KC and World Religions 3 – Christianity 2

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
so i will discuss a few more points today i may be in the next class when we start with islam um so yesterday i just yesterday i summarised what i discussed i started with a completely outline about jesus’s life and how he was crucified and how the response of the people or response of his followers was very positive and that’s what led to the preparation of christianity we will discuss a little bit about the history of christianity how it became oppressive and rejected by the intellectuals in europe how they came to india and they had a conversation about us through intellectual means related to humanitarian and educational means and i’ll discuss a little bit about talking about religion in the mode of passion ignorance and also talking about how ultimately we’re focussing on love of god so today i will talk about no religion is even if it is coming from one tradition one scripture one prophet or one main saint it’s a wide variety of diversity and there are spiritually evolved people and there are also materially egoistic people who use religion for their own agendas so we’ll look at this and we’ll try to see how christian consciousness can help us to offer have a broader perspective on this so in the christian church the central ritual is called the eucharist so what is this in the last supper with jesus he had a meal with him the night before we on the night before he was crucified the next day he was crucified so that is called the last supper and that is when we call his disciples together the apostles and we don’t know that the bread that he was eating so jesus took a look this is a math thing jesus took a look of bread and after blessing it he brought it again to his disciples and they said take eat this is my body and similarly give them a cup and drink from it this is my blood and basically the idea was to fold in this so this bread and water that now of course currently they offer wine although what jesus unfermented grape juice which is not the same as wine and is intoxicating but this is the closest that christianity comes to prasad the idea many christians have the idea that the food that is offered over there that the bread that is taken it becomes transubstantiated so substance means its nature trans substance means to change the substance so the bread changes from material to spiritual so they consider it transubstantiated so that idea is quite close to that of prasad that we have of course there are significant differences that they don’t consider all their whole meat with transubstantiated it’s only one part which is offered by the priest in the church during the mass so this is every sunday the christians meet this is how the central rituals they have the bread and the wine that is offered to everyone is offered in sanctified now christians don’t have a dd we’ll talk about that a little later in how many temples they have something is what they are and how they treat each other generally they don’t have so you know the fundamental contrast is if you look at christians muslims or jews they say we are going to a religious place for worship we’re going to church synagogue or a mosque for worship but if you still don’t know any part of the Hindu tradition hindus who are they say we are going to a temple not for worship but for darshan so the visual faculty the idea that visual faculty is very fundamentally used in the vedic tradition and that’s because they don’t have the idea of meeting so the sanctification is not by keeping it in an altar or something like that it’s just that through the ritual it becomes sacred it becomes sanctified so at that time in that area there was a christian bishop who was quite popular he thought he was popular and he was quite respected over there but then he saw that so many young people are coming to this what he thought was a pagan church a temple which was of some false religion and most of the young people didn’t really deal with him properly when Prabhupada came he came he wanted to meet him so he came to meet Shri Lankan Kuppa and Prabhupada had a very brilliant conversation with him so actually in that conversation Prabhupada quotes from the bible and this stuns him whatever he has to say Prabhupada quote whatever he has to say Prabhupada quotes from the bible and at the end he says so what is the cause we are separated from God so he said it is because of sin he said yes at some point why don’t you tell people to stop sinning and by this time Prabhupada’s logic broke first when it is not Prabhupada’s knowledge the bible is stumbling and he doesn’t say Prabhupada is stumbling because at the same time he is offering a lot of sacraments and then at the end this biologist priest becomes almost like a Suryanishvara Prabhupada he asks Swami you know in our church young people don’t come here how is it so many young people are coming to your temple Prabhupada said instead of giving that small wafer that you give in your church give all these men all the sweets your churches will become full so you know what I said Prabhupada taught a thin leaf when he was talking about the small slice of bread that is offered to you next so actually speaking now one of the distinctive features of bhakti is that it uses the senses in Krishna’s service and Christianity because it rejects the idea that God can manifest in matter they have their songs they have their music because yesterday we saw the commandment of not making any icons not making any idols so for a long time in Christianity there was no depiction even through wall paintings or sculptures sculptures of Jesus or God or any of the saints but over a period of time humanity needs some sensory expression some sensory connection with God and when that is not there then people’s spiritual life remains mostly intangible but we don’t have to say in Jaya Dharma that those religions that do not exegete the worship they do not revise much about the material life and some people revise because individually very serious and when we go out from previous life there are always individuals like that but for the general community of people the sensory experience of God is very important whether it be by seeing the deity or tasting the prasad so that that is the process that they come but they don’t know much beyond this and they don’t satisfy all that now in the Christian tradition we see that on one side there is the idea of exclusualism that Jesus is the only way that we discuss history we’ll come to that towards the end of that class once again so but there’s also the idea of a call for humanity so the mood of this verse which was called Matthews it is very similar to Trinadukti’s mission let’s start with the kingdom of heaven blessed are those who mourn for they shall become purgative blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth so the idea is that man has to be humble in front of God so that is fine and that is essential to his virtue but when contrasted with their attitude towards other religions as we follow other religions this humility is rarely manifested what is unfortunately manifested is a sort of self-righteous zeal and bravado to convert other people or to exterminate other people but as far as the relationship with God is concerned that is very clear now in general if you see there will always be some exclusive statements in all religions in a future class when we discuss about Islam I mention this more but every religion will have some exclusive statements look religious thought can be in three categories include the exclusivist pluralist and inclusivist exclusivist means this is the only way we have exclusive right to take you to God and if you don’t adopt that way you are going to go to hell that’s exclusivist pluralist is oh there are many ways to God and you can choose whichever way you want and inclusivist is the which the conscious understanding that there’s not many ways but there’s one way and there are many levels in it so exclusivist and inclusivist is like two extremes and inclusivist is a little balanced so the simple avenue to understand this is we can say if religion is meant to help us with knowledge of God and love of God then a religion is like a university in that sense so somebody who’s exclusivist that person is saying that you know my college is the only engineering college if you are not going to get a degree from my engineering college then you are not a student and the other extreme pluralism is what every building is an engineering college so there’s practically no objective criteria level but there are objective criteria by which we can understand what are different levels so what is the etymology of the letter what are the faculty calibre what is the placement by that great universities so that that is sort of inclusivism so we have a classification of fear desire beauty and love this talks about inclusivism so christianity has been traditionally exclusivist and even now it is exclusivist at least internally although externally they have changed something that his calculus has changed some things the greatest scholar in the christian tradition was saint augustine and he was the person so these are if you see in his course he is quite devoted thou has made us for thyself oh lord and our hearts are restless until they rest it’s quite an emotional sentiment like we say that and fix our mind then you become fearless so our hearts are restless until they rest in me and he also talks about giving god the top most priority in our life god must be our highest interest and when that is the case then the next in line is our soul then our body and external things we attain peace then only when our proper place so the idea of devoting oneself to god is that there are many saints who have applied themselves to this so historically saint augustine was among the first prominent intellectuals in christian history so if you look at the bible there is not much philosophy in it it’s mostly stories with some morals yesterday i showed you a copy of the books of the bible so there are the four gospels so just go back to that slide so now all these the first top one of the gospels these are mostly the account of the life of jesus so there may be some account of his teachings which may be some philosophy but in the bible there is nothing like sitting together and discussing for hours and days together on elaborate philosophy there’s nothing like that and if you look at all the other books they are mostly letters of instruction so primarily it is moral instruction centred around god there is not much philosophy there overall in the books so this is not a criticism and this is the objective fact and by christians they often use it to this advantage by saying that actually ultimately god is unknowable so rather than struggling to know the unknowable we should focus on doing the will of god which is fine but if you want to do the will of god we need to love god and to love god we need to know about him but they have a lot of moral and moral instructions and self-improving sort of instructions which modern christians use in their self-help outreach many christians in modern times if you are the bible can help you to become a better human being a better person that’s how they teach but as i said if you look at the world map when the christianity emerged in arabia and then paul took it to europe europe at that time was under the roman rule the romans were not so philosophical romans were more of kshatriya type before them of course they’re not fully evolved kshatriyas they were many years barbarian but they were more administrators before them were the greeks who were quite philosophical there was socrates plato aristotle and before the pythagoras pythagoras is a little talk about how he remembers his past lives who he was in his past lives and he would go to different places and say i was here i was this warrior and i was fighting this and i was killed like this so they have their beliefs if you look at the greek beliefs they are very similar to greek beliefs of course greek civilisation had wide variety of beliefs and not everybody was spiritual but at least many prominent thinkers had insights which were very similar to the greek teachers so what happened when the christians came to europe europe already had a tradition of scholarly philosophy coming from the greeks and the bible there was not much philosophy so many of the thinkers and prominent among them was literacy he took the greek philosophy and he blended it with the message of the gospel and what emerged from that blending was christian pure gospel so the philosophical musings about who god is what god’s relationship with the world is that doesn’t come directly from the bible that comes from the greek philosophy blended with the bible and there’s a problem with that because it was quite clear that uh plato or aristotle or socrates they were not christians they were not jews also so how would their parts be integrated so then they had the idea that there were three christian christian saints so they sort of there are many christian churches where plato and socrates are depicted as their christian saints so they appropriated them into their tradition and use their insights but that is the root of philosophy in the philosophy theology of philosophy in the catholic church and this is important because we will later on discuss about the conflict between science and religion that happened at the time of kennedy so now from saint augustine time onwards christianity spread now in the 13th 14th century a lot of political upheavals happened constantly no one fell into islam and islam emerged in 7th century and from then onwards it started spreading rapidly in fact when we discuss about islam the spread of islam by political conquest is one of the fastest spread of any religion that is born it’s but it emerged and spread very rapidly so because of the political upheavals that resulted at that time many of the greek writings which were earlier than constantinople were brought elsewhere and they became accessible to the christian people so at that time the prominent christians called thomas athenas so he started studying the greek philosophers and he studied primarily aristotle so now there’s a socrates plato and aristotle these are like some sort of parantha they’re teacher student student so socrates never wrote anything down so many thinkers compare socrates to lord chaitanya not in the spiritual evolution spiritual advancement but lord chaitanya practically tried everything down so everything about lord chaitanya is from his followers not who he’s identified as so socrates is more primal than plato after plato was aristotle he was a student but aristotle went practically entirely against plato and he gave up his own school of thought so socrates and plato see there is the material and the spiritual there is the particular and there’s the universal so plato and socrates focused on the universal underlying the particular or the spiritual underlying the material so it’s a elaborate philosophical point this is a simple example to illustrate this that suppose i say that i saw a horse today morning so this is discussed especially in our this is a philosophy this is discussed in as well as in so i saw a horse today morning when i say this i have the conception of a specific horse that i saw when i speak you don’t know which is the horse i saw and probably depending on the horses which you have seen some other horse may come up in your imagination unless i tell a specific horse she also so if i saw a horse i have a specific image in my mind and some image comes in your mind which is not the same that is there in my mind so what have i communicated what have i so socrates had the idea that underlining and unifying all the horses is a sense of hoarseness a sense of there’s a universal category called hoarseness so all horses have the property of hoarseness and that is why that is what defines a horse so his idea was this universals underlying the particular order important and he was trying to discuss how many universal categories are there so like that we have the idea of 8.4 million species now biologically the number of species will be much more but 8.4 million is the universal categories that are there something similar and he said underlying all these universal categories the universal of all universals is god that was his idea so aristotle’s focus sorry socrates and litos focus was trying to understand the universe that is below the particular so that is actually the focus of the christians also in our tradition but as contrasted with that plato’s focus was sorry aristotle’s focus was that forget about the universals who has seen them who knows if they exist or not focus on the particulars focus on what you see here right now focus on the material and this was what actinus adopted so christianity there are these two independent intellectual traditions there is a plato augustine tradition and there is an aristotle actinus tradition so from the 14th century onwards this became very popular and they just which involved emphasis of the material rather than the spiritual there’s no denial of spiritual god is lower case but the emphasis of spiritual paved the way for the advent of science and the beating back of religion by science why so from thomas ackerman this time onwards if you see in our tradition nobody practically speaking has talked about so much about proving the existence of god initiates it doesn’t go about doing the existence of god in fact in the purport to this 1.1.3 goes about elaborately proving how we cannot know what god of material means it talks about how the design argument cannot really be used to know god we just get an indication of god’s existence but we can’t know god’s nature by looking at how intimately a flower is designed and we conclude that there is a designer behind it but i cannot conclude that the designer is a big complexion boy wearing a peacock feather and playing a flute for that uh just observation of nature is not enough for that we need revelation from scripture so the point i’m making over here is that the christianity by emphasising the materials thomas ackerman came up with famous uh statements about the design argument he said that we can throng the world to understand that god exists and then the example became very popular among christians they tried to prove the existence of god but unfortunately the emphasis on the material led gradually to the denial of the spiritual let’s see how that happened so now in the 15th century first thing that happened was protestantism came out yesterday i mentioned that so what protestantism was a reaction to the materialism that was there in the church so the protestants starting from martin luther dan calvin and all of them they said that actually ultimately there’s no one between you and god you don’t have a direct relationship with god and there’s no need for anyone in between so there’s no need for any priest in between no need for any church in between of course they also found their churches but their idea was to have a direct relationship with god so many churches many christian churches when they have sunday gatherings they have no fixed speaker they all come and meet and whoever gets the inspiration that person will speak it’s like that it’s a little arbitrary but then they became popular because they thought of a direct experience of god and they used local languages over there vernacular languages and one of the problems with that was they said if i read the bible directly i don’t consider anybody as a authority and send the bible then i will interpret the bible my way you interpret the bible your way and because you have a direct relationship with god i have a direct relationship with god so how can i say that my interpretation is superior to your interpretation so what happened by allowing everyone the right to interpret the bible they started having endless interpretations and as i mentioned now uh the protestantism has been there for 500 years but in 500 years they have had more than 50,000 sects of protestantism so it’s like every year they are producing how many almost 100 sects they are producing 50,000 are major sects so then some protestants just swung back from this and they said if everybody gets interpreting there is no you it won’t work so there should be no interpretation at all so everything should be taken just as it is all words should be taken entirely true so there are there is a prominent protestant uh preacher in america who said that anybody who believes that there is life on other planets this is a belief that is against the bible so that person should be stoned to death and he says in the 20th century so the point is if somebody just refuses the authority of those who are learning scripture and understanding scripture they will either endlessly interpret the scripture or what will happen is they will go to literal understanding which is completely illogical and impractical so there are Christians who say the world is just 6,000 years old and they will try to interpret the scientific history in that way so what these Christians many of these Christians because they’re motivated by their belief they will go in colleges and they’ll get their PhDs and by doing their PhDs they will say that evolution is right and they’ll like to make a thesis on evolution itself and as soon as they get a PhD degree then they will write books saying evolution is bogus and the earth is 6,000 years old so this has alienated a lot of scientifically minded people they feel that religion is using us for using science to prove its own beliefs and this background comes up when we also confront uh religion we confront science so now there have been a lot of contributions to Christianity Catholicism they built many big schools for studying their tradition so they have these Jesuit seminaries or schools they were the forerunners of the modern universities whether in Europe if you look at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale all these universities were when you started the Christians for teaching Christianity and gradually they evolved into secular subjects so Jesuits are like the scholars in the Christian tradition and these people this before I was a Jesuit bishop these people studied for 12 to 15 years before they become a bishop so I had not gone on conference so I had met one boy he says I’m brother Joseph next month I’ll become father Joseph so he was going to Jesuit so he had been studying for 14 years and in India so I asked him what did you study so when they studied 14 years almost like 80 percent of what they study is Hinduism and 20 percent of what they study is Bible and Biblical tradition why they study Hinduism so that they can refute Hinduism so many of these Jesuits teachers actually they know they don’t understand the heart of Hinduism but they know much more about Hinduism than most Hindus do so we’ll come to this later now historically so but education in India as well as all over the world ultimately had its origin in Christians Christianity spreading education so we see this similar but the difference is between the Vedic Gurukul system that was there in the Gurukul system the Guru is spiritual and material knowledge but the fundamental difference was that in the Gurukul spiritual knowledge was much greater and in the 16th 17th 18th century the Protestants were being persecuted by the Catholic Church these Protestants left Europe and came to America so America is primarily a Protestant country it is primarily a Protestant country there are Catholics also now but much more Protestants and America was founded and developed by Protestants so as compared to Europe Protestantism is much more in America and as of now America is the headquarters for spreading Protestantism all over Christianity all over the world and most of the missionary organisations that are there in India have their roots as well as their financial basis in America so from America they are spreading out very rapidly now one of the things that many of them strongly oppose celibacy in the Catholic Church there is a tradition of celibacy but over the period of time because of multiple reasons one is that many of the priests were involved in some scandals and especially the worst of it was child abuse so there has been an increasing demand that celibacy not be a mandatory requirement in the Catholic Church celibacy is a requirement for somebody to be a bishop but in the Protestants they have always abandoned it to a large extent and they focus primarily on a personal relationship with God through one’s own practise so we see in the Vedic tradition the celibate that were there the so when the renounced order is not there in religious tradition we will talk about this more in Islam.
In Islam practically except for a few Sufis there are no direct renunciates so when there is no renounced order in religious tradition then that religion doesn’t have a living spiritual inspiration and then the religion often gravitates towards materialism so when science started progressing many Christians thought that actually science is God’s gift to the world just as Jesus was going to elevate his spiritual belief but same Jesus, same God has given the science to elevate his material belief but then they found out that while elevating their material belief denied their beliefs and rejected their spiritual beliefs but again the point is that there is a lot of emphasis on dharma, artha, kama they may not be doing the yajna that we are doing but the idea that religiosity should lead to a good material life and this is one of the major preaching plans that Christians use in India if your religion is a true religion why are you organised in it if your God is a true God why is he keeping you suffering in poverty the proof that our God is a true God is that we are costless financially this is a very rudimentary understanding of religion but that is where they are at, many of them so now how does spiritual fall happen? this is a little bit more intricate historically normally how do we live with God? we live with God through God’s words as we receive them through God’s face that means there is Shastra but we understand Shastra through Guru and Sadhu so if I want to go to Krishna without Guru, Sadhu, Shastra, it is not possible this is what happened in western religious history so what happened? you see this hierarchy from right to left through God’s face we understand God’s word and by understanding God’s word we reach God so the reformation that happened was you reject the priests to some extent in that sense Protestantism is like Lutheranism you reject the present generation we just have a direct relationship with the main spiritual figure that is Jesus in our context it is Prabhupada so there is no need for any living medium between us and that person now what happens is when we reject the representatives of God that is what happened in the reformation first and then after that we will study the word of God ourselves if I have the right to study the word of God then I will use my so how do I decide what is the meaning of the word of God? I am not accepting authority who becomes my authority? my own intelligence and my own logic becomes my authority so when they started studying the Bible and they found that a lot of things seem illogical some of them seem unscientific and from the 14th century onwards and 16th century onwards when Copernicus was jailed Copernicus was persecuted and Galileo was jailed that time onwards basically in the Bible there is not much direct description of the universe so the idea that the earth moves the sun moves around the earth that was taught by a Greek mathematician called Ptolemy and the Catholic Church adopted that but when Galileo taught the proposal that the earth moves around the sun it was seen as an attack on the church doctrine and so he was imprisoned and he was punished that time onwards basically in science later on it was found that Galileo’s model explained astronomy much better than Ptolemy’s model so that time when the church tried to persecute him so that led to the fall of the church and from that time onwards the church has been defensive and when when Darwin proposes the theory of evolution so basically what happened that the science progressed more and more they rejected the word of God this is not scientific work we believe in God but we don’t believe in the world and then later on as science progressed Darwin’s theory of evolution came up see there is no need for God also we can explain the world also without God that’s how it progresses so reject the priest of God reject the word of God and reject God itself that’s how it happened in western history now in modern Christianity as it exists in the western world many Christians are on the defensive last year was the 150th anniversary of Darwin publishing his book on the evolution of species so at that time the British church submitted an apology to Darwin you know we have misunderstood your teachings and we have caused a lot of a lot of criticism against you that was all unmanageable so we apologise to you for that and the Catholic church has already accepted the theory of evolution more or less so what has happened is because of the memory of that defeat now the church is going on an excessively defensive posture but this is how it all originated so ultimately how it works out is that the faith of the people depends on the representatives of God if the priests are good if those who are devoted to God then they will inspire people if they are not good then whatever be the philosophy people will lose faith and people will get disillusioned they will not be able to understand scripture they will not be able to understand God also that’s why in America there is a popular there are many evangelical Christians who very aggressively push their beliefs so on cars sometimes they have some statements which they write so one of the statements in American cars is Oh God, please save me from your followers so I believe in you but please save me from your followers so basically this doesn’t work because God saves us through his followers but the point is that if the followers themselves are not his number then ultimately it is the society that loses the people that lose so one of the major causes of atheism in that sense is the improper irresponsible behaviour of the representatives of God so now when we come to India now ok before I come to India let’s look at quickly at how things have played out in Islam’s history I talked about how Christianity sort of lost its hold on the world because of its confrontation with science in which it failed to a large extent so as of now if we see with respect to Christian revolutionist movement we have that all over the world and most of the places where the church is strong we generally face opposition whether it is Poland, whether it is Maharashtra preaching, whether it is Russia whether it is the Bruega case now actually Kumbha went to preach in America in 1966-1965 so 1965 was the year when Pope John Paul II completed his second Vatican council and this was the council 1960-65 so the leaders of the Catholic church from all over the world they sat and met together for 4 years to plan how to actually plan for the future of the Catholic church and that time one of the things they stated was that we respect all that is holy and good in the other religions of the world also this was the first statement by the Catholic church that there is something good in other religions also till then the idea was that everything is bad so that Pope Manchala Prabhupada went to America in 1965, they were just organising this second Vatican council, they met and finalised it so Christians became more open to intellectually investigate other religions and we see that Professor Harvey Cox and other people they came and met Manchala Prabhupada, they appreciated the life of this continent, at least in the early days that was because of the atmosphere that was created over there otherwise generally speaking our devotees face a lot of difficulties whenever there is a strong Christian rule it becomes difficult to preach because they feel that this is a pagan religion which takes people away from God of course some people who actually come close to devotees and see their lives and they see that actually they are as devoted to God as we are but many times for people to break through the intellectual preconceptions that they have got is quite difficult so I will come back to this a few months again but because we are focused on India we will now focus on the interactions of Christianity with Sanatana Dharma and then we will look at its called the interactions of Sanatana Dharma in India so we are focussing on India now yesterday I mentioned how first the Catholics came to India from the Portuguese rule in Goa and later the Protestants came to India through the British rule in Bengal I mentioned this briefly so one of the prominent Catholic missionaries to India was St. Francis Zeliot before he came some people said that one of the Apostles, St. Thomas came to India and there are some Thomas Christians who are there in India and some people say that he was crucified here and in some Christian churches they show even a graphic of St. Thomas who is praying on the upper mountain and there is Sri Vaishnava going behind the spear and piercing these sort of stories are very popular ways of evoking the wrath of the common Christians against the pagan masses now these sort of depictions are already there in Christian churches the most funny thing about this is that Sri Vaishnavism in one sense started in the 10th century and St. Thomas was in the 1st century so its historically rubbish but what happens is this sort of corporate comes along and that misleads people to a large extent so of course after that there are not any incidents of any violence to the Christians because Sanatana Dharma had this whole ethos that different people are at different levels and they were practised according to their level so this is a preaching record of Francis Xavier to his boss in missions so what does he say I would gather all the boys in the village and go to the place where they had made and worshipped the idols and then the dishonour heaped on the devil was greater the honour paid to him by the parents in relation to the boys at the time when they made and generated the idols that means the parents were very well the sons had been converted the children are going and desecrating the bitties now for the boys would take the idols and break them to tiny pieces and then they would spit on them and trample them underfoot and do other things which perhaps it is better not to record in detail this is talking about passing the human waste products on them thus showing their contempt for the one who had any pertinence to demand the remediation of their fathers so this is he is writing this as a very proud achievement of success of my preaching this is not necessarily the attitude of all Christians today but it is there in their attitude they may not be able to express it externally so as I said earlier desecrating the bitties is not an activity of some fanatical it is more to their theology so of course when the protestants came to India through Bengal they did a huge amount of study of the Vedic literature and there is one protestant monk a protestant priest he single-handedly learned as many as 26 Indian languages and translated the Bible into all those languages so as of now in India the Bible is available in more vernacular languages than the Bhagavad Gita is available India has so many dialects so as far as their missionary series is concerned it is enormous and there is much that we can learn from them so basically the Christians have had three approaches towards Dasnadan Dharma so their approach was condemnation, irrelevance and fulfilment so condemnation means this is a false religion, if you follow it you will go to hell give it up and come to the true religion so that is the attitude of Xavier Francis we talked about and this was the attitude of the early Christians who came to India but over a period of time they realised that this attitude cannot sustain if they are going to agitate the feelings of the majority of people over here they can’t sustain themselves then they adopted irrelevance and presently the main idea that they adopted is fulfilment irrelevance means some of it is mythology some of it is reality who knows what is actually there ultimately it is not practical it is not relevant for us therefore if you follow Jesus teachings that is irrelevance and Max Muller he talked he was considered to be the father of Indology he was considered to be a person who was pioneering the study of the Vedic scriptures in the English language and he he in his own way what he did was he focused on interpreting the scriptures in a way that damaged people’s faith so he did that and he worked very hard in his own way and he basically focused not on the mission there are many codes that you can find in the Vedic scriptures profound wisdom the conclusion is they start with flashes of brilliance and end in total darkness that is the idea so ultimately people have to come to Christianity and the present attitude that they have is called as fulfilment fulfilment means Hinduism is good, you follow this and you will become a better human being so that you will become better qualified to receive the mercy of Jesus and then you will be saved so actually speaking if you look at the Hindu studies in English Christians have done Hindu studies in English more than Hindus the studies of Hindu scriptures so if somebody wants to get an introduction of all the religious literature that is there in India so J.N.Farquhar his book is the third textbook for that purpose and he is a Christian and he is a profound Christian part of Hindu so he wrote another book on the relationship between Christianity and Hinduism that is called the crown of Hinduism so the idea is the crown of Hinduism is Christianity that book is there in in Pune one of the biggest Christian seminaries in the country so they have almost like 7000 students over there who have become priests Christian priests and one time they had come to our Swan Temple they said we wanted to take our people on a pilgrimage to the different religious sites and we found that the most active Hindu place in our country so they came and said we want to know about Hinduism so I had to talk to them around 80 students were there so I was surprised all of them were Indian boys and typical South Indian boys who we might see in our South India there was no difference but all of them had normally got involved in Christianity but they were actually going to be Christian priests so they do a lot of work in attracting the words now in this college the name of their college is Gyan Deepak School of Theology now we know Gyan Deepak Bhasmata where there was a Gyan Deepak in a Bhasmata so they had the same words and they had the image of all the Hindu Gods in a torch and Krishna is at the uppermost part of the torch and above that there is a Gyan Deepak and coming out of the flame is Jesus that means all the Hindu Gods are rising upward ultimately they will bring you to the feet of Jesus this is their present idea and they use it extensively for their purposes Presently Christianity in India is the fastest growing religion because from the time just before independence Christians found it difficult to convert because America is quite materialistic it is polarised between the hardline Christians and the people who are either sold out for materialism or sold out for atheistic science In Europe the influence of Christianity is mainly in Russia there is some positivity there Africa is something like these are very dark patterns but Africa is something like 30% Muslims 40-50% Christians and remaining are African tribes and these African tribes want to hold on to their religion and Australia is already quite materialistic so the only place where they see China they are not allowed to go much the only place where they can go South America is entirely converted so the only place where they can go and convert is India and India is a place where the government doesn’t care much and the people are poor which is a blessing for them because they can convert people very easily by financial arrangements so the whole Catholic as well as Protestant focus on India is in conversion so in Pope John Martin he said they have the idea that the second coming of Jesus will come again so he says to accelerate the second coming of Jesus we should offer a rich harvest of souls to Jesus in the Asian continent that means the more souls we can offer to Jesus that will accelerate Jesus to come faster so he said for this purpose we should use he said the church should be more Christian in essence and more Indian in form more Christian in essence and more Indian in form Indian in form means since that time onwards although they don’t have the concept of deity worship they have adopted many Christian churches which see Jesus images see Perseverance images then they have also adopted the concept of home offering fire sacrifices they have also got Jesus Ashtakam Jesus Saraswara Naam and they have they have even adopted the whole concept of Jesus Diksha so the Guru will give a mantra in their ears so adopt the culture but change the essence that is their idea and by this they have been hugely successful they have been hugely successful because ultimately people are very few people are philosophers people are attracted to religion because many reasons why people are attracted to religion but culture is one of the main things so now currently what they have started is they have started you don’t even need to change your means and you can keep your Hindu names or they have sort of as scholars have recorded all the names of Biblical characters and they have found Sanskritized versions of those Biblical names which are there in Arabic and then a person becomes converted but the name also doesn’t change so that you don’t create an anomaly so they are converting the underground people so so anyway as of now as I said that Christians are converting very vigorously in India Krishna Prabhupada’s attitude towards Christians converting in India was very interesting I conclude with this point when the devotees there are 3-4 quotes about this so when the devotees spontaneously are not allowed to come to India or rather they are not allowed to stay in India because they do not have the visas we know that in Nepal American European devotees would come the Indian government did not give them visas so many times they had to go to Nepal or somewhere else and just come back so if Prabhupada says that if the Christian missionaries are allowed to come and spread their religion then why are the American European devotees not allowed? so Sri Prabhupada in that sense rather than criticising Christianity for this conversion he says that actually they are allowing them rather than allowing us when Sri Prabhupada was in Cottage Church College there was a one of the professors who was teaching from Cottage Church College was one of the most prominent Christian preachers in India and we know how during his teachings also he would criticise another example of who is the witness in their heart but if you look at Sri Prabhupada’s comments Sri Prabhupada in his Sahaja Yoga he actually said that these people whatever he has talked about in his conversations the Christians that I have met they were men of integrity and devotion to God there are other kinds of Christians also but Sri Prabhupada has over all talked positively in terms of their devotion to God and in terms of their moral integrity and another place Sri Prabhupada when he met one young boy came to Sri Prabhupada and he said Swamiji I have converted to Christianity Sri Prabhupada said why? he said in India no high class people get converted only low class people get converted and you have no good family so this boy says but there is no difference between our philosophy and between Vaishnava philosophy and Christian so what is the problem you have converted? Sri Prabhupada said there is a difference the difference is that they eat meat and we don’t they eat meat and we don’t and then the conversation went on and then Sri Prabhupada came to the point so what is your philosophy? and Sri Prabhupada says our philosophy is that God is great and we are tiny and therefore we should devote ourselves to God everything else is detail so Sri Prabhupada says that we should see the good in everything Sri Prabhupada actually focusses on seeing how Christians practise missionary spirit and as devotees we should also have missionary spirit Sri Prabhupada says just as the Christians know the Bible, devotees should know the Bhagavad Gita or something like that how can you quote these verses and be able to preach properly so we discuss this over on the street where we conclude about Christianity we focus on how they have their agendas but they have rejected and executed their agendas by talking about the cultural forms, how they have propagated it so in Pune, for many generations the church has been there but there are Tukaram Maharaj and so many other saints because they have refused to convert so then the current bishop of Pune is converted into a guru his name is Dr. Thomas W. so he has done his PhD in the God experience of Tukaram Maharaj and when he became the bishop, there was a frank introduction to all the people of Pune and very you can call it intelligent you can call it cunning, whichever way you look at it very sound strategical preaching what was this thing, he said I am a Marathi person and protecting Marathi culture is my duty I am a Marathi person and protecting Marathi culture is my duty so he said from today onwards all the religious services in our church will be Marathi and he said that so what he does is he speaks in Marathi and he quotes verses from the Bible and he quotes among us from Tukaram and he says actually Mr. Tukaram Maharaj was brought into the Pitotsias so this is used in a very deceptive way and since he became the bishop the Catholic church attendance and compulsion increased tremendously so I had gone to a conference where he was also there and we had a brief talk so two things I observed that these people are sincerely misled sincerely misled because they are sincere and their devotion to God which is whatever they want to but as far as the understanding of the Vedic philosophy is concerned they are misled they are not mal-intentioned they are not evil it’s not that they hate but they are actually convinced in their own way that Jesus is the only way and we have to save people but then what? so actually Mr. Prabhupada you saw back in our interview when he started his teaching and this is something which you can learn from him and we need to increase our preaching bigger so that people who are inclined towards spirituality instead of going to some other path they can come to Krishnamurti’s teaching and then they can become obligated to Krishna’s message are there any questions? one quick question of course before that Samana Guru, any corrections? so in the next class we’ll discuss something more volatile we’ll discuss about Islam thank you very much thank you very much Mr. Prabhupada I love your teaching I love it very much