Is Jesus a forgiving God and Krishna a punishing God?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
then there will be all-round success based on that. Thank you.
Whereas Krishna arranged to have the Kauravas killed. So is it that Krishna is punishing whereas Jesus is forgiving? Answer, no. This sort of simplistic generalizations about anyone are very misrepresentative of people who are themselves very deep and of day acting in situations which are also complex.
If we wanted to play a competitive game, we could turn around and say that rather than looking at the specific action, let’s look at their philosophy. And Jesus says that no one can come to the father except through me. And by teaching us and by the way Jesus understood right now, I mean remains to Christianity, they don’t accept the concept of reincarnation also.
So that means that anyone who is not fortunate enough to come to know about Jesus will go to hell forever. And there is no reincarnation also. There is no future chance.
Whereas Krishna teaches a worldview wherein there are many, many chances. Even if we don’t turn towards God in this life, we have future lives and the soul gets multiple opportunities to progress gradually towards spiritual perfection. So a God who gives only one chance to his children to come to him, whereas a God who gives multiple chances.
So we could say very well that Jesus is the punishing God because he is so unforgiving that in this very life if you don’t come to me, then you are going to go to hell and hell forever. Even if we say that Krishna killed the enemies, but at least that killing was only once. And those whom he killed also, if we consider from the bhakti worldview, they were, they benefited.
Many of them were liberated also. But still he killed them only once and they had a future lives in which they could have redeemed themselves. But Jesus in his worldview says that those who don’t come to him, those who don’t come to know about him and those who don’t surrender to him, accept him as their savior, they’re going to go to hell and hell forever.
So who is more, who is more merciful and who is more forgiving? To send a person to hell forever for not doing something which they maybe didn’t even have the opportunity to know to do. If somebody is born in some place where they never come to know about Christianity, they never come to know about Jesus as a savior and then they go to hell for that. So is that mercifulness? So the point is, and this way if you start playing this game of competition, the sword can cut both ways.
The important point to recognize is that there is no competition. There is a harmonious mission. There is one supreme lord who himself descends or who sends his representatives for the same purpose of raising people in their God consciousness.
And how that raising can be done, that may vary according to time, place, circumstance. So when Krishna descended at that time, we see that he also acted in various ways. It was not that Krishna was a war hungry, war mongering God.
Far from it, Krishna acted as a peace seeking God. What to speak of instigating war against anyone, Krishna himself went in the peace messenger and offered peace on the most accommodating of terms to the Kauravas. So when the Kauravas refused to grant the Pandavas five villages and the Kauravas showed all intention of contributing on in their atrocious ways, ways by which they had dishonored Draupadi, by which they had dispossessed the Pandavas of all their wealth and all their kingdom and all through dishonesty.
So then they, if they had continued in power, they would have destroyed everyone. They would have wreaked havoc in the kingdom itself, not just against the Pandavas. So Krishna protected his devotees and Krishna ensured that the law of righteous rule, that the law of dharma was there in the kingdom and for that he had to do what was necessary.
So he is killing the Pandavas like a surgical operation. A doctor doesn’t want to amputate a patient’s leg, but there’s no other way to save the patient and that’s what has to be done. So what Krishna did was not cause war, but do his very best to try to prevent war and in the face of utterly recalcitrant obstinacy, he was forced to do the needful.
So now if we consider even the biblical tradition, yes famously Jesus has said that if somebody slaps turn your other cheek, but the Christians after Jesus, they have based on the teachings of the Old Testament as well as overall Christian theology, have long recognized the need for a just war. If there is an enemy which would destroy everything, the enemy is an aggressor and is going to destroy then defending oneself and defeating such an enemy is considered a just war and is not considered against the principles of Christianity or the teachings of Jesus. So it is not that virtue, that pacifism is a universal absolute virtue.
Yes, there are times when observative action even in terms of confrontation and war may be required and this is accepted. Saint Augustine of Hippohy has given elaborate guidelines about what would constitute a just war and just as there are Kshatriya codes of conduct within the Vedic tradition, similarly there are codes of conduct for a righteous war. So it is not that within Christian tradition, there is never any punishing of anyone, there is never any administering of justice through violent means and we are here not talking about some of the excessive violence that is done by some fringe elements of Christianity when they for example, practically annihilated millions, annihilated millions either in the, either in North South America when they converted Exico and other places, Catholicism did that and whether it was in North America when the Native Americans were killed through various means or sequestered in colonies.
So either way, the point is that there can be abuse of theory, abuse of ideology that can happen but we are talking about the, even from the point of view of correct ideology, violence is sanctioned within even the Christian tradition. So now if we consider as Jesus forgave at that time but we also have to know that within the Vaishnav tradition, we accept Jesus in the Shaktyavesh Avatar as a manifestation of God. Christians in some way because of the concept of Trinity, they consider Jesus to be God itself but either way, whenever God or his representatives descend, they act according to time, place, circumstance, doing what is necessary.
So Jesus at that point, if you look from the socio-political perspective, he did not, he was not a Kshatriya, he did not have an army, he did not have soldiers and he did not have the capacity at that time to resist with violence against the Roman Empire which had been instigated by the Jews who felt that Jesus was going, rebelling against their religion and fomenting unrest. So now irrespective of the wrongness of the sentence of crucifixion, the point is that Jesus descended at a particular time, acted in a particular socio-political context and demonstrated a particular lesson. So in that situation, he demonstrated forgiveness.
Now from a sceptical point of view, if we want to go on arguing, we could say that he did not demonstrate forgiveness, it was just that he was defeated and he was crucified and after that his followers were disheartened somehow to rehearten themselves and to galvanize themselves. They imagined that he had risen again and that’s how and somehow people were gullible and they believed it and that’s how the whole story of resurrection came up and that’s how people have become influenced. So we could, if we are going to take a comparative sceptical attitude, then we could say that the whole resurrection was a myth and Jesus was utterly defeated.
So rather than saying that he forgave, he was helpless and he had no alternative except to forgive. Yes, in the Bible itself, it is said that he forgave them for they know not what they do. But before that, the Bible itself also says that, O father, why have thou forsaken me? Why have thou forsaken me? So that’s a clear statement that Jesus feels that God has abandoned him and among the four Gospels, different Gospels portray Jesus differently.
In some Gospels, Jesus is portrayed as being very fearful when he is being led towards the crucifixion. In another, he is portrayed as being fearless. So the point is, Christian theologians try to explain this as when we are faced with adversity, we may go through different emotions at different times and Jesus demonstrated both kinds of emotions, fearlessness and fearfulness.
So because he was God, he would become human. So the point is that Jesus acted in a particular way and that particular situation, that was the most effective way he could have acted. So by being crucified, by later on reappearing and inspiring his followers, he was able to galvanize them into action.
So the point is that there is God consciousness. So whether Jesus forgiving was purely out of spiritual compassion or was a strategic act where there was nothing else that he could have done at that time. He did not have the armed forces to resist the Roman Empire.
So that could very well be a sceptical attitude. We are not taking that sceptical attitude here, but we are just demonstrating if we go into this critical, sceptical, competitive game, then we can go both ways. The sword can come both ways.
The important point is, we understand that God himself comes and God sends his representatives and they help raise people’s consciousness by acting in different ways at different times. So what is appropriate at one time may be different from what is appropriate another time. So Krishna’s punishing the Kauravas after beseeching, after petitioning for peace, fervently, that was what was necessary at that time and that was what was beneficial at that time.
And Jesus accepting the crucifixion and thereafter inspiring his followers through that act of sacrifice, that was what was beneficial for people at that time. So there is one God and he has one mission and he and his representatives act towards that mission. And by trying to make competitive comparisons, wherein we try to do a game of religious one-upsmanship, wherein we try to prove my religion is better than your religion, this is actually a neophyte mentality which does injustice to the legacy that God has beckoned to us through his manifestations and his teachings.
Thank you.