Kushwant Singh on Religious conversion

Faith, no more

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Khushwant Singh

October 03, 2008 Hindustan Times 

First Published: 21:44 IST(3/10/2008)

Last Updated: 21:51 IST(3/10/2008)

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Recent incidents of violence and vandalism against Christians and their churches deserve to be condemned unreservedly. They have blackened the fair face of Mother India and ruined the reputation of Hindus being the most religiously tolerant people in the world. At the same time, we must take a closer look at people who convert from one faith to another.

To start with, let it be understood that these days there are no forced conversions anywhere in the world. India is no exception. Those who assert that the poor, innocent and ignorant of India are being forced to accept Christianity are blatant liars. A few, very few educated and well-to-do men and women convert to another faith when they do not find solace in the faith of their ancestors. Examples are to be found in America and Europe of men and women of substance turning from Judaism and Christianity to Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism.

There are also men and women who convert to the faith of those they wish to marry. We have plenty of cases of Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh inter-marriages. However, the largest number of converts come from communities discriminated against. The outstanding example was that of Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar who led his Mahar community to embrace Buddhism because they were discriminated against by upper caste Hindus. This is also true of over 90 per cent of Indian Muslims whose ancestors being lower caste embraced Islam which gave them equal status. That gives lie to the often-repeated slander that Islam made converts by the sword.

An equally large number of people converted out of gratitude. They were neglected, ignorant and poor. When strangers came to look after them, opened schools and hospitals for them, taught them, healed them and helped them to stand on their own feet to hold their heads high, they felt grateful towards their benefactors. Most of them were Christian missionaries who worked in remote villages and brought hope to the lives of people who were deprived of hope.

To this day, Christian missionaries run the best schools, colleges and hospitals in our country. They are inexpensive and free of corruption. They get converts because of the sense of gratitude they generate. Can this be called forcible conversion? Why don’t the great champions of Hinduism look within their hearts and find out why so many are disenchanted by their pretensions of piety? Let them first set their own houses in order, purge the caste system out of Hindu society and welcome with open arms all those who wish to join them.

No one will then convert from Hinduism to another religion. source 

Relgionless People, Godly people

God has no religion. Religions may point to God. No religion has God. There are godly people in religions. this blog wants to search God in all religions as well as in secular faiths or no faiths, God being the  dream, fulfillment, values and hope of the world. No God with out world, world cannot be without God. God is in the world; God transcends world, but not without world, the creation. This blog is on people who searched God; of people used by God; people who made life meaningful and worth living.

Every one sitting under One’s own Fig tree and One’s own Vines

Perhaps this image of every one sitting under One’s own Fig tree and One’s own Vines, captivates my imagination of future free society more than any other images of eschatology in the Bible. There are, of course, more popular and beautiful images like turning the instruments of war into agricultural implements or a village where all animals, including humans living together in an ecologically well tuned harmonious ambiance or a city the gates of which are open always and where all the people of earth are welcome, through which living waters flow through the middle of the street and on the banks of which through out the year fruit giving trees stand and where healing is free for all. All these images are captivating and one can choose as many as one wants. Or we can make a combination of these images. These are all secular images, propagated by religious prophets. In one of the images in the book of Revelations, it is specifically stated that there is no temple in the city and God is the temple. And it has been the classical teaching of the Bible that we do see God in heaven not more than we see God on earth. Sadhu Sundar Singh emphasized this aspect in his vision of heaven. Paul says that our understanding of God will not be perfect even in eternity. No one has the ultimate answer to our questions of being and meaning. That means we will be continuing our search for God, meaning of everything even in eternity. Mark S. Hiem envisaged pluralistic salvations. One single image of salvation does not satisfy the multiple spiritual needs of human experience and imagination. Salvation pictured by one religion does not satisfy the spiritual need or aspirations of another religious community. Even one religious community cannot satisfy its members with a single image of salvation or even one image of God, though some dominant image may satisfy the majority, or forced to accept the dominant view, often by suppressing the differing teachings or heresies. In every religion, there are several images of God and salvations in dormancy. Different sects in religions are proofs of different God concepts and salvation images within religions. Trinity or Trimurthy express the human desire to bring different God concepts together. This multiple understanding of truth, or search of multiple truths are present even in religious scriptures like the Bible. Several stories of creation, sometimes conflicting, several Gospels of Jesus Christ, correcting the chronology and even theology, like John correcting the sacramental understanding of the synoptics, validate multiplicity of not only methodologies, but even of the ends. The image of living under my own fig tree and vines is more satisfying to my personal aspirations, though I enjoy other visions of the future. The point is that each one is endowed with such peculiar traits, DNA, that each one has to enter into a search for meaning that is unique to them. Forcing all our thought into one picture is not biblical, not scriptural (any religious scripture), or do justice to our secular visions of future. We need multiple images of the end of life, goal of life as it suit to our personal need and secular and religious freedom to pursue our own vision of the future without being forced to any dominant view. That freedom is important to my spirituality. My religious life is pursuing my spirituality. It is the withering away of state as well as religion, a religionless world, a stateless world, where the knowledge of God and world will guide our live-in-experience.

Faith and Ideology