How should we respond to religious conversions happening in India?
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Question from Pawan Tiwari Prabhu. I grew up in a family where Hindu culture was followed and from the very beginning I had the impression that our Sanatana Dharma is really great. And when I associated with devotees and came to know about Prabhupada, it gave me immense joy that Bhagavad Gita is so genuine.
But when I see people are moving to other religions and not searching for our own culture, it gives me immense pain and I see our culture is losing its value among its own followers. I think we have really failed to reach out to public and explain the message of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. I do not know how to respond and see such type of conversions are taking place in India.
Please comment. Answer, as devotees of Krishna we are not primarily interested in converting people from one religion to another. Sri Prabhupada would say that if at all there is any conversion, he would say that you want Christians to become better Christians and Krishna conscious principles which are universal can help people to become that.
So if there is any conversion, there should be conversion from being materialist to being spiritualist, from being lovers of matter to becoming lovers of God. So if somebody actually feels, somebody who is living in Vedic culture, Hindu culture today, feels that his or her search for God is answered in some other religion, then such a person converting to make spiritual advancement is not necessarily objectionable. It is just that the person, ultimately everybody has an individual inspiration, an individual inclination.
So a person can follow his heart or her heart but very often the way conversions happen today in society are based on a propaganda of misinformation and allurement. Many conversions happen because people are materially not well-to-do and they promise that the spiritual situations will become better if they convert and that's how they are converted and often when people become converted like this, they become hostile to Vedic culture because they have to to some extent defend what they have done and that's why in order to defend what they have done, they try to believe themselves and try to tell others that the culture from which they have left was not a good culture, was a harmful culture, something like that. So that when they become hostile to Krishna and Krishna consciousness because they see Krishna and Krishna consciousness also as a part of the culture that they have rejected, then that is very unfortunate.
Then there is a long discussion in this website on conversion to what? Intolerance or transcendence? So I'll phrase a few points over here from that and some other point but you can for understanding this in a broad perspective, you can read this article. So I would like to make three points primarily. First is that because people often become hostile to spiritual culture due to this kind of conversion and that is why it is harmful primarily.
In general, if people are within the Vedic fold then they have a broad receptivity towards the highest knowledge in the Vedic fold, that is Krishna consciousness. Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita. So when Srila Prabhupada was asked about which who is better, a Christian or Muslim practicing as a religion or a demigod worshipper, he said the demigod worshipper is better because the demigod worshipper is in the house of the Vedas.
So that is a distinctive statement of Srila Prabhupada in this context. So in that sense, people have to, when they convert from one religion to another, especially the conversions that are happening are primarily to Christianity, to a lot of financial allurements and quite often to Islam nowadays because of the propaganda of some pseudo scholars. So at such times, because people become hostile to their original culture, that's what makes things quite harmful and what can, so that's the first point, certainly to the extent people are receptive to the highest level of spiritual culture, to that extent their spiritual prospects are safe but if they become hostile then their spiritual prospects become endangered by that and that's why there has to be the requisite corrective measures taken.
Now what are the corrective measures that can be taken? One is that most people, even within what is called as Hinduism today, don't know anything about the lofty philosophical and devotional teachings that are given within Hinduism, that is ultimately, what we call as Hinduism is some kind of expression of Vedic culture as was taught in the Vedic scriptures but because most people don't know about it, that's why often they shift away from Vedic culture towards other cultures. So therefore, it is extremely important for us as devotees to try to share Krishna consciousness as much as possible, as vigorously as possible with people and that's how when they come to know about spiritual culture, especially many, you know, India and Indian culture has actually penetrated into the heart of America, intellectual heart of America because so many spiritual teachers from India have gone there, where Christianity was already living and acting, people have seen the vast broadness and the depth of the Vedic worldview and have adopted that. So especially when people see that there are, when I say Indian people, they see that people from all over the world have adopted Indian culture, it is not Indian culture, it is spiritual culture which is given, which is revealed in India through the Vedic scriptures but common people may think of it as Indian culture but even when they see that, then that restores some level of respectability for that culture in their own eyes.
So we need to vigorously share Krishna consciousness to as many people as possible. At one level, we can't blame other religions for converting people because at a material or functional level, religion is just like any other material enterprise. So whichever, if there are different companies, there are different competing companies, whichever company does the best marketing, whichever company does the best consumer service, customer care, that company will get the maximum customers.
So in a sense, if some other religions do better presentation of their teachings, take better care of people, offer them benefits, then naturally they will be attract, people will become attracted. So much of Vedic culture is today left like, almost like a fossil or a museum. Many of the spiritual teachers don't try to share vigorously their culture with others and Akshila Prabhupada, even in old days set extraordinary example by traveling all over the world to share Krishna consciousness and his example is extraordinary and it's worth emulating for everyone.
So as devotees, we can try to make our preaching especially vigorous so that we can reach to more and more people and by sharing the philosophy, the culture of Krishna consciousness with its proper understanding and then by sharing with people the global acceptance of Krishna consciousness and the spiritual culture of India, we can inspire those people who might be considering converting to other religions, to stay within the Vedic fold and not just stay within the Vedic fold where they are but to rise to its highest level by embracing the practice of Krishna consciousness. So can we say that devotees have failed in this effort till now? Not exactly failed because if we look at the history of various religions and if we see say Christianity or Islam, where it was in the first 40 years of its outreach, actually and if we compare that with the way Krishna consciousness movement has spread under the guidance of Srila Prabhupada and his followers in the first 40 years, Krishna consciousness movement has spread much much more dramatically and if it continues to spread in this way, then surely within a century or so, many many more people, its spread will be far far greater than what would have been of the other religions within the corresponding time. So we can't say that what Srila Prabhupada has done and the way Vedic culture has been shared by the Krishna consciousness movement is a failure but surely much we need to recognize that much much more work needs to be done and of course unlike the examples of Christianity or Islam which were started at particular times by their founders, Srila Prabhupada was not the founder of Vedic culture, he was the founder of the Krishna consciousness movement in its expression as ISKCON and ISKCON has spread a lot but before that Vedic culture was existing and certainly we can say that many of the protectors of Vedic culture, especially the caste Brahmins, they were more concerned with maintaining their privileges than with sharing a deeper understanding of the spiritual truths with the people and because of that Srila Prabhupada himself says that the Brahmins were quite apathetic when during the Islamic rule people were converted to Islam and many people are quite apathetic even today when people get converted they may say so sir so that's because the Brahmins are meant to give spiritual education and then they're not doing that so every devotee can feel that urgent responsibility to try to share Krishna consciousness as much as possible with as many people as possible so that is the second thing the third thing is while we are trying to share Krishna consciousness we need to have a proper consciousness, now we shouldn't think that we are necessarily competing with other religions, Srila Prabhupada wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II saying that atheism is spreading all over the world and we need to unite to check the spread of atheism, a scholar also made an interfaith statement where it quotes Bhaktivinoda Thakur to explain how the confrontation is not between one religion or another religion it is actually between religion and atheism, so we should not have a material we day mentality where we think of ourselves as good and other religions as bad, such a mentality will reduce us largely to material consciousness and that is the mentality which many hardline right-wing Hindu organizations have and often they don't rise above the bodily conception at all, so the spiritual culture of Krishna consciousness recognizes that even Hinduism today, Hinduism what we call is also a bodily designation and ultimately we want people to get break free from the bodily designation and rise to the spiritual level of consciousness and Krishna consciousness offers a very powerful and quick way to rise to the spiritual level of consciousness and this is not just a self-serving sectarian claim, it's an objective fact because we see that so many people are becoming free from so many bad habits, the four regulative principles are not easy to follow in today's culture but so many hundreds and thousands of devotees all over the world are practicing them, why because Krishna conscious process is giving them a higher taste, so in a sense the battle is not between the Krishna conscious movement and other religions or even Hindu culture and other religions, it is actually a battle between materialism and spirituality, so between the lower modes of nature and the higher modes, so we want to elevate people's consciousness and based on the vertical scriptures and based on the global experience of sharing Krishna consciousness, the process of Krishna consciousness offers an extremely powerful way to raise people from the lower modes, Shrila Prabhupada even reached out to the hippies who were practically in the mode of ignorance and he elevated them from the mode of ignorance to even transcendence, he made many of them very advanced and dedicated devotees, so that is our aim to elevate people from the lower modes to the higher modes ultimately to transcendence and unfortunately many religions today operate in the mode of passion and to some extent in the mode of ignorance, mode of ignorance means that they use violence and hooliganism and destruction and terrorism against their religious competitors, what they feel are false religions, this is so religious fanaticism is not at all an expression of devotion, it is the expression of religion being practiced in the mode of ignorance, that means if people are in mode of ignorance, somehow they are using religion as a means to play out their actions in the mode of ignorance, so religion in the mode of passion focuses on, focuses on material gains and there are many, there are religions which offer material allurements for people to convert and at the end of such conversion, the person doesn't change from being a materialist to being a spiritualist, the person changes just from being a Hindu materialist to be a Christian materialist, so there is no elevation of consciousness that happens by this and that is what is our concern primarily, if somebody from becoming a Christian say, becomes more devoted to God, then that person is rising in his consciousness and that is good because ultimately people have to raise their consciousness, whichever be the religious tradition that they use for going up, so in a sense that if we said the different religions are like a means to climb up a mountain and there are different ways to climb up a mountain, Bhaktivinod Thakur uses this for example in Chaitanya Shikshamrit, at a mountain peak may be seen by different people from different sides and they may decide to climb it up from their particular perspective, so reaching the mountain peak is like reaching transcendence and there may be different paths to climb up the mountain, now by the mercy of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, in the Vedic culture offers a path that can elevate people from the lowest level to the highest level and that's the general attribute of Vedic culture and the mercy of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu makes this path of elevation very easy and very potent, so people can rise very rapidly and that's why we want people to take this path because then they can get elevated very quickly, so now if somebody feels inspired to take up some other path to rise up the mountain, then that is up to that person and that is as a individual with free will, that is something which is accepted but very often when people get converted, they just change from one kind of materialism to another kind of materialism, I say from Hindu materialist become a Christian materialist, then basically these are people who are just going around and around at the foothills of the mountain, trying to catch people who are on one side of the mountain and get them to the other side of the mountain but neither are these people rising up the mountain themselves nor are they encouraging their followers to climb up the mountain, that means many times when people become converted from say Hindus into Christianity, it is not that they become devoted to God, often their conversion to Christianity gives them more license for becoming materialistic, they can drink and they can do so many other things which are disapproved of in Vedic culture, so actually what happens by such conversion is they not only stay materialist but they often become worse materialists, so in that sense while trying to preach vigorously Krishna consciousness, we don't necessarily have to have a competitive mentality with other religions, the competition is between the lower modes and the higher modes, within other religions also there are pure-hearted souls and they are saints, Srila Prabhupada appreciates St. Francis of Assisi when he was asked in Australia, at St. Francis would consider all living beings to be like his brothers and sisters and Prabhupada said yes, this is a saintly vision, so if through other religious paths there are people who are climbing up the mountain and they have reached near the peak or they have gone to very great heights, we respect them for that so we are not primarily competing against religions, our goal is that those people who are at the bottom of the mountain, that means those who are trapped in this grip of material desire, suffering in the cycle of birth and death, they need to be elevated, now unfortunately when people convert from one religion to another, especially from Hinduism settled Christianity or Islam, they not only don't rise upward the mountain but they also become critical and cynical even about Vedic culture and because of this offensiveness that is harmful for their own spiritual life, so that's why while trying to share Krishna consciousness, especially in the context where we see that there's a lot of conversion happening, we need to have proper consciousness, the consciousness is we want to elevate people from the lower modes to the higher modes and religious conversion as it happens today doesn't really elevate people and that's why we are concerned, not only doesn't it elevate people, it makes people antipathetic, hostile to the path that could have best elevated them, so we are concerned primarily with elevating people to the higher modes and ultimately transcendence and for that purpose we share Krishna consciousness as vigorously as possible.
Thank you.