Christ in the Hindu Mind – From Idol-Worship to Ideal-Worship
Three Christian Ideas, their evolution into Liberal ideals and a Hindu rebuttal
1. The Liberty Principle
“There is a Heaven, a place of perfection, and every Man can go to Heaven”
The Liberal Equivalent: Every Man is Free, and in the Future, technologies of convenience will make him even more Free. This Earthly Heaven of Freedom is reached through the Individual pursuit of Happiness and the communal pursuit of such technology.
How it translates in Pop Culture: Beyond the communism that it sold us since the 50s and social degeneracy that it sold us since the 70s, Bollywood in the 2000s offered us an explosion of direct Heaven-Centric Messaging– “Break free from the past and relationships, superpowers await you!”
Here is something from the 2001 smash hit, Dil Chahta Hai –
“Duniya Roothe, Roothne Do
Bandhan Toote, Tootne Do
Koi Chhoote, Chhootne Do, Na Ghabraao
Hum Hain Naye, Andaaz Kyun Ho Puraana
Aankhon Mein Hain Bijliyaan, Saanson Mein Toofaan Hai
Darr Kya Hai Aur Haar Kya, Hum Isse Anjaan Hai
Hamaare Liye Hi To Hai Aasmaan Aur Zameen
Sitaarein Bhi Hum Tod Lenge, Hamein Hai Yakeen”
How it translates in our children’s minds: “Appa, I like it that’s why I will do it”
Reality: There is no Heaven. The Individual Pursuit of Happiness leads immediately to conflict, both internal (depression) and external (competition). A study of conflict, and the individual and communal means of settling conflict (both internal and external) is the obvious starting point to understanding the human condition, something that neither Christianity nor Islam or their spin-offs have understood
2. The Equality Principle
“Every Man is Equal before God regardless of whether he is a saint or a sinner”
The Liberal Equivalent: We all Deserve Equal Rights regardless of our Duties, Capacities, Hard-Work, Intentions, Usefulness to Long-Term Survival or Goodness.
How it translates in Pop Culture: A very important interpretation of The Equality Principle is frequently played out in pop music and movies and that is the idea that the world owes each one of us the right to indulge our emotions and manifest our dreams. In other words, we DESERVE whatever the hell we want. The wildly successful 2016 animation movie Zootopia was chockfull of wokeness but some lines deserve to be called out for the sheer brazenness in the way they lay the ground for today’s Trans movement and tomorrow’s made-to-order babies. Equality has come to be interpreted as everybody deserves everything they can possibly imagine! Here we have a rabbit cop encouraging a baby fox with these memorable words–
“and you little guy…you want to be an elephant when you grow up? You be an elephant! …because this, is Zootopia…anyone can be anything!”
How it translates in our children’s minds: “Appa, if Anna can do it then why not me?”
Reality: To believe that a man of honour and a child rapist are both equal before God raises deep questions about our imagination of God and the nature of the religions that spread this canard. All of Life and Creation is Un-Equal. This diversity is literally the will of the Gods. It does not mean that we must be cruel and unkind to each other. It means we must expend effort in understanding each other and devising rules for collaboration. In the failure to do so, we must design ritualized power-sharing treaties between groups that are as nuanced and fair as possible. Fairness does not mean Equality, Fairness means proportionality. As a last resort, there will be War or excommunication. All of this cannot be ignored and civilization itself led down the garden path by child-like idealists of the BLM variety.
3. The Fraternity Principle
“The Kingdom of God will be established on Earth and every Man will be made Christian (even if we have to kill him to make him, goddammitt!)”
The Liberal Equivalent: Once Democracy and Free Market Enterprise are established all over the world (through war and other unfair means), peace will prevail and we will all speak Hollywood.
How it translates in Pop Culture: Though American Rock music likes to imagine that it is a counter-culture, it is actually a key representative of the deep liberal impulses from which it has sprung. Right from John Lennon’s 1971 hit Imagine which speaks of “A brotherhood of man” with “all the people sharing all the world”, to Michael Jackson’s 1985 hit We Are The World which declares that “We’re all a part of God’s great big family…And the truth, you know, love is all we need” and further on and nearer home to the 2019 sleeper hit movie Gully Boy, in which we are urged to bridge our differences with “real” Hip-Hop –
“Chilaao zor se uthao apne haath tum
Asli Hip-Hop se milayein Hindustan ko
Hindustan ko, haan ji Hindustan ko
Asli Hip-Hop se milayein Hindustan ko
Hindustan ko, haan ji Hindustan ko”
this deep incessant urge to ignore our differences, ignore real conversations and simply go on and on pushing some superficial band-aid as the solution to our problems is classic Western Fraternity-speak.
How it translates in our children’s minds: “Appa, why can’t everyone be friends?”
Reality: Both, the Multi-National Corporation inspired World-Peace and the Kingdom of God are fictions. The so-called Tower of Babel, the tribal nature of the world, has been reality since the dawn of Human Culture and every calculated move away from that has led to more and not less pain. See the colonization of the Americas or Australia for example. The only civilization that has offered humankind ideas and solutions for the maintenance of both diversity and a relatively pain-free peace is the Hindu Civilization. It is important to teach our children respect for their own group identity and provide them the means to engage with other groups under the flag of mutual respect. The Abrahamic approach, which includes the Capitalist idea that Bhoo Devi herself belongs to the calculus of global finance and business, is a dead end approach. There is no Second Planet, there is no Second Coming.
Three Liberal Tribes, their evolution in Christian lands & their establishment in Hindu lands
Introducing the Liberty-Wallahs, the Equality-Wallahs and the Fraternity-Wallahs
Since my first essay on this topic published on Indiafacts, I have been using the word Liberalism rather liberally and I thought I should clarify my usage of this word. While the simple phrase Western Culture fails to capture the specificity of the post-Enlightenment culture of Europe, a more accurate phrase – “Commonly-Held Abstract Ideological Culture Of Post-Enlightenment Europe”, CHAI-CoPEE, is way too unwieldy! So what’s an appropriate word?
The European Enlightenment was associated with three core values – Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and I have argued earlier that this is a one-on-one mapping with the Christian Trinity.
Just as there are Christian devotees with a special affinity for The Father (Jehovah’s Witness), The Son (Oneness Pentecostalism) and the Holy Spirit (Classical Pentecostalism) there are also devotees with a special affinity to Liberty, who call themselves Classical Liberals (the Liberty-wallahs); to Equality, who call themselves Left-Liberals (the Equality-wallahs); and to Fraternity, who call themselves Free-Market Globalists (Fraternity-wallahs).
You will notice that all three groups use the word Liberty or Free to describe themselves while they continue to fight tooth and nail against each other. This is the reason why the word Liberalism, with its shared roots with the word Liberty, is the appropriate word to use to describe the CHAI-CoPEE people. It captures perfectly the essence of the common cultural value of all its three tribes – its obsession with individual autonomy since the 1700s.
The Old Testament gives way to the New, the Three Liberal Tribes evolve in Christian Lands
For much of CHAI-CoPEE history the Liberty-wallahs ruled the roost- John Locke, James Mill, Thomas Jefferson… Money flowed from the colonies and slaves did their work for them. Constitutions were written, Bills of Rights were passed. Liberty was a wonderful thing!
The World Wars were a rude awakening for the Liberty-wallahs, all was not well in the Kingdom of God that they thought they had established. Post-War, a superficial reorganization of the world was arranged, peace was band-aided together along with the Fraternity-wallahs. The GATT was established in 1948 trying to bring the world together through trade. “We need more Fraternity in order to preserve Liberty” it was argued. World Trade expanded, Democracy was exported, Hollywood was celebrated…dreams of world peace and brotherhood bloomed in the mono-cultural palm oil fields that sprung from the fecund coming together of the Liberty-wallahs and Fraternity-wallahs. But these dreams were short-lived.
Deep changes in Western society were afoot, and on the streets, the Civil Rights movement of 1965 resulted in America finally became the world’s youngest democracy, two years after Kenya. By then the Liberty-wallahs probably had a feeling that something strange was emerging in their Heaven on Earth. By 1968, Feminism, Environmentalism, and the so-called Sexual Revolution broke through their carefully constructed calm. Streets were occupied by young people high on dope making out in dumpsters. Academia had been infiltrated. Out-of-portions subjects like Post-Colonial Studies, Women’s Studies and Post-Modern Studies burst into the scene and into the impressionable minds of young people.
Soldiers of the third army of the Holy Trinity, the Equality-wallahs, were awakening, and they were screaming for relevance. 40 years was all it took for victimhood and self-flagellation to become the pre-eminent means of earning a livelihood in Academia, Media, Journalism and Politics. Today, Black Lives Matter a “subversive movement of sub-alterns” has taken America by storm. Seemingly about justice for black people but in reality a façade for the Equality-wallahs to launch a desperate assault on the institutions created by the Liberty-wallahs and the Fraternity-wallahs. They intend to take down the institutions of law and trade in just the same way as they take down statues of sundry nation-building racists. There is no Liberty they scream unless there is our type of Equality.
An Auto-Immune Condition, the Three Liberal Tribes Establish Their Religion In Bharat
This European tribal story is relevant to Hindus of today because project colonization is finally bearing fruit across our land. The formation of the three liberal tribes in Bharat is clearly visible now and growing at a rapid pace. Bharatiya Liberty-wallahs are represented by a vast army of “modern” TikTok youth who have turned away from tradition and towards greed and lust as a means to pursue their happiness. Bharatiya Equality-wallahs are represented by an army of slightly more erudite, English educated, de-racinated youth who have turned away from tradition and towards SJW political mobilization and activism. Bharatiya Fraternity-wallahs are represented by an army of working professionals, babus and political leaders who have turned away from tradition and towards a starry-eyed Walmart future for our nation. All these three tribes have their adherents and their influence on media narrative, policy and eventually law-making is rapidly growing. See the nexus between Government and liquor outlets (Liberty), see the nexus between the Media and the anti-CAA protests (Equality), see the nexus between Government and Multi-National Corporations (Fraternity).
Every cultural war you see in America today will be replayed in our country on a grander scale if we don’t get our act together really fast. For decades, education was the only means they had of brainwashing us but our notoriously high illiteracy levels delayed the coming to fruition of the liberal colonial dream. They then turned their guns on Bollywood and our cinema-mad country lapped up their entire spectrum of communist, anti-Hindu, anti-family, consumerist clap-trap. But the penetration of these outlandish foreign ideas remained low. But in the last 20 years, free TVs distributed by the state for political purposes and wide-spread internet penetration have served a cultural body blow to our nation. The now-ubiquitous TV-inspired consumerism, cell-phone porn, fake news, and anti-Hindu narratives on social media have normalized Liberalism across all our cultures, across all ages, in the remotest parts of our land. At the superficial level, the vast majority of the population will remain Hindu but at the deep level, they will have been rewired. Hinduism itself would have been digested by Liberalism creating yet another of those flavours that it likes so much- the Hindu Liberal.
Today, there still exist living links to our non-liberal Hindu past. Today, we can access the wisdom of the ages. Tomorrow, we are lost.
A vast number of Hindus today, both formally educated or informally educated by films have absorbed liberal ideas and you will find them spouting stuff that’s totally antithetical to their ancestral culture. Look for example, at a popular fiction writer whose work is lapped up by millions. Amish is a writer who took English-speaking India by storm a decade or so ago with his Shiva Trilogy set in ancient India. He calls his genre mythological fiction and his stories have our Gods in human situations. Inevitably, the plots get mixed up with contemporary political messaging. Here are some passages from his Ramachandra Series-
“And where did these diktats come from? They came from parents, who forced their values and ways on their children. Brahmin parents would encourage and push their child towards the pursuit of knowledge. The child, on the other hand, may have a passion for trade. These mismatches led to unhappiness and chaos within society.
Sita proposed that all the children of a kingdom must be compulsorily adopted by the state at the time of birth. The birth-parents would have to surrender their children to the kingdom. The kingdom would raise these children, educate and hone the natural skills that they were born with. At the age of fifteen, they would appear for an examination that would test them on their physical, psychological and mental skills. Based on the result, appropriate castes would be allocated to the children.”
What is being proposed by way of fiction is an LSD-inspired Aldous Huxley nightmare, many stages past the now trivial goalpost of communism. And this radical ideology is being home delivered into the minds of impressionable youth through the vehicle of Sita Ma herself, whom they all have venerated since childhood.
I don’t blame Amish for this, I see this as symptomatic of a nation-wide disease which many of us have suffered from and continue to suffer from. Even you, reader, if you are reading an essay of this complexity in English, you too are probably compromised. We are all compromised in varying degrees. Our inner wiring, the fundamental philosophical foundation of our culture itself has been tinkered with by colonial and neo-colonial forces. Amish, as per his own admission is a deeply devout man, but that does not stop him from perceiving the world, even the ancient world, in liberal terms. Deep down, we have been rewired, we have all been Christianized and the sooner we realize it the faster we can step out of the long European shadow that has fallen over our civilizational heart.
What is the nature of that rewiring? How do Moksha (Freedom), Karma (Equivalence) and Dharma (Harmony) come to be replaced by Liberty, Equality and Fraternity? Is there a way to grasp the nature of this change at a deep epistemological level?
Yes, There is.
To be continued in Part 2 – A Matter of Time | The Ticking Clock of Hindu Conversion
Influences
The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan, 1967 (On Media and Culture)
Technopoly, Neil Postman, 1992 (On Technology)
Capital Vol 1, Karl Marx, 1867 (On Work and Wealth)
The Art of the Commonplace, Wendell Berry, 2003 (Essays on Conservatism)
The Darkening Age, Catherine Nixey,2017 (On Christianity and the Fall of Pagan Rome)
The Life Divine, Shri Aurobindo, 1939 (On Dharmic Human Evolution)
Mahabharata, Rishi Ved Vyasa, Antiquity (On Dharma)
Who am I, Ramana Maharshi, 1923 (On Self)
Featured Image: Dreamstime
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