Bharat Rakshak

Raju wrote:I think it is in the spirit of this thread ! Even after so much acrimony, the spirit of accommodation & coexistence is omnipresent, this needs to be reaffirmed. Why be defensive about it ?

AshokS wrote:Flawed logic to suit your flawed agenda....

Except that the US is not constitutionally a Christian country....yet is depicted as such. The map is flawed and India is predominantly a Hindu country and if they want to be consistent in the data they are protraying India should have been represented as such....

But you do realise when you say Happy Easter, you are commemorating an event in which the Son rose from the dead, by His Father in full plain view & will of the Holy Spirit - all three of whom are God

Raju wrote:

But you do realise when you say Happy Easter, you are commemorating an event in which the Son rose from the dead, by His Father in full plain view & will of the Holy Spirit - all three of whom are God

I am of the view that anything that rises should be encouraged and reaffirmed.

the future of entire mankind rests on this act.

Rakesh wrote:I for one am glad that St Thomas came to India in 52 AD and also the Islamic hordes that came to India during the time of Babur (or whenever they came).

Rakesh wrote:I for one am glad that St Thomas came to India in 52 AD and also the Islamic hordes that came to India during the time of Babur (or whenever they came). India is better off a nation of multi-religious faiths, otherwise we would be sharing the same fate as Pakistan.

But you do realise when you say Happy Easter, you are commemorating an event in which the Son rose from the dead, by His Father in full plain view & will of the Holy Spirit - all three of whom are God. But the Trinity has been hounded as a belief of half-baked truths and old folk tales and thus by saying Happy Easter, you are basically recognizing an event which as per the majority of views in here is just plain wrong. But Happy Easter!

I for one am glad that St Thomas came to India in 52 AD and also the Islamic hordes that came to India during the time of Babur (or whenever they came).

Rakesh wrote:I for one am glad that St Thomas came to India in 52 AD and also the Islamic hordes that came to India during the time of Babur (or whenever they came). India is better off a nation of multi-religious faiths, otherwise we would be sharing the same fate as Pakistan.

G Subramaniam wrote:In the process they acquired the raw materials for a new cult, the St. Thomas legend, which would prove to be their most enduring "gift" to Mylapore—along with a large number of churches that have been built on temple sites around the southern coasts.

According to Christian leaders in India, the apostle Thomas came to India in 52 A.D., founded the Syrian Christian Church, and was killed by the fanatical Brahmins in 72 A.D. Near the site of his martyrdom, the St. Thomas Church was built.

In fact this apostle never came to India. The Christian community in South India was founded by a merchant Thomas Cananeus in 345 A.D. (a name which readily explains the Thomas legend).

In Catholic universities in Europe, the myth of the apostle Thomas going to India is no longer taught as history, but in India it is still considered useful.

Hamsa.org explores how the myth of Saint Thomas in India arose and why it has been perpetuated despite the absence of any historical basis in truth.

Calvin wrote: It appears that the sensitivity of people is forcing a politically correct language, where anything positive that is said about the invasions, or their result automatically results in a stereotype..

would folks agree that Christianity in Goa was built up on barbaric principles?

Little is recorded of St. Thomas the Apostle, nevertheless thanks to the fourth Gospel his personality is clearer to us than that of some others of the Twelve. His name occurs in all the lists of the Synoptists (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6, cf. Acts 1:13), but in St. John he plays a distinctive part. First, when Jesus announced His intention of returning to Judea to visit Lazarus, "Thomas" who is called Didymus [the twin], said to his fellow disciples: "Let us also go, that we may die with him" (John 11:16). Again it was St. Thomas who during the discourse before the Last Supper raised an objection: "Thomas saith to him: Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?" (John 14:5). But more especially St. Thomas is remembered for his incredulity when the other Apostles announced Christ's Resurrection to him: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe" (John 20:25); but eight days later he made his act of faith, drawing down the rebuke of Jesus: "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed" (John 20:29).

Now it is certainly a remarkable fact that about the year A.D. 46 a king was reigning over that part of Asia south of Himalayas now represented by Afghanistan, Baluchistan, the Punjab, and Sind, who bore the name Gondophernes or Guduphara. This we know both from the discovery of coins, some of the Parthian type with Greek legends, others of the Indian types with the legends in an Indian dialect in Kharoshthi characters. Despite sundry minor variations the identity of the name with the Gundafor of the "Acta Thomae" is unmistakable and is hardly disputed. Further we have the evidence of the Takht-i-Bahi inscription, which is dated and which the best specialists accept as establishing the King Gunduphara probably began to reign about A.D. 20 and was still reigning in 46. Again there are excellent reasons for believing that Misdai or Mazdai may well be transformation of a Hindu name made on the Iranian soil. In this case it will probably represent a certain King Vasudeva of Mathura, a successor of Kanishka. No doubt it can be urged that the Gnostic romancer who wrote the "Acta Thomae" may have adopted a few historical Indian names to lend verisimilitude to his fabrication, but as Mr. Fleet urges in his severely critical paper "the names put forward here in connection with St.Thomas are distinctly not such as have lived in Indian story and tradition" (Joul. of R. Asiatic Soc.,1905, p.235).

On the other hand, though the tradition that St. Thomas preached in "India" was widely spread in both East and West and is to be found in such writers as Ephraem Syrus, Ambrose,Paulinus, Jerome, and, later Gregory of Tours and others, still it is difficult to discover any adequate support for the long-accepted belief that St. Thomas pushed his missionary journeys as far south as Mylapore, not far from Madras, and there suffered martyrdom. In that region is still to be found a granite bas-relief cross with a Pahlavi (ancient Persian) inscription dating from the seventh century, and the tradition that it was here that St. Thomas laid down his life is locally very strong. Certain it is also that on the Malabar or west coast of southern India a body of Christians still exists using a form of Syriac for its liturgical language. Whether this Church dates from the time of St. Thomas the Apostle (there was a Syro-Chaldean bishop John "from India and Persia" who assisted at the Council of Nicea in 325) or whether the Gospel was first preached there in 345 owing to the Persian persecution under Shapur (or Sapor), or whether the Syrian missionaries who accompanied a certain Thomas Cana penetrated to the Malabar coast about the year 745 seems difficult to determine. We know only that in the sixth century Cosmas Indicopleustes speaks of the existence of Christians at Male (? Malabar) under a bishop who had been consecrated in Persia. King Alfred the Great is stated in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" to have sent an expedition to establish relations with these Christians of the Far East. On the other hand the reputed relics of St. Thomas were certainly at Edessa in the fourth century, and there they remained until they were translated to Chios in 1258 and towards to Ortona. The improbable suggestion that St. Thomas preached in America (American Eccles. Rev., 1899, pp.1-18 ) is based upon a misunderstanding of the text of the Acts of Apostles (i, 8; cf. Berchet "Fonte italiane per la storia della scoperta del Nuovo Mondo", II, 236, and I, 44).

Rakesh's post is saying that regardless of what happened in the past, we now have a multi-religious population, and that he is glad that the population is multi-religious.

Can you tell me what "positives" we had from the invasions

Globalization would have ensured mutireligious population in the world without the bloodshed of jihad or crusades.

While exploring the Malabar coast of Kerala, South India in 1498, the Portuguese encountered Christians who traced their foundations to Thomas. However, the Catholic Portuguese did not accept the legitimacy of local Malabar traditions, and they began to impose Roman Catholic practices upon the Saint Thomas Christians. Others resisted and remained fully within the various Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian traditions. A number have since joined other Christian denominations.

The idea that Thomas even came to South India is, however, contested by some. Given that the primary evidence for the same is oral tradition,[6] skeptics have suggested that the official Keralite Christian version of events may not be completely true.[7] In 2006, even the Pope stated that Thomas only went as far as western India,[8] raising much controversy in Kerala.

In effect, the supposed apostolic evangelization of Latin America gave Christianity in these lands a direct independent link with one of Jesus' disciples, reducing the Christinization carried out by Spanish and Portuguese clerics to the status of "a secondary foundation" - with a corresponding reduction in the prestige and legitimacy of the conquistadors under whose wing these missionaries had come, and of the colonial rule established by these conquistadors. By claiming St. Thomas as their founder, Latin American Christians were no less than rejecting the status of a late off-shoot of the Spanish and Portuguese Churches and claiming to be co-eval - if not senior - with Iberian Christianity itself.

Due to such implications, the church hierarchy was far more reluctant to give to the Latin American legends and myths associated with St. Thomas the same kind of credence which it gave to the equivalent myths of the Syrian Christians in South India - where direct Iberian colonial rule was limited to small enclaves and there were not such far-reaching implications.

Calvin wrote: This is correct. It would have been preferable if the rapist actually romanced the girl, and married her before he knocked her up.

Nevertheless, that doesn't mean we condemn the baby.

shiv wrote:

Calvin wrote: This is correct. It would have been preferable if the rapist actually romanced the girl, and married her before he knocked her up.

Nevertheless, that doesn't mean we condemn the baby.

No we must not condemn the baby.

But we must not deny the rape either.

Also how to make sure that rape does not happen by not welcoming the rape as legitimate.

I discovered that historians consider the Goa Inquisition the most merciless and cruel ever developed. It was a machinery of death. A large number of Hindus were first converted and then persecuted from 1560 all the way to 1812!

Over that period of 252 years, any man, woman, or child living in Goa could be arrested and tortured for simply whispering a prayer or keeping a small idol at home. Many Hindus -- and some former Jews, as well -- languished in special Inquisitional prisons, some for four, five, or six years at a time.

I was horrified to learn about this, of course. And I was shocked that my friends in Portugal knew nothing about it. The Portuguese tend to think of Goa as the glorious capital of the spice trade, and they believe -- erroneously -- that people of different ethnic backgrounds lived there in tolerance and tranquillity. They know nothing about the terror that the Portuguese brought to India. They know nothing of how their fundamentalist religious leaders made so many suffer.

Alok_N wrote:nice google, but it ain't Arno ... to learn the truth, you have to do a better literature search ...

Arno is in his mid-seventies ... what he did was not that great ... the Nobel should have gone to Dicke ...

assuming you will meet Arno in heaven when you are both there ... mind reporting back from there about how Arno felt about Dicke? ... I am assuming that you have your economy class supersaver one-way ticket to Suburban Heaven International already purchased ...

surely, your god dude owes it to you for the deep concern you have for tribals in India ...