Bharat Rakshak

Why do we need Asatru?
Aren't most people who want religion satisfied with Christianity or one of the other "Established" religions?
People are attracted to the better-known religions because they have genuine spiritual needs which must be filled. People are looking for community and for answers to the "big questions": What life is all about, and how we should live it. For many people today, the so-called major faiths do not have answers that work. Asatru has answers, but it has not been an alternative for most seekers because they haven't known about it. Once they realize that there is another way - a better, more natural, more honorable way - they will not be satisfied with anything less than a return to the religion of their ancestors.

Why is the Religion of our Ancestors the Best One for Us?
Because we are more like our ancestors than we are like anyone else. We inherited not only their general physical appearance, but also their predominant mental, emotional, and spiritual traits. We think and feel more like they did; our basic needs are most like theirs. The religion which best expressed their innermost nature - Asatru - is better suited to us than is some other creed which started in the Middle East among people who are essentially different from us. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are alien religions which do not truly speak to our souls.

Why Did Asatru Die Out if it was the Right Religion for Europeans?
Asatru was subjected to a violent campaign of repression over a period of hundreds of years. Countless thousands of people were murdered, maimed, and exiled in the process. The common people (your ancestors!) did not give up their cherished beliefs easily. Eventually, the monolithic organization of the Christian church, bolstered by threats of economic isolation and assisted by an energetic propaganda campaign, triumphed over the valiant but unsophisticated tribes.

Or so it seemed! Despite this persecution, elements of Asatru continued down to our own times - often in the guise of folklore - proving that our own native religion appeals to our innermost beings in a fundamental way. Now, a thousand years after its supposed demise, it is alive and growing. Indeed, so long as there are men and women of European descent, it cannot really die because it springs form the soul of our people. Asatru isn't just what we BELIEVE, it's what we ARE.

Wasn't the Acceptance of Christianity a Sign of Civilization - A Step up From Barbarism?
No! The atrocities committed by Christians, Muslims, and Jews throughout history are hardly a step up from anything. The so-called "barbarians" who followed Asatru (the Vikings, the various Germanic tribes, and so forth) were the source of our finest civilized traditions - trial by jury, parliaments, Anglo Saxon common law, and the rights of women, to name a few. Our very word "law" comes from the Norse language, not from the tongues of the Christian lands. We simply did not and do not need Christianity to be civilized.

How Does Asatru Differ From Other Religions?
Asatru is unlike the better-known religions in many ways. Some of these are:

We are polytheistic. That is, we believe in a number of deities, including Goddesses as well as Gods. We do not accept the idea of "original sin", the notion that we are tainted from birth and intrinsically bad, as does Christianity. Thus, we do not need "saving".

The Middle Eastern religions teach either a hatred of other religions or a duty to convert others, often by force. They have often practiced these beliefs with cruel brutality.

We do not claim to be a universal religion or a faith for all of humankind. In fact, we don't think such a thing is possible or desirable. The different branches of humanity have different ways of looking at the world, each of which is valid for them. It is only right that they have different religions, which of course they do.

To understand what happened to the Greeks, it is worthwhile to read the book "The Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes"...

http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Greeks-Ch ... 1593860390

A bit polemical, but well researched... and well, typical of the Greeks, passionately argued.

And this is a fairly useful resource:

http://hellenismos.us/f/YaBB.pl

The Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes,

Mediterranean Quarterly, 19:1 (Winter 2008): 97-106.

Book Review

Evaggelos G. Vallianatos, The Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes, (Harwich Port, Cape Cod: Clock & Rose Press, 2006), Hardcover, 245 pp. ISBN: 978-1-59386-039-4

Reviewed by Christos C. Evangeliou.

This book was a pleasant surprise for me. Its title, The Passion of the Greeks, reminded me of a statement I had made in the Hellenic Philosophy, published ten years ago.[1]I had stated then that: “By the Hellenic definition of philosophia, understood as a free inquiry and unfettered speculation about both nature and culture, “European philosophy” becomes simply a case of homonymia. For this kind of “philosophy” has been deprived, for historical reasons, of that essential freedom of spirit, which is absolutely necessary for an authentic and genuine philosophy to be born and flourish…. [It] had the misfortune to serve, alternatively or simultaneously, three very non-Hellenic musters: dogmatic theology, scientific technology, and political ideology. Hence, what I have termed “the passion of philosophy,” which the forthcoming volume will attempt to bring to light, by critically analyzing the phenomenon of the historical transformation of Ancient Hellenic philosophy in Christianized Europe and the West.”

So, while I was still trying to figure out the details of “the passion of philosophy,” that is, what happened to Hellenic philosophy in Christian Europe, Vallianatos’ book came to address such larger questions as: “What happened to the Greeks? When did the Greek Gods become “myths” and their people, the most highly evolved in the Mediterranean “pagans”? Why are their statues mutilated and their temples smashed? Why was so much of their knowledge destroyed? This book tells the secret story of the Greek genocide at the hands of the Christians between the fourth to the sixth centuries CE... At a time of religious conflict between Christianity and Islam, this book highlights the intolerant nature of monotheism, the hidden history that plunged the West into the Dark Ages. This book is pleading for another Renaissance, another love affair with the Greeks, so as to reinvigorate our civilization with Greek values.”

Written with great passion, by a passionate Greek scholar, this impassioned book recounts with graphic details the historical “passion” of the pagan Greeks at the crucial time, when they encountered the fanatic hordes of missionary monks and Christianizing Roman Emperors. They tried to convert the remaining Greeks too to the new, fanatical, and fashionable faith at the time, willy-nilly. This book is unlike other books, which present the Christianizing of Greece and of the Mediterranean region as some kind of felicitous meeting and mating of the philosophic spirit of Hellenism and the prophetic spirit of the new and ecumenical religion of love and peace. For it chronicles, with boldness and candor, the other and more hideous side of this tragic story. The meeting of Christianity and Hellenism was not peaceful and pious, in the eyes of the author, but bloody and brutal, and has been kept secret and hidden for a long time.

This challenging and truthful tale, therefore, will probably offend the sensibilities of Christians and Greeks, who have been taught the other aspect of the story for so long that they have come to believe it with fanatic faith. They even feel proud of what they refer to, with equal passion, as the great and glorious synthesis of the Greco-Christian heritage, historically facing the menace of Islam. For, as Prof. Thanasis Maskaleris has put it: “[The] book dramatically portrays the immense conflict between Christianity and Hellenism from its beginnings to the present, and is structured with a backbone of extensive documentation. It also estimates our great loss for essentially abandoning the political and humanistic principles the Greeks shaped for a civilized sustenance of our world. One wishes that more books were written in the same vein, for the wisdom of the Greeks can provide the guidance we desperately need…”

More praise for this good book comes from distinguished Professors, like Apostolos Athanassakis and Phillip Mitsis. They have stated respectively that: “The Passion of the Greeks is a book which proposes to sail into the highly controversial early centuries when the Christian faith made every possible effort to prevail over the deeply-embedded Hellenic religion…. However, violence, political conspiracy, and downright destruction of the great religious centers of antiquity were much more the order of the day….” And, “His plea for reason, moderation, liberty, and a general world view that he finds best defended in the traditions of Hellenic philosophical thought is especially timely in a world increasingly disturbed by religious fanaticism and sectarian violence. Rather than giving into despair, however, Vallianatos tries to chart an optimistic map of human and political possibilities and calls for a general renewal of individual and societal reason based on modern pagan principles.”

The book deserves all this praise and more because it is written not only with great pathos, but also with clarity of thought and lucidity of style. What he said about Zosimos, one of his favorite Greek historians, applies to Vallianatos work as well: “He wrote in the great Greek historical tradition—of honesty, conciseness, insight, originality and moving narrative.” (p. 87) The book combines historical erudition with a personal touch, as the author tries to understand what happened to his beloved Hellenes and to him personally. His journey took him from a war ravished Greek island, Kephalonia, to America, where he discovered himself and his Hellenic roots through the study of history, with help from Adamantios Koraes, an enlightened and inspired Greek scholar on whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation.

Life in Valsamata, the village where Evaggelos was born and raised, in the post war Greece which was also torn apart by civil war, was tough and determined by the interplay of shadows. On the one hand were the shadows cast by mountain Ainos, with the ruins of the shrines of Zeus, Apollon, Athena, and Pan; and on the other, the shades coming from the monastery of St. Gerasimos, with its Church bells, festivals and icons. He explains in the prologue of the book the conflict within this tradition and in his inner soul:

The ideal of what Greece was in “ancient” times and the ideal of what it should be in my time clash violently with what Greece is, in fact, in the dawn of the twenty-first century. I love passionately all that is still Greek in Greece. I say this with sorrow, for Christianity radically remade Greece to the point that the real Hellas was buried for more than a millennium, indeed it is still buried, in the country, which calls itself Hellas or Greece…. The Christians made the whole country a cemetery, which quite unintentionally preserved the aftermath of their plunder and genocide of the Greeks and Hellenic civilization…. The products of Christian culture—the bible, the liturgy, the miracles of Jesus and the saints, the dogmas of sin, paradise and hell, the icons of the religious hierarchy—come from a world that has nothing to do with the Parthenon and the philosophy and piety of the Greeks, who built this greatest masterpiece of Greek and Western culture in order to honor the Greek virgin goddess Athena. (pp. 4-10)

Between the long prologue (pp. 1-26) and a short epilogue (pp. 201-207), the author has arranged
eleven chapters that make up the bulk of the book and house his passionate narrative of the passion of the Greeks. He chronicles the tragic transformation of the Hellenic and Greco-Roman civilization in the crucial time o f the 4th and 6th centuries. As he sees it, this civilization (rational, beautiful, good and humanistic) was replaced, for the most part violently, by the monstrosity of a theocratic Christian Empire, which was based on a fanatical and intolerant faith, with its foolish hopes and irrational fears of an after life.

Chapter one, “Greek History: From Marathon to Korinthos,” covers the historical period falling between the glorious battle of Marathon, which marked the first Greek victory over the Persians in 490BC, and the infamous battle of Corinth in 146BC, which the Greeks lost to Romans. It made mainland Greece a province of the expanding Roman Empire. Of special interest here is the theory regarding the relation between Hellenic historia (history) and mythologia (mythology), or “early history.” The author explains, “God Prometheus comes to us out of what we call “mythology”. Greek mythology, however, is not a fairy tale or a legend—this is a pernicious lie the Christians invented to denigrate the Greeks. Mythology, for the Greeks, is early history or history lost in time, and it is the fundamental key to understanding the world, how it works, and where we humans fit in.” (p. 29) In support of this theory he refers also to the work of an expert in the field of Classical Greek Studies, Dr. Mary Lefkowitz.[2]

Chapter two, “Power and Importance of Greek Religion,” builds upon and elaborates this theory. It addresses the important questions of how the Greeks and their gods are literally inseparable, and “why religion, in the form of piety for the gods expressed in athletics, the tragic theater, the oracles, and the festivals, helped the Greeks to maintain their Greek identity?” He insists that, “Greek piety, the veneration of the Greeks for their gods, was at the core of how the Greeks understood the universe, nature, the rest of the world, and themselves. In fact the religion of the Greek people was their culture, which was full of gods but did not have a creed, holy book or church…. All agricultural festivals were propitiation to the gods for increasing the fertility of the land, for a good harvest.” (p. 42) He concludes with the insightful observation: “So the Greeks started their grand political experimentation in the gymnasion-palaistra of each polis with a combination of training the beautiful nude body of young people with rigorous physical exercises, and educating their mind with a command of the Greek language, music, philosophy, mathematics and science. The nude athletic games of Olympia…. were a sort of final exams, an offering of piety to the gods, all in one political act and celebration of common Greek culture.”(p. 48)

In chapter three, “Apollonios of Tyana: Hellas is the World,” he discusses the special case of the sage Apollonios of Tyana, his travels all over the world, his many exploits, as well as the rivalry between his Hellenic movement and the early Christian cult. In him, the author sees an archetype with which he can identify. For, like Evaggelos, “He passionately tried to preserve Hellenic culture by choosing its ascetic and scientific version worked out by Pythagoras 700 years before his time… He urged the Greeks and Romans to stand by their traditions, studying nature and medicine, offering piety to their gods….Christianity did to Apollonios what it did to Greek culture—it obliterated his works and influence…. Apollonios, however, made a difference among the Greeks, offering a model of inspiration and resistance to them, which they used to preserve and protect their culture for many hundreds of years.” (pp. 59-60)

Chapter four, “The Treason of Christianity,” is one of the longest and most passionate. It narrates the failure of the Roman State to deal effectively with the serious danger that the rapidly growing, the “insidious and seditious,” Christian sect represented, although the authorities were aware of its devious, anti-social behavior. One Roman Emperor after another underestimated the threat of Christianity, until it was too late to stop it in the 4th century, when they embrace it and used it for their interests. Of course, “What happened to Rome eventually reached Greece: Tremors in Rome became earthquakes in Greece. [But] it took time for the cultist tremor of Christianity to become a political and cultural earthquake.”(p. 62)

Several pages of this chapter are devoted to Celsus or Kelsos’ sustained attack of the new religion, as well as the reactions to it of leading Platonic philosophers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE, such as, Ploutarchos, Plotinos, and Porphyrios. According to Kelsos, “Christianity had nothing original or divine in its history and theology. It was a stolen piece of Judaism modified to fit the fiction of Jesus. This was a Jewish sorcerer whom the Jews rejected because he claimed to be their messiah. The Jews, however, expected a messiah-prince to free them of Roman rule, but Jesus had nothing to do with princes or revolution. The Christians, nevertheless, made Jesus, a secretive, untrustworthy sorcerer, into a god. …Christian teachers sought their converts among slaves, women, children and fools. This was no accident but a consistent policy because they feared educated people. They considered science and learning dangerous and evil, and thought of knowledge as a disease of the soul.” (p. 68) All these conclusions the author derives from Origenes’ response to Kelsos’ attack of the Christian Church. In the eyes of Hellenic philosophers and Roman authorities, the Christians appeared as “atheists and impious and criminal.” This is attested by Christian Eusebius, among other authors, in Preparatio Evangelica (1.2. 1-4).

The 3rd and 4th centuries were certainly stressed times intensified by ideological war between the new Christian thinkers, like Eusebius and Augustine, and traditional thinkers, like Plotinus and Porphyry. Porphyry in particular became the champion of Hellenism and Hellenic polytheism, so that he attracted the ire of the theologians. In this, the author sees a parallel to the recently ended Cold War pitting Communists against Capitalists: “This war was as nasty a war—fought between the Greeks and the Christians—as that fought in the twentieth century between the Communist Russians and the Americans. Eusebios and Augustine played the role of the hagiographers of Lenin and Stalin. No crime made any difference as long as the hero was on the side of Christianity…. After all, they spent their entire lives trying to show the Jewish prophecies and the gospels were not fiction but the word of god…. Yet the slander of Porphyrios by Eusebios and Augustine did not diminish his timely and all-important message.” (pp. 79-80) The Emperor Maximinus Daia (308-313) was probably influenced by Porphyry and picked up the message and the struggle against the enemies of the state, but it was too little, too late. Constantine had other plans in mind.

Chapter five is titled, “Decline and Fall of Rome--Through Greek Eyes.” The author wants to look at the decline and fall of Rome through the eyes of two Greek historians, Zosimos and Ammianus, because: “To uncover what the Christians did to the Greeks, we need to turn to the Greeks themselves—that is, we must understand Roman imperial history from the perspective of the Greeks who witnessed the smashing and burning of their culture. That is the only way to get to the truth. The Christians… whether historians, philologists, translators, editors or theologians writing in the last several centuries, including the twentieth century, are unreliable: They no longer see the Greeks as Greeks but see them as idolaters, heathens and pagans…. That is the main reason we must consult the Greeks in order to reveal the truth.” (p. 87)

When we do consult the Greek historian Zosimos, we see that he identified the period 313-363 as the crucial time of Roman decline. Two related factors, Christianity and barbarity, combined to bring down Roman power. For the Barbarians “infiltrated the Roman world, and together with the Christians, barbarized it. Finally, the barbarians and the Christians became indistinguishable, destroying the integrity, and indeed the civilization, that had been Roman Empire.” (p. 88). This certainly happened in the western part of the Empire, but the eastern part seems to have faired a little better, perhaps in the eyes of other observers, but not in the eyes of the author of this book. For him, as for Zosimos, the emperors Constantine and Theodosius I, do not deserve the title “Great,” that Christians historians have bestowed on them, because they share “most of the blame for the catastrophe,” the collapse of the Empire. More to the point:
Zosimos disliked Constantine primarily because, by his support of Christianity, he broke irrevocably with both Greek and Roman past. Zosimos was right…. Constantine inflicted a nearly mortal wound on the civilization of Rome. He was the first Roman emperor who, by his actions, became no longer the chief magistrate of the Roman people, but a despot armed with troops and his own state religion, Christianity. He wrecked the ancient Roman tradition that the emperor, the princeps, was the legal representative of the senate and the Roman people. Instead, Constantine founded a hereditary monarchy and used religion to draw moral and political support. This, in my opinion, is the overarching reason why Constantine made Christianity a state religion…. Christianity would forever bless him and justify his rule.” (p. 93)

These insights are right on target. Christianity was ready to forgive Constantine’s many hideous
crimes, and even elevate him to the level of the Apostle, calling him isapostolos. Ammianus was equally “disturbed by the violence of the Christians,” in the rein of Constantius, son of Constantine. (p. 99)

Chapter six is titled, “Julian the Great,” not surprisingly, since Julian was the champion of the “pagan” party and, in this regard, the opposite of Constantine and his pro-Christian policies. His rise to power, his short rule, and his tragic fall (362-363) are described in detail following Ammianus’ account. Julian was determined to restore the worship of the gods and the honored Greco-Roman traditions. Thus, he “declared religious freedom in the empire,” although he made it public that he was not a Christian, “but a faithful follower of the Greek and Roman gods.” He “immersed himself in Greek religion with the passion of a person who waited an entire life for that moment;” he “loved Greek philosophy and the gods, for the two were inseparable.” He made a distinction between Christianity and Judaism and showed more respect for the latter. He also considered rebuilding “the sacred city of Jerusalem.” But he always saw Christianity as “an illegal, treasonous and newfangled cult and ideology that destroyed Greek culture.” (pp. 106-112)

He even prohibited, rightly in the opinion of the author, Christians “from teaching Greek and Roman philosophy, poetry and literature.” These were replete with references to Greek religion and reverence for the gods. How could Christians appreciate their beauty, understand their truth, and interpret it correctly? Gregory of Nazianzus, who had met Julian as a student in Athens, called him “a public and private enemy” and an “apostate,” an epithet that stack with him since. To counterbalance this, Vallianatos calls Julian “ the Great” and a “Philosopher-King.” If it was not obvious that he loves Julian, the author tells us so (p.119). Because of this love, he admits that his portrait of this tragic Emperor is “probably more one-sided than I would like it to be.” However, at this point, he is critical of Dr. Polymnia Athanassiadi who, following the line of St. Gregory, sees in Julian a fanatic man and “the very incarnation of evil.”[3]

Clearly the author identifies with Julian and his project: “He, no more than I, had no choice in growing up Christian. We dumped Christianity because it had been imposed on us by the force of the church and the government in his case, and by the force of unexamined tradition in my case. In addition, and this is the real reason of abandoning Christianity, that religion had nothing to do with our Greek culture. In fact, it turned out to be a fatal enemy to that culture. The apostates were the likes of Gregory Nazianzus who willfully ditched their fabulous and philosophical Greek tradition for an alien and treasonous doctrine.” (p. 119) With the assassination of young Julian (in 363, at the age of 32), and the intensified barbarian attacks on Rome, the Empire seemed as if abandoned by the gods, and doomed to follow “its Christian path of violent decline and fall.” This decline is covered in chapters seven and eight


Of special interest is chapter eight, “Universal Captivity of Greece,” because it provides what the author calls “chronology of murder and genocide,” a long list of dates in which policies directed against the pagan Greeks were adopted by Christian Roman Emperors. Worship of the Hellenic gods and sacrificing to them were forbidden on the penalty of death. The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Olympic Agones were ended. Teachers were forbidden to engage in Greek studies. An edict of Zeno, published in 484, reads thus: “Bishops and government agents should find and punish teachers of Hellenic studies. They should not be allowed to teach, lest they corrupt their students. But, above all, Bishops and government officials should put Greek teachers out of business, bringing the “impieties” of Hellenism to an end. No one shall leave a gift or bequeath anything to Greeks or to schools and other institutions supporting the “impiety” of Hellenism. All previous legislation against the “error” of the Greeks is reaffirmed.” (p. 139)

Dr. Vallianatos comments on the imperial order that brought an end to the Olympics, as follows:

Here was a millennial tradition of athletic competition for arete (courage, virtue, equality before the law, goodness, manliness, nobility and excellence) started by Herakles, son of Zeus and the Greeks’ greatest hero, and Theodosios, thinking like a barbarian, brought it to an end.

The Olympic agon (contest) was much more than a struggle between outstanding men for physical excellence. It was, above all, a Panhellenic honoring of the gods. It was an extraordinary effort to rein in the Hellenes’ passions for war and bring them together from all over the world for the celebration of their common culture. The overwhelming idea behind the Olympic contest was political. The Olympic contest was an effort to build a Panhellenic polis and commonwealth, a united Hellas under democratic governance. The Olympic agon was also building better and nobler human beings. And, yet, the Hellenes’ greatest athletic contest and celebration of national identity were buried…. by a barbarian king who knew no better than listening to the fanaticism of his Christian advisors. (p. 136)

The destructive work of Theodosius against the Greeks and their culture continued by his successors and, with real zest, by Justinian, who closed down the schools of philosophy in Athens in 529, and “brought barbarism to Greece.” According to John of Ephesus, “in 546 Justinian’s agents discovered several illustrious and noble men, grammarians, sophists, and doctors, who were worshiping the Greek gods. The government of Justinian tortured, beat, flogged and imprisoned these men who then rushed to denounce each other. Some of them admitted their “false beliefs” and became Christians. One of these rich and powerful men, Phokas, committed suicide in prison rather than face Justinian who ordered that he “be buried like a donkey.” (p. 148) Together with the pagan Greeks, the Jews were targeted too. For instance, St. John Chysostom considered them, long before Hitler, as a “disease that had to be eradicated.” (p. 154)

Chapter nine is titled, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The question has been borrowed from Tertullian, a Christian fundamentalist and bigot, who represented an extreme version of Christianity. He expressed deep suspicion and hatred of Hellenic philosophy, which he considered the seedbed of heresy. For him, and many other Christians like him, the truth had been revealed and was to be found in the Holy Scriptures, whose origin was in Jerusalem, and not to be sought by philosophers and their theories, whose origin was in Athens, Greece. At any rate, the fact is that, although the Christianized Roman Empire retained in its eastern parts at least the Greek language and some morsels of classical literature, this was just the cell of the Hellenic culture, without the soul or vital spirit. The spirit was lost and would not be revived in the West for more than a millennium, until the coming of Renaissance in the 14-15th centuries.

But, before the Italian Renaissance, another renaissance had taken place in the Islamic world in the 9th and 10th centuries, especially in Baghdad under the Abbassid dynasty. This was primarily due to the fact that many books of Greek philosophy and science were translated into Arabic in a systematic way. The two captures of Constantinople (by the Crusaders in 1204, and the Turks in 1453) brought to the West valuable Greek manuscripts and competent Greek scholars, who gave an impetus to the Renaissance. But the light of Renaissance was soon to be dimmed by the fury of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic reaction. Thus, the Council of Trent (1545-1563) brought effectively the Renaissance movement to a premature end. The author correctly observes that, “As a result, the religious wars in the sixteenth century, among many other catastrophes, nearly sealed the fate of Hellenic logos (reason) in European culture…. Calvinism brought an end of pleasure, the agonizing fear of sin, and hatred for nature and the earth to the Evangelical Christians. Calvin said Christians longed for death, not life. Calvin was right about that.” (p. 169)

However, the movements of Renaissance and Reformation left Greece and its Orthodox Church unmoved, as they were covered protectively with the darkness of Turkocracy (1453-1821). To this theme the next chapter (chapter ten) is devoted and is titled, with caustic irony, “The Greek Palimpsest.” The comments, in this chapter particularly, about the Greek Church will make religiously minded people in Greece upset, and not eager to extend their Christian love to the author of this book. Consider for example:

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Christianity is still a force to contend with in Greece. The church is an occupying and colonial and colonizing force. The church in Greece is the highest of all conceivable corruption. It stole the identity of the Greeks and continues to muddle their minds with anti-Hellenic thoughts. The church is also the wealthiest institution of the country. It has made religion into an extraordinary profitable business…. What Christians did to the Hellenes and their culture…. is a closed and secret page of Greek history in Greece…. Most Greeks don’t know that their church collaborated with the Turks to keep them slaves for 400 years. Adamantios Koraes was straightforward. Writing anonymously in 1806, he said the priests and monks and bishops were primarily responsible for the Turkish occupation of Greece…. The country is a Palimpsest. Barbarians are writing over the scraped history and culture of Hellas…. Greek children and students sing the praises of Christian saints, some of them with abominable records of anti-Hellenism, but barely know the poetry, or even the names of, Homeros, Hesiodos, Aischylos, Sophocles…. (pp. 171-172)

In spite of this bleak picture of the status of Greek culture in Greece, in Europe, and the world, he is optimistic that a possible renaissance by the resurrection of Hellenic gods, especially agrarian Dionysus, to replace Christian Jesus, is not out of the question completely. To this possibility the last chapter of the book is devoted, “Dionysos for a Permanent Hellenic Renaissance.” Following on the steps of Nietzsche, he sees the difference between a Greek god and other gods: “A god to a Greek is not what Christians (and other monotheists) understand their god to be. The Greek god was sometimes an immortal being of pure goodness, intelligence, beauty, and power; but, more often, the Greek god was a mixture of human and divine elements, a human-like god or god-like human with immortality, goodness, power, beauty, and intelligence to spare—the very ideal of Greek philosophy and culture, kalon k’ agathon, the beautiful and the good.” (p. 187)

He also meditates on the relation between Greeks and Christians, and finds the combination of “Christian Greek” a kind of oxymoron. This will not please many Greeks and Greek-Americans who are proud of their Greek Orthodox Christianity. He always seems to return to the basic “anti-Hellenic impulse of Christianity” which, for him, constitutes the “Greek tragedy in Christian Greece.” This would make one wonder what a Jew would say about Christianity, which, in his eyes, took the concept of the one Jewish God, and turned it into a Trinity, using the tricks of Greek sophistry and some ideas of Hellenic philosophy. We know that Mohammed found this radical transformation of the “one true God” abominable and blasphemous. Hence the unbridgeable gap that separates these two sister religions and “faiths of Abraham.”

The author hopes earnestly that Hellenic logos and a revived Dionysus can help humanity to find its way back to reverence for nature and its gods. But, as the 9/11 and the war on terror indicate, Islam and Christianity are ready for another round in the cosmic arena for world dominion. It would be great if only fundamentalist Muslims and Christians could be persuaded to supplement the reading of the Holy Bible or the Holy Koran, with the reading of other good books like the book of Dr. Vallianatos! Then, there would be more hope for his dream to come true, a renaissance of Hellenic learning and culture. But that will take a true miracle. On the other hand, just as the Hellenes were turned into Christians, the Christian Greeks at least could be made to return to their Hellenic cultural roots with some good luck and in better times ahead.

Dr. Christos C. Evangeliou

Professor of Hellenic Philosophy and Poet

Towson University, USA

Author of several books, including

Hellenic Philosophy: Origin and Character.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Hellenic Philosophy: Between Europe, Asia and Africa, (Binghamton, NY: Binghamton University, 1997), p. iii

[2] “Greek Gods, Human Lives: What we can Learn from Myths” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

[3] Julian: An Intellectual Biography (London: Routledge, 1992), especially, pages 32 and 227-229.

MANY HAVE noted some strange parallels between Hindu and Greek philosophies. Did one influence the other? Or were the similar ideas spontaneous original growths? Or was a common ancestry responsible? The author examines such questions in this engrossing book. He warns us that all Hindu philosophy was not idealistic as was not Greek. But Vedantic monism ultimately came to rule the roost in India, and Plato was a major influence in Greek philosophy.

The author therefore, mainly compares Plato’s ideas with those of Hindu idealist philo­sophy. The resemblances, like Plato’s idea of the detached Philosopher-king, like the rajarshi, his three classes, almost castes, in his Republic, his conception of the nous and the Demiurge, like jivatman and paramatman his idea of doxa (appearances), very much like the Hindu maya, his three-part formulation of the soul, corresponding to sattva, rajas and tamas, his doctrine of rebirth etc all point to borrowings from India, which developed these ideas earlier. No direct proof is possible, hut there were contacts between ancient India and Greece, and the circumstantial evidence for Greek borrowing which the author brings forward with judicious care, is overwhelming. Both Socrates and Plato may have had, the author gives reasons to think, Indian contacts. In any case, the Pvthagoreans had them, as the author proves and these two eminent fathers of Greek philosophy had acknowledged connections with the followers of Pythagoras whose ideas are deeply permeated with Hindu idealist philosophy.

This is a lucidly written book, which will be of interest, not only to students of philosophy, but also to laymen interested in the deeper questions of life and its meaning.

Timothy Lomperis is a professor of political science specializing in international security and Asian studies. He has written three books on the Vietnam War: "The War Everyone Lost --and Won" (1984, 87, and 93), "Reading The Wind" (1987), and From People's War To People's Rule ('96). The latter work received the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award for the best book in the social sciences published at a Jesuit institution from 1994-1998. He received post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University in 1985-86 and at the Wilson Center for International Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC in 1988-89.

But it is clear to my mind that if Hinduism accepts social democracy it must necessarily cease to be Hinduism.

He is alluding to caste system in double speak.

I have increasing difficulty in understanding what the free world means anymore.

More assassinations, covert operations, killings and bombings than by any other regime, military, terrorist - or even a criminal group. In more than 50 countries in any month. Even if we ignore the 120 that is being waved around.

2 million people in US prisons. Human beings. All of them. US has more human beings than animals in captivity. More than in any dictatorship. More surveillance cameras and telephone tapping in the US, Britain and Europe than in any dictatorship in the world.




Just what is the idea behind this Free World, Democracy and the Rest of the Rigmarole? Just one word comes to my mind.

माया Maya.

In fact, two words. घोर माया Ghor maya .

The making of identities

It is important that Hindus as a part of their defensive strategy anthropologize their rivals – this act of reverting the gaze on them is also critical to redress the balance of power. An important aspect of this is the analysis of the formation and the deconstruction of identities. Identities take a particularly important role in the analysis of the West, the Mohammedans and China. In particular, “soft” power-projection by the West revolves around deconstruction of others identity while reinforcing and remodeling their own through selective historical narratives. So an analysis of these processes is critical to understand the framework of the dangers confronting the Hindu. Firstly, it should be noted that Hindus are a key target for identity deconstruction. The strategy being used for this is one of cognitive dissonance. On one hand Hindu modal behaviors, tendencies and physical appearances are caricatured and discouraged as being “uncool”, whereas there is strong projection of the mlechCha mode being the “in thing”. Not unexpectedly there is some reaction to this from the Hindu masses in the Occident. Hence, on the other hand, this reaction is given official recognition via an allowed channel namely that of South Asianism. This South Asian identity is primarily aimed at deconstructing the powerful and ancient Hindu identity and replacing it with something shallow. By its very name the despicable term “South Asian” also effaces the centrality of the predominantly Indo-Aryan (Hindu) culture emanating from India to the distinct identity of Asia itself. Instead, it tries to equalize India with with many other modern states in the subcontinent and place the high Hindu culture on equal footing with the barbarisms passing under the name of the religion of peace. Hence, it is strongly advised that every self-respecting Hindu in the West eschew participation in anything that goes under the banner of South Asian and instead affirm his Hindu identity. Another point to note is that that South Asian identity has been further subverted to be used as a decoy or a means of subterfuge by the religion of peace to achieve its objectives of “stealth Jihad”. Thus, anyone adopting the South Asian identity is ultimately contributing in someway to the grand project of the marUnmatta-s.

Even as these deconstructionist forces are active on the Hindus, the mlechCha-s led by those from the madhyama mlechCha-varSha in the krau~nchadvIpa are embarking on reaffirming their own identity, which we have termed the leukosphere in these pages. At the heart of it lies a confluence of the race-based leukotestate identity with the kIlita-pretamata. The importance of this may be noted in the fact that the mlechCha-s helped the Qing ruler to annihilate the preta-mata lookalike started by the “Chinese brother of the preta” amongst the chIna-s. The mlechCha-s realized that if the demographic balance of the pretamata shifted from them to the chIna-s then it could potentially undermine their very identity. Another key aspect of this identity project is that it actually cuts across political lines in the west though its manifestations might look dissimilar to the undiscerning eye. Three major manifestations might be noted: 1) The manifestation based on the overt expression of the preta-mata. In this manifestation the superiority of the mlechCha-s is supposed to come from their adherence to the preta’s words, given their belief that the preta, when alive, was the parama-rAkShasa himself. 2) Another manifestation holds the view that the shveta-varNa-s are a superior people because they are the best in intelligence, beauty and strength of all the races. This is epitomized in the work of Charles Murray who holds that view that everything of worth in human endeavor was due to the mlechCha-s and the preta-mata. 3) The final manifestation is that of the liberals (overt or covert Marxists) who believe that they have a higher “moral standing” than everyone else. While the frank pretAcharin wishes to save the heathens by bringing the religion of love, the liberal wishes to bring to them the glories of democracy (or is it Marx and Engels gift-wrapped?) and biology-defying, society-rending egalitarianism. While these manifestations might strongly oppose each other they are rather united in their beliefs and characterizations of the Hindu and related organic civilizations (as opposed to those based on memetic diseases). So it is important to dissect this the emergence of this collective identity of the leukosphere.

Until as recently as world war-2 there were strong national identities – English, German, Dutch, American, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Russian. They had fought each other brutally, spilling much blood. There were several internal fault-lines in addition – in England the Anglo-Saxon British fought the Celtic peoples on island and eventually subjugated them with much brutality. In North America the slave-owning southern confederacy and the northern union fought with much ferocity. The Spanish and the Americans fought a major naval war resulting the loss of the former’s island possessions. When the European nations were attempting territorial claims in India they were at war with each other and lacked any unified leukospheric identity. The Hindu rulers clearly saw this situation as what it was – for instance, the peshva bAlAjI nAnAsaheb saw an opportunity in using the English to tie down French so that he could complete the crushing of the latter. Finally, there were the world wars which were essentially intra-European conflicts that spread over a wider theater. Even after that the West has still remained at war with the Russians to this date. This suggests that the leukospheric identity has a fractured foundation – much weaker than that of the Hindus. This is a point Hindus need to emphasize to turn the table on their detractors. This fractured identity of the leukosphere is also important when Hindus tackle the issue of unifying identity in the historical sense. Often Hindus whine that the mlechCha-s have divided them using the “Aryan invasion theory”, linguistics and philology and the like. Unfortunately, hardly anyone among these Hindus, who lead Don Quixotic charges at AIT and linguistics, realize that the the same linguistic gaze can be powerfully turned on to Europe. Firstly, while whole of India is unified by a single clearly defined lineage of Indo-European, i.e. Indo-Aryan, Europe has an whole assembly of IE languages which are rather distinct from each other – Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Slavic and Baltic in addition to some minor ones. So there is no common denominator for an “EU” other than being partially militarily unified under the Roman banner. Likewise, if a mlechCha tries to invoke the presence of other language families like Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic one simply needs to point to Hungarian, Finnish and Basque. After all the Basque are still fighting for their own state and want to retain a distinct identity! If the mlechCha considers the Austro-Hungarian empire a natural development in his lands then what is so surprising of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian coexisting for ages in bhAratavarSha?

In another direction they also want to imitate the making of identity in the UK by stating that “Indian” identity is the way to go, as in the assertion: “I am Indian before I am Hindu.” There is really no need for such artificial nationalism – after all an unified identity in the UK is still tenuous despite all the Anglo-Saxon attempts to subsume the Celts. Still Scotts, Welsh and Irish retain a significant strand of their ancestral identity. The Hindu does not need this — even in the periods of great regionalization, their identity allowed Hindus to crisscross bhAratavarSha as per their wishes. It should be realized that in comparison to the deep and organic roots of Hindu identity most of those which have developed in the west are relatively shallow and artificial. To apprehend their emergence let us take two examples:

1) The Germanic identity The Germanic people are one of the most expansive branches of all the Indo-European speakers. However, they developed late. When other Indo-Europeans like the Hindus, Iranians, Greeks, Tocharians and Romans were already rather advanced in their civilization the Germanic branch did not have much to show (other than the great southward invasion of the Teutones and Cimbri, a little before 100 BCE, to threaten Roman lands; the early history of the Germans is a fascinating topic which we shall attempt narrate on another occasion). However, after most of these former IE cultures aged the Germanic branch had so remarkable an efflorescence that one of their languages has become that of common usage throughout the world. But through much of the early historical period their identity was rather fractured. They appear to have identified themselves only by their tribe, though their larger phylogenetic unity was clearly visible to the external gaze of the Romans (e.g. as recorded by Julius Caesar and Tacitus). It was Tacitus who composed a famous tract the Germania giving an account of the Germans around 98 CE. Between 100-200 CE in mainland Western Europe (those of Scandinavia had not even entered the gaze of the rest of humanity) the following German tribes were recorded: 1) The northernmost were the Anglii from whom we have acquired the language of the current yuga. 2) A bit to their south west were the Frisii. 3) To their South were the Chauki, the Chasuarii, Chamavi, Tencteri, Ubii, Bructeri, Marsi, Chersuci. 4) To the southeast of the Anglii were the Langobardi (long beards) and the Reudigni. To the deep south were the Hermunduri, Marcomanni, Chatti and Mattiaci. 5) Further east, between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea were located the Rugi, Gotones (Goths), Venedi. 6) The south of the above closer to the course of the Danube were located the Burgundi, Quadi, Vandali, Cotini and the Bastarnae. Such was the throng of German peoples who terrified the Roman world. Based on Tacitus’ explanation it is clear that very name Germanus is a Roman coinage — it was originally the name of a group of Germanic tribes who invaded the Gauls from the east after crossing the Rhine and routed them in battle in what is now eastern Belgium. Having driven out the Gauls they settled there and came to the attention of the Romans, who applied that name to all the related tribes whom they were to soon encounter. Thus, the identity of most Germans of the age was that of one of the above tribes, rather than “Germanus”. The Latin Germania was rediscovered and published using the printing press in Nuremberg in 1474 CE and in 1519 CE Beatus Rhenanus wrote a commentary on it establishing the connection between the tribes of Tacitus and the medieval Germanic people. This led to the emergence of a unified German identity — in essence projecting the German commonality perceived by the ancient Romans on to the medieval people of the land. Tactitus was an objective observer and he noted the rough valor in battle of the German tribes and their generally honorable conduct. By 1848 CE these observations on the ancient German tribes were projected on the modern inhabitants of the land and became a part of their perceived glorious identity coming down unbroken from the ancient times. This found expression in constructions like the Valhalla of Ludwig-I where the artificially created pan-Germanic identity was reinforced by installing a Greco-Roman style shrine for great “Germans”. By the 1920-30s all this took an ugly turn with the political forces among the modern inhabitants claiming them to be the purest and the greatest of all races. The only evidence for an ancient Germanic identity came from a Latin manuscript of Tacitus (the Codex Aesinas) that was housed in Italy with an Italian nobleman. So the Nazi commandos tried to raid his residences to take the manuscript to Germany, but failed in the attempt. This incident in itself encapsulates the irony in the way the making of Germany identity proceeded in modern times. The English, though one of the original Germanic tribes, appear to have been shielded in part from the developments on the continent and seemed to have been left out of this creation of German identity – yet another illustration of the relative superficiality of this identity.

2) The leukosphere or white identity. In the 600s of CE the English king Oswald of Northumbria, a new convert to the religion of love decided to wage holy war on both other coreligionists like the British king Cadwalla and the heathen Saxon king Penda, a worshiper of Odin and Thor. Oswald was the victor of many brutal wars, killing Cadwalla in due course, though his holy war on the heathen Penda ended in him being hacked to pieces on the battlefield. His brutality notwithstanding he was made a saint as he had fought the heathens on behalf of the pretamata – a reminder of innate deception typical of these memetic diseases, the preta and the rAkShasa mata-s. About 100 years down the line came the dreaded German holy warrior Charles-I (Charlemagne) who imposed the religion of love with utmost brutality on other German people. Likewise, Charles waged holy wars to spread to spread the memetic disease of the pretamata to the western Slavs and the Avar khaganate. In the process practically exterminated the archaic Indo-European culture of the Germans and the western Slavs. He seems to have even found some kind of resonance with his fellow holy warrior from the religion of peace Harun al Rashid in Baghdad with whom he exchanged gifts. He is fondly remembered by the descendants of his victims as the “father of Europe” and his tall, fair, blond haired image still provides them with their ideal of a puruSha. These events encapsulate the emergence of the precursor of the identity under discussion. In essence, it was the artificial identity of the pretamata that was stuffed down the throats of the unwilling heathens of Europe. Subsequently, the same identity forged the European alliances against the Islamic Jihad. But over time it receded to the background with fragmentation and local identities taking precedence. Fast-forward several centuries ahead to when the United States was born. Its elite had their deep cultural moorings to England, despite seeking political independence from it. In its war of independence it had succeeded in no small measure due to the aid offered by France. Thus, in its very birth the US had links to European powers that had long been rivals. Within the North American continent it was at war with the natives and was being steadily settled by other European peoples. On the whole, the birth of the US was a success story – it had beaten the mighty English who were victorious against most other nations of the world. It had built a formidable navy in a short time and projected power far away in the North African coasts by smashing the Moslem fleet in the Barbary War. Its successes also lead to introspection about its own place in history and identity. Given its origins and peoples, it had no need to adopt a narrow identity pertaining to a particular European nation despite its links to Britain and France, but sought to forge a new one. In this situation, two things came to the fore – the sub-current identity of the pretamata, which had been submerged in fragmented Europe and the white racial identity. The former was particularly strong as they needed something to replace the regional allegiances of Europe to their respective kings. So the rAkShasa spelt with the capital G took the place of the king or Kaiser. The latter emerged as a result of their encounter with the “other” in the form of the natives of America who were locked in a life and death struggle with them and the slaves they had shipped in from Africa to ply on their fields. Their military triumphs against the natives, as well as elsewhere in the world, along with degradation of the Africans to a lowly position, gave them a feeling of a superior white identity. Indeed, even their great intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson, who advocated free-thinking on religion, upheld these core aspects of the developing identity. This becomes clear when one examines his “Indian Removal Plan”. His main idea was to enforce the pretamata on the natives at the expense of their own traditions and force them to adopt “Western European culture” and eventually assimilate into the white identity of the US. Failing this they were to be driven westwards or exterminated.

The events surrounding the American civil war, often acting in different directions, led to further strengthening and recalibration of the white identity. The civil war resulted in a strong sense of white identity being reinforced in the southern states. In the north while the prevailing mood was for universal rights it was not as if the white identity had been given up. In fact, non-English European immigrants, primarily Germans and Irish joined the union’s cause, providing it with the much needed manpower in the war against against the southern states. Now the important role played by these European immigrants meant that upon victory of the union they were to play a major role in the north. This again meant that the white identity was a more suitable one than an English one. In particular the Irish had earlier not been considered white enough, but now they slowly gained that status and reinforced a much wider identity based on generic adherence to the pretamata and being of lighter complexion. Even through the civil war battles to suppress and exterminate the natives of the land continued, further reinforcing the white identity as one of superiority, relative to the free tribes who refused to accept the white ways. The post-civil war period saw the rise of white movements that attacked blacks in the southern states. This resulted in blacks going north for finding better and safer work opportunities and fell in a competition with the Irish who occupied similar working class niches. This also contributed to the strengthening of white identity further. Finally, with the failure of post-civil war reconstruction and rise of racial tensions the white identity strengthened greatly and now resonated with the ideas of supremacy, which were also current in the German identity movements. However, its American flavor, instead restricting glory just for the Germans, extended it to all light-skinned people of European decent who followed the preta-mata. The strength of this identity in the US is attested by the opinions and actions of the post-civil war American president Woodrow Wilson and the roaring success of the blockbuster movie during his reign titled the “Birth of a Nation”. It also explains why the apparently genuine efforts of the American presidents like Grant and Coolidge to improve racial relationships and non-white rights were not very successful. Eventually, with the American victory in world war 2 and the conquest of Germany, this white identity (of course with the pretamata subcurrent) also came to guide the European unification and establishment of the leukosphere through the recognition of the white colonies of Australia, New Zealand and some degree South Africa as brethren.

Thus, rather than being something very deep and ancient, as some Hindus mistakenly believe, this identity is a rather shallow one of recent provenance. The shallowness of the white identity, like the modern German identity, is revealed by its need to appropriate other peoples identities and achievements as their own. The tale of how both these groups appropriated the ethnonym of my people does not need any further elaboration here. But we may turn to some other examples, namely the appropriation of Greek and Roman achievements as their own. For instance, in his work “Wisdom of the West”, Bertrand Russell appropriates Greek scientific and mathematical achievements as collective property of the west, and this indeed is the norm in modern America. Hitler thought that the yavana warriors in Thermopylae certainly had some German connection. During the height of the battle of Stalingrad he hoped his field marshal would not surrender but die fighting as a fitting enaction of the Spartans being hammered by the Iranians at Thermopylae. The same yavana-s were also claimed by the Americans who made a movie to mark their hostilities with the Islamic nation currently occupying the land of the Iranians of yore. They use terms like senate and senator emulating the Romans. Yet, no where do we find the Greeks or Roman claiming such a grand white identity. If anything Hellenistic civilization was destroyed by the founding principle of white identity, i.e. the pretamata, despite the valiant efforts of Julian (To realize the importance of the pretamata to this identity note the fact that Panjabi Americans, who might barely make the cut on the skin color metric, were still able to gain the admiration of those with leukotestate identity by converting to the pretamata).

http://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/20 ... dentities/

Did you know that Vedic priests were using the socalled Pythagorean theorem to construct their fire
altars in 800 BCE?; that the differential equation
for the sine function, in finite difference form, was
described by Indian mathematician-astronomers
in the fifth century CE?; and that “Gregory’s”
series π/4 = 1 −
1
3 +
1
5 − · · · was proven using the
power series for arctangent and, with ingenious
summation methods, used to accurately compute
π in southwest India in the fourteenth century?
If any of this surprises you, Plofker’s book is for
you

. In particular,
as I mentioned above, one finds here the earliest
explicit statement of “Pythagorean” theorem (so it
might arguably be called Baudh¯ayana’s theorem).

Though P¯an.ini is usually described as the great
grammarian of Sanskrit, codifying the rules of the
language that was then being written down for the
first time, his ideas have a much wider significance
than that. Amazingly, he introduced abstract symbols to denote various subsets of letters and words
that would be treated in some common way in
some rules; and he produced rewrite rules that
were to be applied recursively in a precise order.
6
One could say without exaggeration that he
anticipated the basic ideas of modern computer
science.

P. P. Divakaran has traced the continuing influence
of the idea of recursion on Indian mathematics,
7
leading to the thesis that this is one of the major
distinctive features of Indian mathematics.

Pi˙ngala, who came a few centuries later, analyzed the prosody of Sanskrit verses. To do so,
he introduced what is essentially binary notation
for numbers, along with Pascal’s triangle (the binomial coefficients). His work started a long line
of research on counting patterns, including many
of the fundamental ideas of combinatorics (e.g.,
the “Fibonacci” sequence appears sometime in
500-800 CE in the work of Virah¯anka)

It is important to recognize two essential differences here between the Indian approach and
that of the Greeks. First of all, whereas Eudoxus,
Euclid, and many other Greek mathematicians
created pure mathematics, devoid of any actual
numbers and based especially on their invention
of indirect reductio ad absurdum arguments, the
Indians were primarily applied mathematicians
focused on finding algorithms for astronomical
predictions and philosophically predisposed to
reject indirect arguments. In fact, Buddhists and
Jains created what is now called Belnap’s fourvalued logic claiming that assertions can be true,
false, neither, or both. The Indian mathematics
tradition consistently looked for constructive arguments and justifications and numerical algorithms

Secondly, this scholarly work was mostly carried
out by Brahmins who had been trained since a very
early age to memorize both sacred and secular
Sanskrit verses. Thus they put their mathematics
not in extended treatises on parchment as was
done in Alexandria but in very compact (and
cryptic) Sanskrit verses meant to be memorized by
their students. What happened when they needed
to pass on their sine tables to future generations?
They composed verses of sine differences, arguably
because these were much more compact than the
sines themselves, hence easier to set to verse and
memorize.
10

Indian work on Pell’s equation in the general
form x
2 −Ny
2 = c also goes back to Brahmagupta.
He discovered its multiplicative property—
solutions for c1 and c2 can be “multiplied” to give
one for c1c2 (Plofker, pp. 154-156). A complete
algorithm, known as the “cyclic method”, for
constructing a solution to the basic equation
x
2 − Ny
2 = 1 was discovered by Jayadeva, whose
work is dated indirectly to the eleventh century
(Plofker, pp. 194-195)

The Paki has attained a certain degree of success in re-engineering its culture since independence, where the new generations in Paki are begining to feel quite alienated from the Indian culture, notwithstanding the popularity of Indian movies, which really means nothing, they are even popular in Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, Arabia and North AFrica. The Urdu language is being more Arabized, the clothing is being more Arabized, the food is already quite Central Asian (Panjabi food across religious lines, even before independence had major Uzbek and Afghan influences) and of course the thinking is becoming more and more radical. Their education systems has systematically and without check disseminated hatred for everything Hindu, which is really an integral part of every PAki today, which was not entirely the case with the Pakis of the partition generation, notwithstanding the violence during partition.

On the other hand look at India today. I dont think anyone today will call India a traditional Hindu society that it was even 30 or 40 years ago. Even the villages have lost their Hindu way of life and even though the number of temples in India have sky rocketed and thousands flock to these temples, outside the temples, in their day to day life, there are very few traces of traditional Hinduism left. A lot of it has to do with the "secularism" heavily promoted by the Indian government, a lot of it has to do with exposure to television and movies, which only peddles popular culture, which again cannot be traditional Hindu oriented, but the lowest common denomenator secular popular culture. It also has a lot to do with the fact that materialism and greed for money has permeated not only the middle class but also the grass roots, not only in urban but also rural areas and the inevitable result of this runaway materialism is corruption which has also permeated all strata of our society.

Therefore, if we really open our eyes and are honest with ourselves, we will realize that it is the Indians who have lost a lot more of our identity since independence than the PAkis. The Indians are fast losing their genuine "Hinduness" and the Paki are becoming more and more Islamic (unless someone believes the nonsense that Islam is not extreme Islamism and therefore PAkis are becoming less Islamic, by being more extreme). The common refrain that we use to console ourselves vis-a-vis the PAki that at least we know who we are and are secure in our identity, while PAki is not, is really a false proposition, totally baseless nonsense.

Only when we recognize this fact, will we perhaps, wake up and try to reverse this situation.

Christians and the Classics: War against Reason
Evaggelos G. Vallianatos
The Athens Olympics in August 2004 were as much a reminder of what
Christianity did to the Hellenes in the past two millennia as it was a celebration of the coming home of this great ancient Hellenic tradition. It was the
Christian emperor Theodosius who abolished the Olympics in the late fourth
century after its life of some 1,169 years. The Hellenes started the Olympics
to honor Zeus, father of both gods and people, and to remind themselves of
their common culture. It was an athletic event and a Panhellenic religious
and political celebration of athletic excellence that marked the unity of the
Greek world.
Now the Olympics, which were brought back to life in 1896, have become
the greatest show on earth, having nearly nothing to do with their Hellenic
origins. The reason is that they are now tied to a different civilization whose
defi ning characteristics are Christian monotheism and money. The ancient
Greeks used money, too, and they gave plenty of money to those athletes
who won immortality in the Olympics, but their polytheistic religion colored
everything they did, including their organization of the Olympics, which was
primarily a means of paying their respect to Zeus. Yet the people of the
West, who now own the Olympics, have the illusion they are following in the
path of the Greeks. They are not. On the contrary, Christianity and materialism have been an insurmountable obstacle in the vague Hellenic dream of
the western people, including modern Greeks living in Greece and staging
the non-Hellenic Olympics in Athens in 2004.
Western people credit the Greeks for their civilization. Yet, despite the
Renaissance, which formally integrated Greek thought into Western culture,
Christianity, an ancient enemy of Greek thought, remains as the core foundation of the Western world. In the best of circumstances, this makes Greek
thought an ambivalent value in the Western tradition. In fact, during the
late twentieth century, an industry of anti-Greek academics became more
vociferous than ever before. So much so that a couple of American classicists, Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, were compelled to write a book
lamenting the “murder of Homer” at the hands of elite philologists and theorists who prefer “therapeutics, moral relativism, blind allegiance to progress,
and the glorifi cation of material culture” to Greek ideas and values.
1
This
may be true, but Christianity, more than anything else, made these philologists myopic in denouncing Homer and the Greeks. In fact, Christianity, not
trivial philological pursuits, has been the fi rst anti-Greek impulse in the
West. This is particularly signifi cant now that Christianity is ready to fi ght
a war against Islam. Christianity, particularly in the United States, which is
behaving and acting like the Roman Empire of the fourth century, is reverting to its crusading fervor, preparing the ground for another wave of global
conversion and conquest.
What Christianity did to the Hellenes and their culture remains, by and
large, a secret in Western historiography. Nevertheless, it is instructive as an
explanatory model of the origins, nature, political, and global purposes of
that religion. This “secret” Greek history also explains why modern Greece
is facing an identity crisis of major dimensions. Christianity made Greece a
palimpsest, that is, something antithetical to its very being. It forced Greece
to become a country where Christians supplanted Homer and Hellenic culture and on top of them wrote Christian stories.

In 392 Emperor Theodosius and his sons, Arcadius and Honorius, proscribed all Roman household
gods: They ordered that no person ought to, “by more secret wickedness,
venerate his lar with fi re, his genius with wine, his penates with fragrant
odors; he shall not burn lights to them, place incense before them, or suspend wreaths for them.” It is “an enormous crime” that any person should
wish to “investigate forbidden matters” and disclose hidden secrets. Those
guilty of violating Christianity’s dogma would be punished with the confi scation of their house or land in which they practiced their “pagan superstition.”
In 396, the year when Alaric smashed Greece, including Eleusis, Emperors
Arcadius and Honorius brought the Eleusinian mysteries to an end. Three
years later, in 399, the brother emperors, Arcadius and Honorius, decreed
that all remaining temples would be destroyed: “If there should be any temples in the country districts,” they said, such temples “shall be torn down
without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed,
the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.” Finally, in 484,
killing Hellenic culture became state policy. Bishops and clergy punished
teachers of Hellenic studies, effectively bringing the “impieties” of Hellenism to an end.
13

An American historian, Ramsay MacMullen of Yale University, says that
the Christians silenced, burned, and destroyed Greek civilization as a form of “theological demonstration.”
16
In their theological frenzy, the black-robed
monks murdered Hypatia (circa 370–415), the beautiful and brilliant Platonic philosopher and mathematician, in Alexandria. Sokrates (circa 380–
439), a lawyer and an ecclesiastical historian, was a contemporary of Hypatia. He says that the monks “waylaid her returning home. They dragged her
from her carriage, took her to the church called Kaisareon, where they completely stripped her naked, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing
her body to pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Kinaron,
where they burnt them.”
17
The Christians dug the Greeks into obscurity and nothingness, destroying
both their spirit and the outward signs and material culture of their civilization. Emperor Zeno (474–91) plundered the precious possessions of the
Parthenon, dismantling the chryselephantine statue of Athena by Pheidias,
already a millennium old by the time of that barbarous act in 484. Zeno did
the same thing to the Asklepieion, the healing shrine and dormitories for
visitors, and temple of the medical god Asklepios on the south slope of the
Akropolis. The Asklepieion, next to the Parthenon, was the most important
institution of Hellenic culture in the Greek world. In addition, Zeno’s barbarian reach trampled the Aphroditeion, the temple of Aphrodite in Aphrodisias, a Carian polis in Asia built in honor of Aphrodite.
18

Justinian brought barbarism to Greece in 529 with his closing of the academy of Plato in Athens. Plato’s academy had been the greatest university of
the Hellenic world for more than nine hundred years. But Justinian’s Christian government offi cials saw nothing wrong in turning off the lights of civilization in Greece. Now that they had a monopoly of knowledge, they were not
about to allow other Greeks, whom they considered mad, to have anything to
do with it. Soon they shut down all Hellenic schools in the empire.
19 With
Justinian, there was no turning back: The Dark Ages had found a booster,
and the Hellenes had found a determined enemy who launched a policy to
“extirpate paganism,” and by that he meant he wanted to exterminate them.
Genocide had fi nally found its greatest patron.

The Violent Logic of Christianization
Justinian was a killer, but he was not an innovator. He worked within a wellestablished Christian tradition stating that ends justify means: The fourthcentury historian and lawyer, Sozomen, says that the Christians routinely
destroyed the temples of the polytheists, “thinking that it would not be that
easy otherwise for them to be converted from their former religion.”
24
Augustine (354–430), a prominent Western father of the church, used all sorts of
sophistic arguments in favor of coercing the pagans to Christianity. He also
sided with repressive legislation as that “stimulus of fear” necessary to shake
people of their negligence in seeking the Christian lord.
25
In 428, Nestorios, bishop of Constantinople, and a “furious prosecutor” of the Greeks,
addressed Emperor Valentinian III this way: “Give me, O Emperor, the earth
purged of heretics, and I will give you heaven as a recompense. Assist me in destroying heretics, and I will assist you in vanquishing the Persians.”
26
In other words, Augustine and Nestorios, the bishops of both west and east
of the Roman Empire, recommended that killing the pagans who refused to
convert to Christianity was the right state policy. In addition, since Theodosius in the fourth century, imperial laws made it a crime punishable by death
to offer sacrifi ces to the gods.
27
This meant the Hellenes would have to abandon their agrarian culture so much infused with the gods and love of nature.
Saint Nicholas started his career by chopping down sacred trees in the Hellenic community of Lycia in Ionia (Asia Minor).
28
In the Ionian Magnesia on
the Maiander River (some fi fteen miles from Miletos), peasants expressed
their piety toward Apollo by planting trees and, occasionally, uprooting some
of them.29

Lessons from the Christianization of Greece
The consequences of the Christianization of Greece were catastrophic for the
ancient Hellenes. Their Christian Greek descendants were and to a considerable degree continue to be crippled. They largely do not know who they
are; they never had a Renaissance and passed from Byzantine colonialism to
Turkish slavery to European and American domination. European and American archaeologists excavated the most important ancient sites in Greece. Now Christian Greeks see their archaeological treasures as strictly business—
attractive tokens for tourists. They read Greek history, though the Greek histories are written by non-Greeks. They celebrate the Olympics in 2004 not
like their ancestors but like the Australians with Coca Cola as the sponsor.
In ancient Greece all wars were suspended to celebrate the Olympic games.
Now Greeks spend billions alone on “security” because the Americans and
the Israelis say so. They are building their country using the architecture of
foreigners and ignoring their own. I visit Kephalonia, the island of my birth,
and I see nearly nothing that is Greek. Churches overwhelm the island, and
the entire country, as well. And the Church of Greece, which owns all those
churches, retains a stranglehold on the country. Orthodoxy is the offi cial religion of Greece, written into the country’s constitution. The Church of Greece
is the largest landowner of the country, with tremendous infl uence in state
policies, particularly on how Christians view ancient Greeks.
Christianity’s greatest orator, the “golden-mouth” John Chrysostom, a
cleric who was the patriarch of the Eastern Roman Empire from 398 to 404,
preached that fi shermen, tent makers, and illiterate men were by far superior
to Hellenic philosophers, including Plato. He had nothing but contempt and
hatred for Hellenes. Their philosophy, he said, was just talk and fables without any trace of wisdom, and he declared that ancient Greek philosophers
were no better. They were full of ashes and dust, with everything about them
reeking with foulness and ulcer. Their teachings were worm-eaten.
35
With Chrysostom’s ideology becoming the militant ideology and politics
of Byzantium, is there any doubt why the Greeks were nearly wiped out?

What the Christians did to the Greeks suggests that the horrors of the
Crusades and the genocide of the Native Americans by the European settlers of North America were no aberrations in the policy of Christian nations.
Monotheism is blind, and determined because it is blind. That is why the
current rising wave of Christian “fundamentalism” in the United States is so
unnerving, potentially tyrannical at home, and revolutionary in international
affairs. A Christian American nation, the only superpower in the world, can
now declare war on Muslim heathens and Christian heretics with nearly
apocalyptic results...

So now we know where Muhammad got his ideas.

If it weren't for the Renaissiance, where the Greek gods re-emerged in the arts, Europe would still be proto-Islamist.

Renaissaince->Reformation->Enlightenment->Modernism->Post-Modernism

Georgius Gemistus (Greek: Γεώργιος Πλήθων Γεμιστός; ca. 1355–1452/1454) — later called Plethon or Pletho — was a Greek scholar of Neoplatonic philosophy. He was one of the chief pioneers of the revival of Greek learning in Western Europe. In the dying years of the Byzantine Empire, he advocated a return to the Olympian gods of the ancient world.[1]
He re-introduced Plato's thoughts to Western Europe during the 1438 - 1439 Council of Florence, a failed attempt to reconcile the East-West schism. Here Pletho met and influenced Cosimo de' Medici to found a new Platonic Academy, which, under Marsilio Ficino, would proceed to translate into Latin all Plato's works, the Enneads of Plotinus, and various other Neoplatonist works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemistus_Pletho

Renaissaince->Reformation->Enlightenment->Modernism->Post-Modernism

I visit Kephalonia, the island of my birth, and I see nearly nothing that is Greek. Churches overwhelm the island, and the entire country, as well. And the Church of Greece, which owns all those churches, retains a stranglehold on the country.

This extensively researched book argues that the development of a libertarian culture was an indispensable component of the rise of the West. The roots of the West's superior intellectual and artistic creativity should be traced back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers. Among the many fascinating topics discussed are: the ascendancy of multicultural historians and the degradation of European history; China's ecological endowments and imperial windfalls; military revolutions in Europe 1300-1800; the science and chivalry of Henry the Navigator; Judaism and its contribution to Western rationalism; the cultural richness of Max Weber versus the intellectual poverty of Pomeranz, Wong, Goldstone, Goody, and A.G. Frank; change without progress in the East; Hegel's Phenomenology of the [Western] Spirit; Nietzsche and the education of the Homeric Greeks; Kojeve's master-slave dialectic and the Western state of nature; Christian virtues and German aristocratic expansionism.

What is the relationship between secularism, the state policy; and secularisation, the social process? Most conversations tend to confuse the two, moving from one to the other. However, we don't really have a clear map of how the two are related to each other. Does the adoption of secularism as a policy lead to the process of secularisation in society? Or is it the other way round? Is it possible that groups such as the Islamists who oppose secularism may be, inadvertently perhaps, facilitating secularisation?

The general understanding about the relationship between secularism and secularisation is based on a reified reading of European history. The potted version would run something like this: "Once the Catholic church was challenged there was a lot of fighting and eventually people decided that tolerance is the best way forward. They also realised that the most convenient way to operationalise tolerance would be to separate church and state, public and private spheres." There are many problems with this narrative, including questions of historical accuracy, as well as immense variations and reversals in the European experience. However, it is important here to note that in this version secularism and secularisation seem to have developed together.

Paradoxically, for the world beyond Europe the policy prescriptive has been the opposite. Since the late colonial period – and particularly for predominantly Muslim societies today – the policy dogma has been that the adoption of secularism as a state project will lead to the process of secularisation. But secularism as a separation of church (religion) and state does not make ready sense in societies where there was no hierarchical, structured church that had inherited an empire's state apparatus as the Roman Catholic church had in Europe. In the various versions of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc there has been no one clerical figure vested with the kind of power and authority that the pope excersised over domains now assumed within the modern state.

So we cannot assume that the lack of secularisation within these societies is due to some "lateness" on their part. They did not secularise in the way that Europe did because they did not need to. Branding them as backward was part of a colonial project but not one that we have to subscribe to today without evidence to support it. At the same time as acknowledging this, we also need to recognise that over the last century something new has happened that has led to much critical thinking about the relationship between religion and the state in these societies. This catalyst for political and intellectual tumult is the modern state. The modern state with its interest in managing individuals rather than communities tends to politicise various kinds of identities, many of which had been assumed to be private/apolitical in pre-modern contexts, for instance, gender relations, sexual preferences, ethnic and of course, religious identities.

The Islamists, or those within the larger category of Muslim fundamentalists who focus on taking over the state, are one of the range of responses generated within societies grappling with the modern state bound up with the legacy of colonialism.

Islamists are not primarily militant nor pre-modern. They are modernist in the structure of their thought, in their organisation – indeed Jamaat-e-Islami, an influential Islamist party in south Asia, was organised on the Leninist model of a cadre-based vanguard party – and in the categories and political structures that they engage with.

Islamism arose in early 20th century at a time when the state was the dominant paradigm for organising political energies. Political movements of the time from communist to fascist to liberal nationalist, and including the Islamists, were focused on taking over the state to transform society.

The Islamists are vehement in their public insistence on dislodging the idea of secularism as universal, claiming it to be a parochial, European experience – with some justification. Yet, the process of raising these and other questions about the definitions of public and private in the political arena, the fierce competition amongst Islamists to provide a definitive answer and the very structure of Islamist thought that emphasises an individual relationship with religious texts has led to a deep, conscious and critical questioning of the role of religion – a secularisation – in predominantly Muslim polities.

Secularisation is not just the increase or decrease in visible markers of religiosity or in church attendance, but also a fundamental shift in religious belief towards rationalisation and objectification. The Protestant reformers were not arguing for less religion, they were asking for more – for a continuously religious life against the Catholic cycles of sin and repentance. Yet, as Max Weber's influential work suggests, they ended up rationalising and secularising. To say all this is not to suggest that Pakistani Islamists will have exactly the same impact as the German Protestants. There can be little doubt that they will produce a very different subject and citizen because of the disparity in context.

But we can at least acknowledge that we need to understand the relationship between secularism and secularisation more clearly before we can build a universal definition of secularism. I am not arguing here for abandoning a universal definition, just for a more truly universally grounded and methodical one.

Renowned archaeologist David Wengrow creates here a vivid new account of the "birth of civilization" in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, bringing together within a unified history the first two nations where people created cities, kingdoms, and monumental temples to the gods. But civilization, Wengrow argues, is not exclusively about large-scale settlements and endeavors. Just as important are the ordinary but fundamental practices of everyday life, such as cooking, running a home, and cleaning the body. Tracing the development of such practices, from prehistoric times to the age of the pyramids, Wengrow reveals unsuspected connections between distant regions and provides new insights into the workings of societies we have come to regard as remote from our own. The book obliges us to recognize that civilizations are not formed in isolation, but through the mixing and borrowing of culture between different societies. It concludes by drawing telling parallels between the ancient Near East and more contemporary attempts to reshape the world according to an ideal image.

the imperialist/oligarchs based in west aided by western forces are setting the stage for continuous war with Islamic countries. There is a wider goal behind this that affects not just Islamic countries but all the countries. Though the fight currently is against Libya, Syria, Algeria etc, the goal is eventual exhaustion of the human civilization which lays the ground for a different political/ideological template for the world.

this was the plan of Albert Pike, a freemason who wrote the script for the 3 major wars in 1871>



these powerful groups also want to prevent mankind's evolution from a Type 1 civilization to a Type 3 civilization*. Towards this end they have a plan of continuous wars with real or perceived/imaginary foes.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

there is also a chance that in these wars, the countries that provide their armed forces to assist in these wars may get stronger and thus giving them the capacity to subvert the wars to their benefits. This aids the nation-state philosophy. In order to pre-empt any such eventuality from occurring, the economic depression has been manufactured to weaken key western economies like US, France, Britain and certain peripheral states from gaining any undue advantages from these wars.

The devil was hidden in the details of clouds at the top of fresco number 20 in the cycle of the scenes in the life and death of St Francis painted by Giotto in the 13th century.

The master may have painted it to spite someone he knew by portraying him as a devil in the painting, Fusetti said on the convent’s website.

The artwork in the basilica in the convent where St Francis is buried was last restored after it was severely damaged by an earthquake in 1997.

Yayati was son of Nahusha.

He had many wives. Key wives were Devayani (daughter of Sukracharya) and Sarmishta (daughter of Vrishaparva - king of Rakshasas) {It is a different story that Sukracharya was guru of Vrishaparva and Sarmishta became Devayani's servant due to some fight between them}

Sarmishta had three sons thru Yayati as she was servant of Devayani and didn't get married. So she married Yayati in secret and had these sons.

Knowing this Devayani complained to Sukracharya and he cursed Yayati with old age. When Yayati explains himself that his actions were Dharmic then Sukra tells him that he can give his old age to any of his willing sons (and make them the king) and get his youth back and have a happy married life with Devayani and others.

1. Yayati asks his first son (of Devayani) Yadu, who declines Yayati's offer.

So Yayati tells his son Yadu that he and all his future generations will be unqualified to be kings (Yadavas are descendants of Yadu)

2. Yayati asks his second son (of Devayani) Turvasu, who also declines the offer.

Yayati tells him - you will not have children. You will reborn in adharmic society and become their king. You will keep reborn in lower and adharmic lives.


3. Yayati then asks his 3rd son (of Sarmishta) Druhyu, who also declines the offer.

Yayayti curses him that he would be born in the place where there are no elephants, horses, palanquins, donkeys, goats, cows etc (basically infertile lands?) and where everyday life is depends upon boats and ships and your descendants will rule there. They will be called Bhojas.

4. The next one to go is 4th son (of Sarmishta) Anu and even this guy declines Yayati's offer.

Then Yayati curses him that his young sons will die before him and he too will be destroyed by fire??

5. Then Yayati asks his lost son (of Sarmishta) Puru. Who accepts his father's request and takes his father's old age.

Puru is coronated as the king and Yayati goes on to enjoy his youth. After sometime he realizes that the desires can have no end, and then returns the remaining youth to his son.

The entire MB families are descendants of Puru.