, a sura was ‘providentially’ revealed, telling Muhammad that he should marry Zaynab after Zayd divorced her, thus ‘divinely legalizing’ what is considered an incest in all civilized societies. (Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad, Pantheon books, NY 1980) His favorite 196

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The oldest versions of the text were quite different. Caliph Othman demanded under threat of death to bring back any previous versions, which were burnt to occult the past and also hide the obvious Judeo-Christian origins. But ironically one of the fundamental dogmas of Islam, without which it could not probably survive, is the rightful claim that the books followed by the Jews and the Christians are not genuine in their present form. They claim that the genuine content of the revelations made to Moses and Jesus2has been preserved in the Koran, allegedly transmitted to Muhammad by a being called the angel Gabriel. They, of course, claim its inerrancy like fundamentalist Christians claim the Bible’s. Analysis of its origin gives doubts about that claim, though. For example, the Koran mentions Alexander the Great going to where the sun sets (!?) and seeing it setting in murky, black waters (18.83-86). This is from a Syriac legend. The history of Nemrod and Abraham found in the Koran is from the Midrash Rabbah, a Jewish book commenting the Bible – here Genesis 15.7. The passage about Solomon is from the Targum of Esther. The passage about Jesus resting under a palm tree and getting dates is from the Gospel of pseudo Matthew. Jesus speaking in the cradle and his creating birds of clay and ordering them to fly is from the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy and the Gnostic Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

The story of the seven sleepers is from an ancient Christian legend.

The story of Iblis and Adam, of Satan cast from heaven because he refused to worship Adam as per Michael’s order as “he was younger and inferior” is from Vitae Adae et Evae 13:1- 16:3 dating from 100BC or 400 AD. The bridge to heaven over hell is not mentioned in the Bible nor the Gospels. It is taken from Zoroastrianism (the Chinvat bridge or bridge of the requiter or of the judgement). The wife Aicha, is known to have told him,” My dear husband, allow me to tell you that your God has the tendency to make laws that really favor you come down from heaven!”

2. The Koran is mistaken in saying that the Gospel was revealed to Jesus, whereas it is made of various books written about him. Some tradition claim that he was revealed a gospel which has disappeared, occulted by the Christians.

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description of heaven with eternally boyish cupbearers handsome like hidden-pearls is strongly reminiscent of the Greek god Zeus whose cupbearer was a beautiful pearl-like youth, and the wide-eyed celestial maidens remind much of Hera, Zeus’s wife, the goddess of conjugal bliss, famed for her wide cow-like eyes.1 So the Koran does not seem to have been revealed to Muhammad by an angel but rather to have been created by himself from different traditions, mainly the Bible. So one can say that the Bible is the original text of the Koran. Everything is there, more precise, more detailed, not tampered with. Moreover, the 1924 Egyptian edition, which is very popular nowadays, is based on one of the four versions of one of the fourteen “genuine” traditions! So it means that there is not a unique unambiguous reading of the Koran. But nonetheless the Acharites created the absurd dogma of the “uncreated” “eternal” Koran not only inspired by God but directly dictated

by Him word by word to Muhammad through Angel Gabriel. Curiously enough for such a supposedly divinely inspired, nay, divinely dictated book, Muhammad himself rearranged and edited part of it but did not leave any complete and definitive recension! He did not make any arrangements to pass on the complete text to his followers either! Apparently there was no such text! There were no witnesses to the revelation of the Koran to Muhammad. In Islam, two witnesses are needed for anything to be accepted as valid. Ibn Abi Sarh was writing the Koran under the dictation of Muhammad. There was no angel Gabriel. He would change some words of the dictation and Muhammad would agree. Later he made more than seventy changes and mentioned it openly in Medina.

It seems that the Koran is simply born from Muhammad’s sermons to his followers: some fragments had been written by individuals taking notes during them or soon after them on various mate1. In the Shadow of the Sword, p 319 198

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rials like bones and palm leaves, some just memorized by others. So some passages were lost or not included; what survived was what was written and what was remembered. And there were different versions with variants. How does that make it an eternal, perfect and inalterable text? This dogma, which claims that this book, as God’s Word and thought, is immanent to Him and therefore eternal and uncreated, and that it is an exact copy of the original Koran which is kept in heaven on a table next to Allah, possibly came through the influence of the Christian doctrine of the eternal Word of God, according to Theodor Nöldeke (1836-1930.) He states that some theologians strongly opposed it, saying that it was grotesque to declare that a book composed of words and unsteady letters and having many different versions could be absolutely divine, but they could not convince their dogmatic fanatical opponents and were overpowered.2Any critical exegesis is forbidden since then; one can only repeat the version of the former exegetes. But fundamentalist literalist exegesis oriented towards fighting the West, such as the Egyptian Sayyid Qotb’s (1906-1966) or the Pakistani Al Mawdudi (1903-1979) are, of course, acceptable. On the other hand, the latter’s countryman and contemporary Fazlur Rahman (1918-1988) had to emigrate to the USA due to his attempts to modernize the understanding of the Koran, which were violently opposed by the fundamentalists.

The dogma of the uncreated Koran does not allow any critical reading of it and represents a virtually insurmountable obstacle to reform. Ignorance is the very basis on which Islam rests in order to exist, and therefore blind acceptance of it is demanded. It has maintained itself throughout history only because of blind faith.

“Islam remained standing because it was strictly forbidden to touch it…

Muhammad put a blind folder of lead on his followers’ eyes…Blind faith doesn’t allow itself any question, discussion, reflection…This intellectual passivity can 2. The Quran, Sketches from Eastern History, 1892.

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only last in ignorance and isolation. That is why the Muslim world is so closely isolated.”1 The determined will of the leaders of this Messianic religion – which would lose all credibility and maybe to its very existence if it submitted to a critical analysis of its sources – is to maintain the Muslims in ignorance by compelling them to be only among Muslims in the closed circle of Islam, warning them to remain defiant of any other way to think or act.

“A Muslim must be also defiant towards himself, because any research on the origins of his own religion is forbidden to him and to question even one verse of the Koran is a blasphemy. To question the tradition is passible of the death penalty according to Muslim law. Thus there is absolutely no freedom whatsoever in matters of religion. One is not allowed to believe or not to believe. Islam is a State religion. In Muslim countries, to practice any other form of religion is not freely done; it is only tolerated.”2

Double Standards Islam claims the right of converting non-Muslims, even and especially by force, but it doesn’t recognize a similar right to other faiths.

It is absolutely totalitarian and has taken hostage all those living in its world. If one is born in a Muhammadan family, one cannot change religion. Apostasy (koufirim) is punishable by death. This is intolerable in the West. However, the Western governments remain blind to these obvious violations of the freedom of conscience of the Muslims who convert to another religion and are psychologically harassed and threatened with death as apostates. According to the contemporary Franco-Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Weddeb, even the Koran itself has been taken hostage by the fundamentalists.3A living dynamic tradition has been frozen into closed societies characterized 1. M. Landrieux, Le trompe-l’oeil de l’Islam 2. Selim Naguib, Les Coptes dans l’Eglise d’Aujourd’hui 3. Philosophie magazine, hors-série, Le Coran 2010 p.15 200

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by intellectual, political and often economic stagnation. It seems that Muhammad had well studied the Christian system enforced in the Roman empire…Muslims pride themselves of the great philosopher ibn Rushed (Averroes) (1126-1198) – who defended Greek philosophy, championed Reason and maintained that the Revelation is the truth and truth is apprehended by the exercise of reason – but they follow the retrograde Acharites like Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) who, in his philosophical skepticism, strongly denied to reason the power to interpret the Koran under the pretext that it is divine and therefore beyond our understanding. No scientific or historical exegesis is allowed. “Allah is sufficient as witness.” (48.28) It’s the dragon biting its tail. In that case one can accept any heretical theory which claims to be divinely inspired. To have a revelation and a prophet, you need something new. But there is nothing new in Islam. It has only revived old conflicts, such as the one of the original followers of Jesus, the Nazarenes and the Ebionites, who strongly opposed the Paulinian and Johannine heretical teaching that Jesus is God. It thus opposes the old “heretical” ideas of groups which have disappeared from the Christian landscape but have apparently survived at the frontiers of the Roman empire, which means in the desert, where it originates from. For instance, the Koran calls all Christians “Nasara”, because the Nazarenes and some monks were the only Christians Muhammad knew. It opposes the specific belief of one branch of these Nazarenes maybe picked up from the followers of 3rd century Persian philosopher Mani, apparently referred to as Sabaeans in the Koran, that the Holy Spirit is Mary, Jesus’ mother. It thus gets the Christian Trinity completely wrong: The Father, the son, and Mary (5.116)!

In addition to the Koran, the hadiths or sayings of Muhammad are part of the oral tradition or Sunna. There is one and a half million of them, each time certified by a chain of fictitious persons to make them look genuine. However, there are four levels of genuineness!?

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When you hear that Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini alone “discovered” four thousands of them, you don’t have any more doubts about their authenticity…

Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus Were Muslims!?

Some say that if Islam is a religion, it is the religion of hatred. The Mohammedans tend to hate everyone but especially the Jews. They claim that they are themselves the true heirs of Abraham – who had allegedly received written teachings before Moses (Koran LIII, 37) – through Ishmael, that he was not a Jew nor a polytheist (mushkrin) but a true believer, a Muslim, as were Adam, Noah, Moses and ...

Jesus! Their claim that Abraham was the first Muslim means they take their desires for reality because he is before anything else the first Jew! Judaism has been professing that since at least 2000 years before Islam! Moses and Jesus were Jews too. Islam ignores simple logic to make his followers enter into a mythical system born from a legend-making process. Why have they changed Isaac into Ishmael? Because Jews and Christians claim their Abrahamic affiliation through the legitimate son, Isaac. Having rejected them because they did not accept Muhammad nor his so-called new message, God had to adopt a new people to replace those who had become unworthy: The Muslim people through Ishmael, the adopted son, is the new and true heir of Abraham. Exactly like Christianity and its doctrine of Supersession (see note 77).

And to justify its conquering nature, Islam must present itself as a victim. Ishmael is the very symbol of it: “a rejected, unloved child, victim of Sarah’s jealousy – who pushed Abraham to exile Agar and her son that he was about to sacrifice and was only saved by divine intervention”. Pure fiction! It is Isaac and not Ishmael that the Bible mentions (Gen.1-18) and that son Isaac was about to be

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sacrificed out of obedience to God not because of some jealousy.

Ishmael was not adopted; he was the son of Abraham’s second wife.

Thus the Muslims present themselves as a victimized people. “Just like Ishmael, Muhammad, rejected by the jealousy of his Jewish and Christian brothers, had to flee Mecca where his message was not welcomed and he took shelter in Yathrib/Medina, from where he came back for a just re-conquest!” The Koran having transformed and distorted the biblical substratum to an incomprehensible point to face oppositions, one had to resort to some device to answer to its adversaries’ arguments against these inconsistencies, anomalies and confusion born from adaptations: the inaccessibility of the divine language! This indescribable and implausible hodge-podge is explained by the “divine intelligence which is beyond our grasp”.

This is the final argument given by a Muslim when he cannot explain a text which has become hermetical due to being remodeled beyond recognition. By invoking Abraham, Islam presents itself as the first religion, but also, paradoxically, claims to be the last one. But can Islam be the religion of Abraham if it is derived from paganism? As with the Jewish deity, the doubt that the Muslim deity is God can be raised, as he was originally a local tribal deity elevated by Muhammad to the rank of “the only God” as mentioned earlier. But the essential value of Islam, its positive side, is that faith in one God, with the religious attitude of worship, submission and confidence in Providence corresponding to this faith.

The Mohammedans rightfully consider themselves better than the Jews because they recognized Jesus as a prophet, whereas the Jews did not; and better than the Christians because they accept him as a prophet and not as God. Today, when we do not agree with someone, we do not attack and kill that person, but back in those wild days and wild lands, it was quite different. Instead of simply philosophically disagreeing with the Christian beliefs, in the name of faithfulness to the unicity of God Islam has made its very life to 203

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fight against what it rightfully considers wrong – the concoctions of self-appointed apostle Paul and John about Jesus’ so-called divinity and vicarious sacrifice for redeeming people’ sins, and the Trinitarian myth – and to kill those who subscribe to them, or reduce them to an inferior, humiliated status. Indeed, analyzing the Koran reveals an obsession about the Christians, so much so that Islam sometimes seems to be just a movement existing in opposition to Christianity.

Why does Islam proclaim that there are no other gods besides Allah? The proclamation of faith of Islam, which begins with “la”, no, clearly indicates its character of opposition. This negation, la, presupposes that a particular group claim that there are other gods, a negation having only a meaning in relationship with an affirmation.

Indeed, if no one professed that there are gods other than Allah, why would Islam proclaim it, repeat it and shout it twenty-five times a day from its minarets? It is to denounce and oppose those who claim that there are other gods. And who did so in the beginning of Islam? The Christians, who associate to Allah other deities in the form of the Trinity. So the negative character of the profession of faith of Islam is a direct response to the Christian affirmation of the Trinity. And why would Allah inspire to Muhammad the “new revelation” that he has no son (2:116; 5; 17:3; 19:91; 25:2)? To eliminate any possibility of Jesus’ divine filiation. If Allah has no son, no human being can be claimed to be so. Again a statement to specifically oppose the Christian dogma that Jesus is the son of God. The Koran always mentions him as the son of Mary. And to deny the possibility of Jesus being God, Muhammad received the “revelation” that Allah neither engendered anyone neither engendered himself (112).

For the Jews and Christians, God is a father figure, yet “Our Father” is not one of the ninety-nine names of Allah. The Koran very specifically denies that Allah is a father (112.1-4). In 5.18, it tells Mohammedans to rebuke Jews and Christians for calling God their loving Father because “Humans are just things that Allah has created.”

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Allah never said he loves his children. Islam has a crushing-like feeling of God’s majesty. Muslims think that Allah’s greatness would be somewhat diminished by an intimate reciprocation of love between him and men, his creatures. The Koran repeatedly says that Allah has no children because he has no consort (6:101) and that to claim he does have children would impugn his majesty (10:68)

Differences Between Jesus and Muhammad A true holy man may have enemies but he personally does not consider anyone his enemy. Rather than taking vengeance on those who opposed him, Jesus only tried to teach them the ways of God, even asking the Lord to forgive those who tortured and crucified him. He taught, “Love your enemies” (Matt.5:44), whereas Muhammad preached only vengeance on his enemies. Jesus was a man who consistently demonstrated mercy and forgiveness, and taught his followers to do the same. Jesus said he did not speak from himself, but only what God gave him. Muhammad claimed the same, but he said and did the exact opposite of Jesus. So if Jesus spoke from God, then in whose name did Muhammad speak? No real representative of God can disagree with another true representative of God. Otherwise, who is really a representative of God? Unless Muhammad’s words were distorted, as I suggested. One can compare what Muhammad said with what Jesus said: “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are ruthless against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves” (Koran 48:29). Versus “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy” (Matt. 5: 7). “Forgive others, and God will forgive you. If you do not forgive others, God will not forgive you” (Matt. 6:14,15).

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth even if they are of the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] until they pay the tax with willing submission, and feel themselves 205

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subdued.” (Koran 9:29) Versus “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matt.7:12).

“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore, strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” (Koran 8:12) Versus “He sent them out to proclaim the Kingdom of God: ‘Whatever house you enter, stay there until you leave the city... and if they do not receive your message, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.’” (Luke 9: 2-5) “The Lord Himself will take vengeance on his adversaries.” (Nahum 1:2) “[In Paradise] They shall recline on couches ranged in rows. We shall wed them to dark-eyed virgin girls.” (Koran 52:13-24) Versus “Jesus said that those who are worthy to attain the resurrection neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels.” (Luke 20: 34,35).

About miracles, there are no mentions in the Koran of Muhammad ever having performed any, except that he is said to have travelled 1234 km in twelve hours between Mecca and the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem which was not constructed until 637, whereas he is said to have died in 632! There were no witnesses. But, on the other hand, his wife Aicha said that Muhammad’s body had remained in Mecca and his travelling was only “spiritual.”1 Two hundred years after his death, his followers wrote stories about him including claims of miracles, but Muhammad himself never mentioned any. There is no suggestion in the Koran that his followers would perform miracles.

No record exists of any of them being given power to perform miracles or ever performing miracles, either in his time, in the following centuries, or today.

What We Should Know In their extreme delusion, Muslims claim Islam, which is obviously the most primitive form of religion, to be the religion of mankind in its most mature stage, the ultimate form of true religion, since 1. Ibn Ishaq Sirat rasulallah 183 206

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they hold the Koran to be the penultimate stage of God’s revelation to mankind! Well, maybe for barbarians… Since Muhammad claimed to be the last and best prophet sent by the “only one true God” and that there will never be another one, the Muslims conclude that all previous forms of monotheism were only steps or stages in the development of the religiousness of mankind – just like the Christians thought about Judaism – and that Islam is the only religion wanted

by God since its proclamation by their leader. For them, it is therefore the only legitimate and true one, to which all members of other religions, now considered “infidels” or kaffirs as their religion has become obsolete and illegitimate, should convert or die, or become a dhimmi. The gruesome history of Islam can thus be traced by following the blood trail it left behind wherever it spread, along with rape and slavery, which it has never abolished and is still practiced today in some Muslim countries. Indeed, the Koran is a mandate for worldwide Islamic supremacy.

“Violent revolution is imposed on every Muslim as a furious and dogmatic religion with its call to monstrous sacrifices, rivers of blood and unabated hatred against the West…Muslims are essentially war-mongers; they are almost always seen with weapons. They have savage appetites of conquest and power and a taste for blood and murder inherited from barbaric times. Their great personalities are almost all warlords…The Arab Empire contemplated upon nowadays by some dictators is only a trap to rock the nostalgia of the crowds which are under the spell of the story-tellers, making them dream to re-live at last the prodigious epic of conquest rhythmed by the sound of clashing swords, and, by promising them the mirage of some recovered greatness of yore, keep them under the jealous authority of the Oulemas and Imams, who are tempted more by the prospect of Inquisition than by the idea of spreading the ‘true faith’...They are inciting their people to hate the ‘Infidels’, to take revenge against the ‘Crusaders’…They have imposed to each one of their people the idea that they represent the Good and the non-Muslims are incarnations of Evil. What to do with Evil except extirpate 207

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it, destroy it, crush it? They have thus let loose against the West hordes of wild beasts armed with guns and bombs instead of swords. They prepare to celebrate the great festival of war.”1 This is nothing new. During the first phase of Islamization, Khalil ibn al Walid already used to write to his enemies before attacking them, “I will come against you with men who love death as much as you love wine.”

We, the ‘Vile Infidels’ Islam is a sort of political religion or a religio-political system which is now basically reduced to its juridical aspect. It has its own body of law, the Sharia, a word which is paradoxically mentioned only once in the Koran, based on entirely different principles than the Western civic sets of laws. The Islamologist Nadia Tazi stated that, “People have forgotten that this word originally means “the path” and not “the law”. The fact that the law and not the path has become what incarnates Islam shows a definite impoverishment. Islam has become juridical under State patronage, and that has produced an intellectual regression and a fundamentalist reaction.”2 More than half of the Koran is badmouthing us. A lot of the Sharia concerns us, the non-Mohammedans, and that is why we should probably worry. If you are not a Mohammedan, then you are an infidel (kaffir). Muslims believe that the “infidels” must either convert, pay the jizya (tax for non-Muslim3or dhimmis) or die. We are “infidels” in their eyes and the distaste that they have for infidels – who are called the vilest of creatures hated by God in the Koran (98:6) – is not a thing of the past. It is not only permitted but also holy to plunder you, rape your women, enslave you or kill you. In 1. Le Péril Islamique 2. Le Coran Philosophie Magazine 3. Muhammad may have borrowed the idea of taxing the non-Muslims from the Jewish tax imposed by the Romans on the Jews after the 1st Jewish war in 70 CE. 208

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their daily prayers to Allah, Muslims invoke his wrath upon us: “We forsake and stay away from the kaffirs…for Your punishment will surely reach the kaffirs…O Allah, punish the kaffirs or the people of the Book who are preventing others to follow Your way… Allah’s anger towards those who have gone astray.”

Guilty Governments?

Muslims apply the dhimmi system for non-Muslims in their countries. Why not apply the same system to them in the West where they add nothing but economic drain by parasitizing off socialized systems they usually do not pay into, rampant rape and violent assault, as well as the highly expected terror attacks? Why should we finance the eventual cutting of our throats? But alas, foolish so-called Christian democrats will never dare to do so. What Muslims have done to us is bomb trains, ram vehicles into pedestrians, stab our fellow citizens, create no-go zones within our cities, assault and rape our women, even demand Sharia law within our own countries…The list goes on. How many people are murdered in the West and in the Islamic world – mainly Christians – every year in the name of Allah? There is a bizarre capitulation of the West to the mass “migration” of Muslims apparently facilitated by the enemy within, the liberal left, which is allowing the destruction of our own culture. Who wants this socalled multiculturalism? They should integrate, but they will not.

Muslims will not assimilate; they will not fit into any other culture without the goal being to change it. They have no respect. Respect must be mutual, which is an impossibility for followers of Islam. It is impossible for true Muslims: they are forbidden to be friends of or to respect unbelievers (Koran 5:51). They cannot accommodate, as their “relentless conquest at all costs” cult will not allow it.

It is insanity to “tolerate” a supremacist ideology that at its root is bent on our conquest and our submission. It is a liberal suicide run to have allowed a primitive culture and religion massively into the West, all with an agenda of dominance, and a massive clash of 209

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cultures is imminent. Immigration of Muslims in the West should be restricted. Islam has no place in the modern Western world, which it has tried to conquer from early on. There is in Muslims an old fund of barbary, and religious fanaticism haunts every Muslim heart. The Koran seems to have been written to motivate the desert nomads to fight themselves out of the desert. It is a guide to conquest, so prepare, for conflict is the reality. In terms of our ethnic genetic interests as an indigenous population, the Muslim immigrants are a disaster. It is called the Balkanizing of Europe, which has a very fast-growing forty million Muslim minority. Indeed, the capitulation is so far advanced that one sometimes wonders how long any hope for living peacefully in their own countries remains for the Europeans.

Westerners should probably be very afraid of the people in their own governments who are blind, ignorant about Islam, or traitors and accomplices, and/or who have been bribed, and who enter into agreements with the Mohammedans that will only harm them. Indeed, this seems to be orchestrated from above by some group of extremely influent and ill-intentioned people, the elite globalists who have arranged the murder of their own people. It is all premeditated to replace indigenous, white populations. Why are the Muslims and Africans in Europe raping our girls? It is because the NWO European leaders welcomed them in to achieve the Kalergi plan of replacing white people with brown ones. They solve African overpopulation by shipping them into aging countries, to replace the kids that they are not having or are aborting. We may end up with something far worse than Communism that plagued Europe for close to a century and murdered well into the millions. It looks like it is again the Jews who are behind it. They hate us maybe more than the Moslems do.

They want to rule over the world as kings and manage a mongrelized population of racially interbred ~90 IQ workhorse slaves, who have no cohesion or hope of rising up to challenge them. As mentioned

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earlier, they own and operate all of the media. Consider in the UK for example the “hate speech” laws instituted in the 1960s. They were first used to silence a whistle blower named Colin Jordan who blew the whistle on Jews being behind colored immigration into the UK. He was jailed for several years as a result of Jews agitating to institute these laws.

Sanctioned Deception Islamic orthodox literature via Muhammad himself teaches that it is permitted for Muslims to resort to lies, cheating, duplicity and deception (taqqiya) to further the cause of Islam, something they recognize themselves. For instance, they say that Islam is peace, but they do not precise that they mean a peace that will come once they will conquer all the world and all “infidels” are executed or reduced to dhimmi status. ‘Islam’ does not mean “peace”; it means “submission” as we saw. So-called “friendly” Muslim governments use Islam for their own purposes, support jihadists and denigrate Western culture – a culture that supports freedom of thought and speech, a freedom far from being supported by them. There is, indeed, a great need for an antidote to the dishonest, poisonous propaganda proffered by the apologists of Islam. So to warn people about facts acknowledged by the Muslims themselves is not “Islamophobia”.

‘Religion of Peace’ and ‘Holy War’?

If Islam is a religion of peace, it has never practically demonstrated it during the course of its history. But, whenever some atrocious brutality in the name of Allah occurs we hear the same strange clichés, like non-stop mantras recited by the media and politicians of our day in the name of progressive political correctness: “Terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. Most Muslims are moderate. Islam is a religion of peace. This is not the real Islam; this is radical Islam.”

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However, a study will reveal that what the media calls “radical Islam” is the very heart of Islam. The very term “radical Islam” is a misnomer. “Terrorist extremists and radicals” are devout Muslims simply following the dictates of their Koran. They quote its verses to justify their attacks and other terrorist acts – oops, sorry, their holy war – so how can one say it’s a religion of peace? Ayatollah Khomeini himself said, “I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”1 The Hadith, the Sirah (life of Muhammad), and many sections of the Koran all idealize the enforcement of Islam by conquest. After a past often tumultuous, all the religions in the world coexist more or less peacefully today, all of them except Islam…

Whereas in both Judaism and Christianity violence has been delegitimized and tolerance exalted, Islam is a religion in which violence and hatred of the non-Muslims continue to be exalted. Angry adherents of the so-called religion of peace resort to mass shootings, beheadings, and suicide bombs in their efforts to win the world for Islam. They call this jihad, “holy” war, and there are countless violent jihadis in the world bent on killing and dominating other peoples and their cultures. Far from an aberration, it has been an integral part of the “religion” of Muhammad from very early on and is imbedded in its very founding text. It is the heart of this book, which is the life of every Muslim. Thus, violence and intimidation are still used by this subversive ideology for its hegemonic ambition. Jihad is a religious obligation for Muslims that remains in force until the whole world submits. Islam is thus seditious against every nation and government on Earth. It demands that all Muslims work to overthrow all non-Muslim nations, governments and non-Sharia laws. Muslims in the military of non-Muslim countries may be loyal to their country, but they are more loyal to Islam than to their country, and could turn into spies and a fifth column. What about so-called moder1. Amir Taheri, Holy Rerror: Inside the World of Islamic Terrorism, Chevy Chase, MD: Adler &Adler 1987 212

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ate Muslims? A significant number do not actually know what is in the Koran, because prayers are in Arabic and most of them do not speak the language, not being Arabs. Like in other religions, there are many who also are not all that observant. But they all support their “non-moderate” brothers. They will not kill you but will let them do it. They will not slit your throat but will maybe hold you while the others do it.

[The radical preachers attract young Muslims from the West with a well-thought out psychological method. They have a discourse which has an authoritative appeal for them because it gives a meaning to their lives which are often empty and directionless. A discourse which dictates what is permitted and what is forbidden is reassuring for weak people; it gives them a frame of reference in a permissive society. They first isolate the individual from his socializing environment. He is then absorbed in a religiously- affiliated group which reassures him about his role in this world. There is thus a relational, emotional dimension to enrolling before even the ideological one.

He is then introduced to more extremist groups, like Salafists and Wahhabis. They feed young men’s search for all-powerfulness, along with their desire to be useful to a “higher” cause, as well as getting some personal advantage. Within the group, repetition replaces reason. One begins to accept a peculiar interpretation of the Muslim doctrine presented by a charismatic preacher, who often becomes a role model. Radicalization takes place gradually and its symptom is that one’s conviction invades the totality of one’s psyche and affects.

One negates himself as a human being and identifies fully with his belief and the feeling of all-powerfulness. One exists solely through the ideology and is ready to sacrifice himself to impose it. Have you noticed the incongruity of those two terms put together: “Sacrifice” to “impose”? One feels he has been chosen to possess the truth and regenerate the world. One becomes unable to have a true relation213

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ship with others. One thinks he is on a “divine mission” but there is nothing divine at all in one’s convictions: one is just trying to escape reality. The link to the group becomes all-important; one is afraid of finding himself alone; it is like a codependence, it is obsessive and addictive. The ideas of the group become one’s unique ideas. One disappears under the weight of “theological” arguments and does not exist anymore outside of his ideology.

The unicity of Allah, Tawhid, is stressed. One is then warned against Shirk, or “associationism”, which is originally meant to distance oneself from polytheism and Trinitarian Christianity and which actually delegitimizes other religious traditions than Islam; it is completely misinterpreted into meaning that if you like anyone or anything, you “associate” it to God, making it a competitor to Him,1 or that if you follow the human laws of your country then you allow a human being, the law-maker, and not God, to tell you what is licit and what is illicit. One builds himself a mental prison.

Sectarian ideas become truths. Hadiths are repeated again and again, for instance, “Muhammad said that the Muslim community will divide in seventy-three sects and that members of only one out of those will go to heaven.”

One is then going from the certitude that one is part of the chosen few to fears of eternal damnation in hell. “Al-walaa wal baraa, meaning, “one should love what God loves and distance oneself from what He does not like” – which is originally meant to guard one against accepting the beliefs of other religions and falling into syncretism – is misinterpreted into meaning that one should manifest hostility to non-Muslims or to non-strict Muslims if you are a strict one, or to non-jihadists if you are a jihadi or to Shiites if you are a Sunni and vice versa. One is manipulated by conspiracy theories of persecution 1. This is also why Islam does not allow representations of human beings nor animals: it is considered making competition with God, their creator.

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– “The society out there and the non-strict Muslims are trying to contaminate you”– based on verses of the Koran or hadiths taken out of context, like “Tachabouh” meaning, “anyone imitating the miscreants is one of them”.

One then feels stress, discomfort, fear and defiance, which exacerbate the feeling of persecution, giving birth to uncertainty, anxiety, isolation, which in turn make one look for dysfunctional compensatory solutions. One is repeatedly told, “Muslims cannot live in a miscreant land. The day of his resurrection, the prophet will disavow all Muslims living among miscreants.”

One then has to choose between Islam and one’s country, go in exile in a Muslim country, preferably Afghanistan or Syria, or work to impose Islam in one’s own country.

Everyone has doubts deep down, especially about the legitimacy of killing innocent civilian people, but they are repressed out of fear, pride or false arguments to reassure oneself. One develops a binary vision, which legitimates violence: “There are no innocent people, there are the Muslims and the non-Muslims, the miscreant kaffirs”.

In the Koran, there is the big jihad, which is the inner struggle against one’s bad qualities and tendencies, and the small, external jihad, which is supposed not to be an aggressive one but a defensive one, something like legitimate defense, a bit like the Christian conception of “just war”. But the radical preachers only stress the external one and call it defensive although it is not. And they guarantee the young jihadists access to the paradise of the “true believers” where everything forbidden down here will be allowed: wine, unlimited enjoyment with countless women, and even homosexual relationships with minions.2Once involved in this deadly spiral, it is impossible without help to break free from it, to understand that the 2. The mention of small slave boys in paradise (76:11) corresponds to the sexual fantasies of 7th century Arabs. Muslim men have the bacha bazi tradition, the abducting or hiring of boys as private sex slaves.

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elements of the radical discourse do not represent the truth and to wake up from the dream of the utopia the ideology claims to offer, both of a better self and of a better world.]1

Islam Is Definitely in Dire Need of a Reformation Islam came from one of the most backward cultures on the planet, Arabia. The highly advanced cultures that it conquered were the font of all knowledge. Much of that knowledge was destroyed because it was considered un-Islamic. The learned men unfortunate enough to find themselves in the advanced nations conquered by the barbaric Arab raiders and later the Ottomans had to tread very carefully to avoid offending Islamic ideology. Most were Persian, Greek Christians or Jews. Many had to become Muslim to survive, as dhimmitude was very hard to endure. So the overwhelming majority of the thinkers under Islam were in a Muslim environment but not Muslim. The myth of an Islamic golden age corresponds to the 8th to the 11th centuries in the form of the Mutazilite School. At that time, translations of Greek works of science, medicine and philosophy were done by these non-Muslim people who created a kind of “Enlightenment Age”. A British scholar wrote, however, that it was actually more from their contact with India, when they invaded West Sindh in 712, that they learned all the sciences which made them look for some time superior.

“The Arab scholars sat at the feet of the Brahmanas and Buddhist monks and learnt from them philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, chemistry, etc., and later on transmitted the same to Europe. The numerical figures which the Europeans learned from the Arabs were originally learnt from the Indians.

The Arabic name for ‘figure’, Hindsa, points to its Indian origin. Hindu scholars were invited to Baghdad and asked to translated Sanskrit book on medicine, philosophy, astronomy, etc., into Arabic. All these scientific elements which made 1. Dounia Bouzar and Farid Benyettou, Mon djihad, Editions Autrement, Paris 20017 216

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the Arabs famous in Europe were borrowed directly from India. Hindu physicians were also brought to Baghdad to organize hospitals and medical schools.

It was India and not Greece that taught Islam in the impressionable days of its youth.”2 Then the Muslim world slowly sank back into obscurantism, with rational exegesis interpretations of the Koran outlawed. “It has known its Renaissance before its Middle Age” according to Regis Debray.

But who are the most vilified Muslims in the Islamic world? The reformers. Since the Koran is considered Allah’s words, it cannot be questioned, so reformers are branded as apostates advocating “Mutalazite” heretic ideas. Some philosophers like Al-Afghani (18381897) and Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) tried in vain to create in the Muslim world an equivalent of what was the Protestant Reform in the Christian world. For merely and intelligently suggesting that the Koranic verses enjoining to fight the Jews and Christians applied specifically to the Medina historical situation of conflict only, and that they should be set aside by modern-day Muslims who should live by the general principles given before in Mecca, the Sudanese Muslim theologian M.M. Taha was tried for apostasy and executed in 1985. For having evoked this need of a “Muslim Protestantism” in a university lecture in Hamadan in 2002, the Iranian Hashem Aghajari was arrested and imprisoned. Others are threatened, harassed, or simply assassinated, so much so that many write under a pseudonym, like Ibn Warraq who is exhorting Muslim thinkers to have a critical reading of the Koran and clearly states that, “We need Enlightenment in Islam. Some Muslim intellectuals have pushed for a separation between the Church and State. But those liberal Arab intellectuals are few in number and are confronted to the determined opposition of regimes which continue to control the institutions and the medias. Arab liberal thought remains fragmented and is often represented by isolated individuals who have few means of expressing their views, so their arguments are only heard by a very 2. Havell. Aryan rule in India 217

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small part of Arab populations. As long as the Muslims will continue to regard the Koran as the literal and inalterable word of God which should be obeyed without any consideration, there will not be any progress in the Muslim world.

It’s only when they will stop that it will be able to transition to more equality, tolerance and freedom.”1 The Moroccan philosopher Abdou Filali-Ansary develops this point by explaining that, “The community founded by the prophet in Medina was not the kernel of the Islamic state, nor a model of political regime offered to the Muslims. Its organization and the regulation which was established then was not the Islamic system people have chosen to believe it was. It was rather a field where the application of ethical principles of equality and solidarity aiming at suppressing tribal hierarchies, disparities, all forms of discrimination and inequalities transmitted, copied and reinforced by traditions, gave rise to a trial-and-error experiment, a concrete search aiming at finding the most adequate formulas to approach a moral ideal. The main characteristics of the Koranic injunctions and the decisions and choices of the prophet were not conceived by the first generation of his followers as elements or bricks of a juridical system, as divine orders valid beyond time and space, as eternal rules to which other rules should be added by deduction and analogy as the later Muslims did. They were understood as examples, as approximations, as an ensemble of concrete answers to concrete problems, as attempts to bring solutions based on a superior type of ethics to problems happening in a particular place and time. That is why those first companions did not hesitate to replace some orders when other rules seemed better, conditions had changed or they were convinced to better put in practice essential ethical principles. Those regulations were attempted responses to questions as they were presenting themselves or problems as they came up. It was an historical process.”2 According to him – and it makes a lot of sense – those rules were not meant to be sacralized, as the Koran was not meant to be reduced to a law book.

1. Philosophie magazine, Le Coran 2. Le sens de la nuance. A propos de Fazlur Rahman, Nawaat.org 218

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A reform is clearly the need of the day. We can only wish that the Muslims masses follow those enlightened opinions and accept to have a critical reading of the Koran. That would liberate Islam of its fundamentalist interpretations, open the way to a pacified, deeper Islam and render its reconciliation with the rest of the world possible.

It seems that the Muslims have well assimilated the lesson given to them by past Christian history. Indeed, when the Roman Empire became a theocratic state ruled by fundamentalist Christians, it became completely intolerant and totalitarian; and when, after its demise, the countries of Europe were subsequently ruled by the same, they also manifested the same traits. The Muslims, as good students, followed that to the letter. But maybe they should update their “schoolbooks” and see what has become of their model. As remarked by Ibn Warraq, “Now that Christianity has digested the principles of Enlightenment, it is not [any longer] a menace to civilization. Even its fundamentalist preachers [that you encounter especially in the “Bible belt” in Southern United States] do not exhort their listeners to exterminate the non-Christians and are thus not responsible for the death of thousands of innocent victims [as the fundamentalist imams are].

But the French historian and theologian Jacques Ellul (19121994) asked rhetorically the following pertinent question: “But is it even possible to reform Islam? Of course, some Muslim governments attempt to fight the Islamic current, but in order for them to succeed, it would need at the same time that mentalities entirely change, the jihad be desacralized, Muslims become self-critically aware of Islamist imperialism, accept a secular political power and reject some Koranic dogmas. Islam would have to be radically reconstructed.”

Indeed, we would like Islam to reform itself and, yes, amend or reject some of its dogmas. But is it realistic to expect such a recast of one entire tradition? The Muslim mind is generally soaked in medievalism. The Muslims are aware of the dangers of so-called Enlightenment. They saw that along with rejection of meaningless 219

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dogmas and the oppression of an abusive Church, another of its fruits was secularism and in its wake doubt and rejection of religion and God altogether, replaced by faith in atheistic science and rampant materialism.

The Muslim reformers are unfortunately not vilified only by the Muslims. The reformist/modernist movement in the Islamic world which began in the second half of the 19th century was completely crushed by the Western colonial powers like Britain and later the USA. This was the case in Iran, for instance. In the early 1950’s a democratically elected liberal government in Iran was overthrown by a coup organized by the USA and Britain; the popular leader Mosaddegh had nationalized the British oil companies in order to use the oil money to feed and educate the people of Iran, but the West was simply not going to let that happen, so he was replaced by a dictator who gave the oil companies freedom to keep on exploiting Iran’s natural resources…The Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini brought back things to a natural order, but at which price?

However, sometimes I wonder if the Western world deserves better than Islamic rule as it has become so faithless, sinful and degraded, and so-called religious people are almost undistinguishable from the regular materialists. Maybe it is God’s plan to induce people to behave more sanely, as Islam, in spite of so much hypocrisy and morbid obsession about women and sex, at least officially enforces some basic morality.

A Bit of History History shows that Islam has spread to all countries – fifty-seven of them having been already conquered and submitted to Muhammadan rule – slaughtered 270 million people (Islam killed 6070 million in India alone. It is the worst genocide in the history of the world) and enslaved other millions in its 1400-year unshakable course to world domination and submission of all non-Muhammad220

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ans. They have relentlessly attacked Christendom until they succeeded to capture Constantinople. It is a fact that if their bloody Westward progression towards the heart of Europe was stopped in 911 at the gates of Vienna, they however conquered Spain and ruled it for eight centuries until the Reconquista by the Christian kings. They also tried to conquer France, which they first entered in 714 from Spain, capturing the southern city of Narbonne which became their base for pillaging and devastating the Southern part of the country for the next forty years. They attacked Toulouse in 721 but their army was defeated and they retreated to Spain losing 80Â 000 soldiers. They came back and destroyed Nimes in 725, then Bordeaux, and ravaged the country up to Poitiers where they were defeated and crushed in 732. The survivors dispersed and formed small groups which kept on harassing the South of the country, regularly reinforced by soldiers coming up from Spain to participate in pillage, until 737 when Charles Martel came down with a powerful army and freed Avignon, Nimes and Beziers. Pepin the Short freed Narbonne in 759 and definitively crushed the invaders. But again the survivors dispersed in small groups and continued to devastate the country. These marauding groups were almost eliminated in 808 by Charlemagne but some were still active up to 972. The next 250 years, they regularly sent raids from the sea from their dens of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicilia and Spain. In 1178 and again in 1197 Toulon was attacked, destroyed and the whole population slaughtered or enslaved. When they were finally expulsed from these dens, attacks on French lands stopped but they continued attacking French ships.

Piracy Throughout the Islamic era of domination in the East, there was constant Jihad into the West, which was for a considerable time very restricted in its intercourse with the East. Islam probably set civilization back by centuries. The Mediterranean was very dangerous be221

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cause of Muslim pirates. From the 9th century until the 19th, piracy was an integrant part of the economy of the Barbary Coast (North Africa). Muhammadan pirates captured around four million Western Europeans to aliment the slave markets of Constantinople and the Barbary Coast, in addition to the slaves they would buy in Spain when they conquered it. They would proceed by surprise attacks, including against fisher boats, on Mediterranean Christian countries but also in Nederland, Ireland and as far as Iceland. They would loot, kill, enslave and ransom, or sign a treaty against financial compensation for not attacking the ships of a particular country. The captured men were first sent to castration camps in Corsica and the women ended in the harems to produce Muslim children. It only stopped when France, tired of their breaking treaties with European countries – who had to regularly bombard their capitals to make them respect them for some time – and even with the USA – who waged two Barbary wars in 1801 and 1815 – resolved to hit the head of the snake and conquered Algeria in 1830, destroying the last bases of the Muslim pirates. A striking thing is that between their first entry in France in 714 and the definitive crushing of the barbarian pirates in 1830, more than a millennium passed, which shows that those people never give up. And since Algeria has obtained her independence in 1962 at the term of an ugly war with Muslim cruelty on civilians at its “best”,1 her children are taught that “colonialism” has ruined their country! History is rewritten, as always. France did not colonize 1. I was born there as my father managed an estate meant to maintain an orphanage in France. He was assassinated in 1956. My mother would tell me and my brothers that at least he had a “clean” death, shot with 2 bullets in the head and not tortured and mutilated.

(Indeed, a favorite tactic of the fellaghas was to attack an isolated farm, rape the daughters in front of their parents then slit their throat, then do the same to the wife in front of her husband, then torture him and let him go and tell what he had witnessed, in order to instill terror in the Europeans. All the males would be killed by cutting their belly open, taking out their guts and replacing them with stones, and their genital cut and put in their own mouth.)

Just after getting their independence, the Algerians killed more than 5000 European civilians in Oran in one day, raping the women, of course, and tortured and massacred 150 000 harkis, Muslims faithful to France.

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Algeria out of imperialism but only to stop piracy! The Muhammadans now openly say that there will not be anyone to stop them like before, and that they will conquer us “by the womb of our wives and your own democratic laws.” There is an absolute incompatibility of Islam with Western civilization, and Islam necessarily poses a threat to the peace and well-being of the West. Its ideology unfortunately fuels international terror. These people have different values from us. They hate all things not Islamic. They do not want our way of life; they want us to live their way

Muslims in India The Muslims have no knowledge of God’s form and therefore, like the Jews and Christians, consider the followers of Vedic culture and the Hindus who worship Deities of the demigods or of God Himself as condemned idolaters. The various Muslim invaders and plunderers of India prided themselves on conquering, slaughtering and enslaving them, raping their women and destroying their temples.

“The first attempt in 637 failed; there were others attacks on Western Sindh in 644, 659, 664 and 711 and in 712 Arabs conquered the Sindh province from king Dahir. Although the Indians surrendered, there was a great massacre for three days; the Hindus and Buddhists were given the option to become Muslims or die or be enslaved, and ‘700 beautiful females under the protection of Buddha’ were among the prized booty partly sent to Hajjaj, the Viceroy of the Caliph, and partly distributed among the soldiers.”2 Violence and sex! At that time, India was constituted of a large number of independent and sovereign states struggling for supremacy among themselves and there was no single paramount power in the country able to check the conquest. There was no sense of unity which could bring those states together to fight against the Muslims.

This conquest, although limited and not lasting sowed the seed of 2. Cambridge History of India, vol. 3 223

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Islam in India. Turks followed in the 11th century. As there had been no invasion of India for a few centuries, the people were suffering from a false sense of security. The result was that no provision was made for the defense of the country from foreign dangers. Armies were neglected and no forts were constructed for defense. The people were living in isolation from the rest of the world, not bothering about what happened beyond their frontiers. Their ignorance of the developments outside their country placed them in a vulnerable position. Dr Pannikar says that, “Patriotism was absent. There was no determination to resist the foreigner.

There was a corrupt bureaucracy. It is only the dynastic interests that united the people and that was not enough to enable them to check the Muslim invaders.”

The Turks got the upper hand over the caliphs of Baghdad. They were different from the Arabs, more aggressive and full of ambition.

The first Turkish attacker of India, Subaktgin defeated king Jai Pal in 986. His son, Mahmud of Gazni (a town in Afghan territory) led 17 expeditions against India from 1000 to 1025. He plundered so much wealth in gold and jewels that, according to Dr Ishwari Prasad, “the acquisition of vast treasures whetted the rapacity of these adventurers and they repeated their raids with astonishing frequency. To the Hindus he is to this day an inhuman tyrant, a veritable Hun.”1 Mahmud, in a demoniac craze, devastated the sacred city of Mathura, melting down the deities made of gold, then the city of Vrindavan which had a number of forts and temples that he also plundered. The biggest slaughter of Hindus was at Somnath in Gujarat in the very temple itself, which he plundered and broke the deity. He was praised by the Muslims for waging jihad and destruction of the Hindus but analysis shows that it was his greed for wealth and thirst for winning military glory that brought him to invade India.

The Muslim historian Ibnu’l Athir pointed that, “his one fault was love of money that he would seek to obtain in every way.”

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He intended to bring the caliph Al Qadir under his control. Havell writes, “He would have sacked Baghdad with as little compunction as he plundered Somnath if the undertaking seemed profitable and easy. He did not hesitate to threaten the caliph with death when the latter refused to give him Samarkand.”

Dr R.C. Majumdar wrote that, “His annexation of the Punjab served as the key to unlock the gates of the Indian interior. Big cracks were made in the great fabric of Indian power and it was no longer a question of whether but when that age-old structure would fall. Neither the Arabs nor the Turks succeeded in adding India to the growing empire of Islam but they paved the way for the final struggle which overwhelmed her some two hundred years later.”2 The rule of his successors, which lasted from 1030 to 1186 was marked by discord, degeneracy and decay. The Saljuq Turks conquered his capital Ghazni and razed it; they slaughtered their coreligionists and enslaved their women and children. Then Muhammad Ghori, who inherited Ghazni turned to India which he repeatedly attacked in 1175, 1179, 1181, 1182, 1185, 1186, 1191, 1192 when he defeated a Rajput coalition, which left opened for him the gates to the interior of India. In 1194 he attacked again, devastating Kanauj and Benares where he destroyed 1000 temples. Then his lieutenants conquered Bihar in 1197 and West Bengal in 1204. The Sultanate of Delhi was established soon after.

The Sultanate was a theocracy. The ideal of the sultan was to protect Islam, to wage jihad against the Hindus and try to convert all the people into Muslim. But even Muslim chroniclers say that most of them were not following the Sharia, drank wine, did not distribute four-fifth of the booty to the soldiers but only one-fifth, appropriated people’s wealth as they pleased, and had not four wives as per Islam law but thousands. They seemed to think only of beautiful women to enjoy and of drinking. Thus these demoniac people, so2. History of Bengal 225

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called worshippers of Allah, were actually living their sinful dreams of enjoying sex unlimitedly, as per Muhammad’s “blessings”. Their nobles followed their example, each keeping many Hindu slave girls.

The government did not care for the welfare of the people. Their social and economic development was totally ignored. Intrigues and murder placed different despots of successive dynasties on the throne (Slave, Khalj, Tughluk) The Muslims gradually conquered the Deccan and the South of the country, pillaging and destroying the temples on the way and building mosques instead. The Mongols were ferocious people who, like the Muslims, took a demoniac pleasure in loot, murder, plunder and destruction. They were also barbarians and also took pleasure in burning towns and organizing massacres. They were also responsible for every kind of inhuman atrocity. They destroyed mosques, temples and churches alike. The Mongols started their plundering incursions in India in 1221, then in 1241, 1271, 1279, 1285, 1292, 1296, 1297, 1298, but in 1299, 1303, 1306, 1308, they came to conquer territory but were defeated.

The Barla Turk Timur invaded India in October 1398 after having conquered Mesopotamia, Persia and Afghanistan. A Tughluk sultan reigned at that time. Timur and his army slaughtered Muslims and Hindus alike. He massacred 50 000 “Hindu” prisoners he had made on the way to Delhi, capital of the Muslim Sultan, which he stormed and devastated. High towers were built with the heads of the decapitated “Hindus”, in Gengis Khan style. Each soldier took from twenty to one hundred slaves. He laid waste the whole region and left in March 1399 carrying a huge booty and countless slaves and having inflicted on India more damage and misery in a single invasion than any other conqueror ever had. After him, the Sayyid, then the Afghan Lodi dynasty ruled, characterized by infighting between Muslim states and bigotry against the “Hindus”, who were persecuted and pressured to become Muslims. Sikhandar Shah, for instance, behaved also like a demon and ordered all the temples of Mathura 226

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to be destroyed and mosques built instead, and he gave the temple deities to Muslim butchers to be used as meat weights.

Then Babur, a Barla Turk like Timur, and founder of the Mughal dynasty, invaded India from Uzbekistan in 1524. He wrote about “Hindus” in his Memoirs with contempt, saying that jihad against them was a sacred duty, but revealed his real motivation in invading India, “Pleasant things in Hindustan are that it is a large country and has masses of gold and silver.”

He was ferocious and prisoners were commonly butchered in cold blood in front of his royal pavilion and a triumphal pyramid subsequently erected with their skulls. He wrote in the same Memoirs that “once during such massacre, such was the number of prisoners brought forward for killing that my tent had to be moved back three times, the ground before it being drenched with blood and encumbered with human carcasses.”

After conquering Delhi, he allowed every soldier to take as many as sixty slaves back to Uzbekistan. When they crossed the mountains, so many died that they called that mountainous pass Hindu-kush, the “butchery of the Hindus.” So many slaves were taken from India that the price of slaves in the Muhammadan slave markets almost collapsed. I have personally met some descendants of those Indian slaves in Uzbekistan.

His son Humayun was weak. He loved his harem and opium too much and lost the Sultanate for 15 years. He was not a fanatic Muslim. Humanyun’s son, Akbar, the real founder of the Mughal Empire in India, was the only Muslim ruler of India who did not oppress the “Hindus “and gave them positions in his government without discrimination, something none of his predecessors nor successors did. He had a policy of reconciliation with the “Hindus”.

“He lifted the terrible pressure of persecutions which the Sultans had exercised over the Hindus. He emancipated India from the thralldom of the religion

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of a minority and extricated her from the clamps of theocracy.”1 He visited Mathura and Vrindavana in 1563 and when he was informed that all the pilgrims had been charged the pilgrim tax, he decided to abolish it, as well as the jizya, the non-Muslim tax, the next year; he also abolished the system of enslavement of the women and children of the conquered people. He defeated and submitted the Rajput princes but did not annex their states; he entered into matrimonial alliances with them and many princesses were part of his 5000 women-strong harem. He gave the Rajput princes high positions in his army, thus getting their loyalty. He created a common citizenship for all his subjects, treating the “Hindus” on a footing of equality with the Muslims. He diminished the power of the Muslim clerics and followed personally a kind of syncretism. His religion was a sort of Parsi-Sufi-Hinduism. He believed that the absolute truth was not the monopoly of any religion. He declared his determination to follow an independent policy of enlightened toleration and even created a kind of national religion with him as the spiritual guide of the nation instead of the Muslim Maulvis or scholars.

These clerics were livid with rage, considering him a heretic. He adopted many elements of transcendental Vedic knowledge such as the transmigration of souls and the doctrine of karma, sometimes put on the sacred tilak mark on his forehead, acting in many ways as a “Hindu” king. He prohibited the slaughter of cows. He invited Christian missionaries to explain to him the principles of Christianity and allowed them to build churches.

His son, Jahangir, was a heavy drunkard but he followed his father’s recommendation of reconciliation with the “Hindus” and had in general liberal views on religious matters, although he had a few temples destroyed in Ajmer, Rajasthan. His son and successor Shah Jahan is credited to have built the famous Taj Mahal in Agra, but it was actually a Vedic temple which he turned into a mausoleum 1. Justice J.M. Shelat, Akbar 228

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for one of his wives, Mumtaz Mahal, the mother of 14 of his 16 children, like so many temples were turned into mosques or tombs.

He was a zealous Muslim but only got a few temples demolished in Benares and some other places. He was imprisoned by his successor and son, Aurangzeb, another demoniac character, who killed his three other brothers and deliberately reversed the liberal policy of his predecessors towards his non-Muslims subjects. Aurangzeb resumed the previous policies of oppressing the “Hindus” and massively destroying their temples, like in Mathura and Vrindavana, and plundering their wealth. He had a special department in charge of systematically destroying all the temples on the way when he was waging war. He shut down the “Hindus” from high offices and reestablished the pilgrimage tax and the jizya tax, harassing the “Hindus” in all possible ways in order to induce them to become Muslims. He got the protesters against the jizya tax trampled by war elephants.

He alienated the Rajput princes who had been loyal to his ancestors. The Sikhs also suffered at his hands and he had their temples destroyed and their gurus tortured and killed. He was a fanatic Sunni Muslim and persecuted the Shias and conquered their Indian kingdoms where he imposed the Sunni faith as state religion. Under his weak and degenerate successors, the Mughal empire disintegrated gradually. Nadir Shah of Iran attacked India in 1739. He ordered the wholesale slaughter of all the inhabitants of Delhi, and burnt the whole center of the city. He left after two months after having seized the imperial treasury, elephants and horses. After his death, his most important demoniac general Ahmad Shah came back seven times to plunder India, repeating in 1757 the pillage, carnage and arson; then he continued towards the holy cities of Mathura, Vrindavana and Gokul. The carnage and destruction begs description. For seven days following the general slaughter, the water of the river Yamuna was red. Temple were desecrated, priests and sadhus put to the sword, women dishonored and children cut to pieces. He similarly destroyed 229

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a thousand towns and villages in Northern India, until an outbreak of cholera halted his army…Except Akbar, the Muslim rulers suffered from moral bankruptcy. The Muslim concept of equality and fraternity had vanished completely in front of personal ambitions.

Education was only intended for the upper classes and the Muslim masses, as usual, remained steeped in ignorance. In India, the frenzied slaughter of Hindus and Buddhists was unprecedented. Islam demoniacally tormented and bludgeoned India. A ruling class of corrupt cruel parasites satisfying all their whimsical ambitions and sinful desires was bleeding the whole country, ruining her fabulous prosperity for financing their extravagant lifestyle of pleasures in a luxury beyond description, monopolizing all high offices and maintaining a huge army to keep the conquered Indians in subjection. All in the name of Allah! “Hindus” were crushed under various taxes.

One Muslim noble, Amir Khusrau, admitted, “Every pearl in the royal crown is but the crystallized drop of blood fallen from the tearful eyes of the poor Hindu peasant.”1 Muslims took pleasure in mass enslaving of “Hindu” women, which they distributed as ordinary gift among friends. This is one of the nastiest things about Islam: that right they shamelessly claim to have to enjoy any non-Muslim woman by rape. Of course, transforming the body of women in a battlefield is one of the most archaic form of war, as by attacking women’s bodies one attacks the virility of their men. Kidnapping “Hindu “women was considered a “holy act of jihad” by these sinful rogues! Some Muslim chief would have a new young “Hindu” girl raped every morning. Another one would arrest “Hindu” marriage processions and rape the bride then give her back to her bridegroom, or he would assault “Hindu” ladies in their palanquins or while they would go for a dip in the river…For fear of having their daughters dishonored, many “Hindus” would kill them at birth or arrange a very early marriage for them. As 1. V.D. Mahajan, History of medieval India, S. Chand &Co, New Delhi 1988 230

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they were considered the “greatest foes of the prophet”, millions of “Hindus” were slaughtered, millions enslaved.

Under the corrupt Muhammadan rulers, India stagnated for centuries. She had little industry, grinding poverty and ignorance, recurring famine (twenty-four in two-hundred years) and constantly squabbling local rulers. So much knowledge and beauty was destroyed, countless temples and libraries, and in fact anything that did not fit the Islamic ideology. The British started the conquest of India under the disguise of making trade through their East India Company. They captured Delhi in 1808. The Moghul emperor Shah Alam II and his son after him became their pensioners. The dynasty ended with Bahadur Shah II who was allowed to retain the imperial title only by courtesy. As he took part in the Revolt in 1857, he was tried and deported to Burma where he died in 1862. Although I am not in favor of Western colonization and the British conquest of India was treacherous and their rule obnoxious, she would still probably be a backward nation like the rest of the Muslim world but for the British who snatched her away from her Muslim tyrants. The British also bled her economically. Even the highest officials of the Company were engaged in private trade amassing vast fortunes through a tyrannical and oppressive conduct, enabling them to drain India’s wealth to Great Britain. Sir John Shore wrote in 1797, “The Company are merchants as well as sovereigns of the country.” But at least they did not persecute the Hindus like the Muslims ruthlessly did for centuries.

I wrote jokingly earlier that Muslims might be in for a surprise upon arriving in heaven, the least of it being a sign that there are no more virgins available. Joking aside, what other possible surprises?

Well, there is no spiritual injustice. God’s laws are the same for everyone. The law of karma stipulates that one must undergo the same suffering that he has inflicted. Moreover, all religious laws, the Sharia included, state that one will be punished in hell for one’s crimes. The Muslims have imagined, on the basis of a wrong perennation of 231

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verses of the Koran referring to historical circumstances, or maybe forgeries of verses, that they could rape, torture and kill non-Muslims with impunity, wanting to believe that these are not crimes but a duty, but nobody is exempt from God’s laws. It is said in the Bible that, “The wheels of divine justice may grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine.”

So they are certainly not going to go to their dreamed about heaven of unlimited sex enjoyment; they are in for a big surprise! Upon dying, they will be taken straight to the hellish planets and will be heavily punished there for a long time for each of their acts of cruelty, forced among other punishments to embrace red-hot iron statues of women. Then upon coming back from hell, they will have to take repeated births as Muslim women to be genitally mutilated, then as “kaffir” women to be raped themselves for every girl or woman they raped. Yes, dear Muslim brothers! Karma is like a boomerang.

The prophet Jesus has spelled it clearly: “As you sow so shall you reap.”

Watch out! Don’t be blind believers!

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W

hy do I write so many horrible things? Is it to put down the “competition”? No. One can only compare things of the same category or value. I do not believe there is any competition between the spirituality presented in Vedic culture and non-Vedic kali-yuga syncretic religions of meat-eaters. What I have tried to do is present how important a proper understanding is of ourselves as souls, and stress that the relation between us as souls and God is most important. You cannot have a true and clear relationship with someone, what speak of loving him, if you do not have sufficient knowledge about that person. Since it is the basis of individual and collective happiness, peace and harmony, we’d better make sure we have a clear idea and a proper understanding of God. My purpose is to underline how crucial the nature of our beliefs is, since they have – as we repeatedly saw – very far-reaching consequences. Our beliefs about God, our conception of Him, translate into particular actions.

What happens if one conceives Him as a distant, quasi impersonal, jealous and cruel deity capable of the horrors described in the Old Testament or in the Koran? Atheists, of course, will always take advantage of these descriptions of an unacceptable God to deny His 233

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existence. But what about a believer in God? On one hand, given the “right” circumstances, one may be likely to perpetuate the kind of sanguinary behavior which that belief led the followers of the Semitic religions to display for centuries, and some up to now. On the other hand, how will one develop genuine, pure love for God? I am afraid one will not be able to, which means that one can sentimentally speak of loving God, or dream of heaven as much and as long as one wants, but one will keep on suffering by reincarnating in the cycle of births and deaths, including some unwanted sojourns in the hellish planets. So it is a question of life and death, individually and collectively.

The three Semitic religions or cultures are all rather new and contain concoctions. But let us try to put aside any prejudice. Although they have elevated tribal deities or a man to the position of the one supreme Lord, I hope and want to believe that all-merciful God accepts the worship of those who sincerely think they are worshipping Him and not a former tribal deity or a prophet – even a failed one like Jesus (if the Gospels reported accurately his prophecies about his coming back). Most followers of these new religions do not know that the ultimate goal of religion is to achieve the stage of loving devotional service to God. Usually, the prophets of these Semitic religions and their present leaders teach worship of the deity on the platform of fear. These religions have often taken the form of a social constraint, an obligation to adhere to a group of rituals, dogmas and formulas. Their followers call him under names such as Adonai, Yahweh and Allah, which express majesty and power. It is especially this aspect of God which is known. They usually approach that deity out of fear of poverty, pain, chastisement, death and hell, and out of hope to go to “heaven” and enjoy forever. They also approach their deity with the idea that all their material desires will be fulfilled by pleading and praying to him, or that their distress will be mitigated; 234

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more rarely in search for the truth, and at best out of a sense of duty or gratefulness. Even if they address and refer to a personal God, these traditions tend to be more or less impersonal and are often followed because of cultural inheritance and social pressure. A group of people playing with people’ fears and hopes set themselves up as God’s representatives and shamelessly enjoyed – and enjoy until now – privileges and riches.

Men usually have a religious sentiment. It is what distinguishes them from animals. They generally aspire after prosperity and sense enjoyment in this life, and heaven/paradise or salvation/liberation in the thereafter. Upon analysis, the great world religions, although paying lip service to the idea of love of God, are mainly centered around catering to those desires. These religious paths do not directly and systematically teach their followers methods to develop pure love of God, and do not contain precise ideas about Him, His personality, form, abode and activities. Some, of course – especially Christians as Jesus repeated the Torah’s core message – speak of and aspire to love of God. So many monks and nuns have dedicated their entire lives to Him, as Catholicism and the Orthodox Church teach a devotional approach of Divinity, but they mistake Jesus for God. They are just lacking philosophical knowledge and understanding, as well as clear detailed knowledge about God. He has been presented to them as a loving father, but also and mostly as the all-powerful judge, chastising the sinners and casting them in the blazing fire of hell for eternal damnation.1 God possesses a wholly different aspect, a very personal, near, intimate one, which is expressed by His name ‘Krishna’. He is the object of the practice of bhakti-yoga, which the aspira1. On this topic, Sir William Jones stated, “I am no Hindu but I hold the doctrine of the Hindus concerning a future state to be incomparably more rational, more pious and more likely to deter men from vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by the Christians on punishment without end.” S.N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in 18th Century British Attitudes to India, orient Longmans, Hyderabad, 1987 235

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tion and spiritual ideal of the Christian mystics have some similarity with – loving union with the Absolute – even if they do not have any clear knowledge about Him. ‘Krishna’, we saw earlier, means “all-attractive”. God attracts all beings to Himself. If we fail to be attracted, it is maybe that – just like iron filings covered with a lot of rust are less attracted by a magnet – our souls are “rusty” with material desires and attachments, as well as misconceptions about God. The real standard of religious behavior is love of God, as taught in the essence of the Vedas and as preached by Jesus as far as he could.

Such a devotee worships Him with selflessness, only out of love, not considering Him to be an order-supplier or problem-shooter.

He seeks no mundane reward in return for his service to Him. The deep spiritual happiness one feels on this platform of love is not because the Lord has satisfied his senses by offering him the objects of enjoyment he desired; rather, it is born from serving the wonderful Lord of love, which fully reciprocates the loving feelings of His devotees. The very principle of bhakti-yoga is to redirect on Shri Krishna the natural tendencies to love and serve. This path allows one to purify oneself gradually from the conditioning that material energy exerts upon us, and to revive one’s relationship with God. Bhakti or bhakti-yoga is thus a form of joyous spiritual discipline consisting of redeveloping that relationship of loving service offered to Him.

An Uninspiring Presentation of God Religious fanaticism and obscurantism have nothing to do with God’s views and feelings. The Old testament of the Bible, as well as some of the early Church fathers and later the Koran, show the most displeasing image of the Deity. Indeed, the three Semitic religions present Him in a very uninspiring way. The atheist revolutionaries took advantage of that to decry religion: “Christianity is a swindle invented by jugglers. Do but read the Bible through, supposing you can overcome the disgust that must seize you when you open the 236

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pages of the most infamous of all shameful books, and you may observe that the God whom this twaddle inculcates is a million-headed, fire-spitting, vengeance-breathing, ferocious dragon.”2 Indeed, the Jewish scribes justified their ancestors’ war crimes by attributing them to their deity, directly or indirectly through his alleged orders, as mentioned previously. It can also be understood by the fact that they elevated a local tutelary deity to the status of supremacy while keeping in their religious texts the attributes and supposed deeds of that deity, which seems to suffer human weaknesses: He appears capricious, bloodthirsty, partisan and brutal, with a taste for blood sacrifice. He has apparently no objection to misogyny, as his holy book condones Loth proposing his two virgin daughters for gang-rape to the gay men of his city who wanted to have sex with the angels who visited him (Gen, 19.8); or the Levite priest proposing his wife to the same gay men, and her being gang-raped all night to death. He also doesn’t mind genocide and slavery3 or racism. (The same analysis can be made about the Koran). He also seems quite racist.4 What do the average Christians say about this? Besides those who blindly believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, they usually say that the Old Testament does not count. If that is the case, then they should remove it from their Bible, shouldn’t they? But there is a problem: all the messianic prophecies interpreted as indicating Jesus 2. Zacher, Die Rothe Internationale 1884, p.27, quoting the Freihet anarchist review.

3. “If a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not be freed at the end of six years as the men are.”

(Exodus 21.7) “If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.” (Exodus 21.20) “You may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance.” (Leviticus 25.44-46) 4. As his exterminating all the local people (Amalekite, Amorite, Hittite, etc.) (Ex. 23.23); His ordering “His people” to steal the virgins from the Midianites, “Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately spare for yourselves.” (Numbers 3.17-18)

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as the long-expected Jewish messiah come from the Old Testament!

Besides, Paul condoned slavery. (Ephesians 6:5-8) So did Augustine.

And John Chrysostom (347-407) wrote, “The slave should be resigned to his lot ... In obeying his master, he is obeying God.” Also, the god of the Old Testament is the very same one that the Christians worship. They have also kept his injunctions. Christians are fond of saying that morality5and what is right or wrong does not change because God does not change. Given that, then we should still be able to sell our daughters into slavery or buy slaves because God does not change and it is still in the Bible! This point is best summed up by Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the American Civil War: “It [slavery] is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation…it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts…Let the gentleman go to Revelation to learn the decree of God – let him go to the Bible…

Slavery existed then in the earliest ages, and among the chosen people of God… You find it in the Old and New Testaments – in the prophecies, psalms, and the epistles of Paul; you find it recognized, sanctioned everywhere.”

It will be clear to any impartial observer making a comparative study between the Bible and the Vedas that Sri Krishna acts quite differently.

5. The founder of Jainism, who lived millennials before Jesus, produced a moral code that outshines anything written in the Bible. “Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: ‘Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.’ Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. It should be obvious that morality did not originate with the Judeo-Christianity, but rather that it deteriorated with the spread of that religion. Under the supposed authority of their faith, Christians violated every one of Mahavira’s precepts and justified it all by reference to their ‘holy’ scriptures.” (Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 23)

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Sri Chaitanya The Christians claim that Jesus is God. It is not confirmed by the Torah nor the Talmud. Muhammad claimed he was the last prophet, the “seal of the prophets”, and that he brought the final Revelation of God. It is not confirmed by the Bible, but let us suppose that this might be true as far as the “People of the Book” or the three Semitic religions are concerned. This has nothing to do with Vedic culture, which still runs its parallel course in history. According to the sacred Vedic texts, as mentioned in chapter 2, God appeared again in this world in 1486 in Bengal as Sri Chaitanya. He is the authentic avatar of God in our age. The Revelation he brought is the same found in the ancient Vedic scriptures. He brought about a Renaissance in decadent Hinduism and spread again a vibrant, dynamic devotional movement. The Christian and Koranic revelations pale in comparison. They appear as what they are: basic teachings destined for barbarians and therefore based on fear so that they follow some basic morals and religious principles.

Conclusion As we saw, all religions are ultimately meant to gradually elevate their followers to the platform of spirituality, the essence of which is pure love for God, but, alas, this understanding is not shared by most of their practitioners, who are usually prone to sectarianism. Some people have said that people quarrel about religious matters with much more intolerance and hatred than about any other issue. Religious beliefs seem indeed to be so blinding and overpowering that people forget all humanity and behave like cruel, heartless beasts, not hesitating to torture and kill believers of other faiths. Maybe some people are so egocentric that they need to see their religion as special and unique to practice it enthusiastically, but it invariably causes conflict. We have been suffering from wars and conflicts in the world for 239

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thousands of years. There is the work of the United Nations and a lot of peace summits. In spite of that, hardly any progress seems to be made towards peace and harmony between people and nations.

But we all share a common father, so we are actually all spiritually related. If people go beyond sectarianism and self-interest and if scientists are open-minded again about a spiritual worldview and let it be known, then we may finally enjoy the peace all people are yearning for and all religions speak about. It is indeed disappointing and saddening to see that the people involved in so-called religious conflicts all believe in God and speak of peace and love but allow themselves to be manipulated into fighting in His name. The world cannot benefit in any way from religious quarrels. Let us practice universal brotherhood to make this world a better place, where we can peaceful live and dedicate ourselves to the main task of human life: self-realization.

As light has the power to push things – witness the tails of comets always pointing away from the sun because, in addition to the solar wind, the sunlight pushes on the dust and gas making up the comet – may the light of spiritual knowledge push away our ignorance! The personal exchanges between God and His worshippers are superior to the claims of any institution of having His exclusive favor. One should examine one’s tradition. If it contradicts, covers or dominates the eternal function of the soul – loving service to God – such religious tradition should be reconsidered and one should endeavor to upgrade one’s religious practice to the level of spirituality. Ultimately, there is only one true religion: to serve God out of love. Let us have unity in diversity! Let us have diversity without division!

Om Tat Sat.

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