Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

18

Christianity

Poor Christ.

A nice enough gentleman from most accounts. Yet those who swear by him keep him hanging on the cross. Poor, poor Christ.

He who could not tolerate sham in the name of religion. Remember his going to a Jewish temple—he was a Jew—with a broom and determinedly sweeping out all the pretentious priests?

He must be hanging his head in shame at the doings of his 'followers.'

Christian clergy and the laity alike felt no shame in doing everything in the name of their Lord. The wars fought in the name of the 'Apostle of Peace,' and the cruelties perpetrated by the Roman Catholic Church in the name of the 'Apostle of Love,' beggar all description.

It was Europe's awakened intellectual spirit that began to revolt against the horribly inhuman acts of the Church in the name of its 'true religion.' The more they scrutinized the Christian dogma, the more the European intellect found out on what falsehood were based the claims of the Christian clergy.

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Edward Gibbon (1737-94), analysing that religion's claims, said, "Christians ... exacted an implicit submission to their doctrines without being able to produce a single argument that could engage the attention of men of sense and learning."¹

As a religion Christianity is rather irrational. To take but one point. It says that those who do not believe in Christ will perpetually roast in hell. It stands to reason then that all those who were born before Christ, including his grandparents and parents, are even now getting roasted in hell? What a peculiar religion! It makes no sense to me.

The intellectual assault on Christian missionaries was led by Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694-1778). He was joined by many more, among whom were Madame de Steal (1766-1817), and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826).

Voltaire, who dominated the intellectual world of the eighteenth century, was also endowed with a lion's heart. He took on the might of the Roman Catholic Church. Throughout his life he waged a war to cut Christianity to size. His discerning intellect saw through the deliberate falsehoods spread by the missionaries, not to mention the cupidity of the Europeans sustained by Christian doctrine. "The Europeans," he pointed out, "have swarmed over India. They have brought war into that country. Many of them have amassed immense fortunes, but few have bothered to know about the antiquity of this land which, in the days of yore, was more renowned for her religion, her sciences and her laws than for her riches which nowadays have become the only reason of our travels there." He did not

¹ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

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stop with deploring his countrymen's greed but was scathingly scornful. "Want created the first robbers. They invaded India because she was rich, and surely a rich people is united, civilized and polished long before a society of thieves." That remark applies not only to India but to other countries also, like the Americas.

Voltaire had a profound reason for his lifelong revolt against Christianity. "The Indian books announce only peace and gentleness, they forbid killing of animals. The Hebrew books speak only of massacring men and beasts. Everything is slaughtered in the name of the Lord." How come the compassionate Christian God had no compassion for his other creatures? Is it because animals, birds, fish et al., do not need a scripture to tell them what is good and what is bad? Because Earth-Nature had endowed them with an instinct? On the other hand the 'heathens' always believed that being a part of the creation they should live in harmony with Nature. Have you read the moving, soul-stirring speech of the Red-Indian Chief to the White Chief? That tells it all.

What gives? Exploitation. That is the mainspring impelling the Westerners. "That spring," pointed out a friend to me, "is to be found on the very first page of the Bible." It opened my eyes. Did not the 'Lord' tell his flock to go forth and exploit the earth? It's not for nothing that Mother had such a hearty dislike for the 'Lord' of that religion. If we read but a few sayings of the 'Lord' we realize with shock the characteristic traits of a dictator. 'Ye shall," enjoined the Lord on them, "utterly destroy all the places wherein the nations which ye possess served their gods." The 'good' Christians did so. Exactly like

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the 'good' Islamists who followed them.

The Christian clergy began their 'good' work in Europe itself. They set out to erase the past. Culturally and materially. Under the pre-Christian Celtic society women's "position was highly advanced compared to their position in other European societies," comments P. B. Ellis. The honoured women, depolarized by the Roman Church, became 'chattels' in a male-dominated society. Christian clergy engaged in a systematic destruction of Roman places of worship, of old Druidic holy sites, of Greek temples—any 'pagan' holy site became rubble. "Historians of the Roman Empire have documented the large-scale destruction of 'pagan' temples by Christian clergy from the fourth century onwards."¹ By the end of the fifth century, the famous Greek temple at Eleusis, where Demeter—Mother Earth—was worshipped, was changed into a graveyard. The rapidity of the destruction is rather breathtaking when we learn that it was only in November 392 that the Roman Emperor Theodosius had banned all forms of public worship other than the Christian.

Madame de Staēl said succinctly, "Pagans divinize life, Christians divinize death." And what death! During the Spanish Inquisition, in a span of fifteen years, between 1483 and 1498, a single Dominican priest who was the Inquisitor-General, sentenced over 114,000 victims—of which 10,220 were burned.

When Napoleon conquered Spain in 1808, the battle-

¹ History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, by Sita Ram Goel (Voice of India). All quotes from this book are with the kind permission of the author. He even gave me carte blanche to quote from any book published by Voice of India. Isn't he nice !

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hardened soldiers of the French Army, accustomed to war and bloodshed, could not stomach the sight of so many cells, dungeons and instruments of torture in a monastery in Madrid, where hundreds of naked victims huddled in torture chambers. They freed the victims and blew up the monastery with gunpowder.

"Millions of innocent men, women and children," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned...."' Europeans themselves were among the worst victims of the brutality of Catholic religion. It has been computed from historical records that within three hundred years from 1484, nine million persons were put to death for witchcraft in Europe. The Catholic Church seems to be a hotbed of superstition. We do not know the total count of victims that perished before, in the preceding centuries.

We have seen a little while ago that under the leadership of Vasco da Gama, who landed at Calicut on 20 May 1498, the Portuguese were the first to reach India. For a number of years they had a free field. Samudiri, the ruler of Calicut (modern

¹ "For more than a century Native Canadians were abused mentally, physically and sexually in schools run by Christian churches. The goals of the schools, with government support, was to de-Indianize the children, a process which robbed them of their rich cultural and linguistic heritage ... some natives assert that the residential school system was nothing less than organized genocide, with 50,000 school children dying in the system, most of infectious disease but some of outright murder." (Hinduism Today, March-April 2001, p. 32-33) The wheel seems to be turning now. The Native Canadians are fighting back. The Canadian government has given them a written apology. As for the Churches, sinking in a "morass of lawsuits," they are facing bankruptcy in legal settlements.

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Kozhikode) received da Gama with great courtesy and gave him the right to trade. Soon the Portuguese spread their tentacles. While they had the Bay of Bengal to themselves, the Portuguese sailed up the Ganges, and penetrating the interior fell like a pack of wolves on Bengali villages. Not only did they plunder all they could, but the pirates captured able-bodied men, and as many young women as they could pack into the holds of their ships. Packed like sardines, cabined and fettered, starving and thirsty, untold numbers perished during the voyages. Those who survived were sold away as slaves. I do not even mention forced conversion of Bengalis. The boast of the Portuguese was that they made more Christians in a single year by forcible conversion than all the missionaries put together in ten. Exactly like Hitler telling Bishop Berning of Osnabruch, "I am only doing what the Church has done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively."¹

It was sometime after 1510 that Goans called the Portuguese commander Alphonso d'Albuquerque to oust the Muslim rulers whose religious persecution of the Hindus, including the forced conversions and the destruction of many Hindu temples, had become intolerable. The Goans did not know that they had dug a canal and invited crocodiles to their home. They found out soon enough. Albuquerque became the founder of Portuguese power in India.

Let me share with you a little story. An acquaintance of ours passed on to us a book of his family history.² They had come

¹Dead Sea Scrolls, by N. S. Rajaram, p. 50.

²The Sowcar Bappai Family (2^nd ed. 1970), or The Pais of Mangalore. Courtesy Major Pai.

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down to Goa when the Saraswati river went dry. The family belonged to the clan known as Saraswat Brahmins.

The Portuguese made their base at Goa. As they settled down, they began to show their true colours. Goa, in the antiquities was known as Gomantaka, as mentioned in the Mahabharata. "At least from 1540 onwards," writes T. R. de Souza, a Christian, "and in the island of Goa before that year, all the Hindu idols had been annihilated or had disappeared, all the temples had been destroyed and their sites and building materials were in most cases utilised to erect new Christian churches and chapels."¹

Well, mere destruction of temples, erecting new churches and chapels, all by native slave labour, was not enough for the new masters. No, it was not enough to have brought to a halt all the important welfare works of the village, and sent "the village economy in Goa into bankruptcy," as remarked N. Sastri. "Missionaries," said Charles Dickens, "are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it." A band of monkeys in a banana grove could not have wrought more havoc.

No, all that wasn't enough. The Portuguese let loose a reign of terror. Francis Xavier arrived in India in 1542. He was one of the founders of the Jesuit order. And began the terror of Inquisition. Francis Xavier had come with the firm resolve to uproot paganism from the native soil and plant Christianity instead.

So it was sauve-qui-peut with our Saraswat Brahmins. It was a precipitate flight. Hugging the coast they sailed down south

1 As quoted by Sita Ram Goel in History of Hindu-Christian Encounters.

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and found their new home in South Kanara "where life and religion were quite secure under the Nayaka rulers of Keladi." They had managed to save their family Goddess, Mahālasā.

Those who were unable to escape, and who would not embrace Christianity, were tortured, then sold as slaves. That is, those who did not die as a result of thumbscrews, stretching racks, leg crushers, spiked wheels, burning sulphur, quicklime ... and holy water. Then the 'heretics' were dragged through Goa's main square, and amidst a carnival atmosphere were burned alive at the stake.

All that came startlingly alive when one morning Satprem told me the nightmare he had had. You know perhaps that Satprem was born on Giordano Bruno street in Paris. Bruno, a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher who regarded God as the unity reconciling spirit and matter, was burned at the stake by the Inquisitors for his belief. Satprem saw the backs of two black-robed figures enter a white painted small church through a door,¹ about fifty metres or so from where he was. Those figures were sinister. Almost instantly he felt flames licking his fingers. Then he saw that he was bound to a stake with cords, his hands tied behind him, and stark naked; as the flames burned his hands, he cried out, "But I am alive! I am alive!" His own cry jolted him awake.

Can our body's cells keep their memories for so long? Do our bodies contain or are formed by the conscious cells of our past forms?

¹ I heard that the door of the Office of the Inquisition at Goa is still standing, though the building itself is in ruins.

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Vasco da Gama's grandnephew, Luiz Vas Camoens, had set sail for Goa in 1553. He saw for himself the havoc wrought by the policy of 'Saint' Francis Xavier. A few lines from Camoens' epic poem, Os Lusiadas.

"What new disaster dire

intendest thou

to lead these kingdoms and folk

into

what deaths, what horror

must they swallow now

under pretence to spread

Religion true!"

*

* *

1755. All Saints Day. Lisbon.

All the Christians, devout or not so devout, were in churches.

A devastating earthquake struck. Accompanied by tidal waves and fires.

Church roofs came down on the praying Christians. Sixty thousand souls went straight up to heaven.

Or was it hell? Did the sins of their forebears finally visit the 'successive generation'?

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