What makes Indians convert to Islam or Christianity?

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
so what attracts people to say convert to Islam they don’t even have a description of the personal form of God Islam is is in the mainstream media quite a vilified religion vilified means it is often depicted very negatively and there are definitely undoubtedly many Muslims have done many barbaric things and even now barbaric things are going on but it is also very simplistic to judge all people according to the actions of some people it is it is it is a vision that lacks depth you know some people say that ok all Muslims are terrorists this is such a superficial understanding cause today in the world you know every fourth person is a Muslim so if every fourth person were a terrorist there would be practically no peace in the world surely there is a lot of peace in the world so it is a complete labeling of any group of people based on just superficial criteria that is wrong so there are definitely extremists who do terrible things and they often quote the Quran to do terrible things but is that what is the essential teaching of the Quran that there are many other Islamic scholars who say it is not and they also have their reasoning for it I have an online Muslim friend there are some religious websites where we are in touch with various scholars so he told me that actually it is easier for me to communicate with moderates of other traditions than extremists of my own traditions so we consider all Muslims to be of one level but it is not like that you know among Muslims there are moderates there are extremists so he says for me as a moderate Muslim I can communicate better more easily with a moderate Hindu or a moderate Christian or a moderate Jew than I can communicate with an extremist Muslim so now ISIS is a big threat in the world today but what is often overlooked is that the maximum number of people whom ISIS has killed is Muslims ISIS they are one group of Muslims and they have killed so many Muslims so it is rather than considering Islam itself as bad we have to recognize that there are people who are quoting Islamic scriptures and they do follow Islam they claim to follow Islam but whether that is the essential Islam that is a question which you know we as third party don’t have a right to judge that because somebody can very well quote Hindu scriptures and say that you know there is so much discriminatory caste system and this and that so many things can be talked about based on the if we want to look with a fault finding eye there is a lot of fault finding a lot of mudslinging that can be done on our tradition also so in general we need to recognize that our shastras teachers should classify based on goodness goodness, passion and ignorance and goodness so this classification is there in all religions goodness, passion and ignorance is there so ultimately it depends on how well the people of a tradition present their teachings so Islam in its own way offers people some level of order some level of Muslims in their own way are quite diligent in practicing their religion they do namaz properly regularly and they go to the mosque and they experience God in their own ways Prabhupada is actually not very critical of Islam he would say that I have seen so many Muslims whenever they earn a lot of money if they earn a lot of money, they say we will build a mosque but he says how many Hindus do that he says I have seen small small Muslim children, they are taught to recite the Quran, he says how many Hindus are taught to recite the Bhagavad Gita so as far as cultural adherence is concerned, many Muslims are quite rigorous about that and by following that they do get some experience of something higher so in general the following of certain level of rules and there are definitely Muslims who do devote themselves to God and there are Muslim saints, there are Sufi saints who have there is one devotee who has written a book called Muslim Devotees of Krishna in the Indian tradition it says that many saints who were from Muslim background, they were devoted to Krishna so the there are so Islam is also Prabhupada says that Mohammed was also a messenger of God and he came to help people elevate their consciousness so by following that path properly people are elevating their consciousness and that’s how they are getting attracted, so this is from the philosophical perspective from the, if you want to look at it from a practical perspective actually every religion is ultimately as good as it is presented so Muslims have done a, although there are extremists who lead to the vilification of Islam but there are many articulate Muslims who have written books who have made presentations and various ways and they have presented Islam fairly, very well so you know, if one company this is commercial but this is how things work in life if one company says we have been existing for if there is an old company say there is one car company which was that car which got extinct, went out of the market Maruti Suzuki and you take any old car Toyota any old car which is not there, which has become obsolete Maruti 800 ok fine, so some old car and they will say we were the original brand, now we have gone out now why are people not purchasing it you didn’t market yourself somebody else came and marketed and that’s how they got it so people in general want something which will give them meaning in their life which will give them purpose for their life give them some direction for their life and whichever religion presents itself people will take that so it is it is very sad actually many of the holy places if we go if we go to Tirupati if we go to Puri if we go to many of the holy places they are so disorderly the pandas are there who are trying to extract money and the worshippers who are going there, they are treated they are treated quite disrespectfully you stay for hours to take darshan and within 5 seconds you have to go in contrast if you go to a church if you go to a mosque you are dealt with quite warmly not on all mosques and all churches but people are dealt with quite warmly so if the teachers of a tradition if the representatives of a tradition present themselves properly, people will get interacted. So there is some spiritual substance in it but along with that there is also relatively positive presentation of it and apart from that of course there is what is often not acknowledged is that Islam’s spread is one of the most spectacular events in world history that means Islam started in the 7th century and within just 4 to 5 centuries it had spread all over the world it started from the middle east and all of India was conquered and there is one king who was able to stop it otherwise they would have conquered Europe also so now we may say that they were unfair or whatever credit has to be given where credit is due it’s a small number of people and the way they spread and the way they conquer, I am not talking about their ethics, I am simply talking about the principle of it that they were inspired by that vision that it is God who has empowered us and we are sharing God’s message and we are conquering on behalf of God so that is something which is they were inspired they were convinced, they were jealous so although even India’s fall to Islam we may say it is a matter of sadness for us that Indian culture was destroyed at that time temples were destroyed but at the same time we have to recognize that they were invaders a few in number this was our home, how many soldiers can come and attack they have come tractor at that time and India had so many kingdoms so it was supposed to be so big and yet what happened so they were heroic now many of them were cunning but cunningness is a part of warfare and you have to be prepared for that so Krishna himself demonstrated in the Mahabharata so the fact is that Muslims once they are convinced about something they are ready to work for it so that is something which we don’t see in there are Christians who come from America from comfortable families I had gone for a conference, I met this Christian who had come from America even when we become brahmacharis we are still living in relative comfort there are Christians who come from America, from prosperous families and they go to one village in India and they dedicate their life throughout their life they stay in that village and they convert we can have a negative vision of conversion and people like Hindus are getting converted but the fact is Christians do have dedication today the Bible has been translated into more languages, languages mean dialects you know India there are different dialects so the Bible has been translated into more Indian dialects than what the Bhagavad Gita has been translated so this is, they have worked hard there was one Christian missionary now he learned 27 Indian languages just to translate the Bible into those languages wow so they do work hard when they are dedicated they may sometimes use unethical means their philosophy may not be as lofty as ours is and they may be to some extent narrow minded but they do work hard and they do present themselves so again we have to look at sattvic, rajasic, tamasic there are tamasic conversionists people who are violent who are intolerant and all that but there are sattvic people and there are rajasic people so there is a whole continuum and ultimately religion is like a marketplace ultimately is not in the sense of ultimate meaning but ultimately in the way things work functionally that it’s a marketplace whoever goes forward and presents the product the people will get attracted if the product has some level of substance and if nobody else is presenting anything nobody else is presenting anything then why not why not I met one at one conference I had gone there was a conference on AIDS and AIDS and religion so there was this it was supposed to be it was supposed to be organized by Christians and then I went there this was all supposed to be this is father Joseph from Malegaon father Peter from Nandgaon father this from this from all the talukas they were there when I went and saw them they were all this father Peter, father Joseph, father John they were all typical Maharashtrian villagers but they had been converted they had become missionaries they had become fathers so I talked with some of them afterwards and they said that you know we we want to be searching for God and in our own villages, in our own temples we were not even allowed to enter the temples the Christians came and they not only allowed us to enter the temples when we took it up they said we will build a church for you and you can become the priest over there so now for somebody who is not even allowed into a temple that person is allowed to become a priest so it is the ego factor is always there we can’t expect even devotees are not free from ego or just become non devotees how can we expect them to be free so they do they do their work well and that’s how we as devotees if we present Krishna Bhakti properly we can rather than blaming that these people are doing like this why are they spreading if we look from the point of view of history of religions the way Krishna consciousness is spread actually the way Krishna consciousness is spread in the last 50 years it is extraordinary if Krishna consciousness keeps spreading like this for the next 500 years Krishna Bhakti will be the world’s biggest religion of course it has to spread like that and relatively speaking if we see the way Krishna consciousness spread in the first 10 years if it had spread like that within 100 years we would have become the world’s biggest religion but then no religion spreads at that pace when initial charismatic founder is there at that time there is a phenomenally fast spread but afterwards many organizations actually crumble and collapse after the founder departs but ISKCON has not only survived that phase but actually stabilized and has prospered also so there are good prospects for us in future if we keep sharing Krishna Bhakti properly