…on behalf of three misguided hecklers (thanks, Anonymous). I guess I wasn’t the only Christian who was saddened by the actions of a few fringe-dwellers. See? Team Jesus isn’t totally teh suck. 🙂
Zed told rediff.com from his home in Reno, Nevada, “I’ve received nearly 100 e-mails — and most of them from total strangers and I don’t know how they got my e-mail address — apologising for the disruption of my prayer by some of these Christian fundamentalists.”
He said many of these e-mails had said, “I am also a Christian but I don’t appreciate what happened with those people protesting, and I apologise for their misguided actions.“
“They also congratulated me for my prayer and for being the first Hindu chaplain to open a US Senate session,” he said.
He said that he had also received some e-mails from some Congressional aides who had also apologised for the disruption by these persons purporting to be from a group calling themselves Operation Save America, a Christian right-wing organisation.
What’s more wicked: intolerance or humbly offering a prayer?
The protestors shouted from the gallery, among other things, ‘Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight.’
They should ask for forgiveness for being obnoxious.
Zed said he had not received a single hate mail “or any kind of nasty mail at all. I have not got any negative mail or correspondence.”
So, goodness prevailed. More goodness? Recognizing that Hindus are just as American as anyone else and deserve to be treated as such. As long as prayers do open the Senate, they should be inclusive, to accurately reflect the various faiths that a Senator’s constituents practice. It’s only polite. And right:
Meanwhile, the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, DC, wrote letters to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, who facilitated Zed’s prayer in the Senate, and to the Senate Chaplain Barry C Black congratulating them for facilitating the first Hindu prayer in the Senate and bemoaning the unfortunate incident of the protest by the members of the Christian right-wing outfit…
“We are writing to express how much we deeply appreciate your efforts to insure that the tradition of opening Senate sessions with prayer remains a process that not only accurately reflects the diversity of our great country, but which celebrates that religious diversity as one of our greatest strengths.”
I eagerly await irrational and inapposite comments which ask, “But…where are the apologetic emails to Graham Staines’ loved ones from Hindus, who should be collectively responsible for his brutal murder? Huh??” Oh, wait…I don’t. Such comments are not germane (or logical for that matter).
Similarly, Christians aren’t collectively to blame for the rude, disrespectful outburst which interrupted Zed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t express our sorrow and disagreement with such behavior. All that is necessary for the triumph of fundamentalism is that good people do nothing. Whatsoever we sow, we shall also reap. If we sow intolerance and disrespect, what else are we going to be shown by others? And would we deserve anything else?
All Catholics are Christian, not all Christians are Catholic. People are converting to other strains. If you want to snark about how Christianity doesn’t help once-Hindu converts, at least be accurate instead of triumphantly seizing upon ONE wiki article.
I work hard to be fair about how I perceive and address other religions, I wish some of you would do the same with regards to Christianity.
Right.. This is what I get from wiki.
Is that right??.
PG is not WASP though.
The Staines incident? I feel sorry for his kids and for that I hope the perpetrators swing…but as for Staines himself, dont give two hoots. I am fed upto my gills about evangelicals in India telling me how my Hindu religion is a path to darkness and how Jesus will redeem me. Frankly, evangelicals have had it coming a long time. The worst hypocrites who yell “oppression” each time anyone pays them back in their own coin. So they reach poverty stricken areas, hand out dollops of cash and ask for a change of faith, and their opponents finally get incited and hit back with violence and thats all the fault of the latter, and not the former. Great.
So what exactly is the problem for a poverty sticken man/woman to change his/her faith for getting more money to make his/her life better. Do you think the missionaries don’t pay the promised amount??.. I think the opponents should come up with more money or a better plan to improve the lives of poverty stricken men/women instead of threatening violence.. Agree ??
Ponniyin, my comment was actually inspired by iABD, not you. Sorry for not being clear about whom I was responding to…your stats do sound right, I just get really annoyed when Catholicism (or Protestantism or Pentecostal…) is conflated with Christianity.
And I am in turn annoyed by Samir’s comment #39 where he glibly says that the ideals of Christianity (he doesn’t differentiate between sects) will free the minds of people oppressed by the society around Hinduism. Read my comment #45 – my point is that all religions when realized have ugly aspects, and people can equally be inspired by the ideals of every religion, but it is either stupid or disingenuous to compare the philosophy of one religion to the realized version of another – either compare religions on the ideal level, or on the visible level.
For the purposes of this point, I don’t think it’s important to distinguish between the sects of Christianity, or even between different religions, as I stated in #150, the comment which annoyed you.
By the way, agree with Ponniyin Selvan’s #155.
Agreed. I’m a Hindu who has no problem whatsoever with anyone converting to any religion, for whatever reason, whether it be personal salvation/enlightenment or just to put more roti on the table for their hungry kids. What does it matter?
Before Hindus complain on this they need first to offer the same incentives to the poor.
.
Unitarian Universalists, a place that we frequented, do this ‘fusion’ thing with all major religions. There are several self-described atheists among them. As well as several self-described Christians.
Camille, I wanted to thank you for that understanding and support and also address the following, partly said in jest by HMF:
As a parent, my first responsibility is to raise kids who are not alienated from the society they live in. I owe this to both my kids and the society. I want to instill emotional intellgence first before feeding their I.Q. or their intellectual capabilities.
The last thing i want is a bunch of intellectual, pompous asses, for kids, even though I am myself capable of being one at times. I want them to relate to humanity in all of its fraility–not just to the strong but also to the meek; not just to the arrogant but also to the humble; not just to the callous but also to the sensitive among us. As we can see, even on this thread, some of us are so lost in the theoretical nuances (or hiding behind nuances); others are openly brash. Some of us can so very easily remind others to forget or justify a killing, others cannot see that real, impoverished human lives are used as pawns in our power games.
In real life, as opposed to internet life, we can actually see the faces of the persons we hurt. And I want my children to know whom they will be hurting, and how, if and when they do decide to become one of us.
Despite other things, I am a product of my grandmother’s human fraility; my husband–a product of his mother’s fraility. These women pulled themselves out of their loneliness and hurdles through their faith–in idols and abstraction, respectively. My kids, even though they belong to a different cohort and are given a different set of variables in life (education, opportunity, choices, _____), should understand and respect where they came from, and be able to accept at face value those people (peers and previous generations) who still rely on their versions of faith to pull them through difficult patches.
As far as I am concerned, that is the first step towards their enlightenment.
I am assuming you and your friends are at least lower middle-class as you are writing in English and are using the computer/internet. If people from a socioeconomic class that is lower than yours and from a place far away from you, converts in peaceful conditions, what are the chances that you will hear about it?
This is not a criticism, by the way.
Without disagreeing on this point, I want to also bring up the idea of confounding factors that influence ‘success’ or predict ‘leadership’ roles–factors such as inter-generational interactions in a family that has been edcuated for generations and groomed its sons for leadership roles.
A similar situation is that oft brought-out example of women and cooking that I’ve been asked more than once: Women have cooked and fed their families for generations and generations, but why is it that there are so few world-renowned women chefs? To which I reply, perhaps the women weren’t groomed to go out and make money or a career out of their cooking skills.
Can something similar also contribute to this underrepresentation of lower castes in the administration? I am wondering…without denying that casteism exists among Indian Christians, generally speaking.
All I asked for is the numbers on who converts and from what caste. I’ve just noted down my observations and it is your assumption that my observation is just limited to my friends from the same socio-economic class, not mine. I have mingled with people from different castes and different classes and i do have close relatives in a village that I visit often. I think I have a somewhat balanced perspective and not generalising based ONLY on my experiences.
Not to worry. I read your post within the context of your other posts. I am just wondering how much we do really know because we rely on the media and we hear from VHP/RSS (maybe I shoudl have made it clearer). Even if there are any incentive-based conversions, you and i have made it clear that we have no problems, one way or the other. In fact, I want to go as far as saying that the yhad better get something in return…
This isn’t the first time you’ve used the phrase, have you read Goleman’s book?
I’m not even sure what your original point was, but I guess my point was for a four or five year old, one can’t sit them down and say, “There are so many choices in the world, and you can do any of them and make sure you respect them all” Rather they must be told, yes, told to do something. anything, whether thats putting red powder in the center of their foreheads, or whatever, but some physical act, that’s symbolic of something. Something that upon repeated action will bring about an internal silence and calmness, not because of what the action is, but because of what it symbolizes
I wasn’t aware.
No, but I will check it out.
I haven’t thought of it that way. I need to think about it on my own.
But my initial, immediate response: some symbols/actions I would like my children to pick up and remember me by are some of those things I listed in comment #99. They do these things with me, as and when they can, as their age allows them to–whether it is watering my herbs or reading before bed or even trying to do yoga. I hope that these family rituals play the same role…
i think the underlying assumption here is that low-caste Indians, especially in rural areas, are unlikely to comprehend English at a level that would facilitate conversion based purely on the missionary’s theological arguments.
if this is true, then it is likely that the desire for greater material status/posessions is a major factor in the low-caste Indian’s decision to convert.
It would also jibe with the current craze in missionary work: the method of planting a church, “seeding” some Bibles, giving a good show to the natives and then leaving.
muralimannered, I am not sure what you are saying, perhaps because I was/am rushing through, and do not give the time and consideration people’s writing should be given. My comment #162 to Ponniyin Selvan had a 2nd paragraph that I deleted at the last minute (that created a misunderstanding between him and me, especially since i should have replaced all the ‘you’s with ‘we’s). Briefly, what i wanted to share then was that a family friend, a Dr. who has worked in rural/remote areas for about 15 years, bringing basic primary health care to people, used to say that things were a lot complicated/misunderstood/misreported than the mere caricatured versions of ‘rich missionaries’ we get from the media as well as biased sources. I for one don’t think that missionaries are all white, gungho evangelists, preaching in English, and full of money. I have heard of non-evangelist Christian Indian doctors providing health care at pitifully underfunded mission hospitals only because they personally believe in service and expect nothing in return. I think that
While those things aren’t bad, I’d classify them as “activities” rather than the precise physical actions I was referring to. For example, it could be placing two palms together or it could be sticking one finger in your ear and the other up your nostril, the point is, it’s a physical action that’s repeated enough times to bring about an internal state (one of peace & stillness), somewhat similar to the theories of NLP. Although NLP follows techniques to bring out a multitude of states.
obviously not. I’ve known a few non-white (Indian, Filipino) missionaries in my time. What i’d like to do is take the debate past the anecdotal stage and into the empirical.
what I was trying to do, was set up, in the absence of hard data (though I will endeavour to find it), a logical framework for deducing whether material gain is a major factor in the conversion of low-caste/tribal peoples, especially in rural areas, to Christianity.
I suspect, with the English-speaking protestant (not main-line churches but those now designated in mainstream discourse as Evangelistic) missionary efforts, that a significant portion of those conversions are facilitated not by reasoned, theological discourse, but a desire on the part of the converted to improve their economic and social standing within Indian society.
We all know about India’s division based on religion and that is what exactly happening in north east insurgency. If you observe the conversion of pre, post-independence, and present day figures ( as i mentioned in my post @ 69) and the local church’s involvement in this separatist and terror activities, one will get a feeling that its high time to stop all forms of forced religious conversions and re-conversions. I feel that there should be a ‘religious conversion disarmament’ in India on this matter by a law. As far as I know nobody including Muslims except some Christian organizations (obviously richly funded by west) have an objection to this law.
there are a lot of theories floating around here like ‘atheist’ and hard line religiosity etc, but for me as an Indian no theory is important than the†sovereignty and integrity of Indiaâ€Â. And this is where I found problem with religious conversions.
I belive that India is secular, democratic because of its majority population are Hindus. All other states and territories who’s population is minority religion are having movements to separate with India, weather its Kashmir or north-eastern states.