Tag Archives: Multi-culturalism

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Debate on Hinduism and religious pluralism

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A very interesting debate that shows how intolerant pluralistic religions like Hinduism can be – so intolerant that they are willing to ban free speech that is supportive of Christianity. In the pluralist East, you can ban the public practice of Christianity, but in the exclusivist West, we have free speech and freedom of religion for Hindus. Is it possible that the view that “all religions are equally true” is far less tolerant than the view that “only one religion is true?”. What if the one religion that thinks it is true also believes that it is a moral good to tolerate free speech and open debate about which religion is true?

Here is the MP3 file. (64 minutes)

Details:

Unbelievable? 24 Oct 2009 – Christian conversion of Hindus – 24 October 2009

In light of Premier’s Faith Without Fear campaign, this discussion between Anil Bhanot and Sunil Raheja addresses the tensions that exist when Christians seek to evangelise Hindus in India.

What is acceptable? Is the response of some Hindus justified? Is it wrong for Christians to state that Jesus is the “only” way to God?

To sign the petition for Justice for Christians in Orissa State, India go to www.faithwithoutfear.org

Below you can find my play-by-play summary of this debate.

What does the Bible say about evangelism?

The relevant passage from the Bible in which Jesus commands Christians to share their beliefs with non-Christians is found in Matthew 28:16-20. This is the part that the Hindu scholars disagree with.

16Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go.

17When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.

18Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

19Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

20and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

What does the Bible say about salvation being exclusive of other other religions?

A few verses from the that teach the exclusivity of salvation.

John 14:6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Acts 4:12 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

Acts 16:30-31 He then brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.”

1 Timothy 2:5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,

1 John 5:11-12 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.

Luke 12:8-9 I tell you, whoever acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man will also acknowledge him before the angels of God. But he who disowns me before men will be disowned before the angels of God.

John 3:18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

John 3:36 Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.

So Christians are required to preach to non-Christians, and they are required to preach what Jesus said about himself – that trust in Jesus’ claim to be God stepping into history is the only way to be rightly related to God, the Creator of the universe.

Are Hindus tolerant of the public practice of authentic Christianity in countries where Hinduism dominates?

Summary of the debate

My snarky comments are in italics.

—-
Hindu_Anil:
– explains Hinduism: impersonal unknowable Brahma, incarnations
– all religions are paths to the impersonal divine (pantheism with polytheistic elements)

Christian_Sunil:
– former Hindu, convert because of lack of meaning and purpose, describes conversion
– changed from works-based salvation to salvation by grace
– there is a capacity for grace in Hinduism, not just works based
– Christian campus groups do a better job of explaining their religion than Hindus

Christian_Sunil:
– well for me, I did it on my own dealing directly with God, no assistance from Christians

Hindu_Anil:
– I object to Christians going out to convert others to your religion

Christian_Sunil:
– i don’t like the turn or burn style of evangelism
– but asking people the big questions, that’s good evangelism

Hindu_Anil:
– we Hindus don’t evangelize
– we think of Jesus as another deity (an incarnation of Brahma)
– i oppose Christians for saying in public that I am wrong and they are right
– Christians are wrong, and I (a Hindu) am right!

Christian_Sunil:
– but persuasion and conversion is everywhere in the marketplace

Hindu_Anil:
– Christians are mean and they go out plundering countries and killing other people
– converting people to Christianity is the stealing of souls from other countries
– Christianity is an evil religion and Christians are evil people
– I know better what Jesus would do than Christians do, Jesus would not proselytize

Christian_Sunil:
– I am against the use of coercion in evangelism

Hindu_Anil:
– sharing your faith in Jesus as your favorite incarnation among many incarnations is fine (polytheism – the Hindu view)
– but missionaries say that only Christ is the true God and they have no right to say things that are incompatible with Hinduism
– Christians have no right to say that Christ is the true God, that is incompatible with Hinduism
– you need to keep your exclusive views to yourself, but I will force Hinduism on you in public
– you should be prevented by law from expressing your exclusive Christian view in public
– Hindus like me are very very tolerant of other views, so you should agree with Hinduism, not Christianity

Hindu_Jagdish:
– Christianity teaches that Jesus is a son of God, not God himself
– Christians are wrong about the doctrine of the Trinity
– efforts to convert should not involve any good works like giving food or medical treatment

Christian_Sunil:
– Mother Teresa met peoples needs for food and medical care, but she did it as a public Christian
– but this would break your rule about conversion using good works and charity
– so is Mother Teresa a bad person for doing good works as a public Christian?

Hindu_Jagdish:
– Hindus believe that there are many ways to achieve union with God
– they are all equal, you can follow the path you like to be united with God
– we Hindus are very very inclusive, every other path is a right path to God

Hindu_Anil:
– the right to freedom of religion does not allow you to say that Christianity is correct
– Jesus did not say that you go and condemn people of other religions

Christian_Sunil:
– but I convert people by my love and self-sacrifice, not through coercion

Hindu_Anil:
– it’s ok to be a Christian if you keep it to yourself and don’t tell anyone else that their religion is wrong

Christian_Sunil:
– are you trying to force your view of religion on me? in public?

Hindu_Anil:
– to say that my religion is false is to breach my human right to exist
– it’s coercive to offer people food and then try to evangelize them

Hindu_Jagdish:
– how do you define secularism?

Christian_Sunil:
– living as though this life were all there is, that religious meanings don’t matter in public life

Hindu_Jagdish:
– Hindus have no problem with that view, it’s in the Vedas

Christian_Sunil:
– India is becoming secular as it grows into part of the global economy
– secularism has the goal of being happy in this life without any accountability to God

Hindu_Anil:
– in opposition to secularism, all faiths should unite on the Hindu concept of the impersonal divine

Christian_Sunil:
– the solution to secularism is found by a personal encounter with God

Hindu_Anil:
– I became a Hindu as a result of performing Hindu rituals as I grew up in a Hindu background

Christian_Sunil:
– a person’s decision to become a Christian is a result of their own inquiry and free decision

Hindu_Anil:
– the purpose of Hinduism is to make people happy and to achieve achieve world peace
– Hindus believe that God is indescribable and unknowable (pantheism)
– everyone has to choose the Incarnation they like to make themselves happy (polytheism)
– Christianity is one incarnation of the Hindu doctrine of impersonal divine (pantheism)
– so all religions are valid because everyone chooses the incarnation they like, we have billions and billions to choose from
– that’s how we will get world peace, by having everyone agree with my view of religion (pantheism and polytheism)
– isn’t it terrible that Christians can tell Hindus that they will go to Hell without Christ
– Jesus said himself that it’s wrong to judge others, although I’m judging you right now!

Christian_Sunil:
– well we should certainly try to be gentle and respectful

Hindu_Anil:
– you can’t say that I am wrong about my religious views, freedom of speech doesn’t cover that speech
– everything that is in the Bible is in the Hindu Scriptures, and the Hindu Scriptures has even more
– anything in the Bible that contradicts Hinduism was invented much later by deluded people
– the Bible doesn’t teach that Jesus is the only true path to God, if you throw out the non-Hindu parts

Christian_Manjula:
– i was once a Jain but now I’m a Christian, and Christianity makes my life meaningful

Hindu_Anil:
– a person can be a Christian, so long as they accept that Christianity is actually Hinduism

Christian_Manjula:
– actually, Christians believe that people are sinful and that Jesus’ death atones for that sin

Hindu_Anil:
– oh Hindus don’t believe that!
– in the Bible, the jews are trying to stone Jesus, and Jesus says that they are all Gods (this is not in the Bible unless he means what Satan says)
– that’s consistent with Hinduism

Christian_Sunil:
– am I allowed to say that I disagree with your beliefs?
– the discovery that washing hands reduces deaths during child birth was ridiculed, but it’s true
– my understanding of Christ is different from what Hindus believe about Christ
– these questions are matters of life and death
– if my research is correct, then this world is in a terrible state without Christ
– because I love other people, I need to do what I can to share Christ with others
– I need to be able to discuss and disagree about it in public

Hindu_Anil:
– well, you can’t say that my religion is false – that’s going too far, but I can say your religion is false

Christian_Sunil:
– i’m not saying that I am better than you, just that my view is true, based on the evidence

Hindu_Anil:
– no you don’t have the truth, that is just your personal preference FOR YOU
– i have a personal preference, and my personal preference is true FOR ME
– you can’t say that you have the truth to me, and laws should prevent you from saying that

Hindu_Anil:
– Jesus said nothing contrary to Hinduism
– it’s only much much later that people added Christian doctrines to the Bible
– everything Jesus taught is consistent with Hinduism, even if the Bible doesn’t say that

News

Canadian federal government reviewing affirmative action policies

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Story from the National Post.

Excerpt:

The Conservatives have ordered a review of federal government affirmative action policies, saying the public service should hire based on merit, not race or ethnicity.

Cabinet ministers Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney announced the review of the Public Service Employment Act, along with any related practices and policies, on Thursday. “While we support diversity in the public service, we want to ensure that no Canadian is barred from opportunities in the public service based on race or ethnicity,” Mr. Day, the Treasury Board President, said in a statement.

Mr. Kenney, meanwhile, was more blunt in his calls for a meritocracy.

“I strongly agree with the objective of creating a public service that reflects the diversity of Canada, and with fair measures designed to reach that goal. But we must ensure that all Canadians have an equal opportunity to work for their government based on merit, regardless of race or ethnicity,” said the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism.

Under the current policy, the federal government targets four “employment equity groups” identified in the Employment Equity Act as being reflective of Canada’s wider diversity: visible minorities, aboriginals, people with disabilities and women.

And consider this editorial about the review.

Excerpt:

A cursory review of the federal public service job website reveals that all positions contain the following statement on their application:

The Public Service of Canada is committed to building a skilled, diverse workforce reflective of Canadian society. As a result, it promotes employment equity and encourages candidates to indicate voluntarily on their application if they are a woman, an Aboriginal person, a person with a disability or a member of a visible minority group.

This statement appears whether you are applying for work as a cabin inspector, a financial officer, a telephone interviewer, or an administrative assistant.  While it is intended to promote the hiring of “disadvantaged groups”, it has the effect of discriminating against other groups, even when those groups are, ironically, underrepresented in the positions that are being filled.

Indeed, for certain jobs, and even overall, it appears that affirmative action would need to be applied in the opposite direction, at least where the sexes are concerned.   In the federal civil service, 54.7% of employees are female, as were 57% of employees hired in 2008/09. But only 51% of the population is female.  It would thus appear that men need help, not women.

The opposition parties (the socialist Liberals and the communist New Democrat Party) oppose the review because they’re racists. They judge people based on the color of their skin, not on the content of their character.

Mentoring

You should read Theodore Dalrymple’s “Life At The Bottom” for free online!

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That’s right. I bought the book and gave it to my Dad, because Thomas Sowell endorsed it. My Dad read this book and he loved it. I read the book and I loved it. And now my co-workers are borrowing it from me.

What’s it about? Well the author is a psychologist in a hospital that deals with a lot of criminals and victims of crime. So he gets to see the worldview of the “underclass” up close, and to understand how the policies of the compassionate secular left are really working at the street level. The theme of the book is that the left advances policies in order to feel good about themselves, even though the policies actually hurt the poor and vulnerable far more than they help them. And the solution of the elites is more of the same.

The whole book is available ONLINE for free! From City Journal!

Table of Contents

The Knife Went In 5
Goodbye, Cruel World 15
Reader, She Married Him–Alas 26
Tough Love 36
It Hurts, Therefore I Am 48
Festivity, and Menace 58
We Don’t Want No Education 68
Uncouth Chic 78
The Heart of a Heartless World 89
There’s No Damned Merit in It 102
Choosing to Fail 114
Free to Choose 124
What Is Poverty? 134
Do Sties Make Pigs? 144
Lost in the Ghetto 155
And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day 167
The Rush from Judgment 181
What Causes Crime? 195
How Criminologists Foster Crime 208
Policemen in Wonderland 221
Zero Intolerance 233
Seeing Is Not Believing 244

Lots more essays are here, all from City Journal.

My favorite passage

The only bad thing about reading it online is that you miss one of the best quotes from the introduction. But I’ll type it out for you.

The disastrous pattern of human relationships that exists in the underclass is also becoming common higher up the social scale. With increasing frequency I am consulted by nurses, who for the most part come from and were themselves traditionally members of (at least after Florence Nightingale) the respectable lower middle class, who have illegitimate children by men who first abuse and then abandon them. This abuse and later abandonment is usually all too predictable from the man’s previous history and character; but the nurses who have been treated in this way say they refrained from making a judgment about him because it is wrong to make judgments. But if they do not make a judgment about the man with whom they are going to live and by whom they are going to have a child, about what are they ever going to make a judgment?

“It just didn’t work out,” they say, the “it” in question being the relationship that they conceive of having an existence independent of the two people who form it, and that exerts an influence on their on their lives rather like an astral projection. Life is fate.

This is something I run into myself. I think that young people today prefer moral relativists as mates, because they are afraid of being judged and rejected by people who are too serious about religion and morality. The problem is that if you choose someone who doesn’t take religion and morality seriously, then you can’t rely on them to behave morally and exercise spiritual leadership when raising children.

An excerpt

Here’s one of my favorite passages from “Tough Love”, in which he describes how easily he can detect whether a particular man has violent tendencies on sight, whereas female victims of domestic violence – and even the hospital nurses – cannot or will not recognize the signs.

All the more surprising is it to me, therefore, that the nurses perceive things differently. They do not see a man’s violence in his face, his gestures, his deportment, and his bodily adornments, even though they have the same experience of the patients as I. They hear the same stories, they see the same signs, but they do not make the same judgments. What’s more, they seem never to learn; for experience—like chance, in the famous dictum of Louis Pasteur—favors only the mind prepared. And when I guess at a glance that a man is an inveterate wife beater (I use the term “wife” loosely), they are appalled at the harshness of my judgment, even when it proves right once more.

This is not a matter of merely theoretical interest to the nurses, for many of them in their private lives have themselves been the compliant victims of violent men. For example, the lover of one of the senior nurses, an attractive and lively young woman, recently held her at gunpoint and threatened her with death, after having repeatedly blacked her eye during the previous months. I met him once when he came looking for her in the hospital: he was just the kind of ferocious young egotist to whom I would give a wide berth in the broadest daylight.

Why are the nurses so reluctant to come to the most inescapable of conclusions? Their training tells them, quite rightly, that it is their duty to care for everyone without regard for personal merit or deserts; but for them, there is no difference between suspending judgment for certain restricted purposes and making no judgment at all in any circumstances whatsoever. It is as if they were more afraid of passing an adverse verdict on someone than of getting a punch in the face—a likely enough consequence, incidentally, of their failure of discernment. Since it is scarcely possible to recognize a wife beater without inwardly condemning him, it is safer not to recognize him as one in the first place.

This failure of recognition is almost universal among my violently abused women patients, but its function for them is somewhat different from what it is for the nurses. The nurses need to retain a certain positive regard for their patients in order to do their job. But for the abused women, the failure to perceive in advance the violence of their chosen men serves to absolve them of all responsibility for whatever happens thereafter, allowing them to think of themselves as victims alone rather than the victims and accomplices they are. Moreover, it licenses them to obey their impulses and whims, allowing them to suppose that sexual attractiveness is the measure of all things and that prudence in the selection of a male companion is neither possible nor desirable.

Often, their imprudence would be laughable, were it not tragic: many times in my ward I’ve watched liaisons form between an abused female patient and an abusing male patient within half an hour of their striking up an acquaintance. By now, I can often predict the formation of such a liaison—and predict that it will as certainly end in violence as that the sun will rise tomorrow.

At first, of course, my female patients deny that the violence of their men was foreseeable. But when I ask them whether they think I would have recognized it in advance, the great majority—nine out of ten—reply, yes, of course. And when asked how they think I would have done so, they enumerate precisely the factors that would have led me to that conclusion. So their blindness is willful.

Go read the rest! This is pure wisdom. And by wisdom I mean an awareness and familiarity with the objective moral that binds human action.

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