Isn’t the Hindu belief that girls are the result of bad karma and boys the result of good karma responsible for female foeticide?

Transcript

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thank you Hare Krishna question, isn’t the Hindu belief that that boys are a result of good karma and girls are born as a result of bad karma responsible for the female feticides that happen wherein young girls they are aborted and killed and this is resulting in adverse gender ratio which is going to create lots of problems in future answer this is a complex problem and trying to pin the blame for such complex social problem simplistically on one particular belief is a attempt to find escape good, to find someone to blame and to not address the problem seriously if you look at the Vedic culture you will see that even the girl child was cherished we see that women were offered swayamvar now swayamvar is in one sense a great honour where the eligible males, the leading eligible males come and the girl gets to choose and when the girl is supposed to choose certainly the girl has to have worthy qualities and the parents cherish her treasure her and train her to become worthy and wherever we look at in the Mahabharata or in the Ramayana or in the Srimad Bhagavatam the girl child is very much cherished swayambhu manu himself gets involved in finding the right groom for his daughter devahuti and the relationship between her and her parents chatarupa and swayambhu if we read in the 20th, 21st chapters of the fourth canto it is very intimate and loving and similarly if we look at when Draupadi gets married Drupada is deeply concerned even when a swayamvar happens nowhere do we see that Drupada considers Draupadi to be a burden even after she is won in the swayamvar by an unknown competitor a brahmana a seeming brahmana that is Arjuna he actually sends Dhrishtadyumna to find out who is this actually and then after he finds it out he is very happy but then when he comes to know that he has to that she has to marry five times she has to marry five husbands he says this is not religious how is this proper and then Vyasadeva has to come and convince so now Kuntidevi says that you wish to accept because it’s Kunti’s world but Drupada cannot accept like that so Vyasadeva comes and gets involved and he explains the past life story of Draupadi so actually speaking the girl child who eventually becomes a woman she is very much cherished in the vedic culture and there are many verses for example Manusmriti says that where the women are respected where the women are happy the god show their blessings over there and where the women are dishonored the gods live from that place so in the vedic culture women is considered to be Lakshmi you know that when a bride comes into the house now the idea is that she is she is Lakshmi coming into the house so now this has today been in today’s society this has been very commercially very materialistically reduced to say the girl brings some dowry along now in the vedic culture the dowry was entirely voluntary and it was given as a method as an expression of affection so the girl child would not normally get the inheritance because if the father has some inheritance the girls women are not normally the owners of property but they would have property that would be their dowry the dowry would be substantial and they would hand that dowry over to their daughters in future so it was their personal when the husband could not take it so it was her possession and if the husband needed it he would have to take it with her permission not without that so the girl child was definitely cherished and it was never considered a burden now in today’s society unfortunately the everything has become very monetized and marriage has become like a business and then dowry has become like a financial obligation and financial burden and along with that today’s society has become so much permeated with lust that the security of a girl child throughout her life and then eventually arrangement of the marriage of the girl child that often people especially if they financially challenge this perceive it as a burden so now if we look at people who do female piticide if you want to say that they think that a girl is a bad that girl is child of product of bad karma and a boy is child of product of good karma if they have that much belief in the law of karma then if they are going to do female piticide will they not have enough belief in karma the law of karma to understand that abortion is a ghastly crime the scriptures say abortion is such a serious serious sin in fact in many ways it is considered to be higher than worse than brahmahatya also brunahatya and brahmahatya so brahmahatya is killing of brahmins, brahmins are not just by birth but those who are by quality so those who are devoted to god if they are killed that’s considered a very grievous sin and brunahatya is considered equal or worse than that so if somebody has that much belief in the law of karma then to consider that the girl is a product or girl child is a product of bad karma then they will have enough understanding of the law of karma to know that abortion will involve monstrously bad karma they will be incurring that bad karma and they will have to get that reaction so now first of all now let’s look at the point of karma and bad karma see there is to get human form is extremely fortunate whichever gender it is, whether it is male or female to get a human form is extremely fortunate so the point here is that the vedic culture considers the human form very important and when it uses the naradeha it uses the nar to refer to human it’s not referred to the male form now relatively speaking I mean the female form and the male form the male form is considered to be more suitable for self realization more suitable for spiritual advancement as compared to female but females also females are more emotional and that’s why they can take to the devotional path more easily they can make more spiritual advancement also so it’s not an absolute rigid statement that entirely in all the ways the male form is more suitable than the female form for spiritual advancement but when we talk about good karma, now good karma is not just with respect to the form actually karma comes in many ways these four are the characteristics which can infatuate people but these four things infatuate people, janma is birth what kind of birth one gets in what dynasty what lineage, what gender, what social position, all that is janma, then aishwarya, how much wealth one is born in, shruta how much knowledge one has, shribiran how much beauty one has, so all these are result of karma, so we can’t just simplistically take one aspect of what we get at birth, the gender that we get and consider that alone to be the result of karma, so the various attributes that we get are the result of karma and now it is this is also the point that a female it’s not the female birth is a result of bad karma actually bad karma krishna says in the bhagavad gita 14.18, adhoga chanti tamasa, one will go to the lower destination lower species or lower planet, so certainly a female birth is not result of bad karma, you can say relatively speaking that it is a result of less good karma as compared to a male birth krishna does use the word to refer to women but he also refers vaishyas and shudras, so the vaishyas and shudras he is not referring to them as females they are males, so now he is talking about this from the perspective of vedic social convention, so certain births are less endowed and they are less suitable for certain purposes, so it is this is not a casteist or sexist slur against certain castes or certain members of gender it is simply a nominal tip of the hat that krishna offers, yes this is what people consider that means relatively speaking as compared to the male form, female form involves lesser good karma but actually one requires good karma to get a human form itself it is otherwise very rare and what is the meaning of this nominal tip of the hat that krishna is offering to the vedic notion, he is saying that even if a person is born in a lower caste, still that person can also make spiritual advancement and can return back to him, so the point which krishna is emphasizing is a message of universalism, that everybody can make spiritual advancement through the path of bhakti, it is not a message of sectarianism at all so if we look at the overall context of the vedic culture the idea that the female birth is a result of bad karma is not at all utilized in any way to deprive or discriminate women of either material opportunities according to their particular nature or spiritual opportunities on the path of bhakti so we shouldn’t misunderstand or misinterpret this this particular understanding of the relative karmic endowments of the male or female form, so overall this is a complex social problem and it is caused by not some belief within the vedic culture but it is caused by the commercialization and sexualization of the culture that is happening so the commercialization and sexualization of the culture coupled with distortion of ancient beliefs has contributed to the current social problems so it is a serious social problem and as there is proper understanding of the spiritual values and principles of life then that spiritual understanding and understanding of the values and spiritual purposes and values of life will permeate through society then women and the female child will be seen also as a gift of god, all children are the gift of god and women will also be given a cherished position as mothers in society, so that is actually the vedic culture and today’s social situation is very complex and if you look at its root, it is ultimately the excessive materialism, so the excessive materialism can express itself in various garbs it can express itself in various garbs, so when the Christians went to America, they had the idea that the white race is the superior race and they either had to subordinate the native Indians or those who could not subordinate, they eliminated them, so millions of people were killed and some other people were kept in reserves native Americans kept in reserves like America, like some animals are kept in reserves reserve areas, so Rudyard Kipling also wrote a whole song which is called White Man’s Burden, that actually we have to civilize the rest of the world and that is the burden of the white man, now they had their own self-righteous conception, now if you look at the bible, the bible doesn’t talk about black men, black people being lower and white people being higher, but the superiority complex that people want to have and then they use religious beliefs to rationalize it and the whole result is often a perverted mess of that so it led to the killing of millions and millions of people and in those times, the way people would live would that the black women would be slaves and they were not just physical slaves, they were sex slaves and the white men could use any black woman for whatever purposes they wanted and because they wanted a black man they wanted the black woman for their own pleasure so they would often not allow the black women to marry a black man, so they were basically treated like prostitutes, meant to be used by black women, black women were used by white men and then any, in fact at that time if a black woman would be asked who is the parent of your child, if she told the name of some lord or some earl or some duke, that’s what it would be these wealthy people and she could be killed for that, she was told to she was with a fearful threat she was sworn to silence, so now if we go back, was this the teaching of Christianity? No, but when Abraham Lincoln declared the war against the southern colonies which had rebelled which had wanted to continue on slavery so actually both sides were quoting the bible, both sides were quoting the bible and both sides were trying to justify their belief based on the bible so the point is that when religious scripture gets mixed with political and commercial interests, then a big social mess can result, so today the Vedic teachings about the relative positions of males and females that has become mixed with the commercial motive of seeing marriage as a as a business proposal where the bride is supposed to bring in money and then the overall sexualization of the society where the women are under threat and they need protection so all that has led to people fearing the female child fearing and considering the female child to be a burden and wanting to do some ghastly deeds like female feticide, so it is very tragic and it’s a very complex mess and we need systematic spiritual education and social re-spiritualization to tackle this problem at its root, not simplistic scapegoating of certain beliefs Thank you