Virendra wrote:
By the way, did you know that Konread Elst is not a fan of P N Oak?
Didn't know that, but was always suspicious of that character!
Comes across as a complex mole. Even if not a mole, he has his limitations.
His philosophy, it seems, is strange. He confesses to be a part of some church society. And despite him supposedly writing against church's theology(piskology of prophetism), he has not left church, supposedly for practical benefits. But, why would church not expel him?
He confesses that he was an ardent believer(supposedly, not any more). He says that his family(or his father) were strong(fanatic?) fundamentalists, to the extent that they considered church to have 'secularizing tendencies'(whatever that may mean).
INTRODUCTION
This book will deal with items of faith central to the Christian tradition. It may therefore be in order to clarify where I stand vis-a-vis this tradition. For most practical purposes, I belong to the Catholic community in my country: schooling, membership of cultural organizations, trade-union etc. I confess (therewith upholding a Christian ritual) that several times, I have voted for the Christian-Democratic Party, a non-confessional party that vaguely adheres to �values� upheld by the Christian tradition.
Moreover, in my youth I was a genuine believer, more than most of my class-mates and my generation as a whole. My father was one of the last polemizing Catholics in Belgium, and a sharp critic of the degenerative secularizing tendencies within the modern Church. I have always respected this wholehearted acceptance of the authentic doctrine and tradition more than the wishy-washy approach currently taken by our bishops and taught in our Theology faculty.
All this may be worth mentioning to clarify that I do not belong to that category of people, fairly widespread in my country, who have a deep-seated hatred against the Catholic Church and traditions, either because they were brought up as militant atheists or because they slammed the church door behind them during adolescence, never to look back again except to pour contempt. There is quite a literature by writers who in adult life continue to react against the frustrations, mostly sexual, which they associate with their years in the Jesuit college. Today, it is no exaggeration to say that the anti-Christian people in countries like mine are more fanatical and intolerant than the dwindling number of churchgoers. My motive in writing this book has nothing to do with that type of anti-Christian reaction.
The point is simply that we, European Christians of many generations, have outgrown Christianity. Most people who left the Church have found that they are not missing anything, and that the beliefs which once provided a framework for interpreting and shaping life, were but a bizarre and unnecessary construction after all. We now know that Jesus was not God�s Only-begotten Son, that he did not save humanity from eternal sin, and that our happiness in this world or the next does not depend on believing these or any other dogmas.
When staying in India, I find it sad and sometimes comical to see how these outdated beliefs are being foisted upon backward sections of the Indian population by fanatical missionaries. In their aggressive campaign to sell their product, the missionaries are helped a lot by sentimental expressions of admiration for Christianity on the part of leading Hindus. Many Hindus project their own religious categories on the few Jesus episodes they have heard, and they base their whole attitude to Christianity on what I know to be a selective, incoherent and unhistorical version of the available information on Jesus� life and teachings. That is why I have written the present introduction to one of the most revealing lines of proper scientific research into the origins of Christianity, viz. the psychological analysis of Jesus and of several other Biblical characters.
As Jawaharlal Nehru said, we do injustice to the Vedas by treating them as divine revelations rather than as milestones of human understanding. Glad that for once I can agree with Nehru, I affirm that we should take a secular, historicizing look at the factual human basis of religious scriptures. In the case of religions, which describe their own basis as God-given, directly revealed by God�s word, such a secular approach will imply an analysis of the consciousness, which claims to receive direct revelations from God. That is the line of research to which this book offers a brief introduction.
Delhi, 24 January 1993
Link
That book, piskology of prophetism, also comes across as a backhanded argument(or apology) that the tales and characters of NT and OT are real. He is trying to argue that the tales and characters are real and historical. One has to understand that in the recent past, historical studies have shown that there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of any of the characters of OT or NT. So, this seems like a backhanded one(a work that looks like a criticism, but in reality is an apology) to argue about the historical jesus(which is the fundamental basis of catholic religion and the elst is a member of catholic church).
For example, the proposal of Christian Lindtner(
Link) and Micheal Lockwood(
Link) that Christ is a mythical character forged by the Buddhists to spread their canonical texts like Mula-Sarva-Asthi-Vadha-Vinaya and Sadh-Dharma-Pundarika-Suthram. Such works, I assume, will not be acceptable to elst because such works(like Lindtner or Lockwood) strike at the very basis of catholic cult.
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(Continuing The Taj Mahal Is A Temple Palace by P. N. Oak)
Part 4.
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Preface to The Third Edition
In presenting the third edition to the reader it gives me great satisfaction to record that the earlier universally held blind notion about Shahjahan’s authorship of the Taj Mahal has been considerably eroded because of the evidence adduced in the preceding editions. This edition embodies three new chapters and some other major changes.
In the earlier edition, there were two chapters on Tavernier which we have trimmed and consolidated into a single chapter. Similarly, two separate chapters on the British and Maharashtriya encyclopedias have also been trimmed and made up into one.
Out of the three new chapters added two adduce new evidence while the third answers specific questions which readers of earlier editions have at times asked.
I am grateful to Dr. A. W. Joshi, Department of Physics, Meerut University, Meerut, for supervising the publication of this edition.
N-128, Greater Kailsas-1………P.N.Oak
New Delhi – 110048
February, 1974
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Introduction to This Edition
This edition titled THE TAJ MAHAl IS A TEMPLE PALACE has been out of print since 1970.
Earlier two editions bearing the same title were published in 1968 and 1969 respectively.
Those were preceded by three other editions. The first one titled TAJ MAHAL WAS A RAJPUT PALACE appeared in 1965. Thereafter, a commercial establishment M/S Indian Book House brought out two sleek, paperback editions of 5000 copies each in quick succession. Their worldwide sale channels made the book widely known through display in London book shops, five star hotels, railway stations and airports in many parts of the world.
Then something happened and they dropped it like an hot brick. Perhaps the Congress party in power in Indian dropped dark hints through its secret service of dire consequences to the publishers. There were two possible reasons. One was the fear that if the disclosure of the Hindu origin of the Taj Mahal was not throttled the enblock Muslim vote, which enabled the Indian National Congress to rule India would be lost. The other factor was the pressure of the academic block comprising professors of history, architecture and archaeology, bureaucrats manning related departments, tourist officials and publicity media representatives who felt threatened that the un-verified sepulchral legend of the Taj Mahal that they had been sponsoring with great flourish and aplomb for over a century through photos, articles, books and exhibits would be exposed as sheer propagandistic and bombastic sham.
I had to resign myself to my book on the Taj Mahal remaining out of print though it had a unique sentinel-like role to perform of awakening and warning the world community of being bluffed and cheated by the concocted Shahjahan-Mumtaz legend of the Taj.
In fact the research methodology expounded in tracing the Hindu origin of the Taj Mahal in this book deserves to be ranked as a valuable contribution in itself since it will help genuine, honest researchers rid history of a lot of chauvinistic sham and cant which clogs history because of long, alien rule and under alien-minded native rule.
In 1990, a sincere friend, Mr. Arvind Ghosh settled in Houston, Texas, USA published a paperback American edition of my book titled TAJ MAHAL – THE TRUE STORY which is still available.
I am grateful to Mr. Shanand Satyadeva of Stanger, Natal, South Africa who too, like Mr. Ghosh, realizing the necessity of making the book available to serious and honest scholars and tourists, has generously offered to finance the publication of this edition the TAJ MAHAL IS A TEMPLE PALACE through his charitable trust.
Starting from the first edition titled TAJ MAHAL WAS A RAJPUT PALACE every subsequent edition has included more and more evidence. The present edition too has two additional chapters one indicates that 230 years prior to Mogul Emperor Shahjahan’s accession to the throne his own remote ancestor, Tamerlain had been so overcome by the beauty of the Taj Mahal that he wanted a similar building raised for himself in his native place. Like every other mediaeval Muslim source, the Arab chronicler, who records Tamerlain’s longing for the attractive contours of the Taj Mahal also severely shuns mentioning the name Taj Mahal with Islamic disdain for a Vedic term. Incidentally, that Islamic hatred for the term Taj Mahal and Tamerlain’s longing for an identical edifice also prove that the Taj Mahal is not the ‘deadly’ Muslim monument that it is made out to be.
The other added chapter concerns the Carbon-14 dating of the Taj mahal.
This edition is also being profusely illustrated (rectifying an earlier failing because of my meager personal financial resources) thanks to the unflinching liberal financial backing so kindly and generously volunteered by Mr. Shanand Satyadeva from his trust.
The belief that Mumtaz had on a romantic moonlit night entreated her much-shared spouse Shahjahan to bury her in a dreamland monument is one of the many fraudulent canards set afoot to bedeck the concocted Shahjahan-Mumtaz-Taj Mahal tangled triangle. Entire Islamic history is full of such unverified, motivated myths which need to be critically examined and determinedly exposed.
That in spite of the overwhelming available evidence produced in this book in chapter after chapter proving that the Taj Mahal alias Tejomahalaya temple palace complex has existed centuries before Shahjahan, generations of modern scholars have for the last 150 years been blandly and blindly passing on the unverified Shahjahan Mumtaz myths with great gusto and glamour. That is a measure of the mediocrity, gullibility, academic dishonesty and intellectual inertial of modern scholarship. As with dozing sentries anything with a Muslim label passes their muster unquestioned.
The second serious failing of modern historical scholarship is its total insensitivity and insincerity. Though, I have written book after book proving that renowned monuments from Kashmir to Cape Comorin are all Hindu though they are being tom-tommed as Muslim that has not disturbed the sonorous snoring slumber of any professional historian, historical body or university.
Had they been true to their job they should have convened special sessions of regional and world historical bodies to re-examine the entire doctrine of historical Islamic architecture and either hauled me up before the bar of world historical scholarship or confessed to the professional ineptitude of their entire fraternity and started a compulsory refresher course to purge their minds of the sediments of the cooked-up Islamic architecture theory.
A practical instance of the total unconcern of the scholastic world to my revolutionary finding that the entire Islamic architecture theory is baseless was provided by the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
When I wrote to the chairman of the Board of Editors of the encyclopaedia, the surprising reply I received was that they had referred the matter to their expert and he had opined that no correction was called for. That amounted to placing supreme faith in the assertion of the accused himself that he is not guilty.
All news media too have been equally guilty not only in failing to publicise this history-shaking discovery but in actively going out of their way to suppress it. For instance, on a number of occasions when any news items concerning the Taj Mahal, published in European or American newspapers routinely recalled that Shahjahan was its originator, I addressed letters to the editors of Sunday Times, London; Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, New York Times and Time magazine all of USA who carried the news, informing them of some salient points among the nearly 120 proofs that I have discovered about the pre-Shahjahan existence of the Taj Mahal, yet they never allowed any of my letters to get published in their papers.
This is a question not only of journalistic propriety but even of ethics. Should editors go out of their way to blot out important news even from the readers’ column? Journalists often claim that they have a nose of news. As such the above-named papers should have asked their correspondents in New Delhi to report in depth on my revolutionary discovery that the Taj Mahal and thousands of other spectacular historic monuments in India (and abroad too) popularly ascribed to Muslim invaders are all captured property. Far from following that important scent as news-hounds all leading news media have behaved like mongrels with their tails tucked in their hind-legs terrified to expose the falsity of the Islamic architecture theory which amounts to professional dictatorship, palsy and lunacy.
The B.B.C. representative in New Delhi who filmed a television documentary on historical monuments in India persisted in describing the so-called Jama Masjid in Ahmedabad as a Muslim creation even though he was informed by a shopkeeper opposite that the Muslim claim to the building had been disproved in a court case and that the edifice was a temple of mother goddess Bhadrakali captured by the Muslims around 1414 A.D. and advertised as their mosque. Historians and journalists must not take such Muslim claims to historical buildings at their face value. They must have sagacity to detect the purpose of the original builder from the look of the edifice and details of its décor. They must be able to distinguish a hijacker from the real father of an historical building.
Germans proved no better. Der Spiegel, a leading German magazine, once sent its representative in New Delhi to interview me on my radical discovery questioning the Muslim authorship of historic buildings. I felt flattered. But later I learned that they had played foul and the write-up they published had ridiculed my discovery and poked fun on it.
There thus seems to be not only a total apathy but even a conspiracy among world new media and historical circles to suppress the news as much as they can of the falsity of the Islamic architecture concept.
It was that notorious mentality which burned Joan of Arc as a witch at the stake and extracted an abject apology from Galileo to escape a similar fate for discovering and asserting that the earth went round the sun and not vice versa.
The earth has turned many full circles since and brought about a qualitative change in punishment in as much as it is not the author who is any more thrown into the fire but his discoveries are certainly thrown into a the raging fire of journalistic and scholastic ire in a global gang-up under which far-reaching historical discoveries like mine are denied all serious debate and publicity by bureaucrats, news-media bosses and professional historians.
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('Introduction to This Edition' will be continued in next post...)
Nobody cares to know the truth I guess 
