Christian Antagonism to Dharmic Spirituality

Yoga is Satanic because it leads to a worship of Hinduism and “all eastern religions are based on a false belief in reincarnation”.

So proclaims the Chief Exorcist of the Vatican, Father Gabriele Amorth. He is known for many interesting things:

• He has performed 70,000 exorcisms from 1986 to 2010. That makes it 8 exorcisms a day for 24 years consecutively, every day of the those 24 years! By his own admission, it takes anything between few minutes to several hours to do an exorcism. Wonder when he slept?

• He believes the Devil has found his way to Vatican. The Child Abuse, Sex and Gay issues in the Church are all the handiwork of the Devil, who has somehow possessed the Vatican’s Church.

Since he knows the basis of all the issues in Vatican (and outside), has he informed the Chief – Pope himself? His reply is fascinating.

“Of course,” replied Father Amorth. “But he does what he can. It’s a horrifying thing.”

But there is a slight problem, in that being German, the Pope has not much of a background in demonology, with Amorth explaining “there practically aren’t any exorcists [there]”.

Whatever Amorth’s personal view of Vatican and other things may be, his views on Eastern Spirituality and Hinduism and Yoga in particular aren’t in isolation. It seems that even Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict had issued a document in 1999 as the Head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, where he had warned of the dangers from Yoga, Zen, Transcedental Meditation and other “Eastern” Practices.

They could “degenerate into a cult of the body” that debases Christian prayer, the document said.

Where do you come together?

Now, the question is – with this sort of Jehadi and Exclusivist mentality shrouded in Holier-than-thou religiosity, how does one even communicate with such a group? It is disingenuous when such a religious body and its officials come to talk peace with you!

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How can Pope Benedict even talk to Dalai Lama with a straight face? Is there any meaning in “interfaith dialogs”? Aren’t they simply an eyewash?

It is not about secularism that is in the West – no religiosity whatever – but about understanding that one should be free to approach his path, as long as s/he is respectful of others. I may not agree with many but as long as they are doing their own thing and not hindering my way, that’s fine!

Religious Expansionism: Church and Politicians

Now, when this kind of Jehadi-speak is combined with Millions of Dollars and with political clout to change a country’s demography – as is being done in India currently, then it is time to sit up and take notice. Read Saving lives, Harvesting Souls and Preparing for the harvest …, an expose from Tehelka. (For easy reading, please download the entire article in pdf form below). The introduction of the expose says:

A new mood of aggressive evangelism has been emanating from America. Well-funded, superbly networked, backed by the highest of the land, seized of its moral supremacy, it has India as one of its key targets.

And then reveals some more dangerous situation:

Religious expansionism has not witnessed this scale, scope, and state resources in a long time. Detailed investigations by Tehelka reveal that American evangelical agencies have established in India an enormous, well-coordinated and strategised religious conversion plan. The operation was launched in the early 1990s but really came into its own after George W Bush Jr, an avowed born-again Christian, became president of the United States in 2001. Since then, aggressive evangelists have found pro-active support from the new administration in their efforts to convert some sections of Indian society to Christianity. At the heart of this complex and sophisticated operation is a simple strategy-convert locals and then give them the know-how and money to plant their own churches and multiply.

Around the time that Bush Jr moved into the Oval office, a worldwide conversion movement, funded and effected by American evangelical groups, was peaking in India. The movement, which began as AD2000 & Beyond and later morphed into Joshua Project I and Joshua Project II, was designed to be a sledgehammer-a breathtaking, decade-long steamroller of a campaign that would set the stage for a systematic, sophisticated and self-sustaining “harvest” of the “unreached people groups” in India in the 21st century. It was just as the operation was taking off that the script changed. Much to the delight of American evangelicals, one of their own, George Bush Jr, became the occupant of the White House.

In a major policy decision taken very early into his presidency, Bush, on January 29, 2001, unveiled a “faith based” social service initiative that included a new White House office to promote government aid to churches and Christian faith-based organisations. This, in effect, threw the massive weight of the federal government behind religious groups and religious conversions. The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was set up in the White House in the first week of February 2002 and a man called Jim Towey was appointed director. (A snap introduction to Towey: he was the legal counsel to Mother Teresa in the late 1980s.)

Now what is interesting is that Mother Teresa was Catholic and American Christians are mostly not. Yet, the counsel and other resources are shared. Whatever the differences internally, externally the powers-that-be come together as one!

The Religious Right of US, the Vatican and the European Baptists is not only trying to consolidate its own territory in their geography, but also trying to indulge in “Religious Expansionism“. The kind that has rarely happened.

If you see the media and the polity in India targeting the Hindu leaders and tainting anything to do with Spiritual work, you may be rest assured that the “motivation” and consideration for that has been financed from this clique.

It is not a conspiracy theory, but based on established Government programs in the US and Official proclamations of the Churches.

To fully understand the implication of convergence of Religion and Politics, one needs to understand how the US Government (and other European ones – India is familiar with the British-Missionaries nexus in Colonial times) use religion for accession and covert work.

The “spying out” missions that generated the vast ethnographic data of the Indian people also involved detailed study of Dr KS Singh’s ‘People of India Project’ that was launched in 1985 by the Anthropological Society of India (ASI). Under Singh’s leadership, the ASI undertook an ambitious project to chart one of the most far-reaching ethnographic studies in the 20th century. Five hundred scholars spent over 26,000 field days to compile information for these volumes. This gigantic research work came handy for American and Indian strategists to draft their evangelical plans for India. According to Luis Bush, “Never before has this kind of information on India been so carefully surveyed, prepared, well published and distributed…We do not believe it is accidental. God is allowing us to “spy out the land” that we might go in and claim both it and its inhabitants for Him.”

The data collected by experts from Wycliffe/Summer Institute of Linguistics, World Vision (WV) and the International Mission Board/Southern Baptists to compile the Joshua Project Peoples list included a detailed and comprehensive list of the people groups in India as well. Though this may appear normal international research activity – generating ethnographic profiles of non-Christian people groups in the 10/40 window – there are unseen dangers inherent in the compilation of such accurate people-group profiles.

The CIA has publicly admitted to having used Wycliffe/SIL and the Southern Baptists for covert intelligence operations in many parts of the world. The cosy relationship between the Wycliffe and CIA is documented exhaustively in a book Thy Will Be Done written in the 1990s by Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett. The book documents joint CIA-Wycliffe missions to source anthropological data from Latin America. Here’s a quote from the book: “SIL had helped gather anthropological information on the Tarascan Indians that ended up in Nelson Rockefeller’s intelligence files. The files contained cross-references to reveal behavioural patterns among Indian peoples in everything from socialisation (including aggressive tendencies) and personality traits, drives, emotions, and language structure, to political intrigue, kinship ties, traditional authority, mineral resources, exploitation, and labor relations. Rockefeller called these data the Strategic Index of Latin America.” The question that will rattle not only the Indian government, but also outrage the Indian citizens is whether the American-funded “spying missions” carried out by Indian and foreign missionary agencies through more than a decade has resulted in the preparation of a ‘Strategic Index of India’ at the CIA headquarters?

What we have is a situation that has a new colonial agenda and instruments. The ways are different, but the way to use the internal people to better manage far away lands for the power center’s purpose is still intact.

Attachment: Preparing for the harvest.pdf

Featured Image – “Triumph of Christian religion” by Laureti, Vatican Museum