Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

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Agnimitra
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Agnimitra »

sanjaykumar wrote:i have the utmost admiration for post Christian westerners. They are truly evolved human beings. The reality indeed is that bible thumpers are increasingly outed as anachronistic and absurd.
This is a view from a self-created bubble, IMHO. In terms of numbers, at least in the US, the proportion of the "anachronistic and absurd" is significant - even not counting those who keep their faith very private. Secondly, among the cultured and "evolved", you will find an even higher representation of people of faith, such as within symphony orchestras and the classical arts - where they rub shoulders with their faithless bohemian colleagues without much ado. (This is true in the scientific and political spheres, too). In fact, the non-judgmentalism movement at an individual and social level was lead by Baptists, and has created a sort of far more subtle and differentiated expression of Christianity within all levels of US. New bottles, old wine, but further aged.
sanjaykumar wrote:Indians need to engage with the rational west. Pandering to be he superstitious and dogmatic is an evolutionary cul de sac.
Indians need to engage with the whole body politic, not just one part. That would be the mature approach. This would be healthier in terms of our relationship with that civilization (the most powerful in the current world). It would also force us to develop the undeveloped or suppressed parts of our own civilization. Worshipping some cerebral tosh as the mature fruit is a pseudo-sophistication that is disconnected from the more intuitive, emotional, and even visceral parts of the human being. The entire hierarchy of Gods needs to be rehabilitated - and that's exactly what the wizards of the West have in mind: to reform and weave in Christianity along with several other strands of their civilization in a way that makes it as comprehensive as possible.

Identity and Learning: Worlds within worlds

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sanjaykumar
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by sanjaykumar »

My dear friend, you are looking for Vedanta in Christianity-well good luck with that. Love and non-judgemental approaches are antithetical to 2000 years of recorded Christianity. Perdition, damnation, hellfire, witch burning, suffering is the trade of the creed. The historical record is clear to any one who cares to read about it. The Englightment -Jefferson and Paine-the very Fathers of America made this explicit.

Your post, albeit interesting, is Wissenschaftlehre more than empiricism. Empiricism is learning that racism, gun ownership, illiteracy, abortion rates, xenophobia, and perhaps animal cruelty assort with Christian belief, in the US. These good folk have no patience nor interest with the Self. Dialogue will be difficult as they leave you behind to perdition in the rapture. They do not consider Eastern Orthodoxy or Catholicism to be equal, they are going to give the heathen a hearing?

The Western model also includes societies like Britain and Canada where there are, empirically, lower rates of incaceration, police killings, socialised medical coverage, less infant mortality. Oddly enough, I cannot recall a Candian politician or British one declaim about their religion. Likewise, in fact (overt) religiosity drops markedly on the US coasts and in academia, entertainment, and government. That is the supreme irony of America.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by sanjaykumar »

Of course before Indians get too sanctimonious,

http://www.hindustantimes.com/bhopal/da ... 6ZxDP.html

Dalit boy denied water from hand pump, drowns while drinking from well


The investigation of the intellectual elegance of Trinitarianism or Vedanta is a fool's errand.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Agnimitra »

sanjaykumar wrote:Your post, albeit interesting, is Wissenschaftlehre more than empiricism.
Philosophically maybe, but with an intent set on political realism. By invoking the ideal, one can rearrange the real.

You also ignored the empirical evidence from meeting and knowing a higher proportion of people of Christian faith in the upper cultural echelons in the US itself. They are not as brashly vocal as the atheistic or "post-Christian", because of the dominant discourse. But they're there - and in higher numbers than you may think.

Jefferson and Paine have a place within the Greco-Judeo-Christian civilizational coordinates of the West. But so do others like Kierkegaard. He ran a "fool's errand" worth checking out, in classics such as "Fear and Trembling", which frames a few concepts we don't do enough justice to in our popular spirituality or attitudes, and the moral imperatives that flow from them.

Lastly, the Christian ideal itself is at odds with their behavior over the centuries. And there are several currents within it, it supplied an antidote to its own neuroses. Remember, it was the Reformation that opened the gates for the Enlightenment. Just like 1 Corinthians 13 is at odds with many of the other things you mentioned.

What this means is that there are many spots through which we can plug in and exert an influence. To think that Vedanta or Christianity are useless is a disconnect from the reality of the human condition.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Agnimitra »

Some insights into how a particular stream of thought among American 'social engineers' factors different religions (among other things) into some Hegelian view of cycles of socio-historical evolution.

Letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 16 July 1814
John Adams wrote:I am bold to Say that neither you nor I, will live to See the Course which “the Wonders of the Times” will take.3 Many Years, and perhaps Centuries must pass, before the current will acquire a Settled direction. If the Christian Religion as I understand it, or as you understand it, Should maintain its Ground as I believe it will; yet Platonick Pythagoric, Hindoo, and cabballistical Christianity4 which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1500 Years, has recd a mortal wound of which the Monster must finally die; yet So Strong is his constitution that he may endure for Centuries before he expires.
Worth reading in full.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by sanjaykumar »

Did John Adams write that? When I read the Founding Fathers of America, my mind is refreshed and hope smoulders still in the bosom.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Manny »

This proves the christian god is real and true

http://tinyurl.com/j4fm4nm

:rotfl:
sanjaykumar
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by sanjaykumar »

^Is it not we were given dominion over all creatures of the earth.


Sounds like he may have left his faith behind along with his behind.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by sanjaykumar »

I am sure I am missing the point but Fear and Trembling is theology rouged at the window tempting philosophy, to use kierkegaard's own words.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Agnimitra »

sanjaykumar wrote:I am sure I am missing the point but Fear and Trembling is theology rouged at the window tempting philosophy, to use kierkegaard's own words.
Yep, just as math ultimately yields to philosophy via the many logico-philosophical half-leaps to unfold its own subjects.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Manny »

PERSECUTION OF HINDUS AND DHARMIC FOLKS AROUND THE WORLD

http://www.desicontrarian.com/persecuti ... the-world/

Blood libel accusation against Hindus.

Quote “According to common Christian tradition, ‘doubting’ Thomas, a practicing Jew, was killed by jealous Hindu priests of Kali. (Or a peacock hunter.)”


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The picture looks quite similar to the one where “Jews killed Jesus” kind of “blood libel”… They once went after the Jews… now their hate has been redirected against Hindus.

The Christians perpetual persecution complex used to persecute others. Interestingly this bloke has published this in the Jewish weekly Haaretz like the Jews don’t know the Machiavellian nature of these blokes. Note the “Thomas the practicing Jew”,, Yeah..St. Thomas the Jew Ha Ha!,. not unlike how they killed the Jews for killing Jesus the Jew.

I never realized until today that I went to a Jewish school called "St Thomas "The Jew' high school. I am eternally grateful to the Jews for going to a Jewish school. :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
JE Menon
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by JE Menon »

Check the comments boss :) to the original article.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by sanjaykumar »

Further to Abraham and Isaac, I am nonplussed at this event in the bible. I understand the Judeo-Christian importance of the test. But to rationalists, it summarises all that is wrong with the tradition. Blind faith, unquestioning obedience.

But more criminally, it is esthetically repugnant. Much better for Abraham to have lifted his finger to the heavens and muttered 'screw you, bub' and suffered the everlasting fire. We would have worshipped him.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Prem »

http://www.liberalamerica.org/2015/03/1 ... ectualism/
Why Fundamentalist Christians Fear Intellectualism
At the core of each of us is our belief system. It is around that belief system that a large part of our personal identity is formed. One of the real strengths of fundamentalism is that it provides a stable core belief system. TFor folks like liberals and progressives this is a little more difficult because the walls around our core beliefs are a little less rigid and more willing to flex as new information presents itself. Which means that we, more frequently than fundamentalists, are reshaping our understanding of who we are and how we relate to society, even if in small ways.This just isn’t true for a fundamentalist Christians. The protective walls around their core beliefs are tall and rigid and with good reason. We have to keep in mind, these core beliefs are so much more than ideas or ideals, they are identification and identity. Who we understand ourselves to be is formed around them. When you challenge a specific belief you are also, in small part, challenging the person’s understanding of who they are.For fundamentalist Christians, it is even more complicated than just that. In both direct and subtle ways, they believe their salvation, at least in part, is dependent upon being correct on issues of faith.
Intellectualism invites the constant assessment of the “correctness” of a person’s belief system. That’s dangerous ground for a fundamentalist Christian. When you confront them on a particular belief you are not only confronting them on an idea that they have held to more rigidly for a longer time than most other folks but you are confronting the very core of who they understand themselves to be. For them, it is those core beliefs upon which their salvation hangs in the balance, at least in part. Questioning it doesn’t just question the thought but, for them, it puts into question a lifetime of holding on tightly to that thought.When you take all of that into consideration, it’s really not surprise that most fundamentalist Christians react negatively to or avoid all together any intellectual questioning of their core belief systems. For that matter, it’s not surprising that fundamentalist of all camps tend to have a less than positive reaction to intellectualism. They just want to be right and the rest of us just hope to sort out some small version of the truth. A subtle difference but an important one.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by sanjaykumar »

The problem is not intellectualism but the concepts of sin and salvation. I do not believe a Hindu can really understand the guilt and fear that these imply. The Christian hopes for grace, the Hindu laughs with his god.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Austin »

St Thomas evangelism into Southern India is well know and document , Popes in past has mentioned that explicitly while Pope Benedict does not deny that fact but just mentions Western India.

There is a healthy Christian community in South India that owes it to St Thomas Evangelical works among the many thousand that must have gone unnoticed and undocumented.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by JE Menon »

There is no doubt that St. Thomas evangelized south India. What is in doubt is whether it was the Apostle Thomas, disciple of Jesus, known as Thomas Didymos (the Twin). There is no evidence whatsoever to confirm that St. Thomas was in fact Thomas Didymos.

In fact there is a crypt of San Tomasso Apostolo (Apostle St. Thomas) in Ortona, Italy. The body itself was supposedly at Chios (Greece) until the 13th century, in the middle of which it was transferred to Ortona.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_ ... o_Apostolo

This page is in Italian, but translate gives you a good gist of the situation. The "Scientific Survey" bit is interesting. Apparently, the Italians are in no doubt about which St. Thomas this is either and the bones of the gent in question can be viewed here.

http://www.tommasoapostolo.it/index.php ... cientifica

Now, here's the catch: why do you think a German Pope was (initially) reluctant to state explicitly that the disciple Thomas went to South India? At least one of the reasons was that it would give reduce the claim of the Ortona Italians, which would piss off a large number of priests and cardinals in the Vatican who happen to be, unsurprisingly, Italians.

It is entirely another matter that the Basilica of San Tomasso was erected in what seems to have been a "traditional" way in the European milieu of the time.

BTW, another part of St. Thomas the Apostle (a bone) is in the Basilica of St. Nicholas of Bari, probably the right arm fully missing in the above photo.

What has happened here is that the Mallus and Tamils were so absorbed in the myth that they did not bother to check what the Italians have been up to since the 13th century, and the Italians for their part don't give a crap what the Mallus and Tamils think - for the most part don't even know about their existence.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by vishvak »

Three held for arson and loot
[quote].. Villagers, however, alleged that the three aimed to hurt religious feelings.[/url]
A thief won't indulge in arson for looting at religious place.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Prem »

Image
Agnimitra
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Agnimitra »

^^ 'Hell' = 0 is wrong. Words like 'Sheol', etc refer to different echelons of hell.
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Post by Agnimitra »

Part of "Christian charity" goes to organizations set up specifically to "document" narratives of Christian persecution and 'martyrdom' around the world. These paid soldiers weave narratives from pure lies, quite apart from the provocative and criminal activities of missionaries and any response to it.

Image

Irony:
“They are wolves in sheep’s clothing,” Jeff King, president of the International Christian Concern, told FoxNews.com.
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Post by vishvak »

Guys like Jeff King should be made poster boy of returning colonial loot. At least these guys cane be allegedly shamed to do something.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by JwalaMukhi »

Digestion and slow appropriation in full flow...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CduzgpaVIAABC4p.jpg
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by krishna_krishna »

x post :

Rdevji excellent as usual, Guru's please spread this on teetar and face kitab so called xtian missionaries involved in kidnapping of Indian babies as well. Lets have investigation on this on how foreign government are supporting such horrible organizations who appear to be benign but involved in such atrocities that amount to human trafficking. Let see what massa and it dalals have to say about this :

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-38205042


The dark story took a chilling turn when two skeletons of infants were exhumed from small graves when detectives raided the Christian charity, which doubled as a free clinic and school for children. The detectives believe the infants died after falling sick in transit and were buried in a garden and a field. "There could be more graves here, who knows," said Bijon Ghosh, a local policeman.
The police soon announced that they had unearthed a baby-trafficking racket. "It appears to be pretty big operation. We suspect 45-50 babies may have been trafficked and sold to childless couples," Rajesh Kumar, chief of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), told me.
Thirteen babies - 10 girls and three boys - have been rescued, three nursing homes shut down and 20 people arrested so far. They include nurses, midwives, middlemen, clerks who allegedly faked adoption certificates and the people who ran the nursing home that was raided, the charity and the home for the mentally ill.
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Post by JwalaMukhi »

The missionaries operate with the same zeal as exhibited couple of centuries ago. This is the SOP. Basically, dehumanize and break the native customs and culture. Didn't think someone would have written a manual for that.
India - Dravidian nonsense, undermining vernacular languages and promoting English, attacking hindu males specifically are taken straight from this manual. The caravan continues, albeit little more nuanced now. But nevertheless, the sentiments are same.
THE MAKING OF A SLAVE. This should be made mandatory reading for every student in India.
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish ... lave.shtml
I HAVE A FULL PROOF METHOD FOR CONTROLLING YOUR BLACK SLAVES. I guarantee every one of you that, if installed correctly, IT WILL CONTROL THE SLAVES FOR AT LEAST 300 HUNDREDS YEARS. My method is simple. Any member of your family or your overseer can use it. I HAVE OUTLINED A NUMBER OF DIFFERENCES AMONG THE SLAVES; AND I TAKE THESE DIFFERENCES AND MAKE THEM BIGGER. I USE FEAR, DISTRUST AND ENVY FOR CONTROL PURPOSES. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South. Take this simple little list of differences and think about them. On top of my list is “AGE,” but it’s there only because it starts with an “a.” The second is “COLOR” or shade. There is INTELLIGENCE, SIZE, SEX, SIZES OF PLANTATIONS, STATUS on plantations, ATTITUDE of owners, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill, East, West, North, South, have fine hair, course hair, or is tall or short. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of action, but before that, I shall assure you that DISTRUST IS STRONGER THAN TRUST AND ENVY STRONGER THAN ADULATION, RESPECT OR ADMIRATION. The Black slaves after receiving this indoctrination shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for HUNDREDS of years, maybe THOUSANDS. Don’t forget, you must pitch the OLD black male vs. the YOUNG black male, and the YOUNG black male against the OLD black male. You must use the DARK skin slaves vs. the LIGHT skin slaves, and the LIGHT skin slaves vs. the DARK skin slaves. You must use the FEMALE vs. the MALE, and the MALE vs. the FEMALE. You must also have white servants and overseers [who] distrust all Blacks. But it is NECESSARY THAT YOUR SLAVES TRUST AND DEPEND ON US. THEY MUST LOVE, RESPECT AND TRUST ONLY US. Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them, never miss an opportunity. IF USED INTENSELY FOR ONE YEAR, THE SLAVES THEMSELVES WILL REMAIN PERPETUALLY DISTRUSTFUL. Thank you gentlemen.”
Nature had provided for this type of balance. We reversed n[b]ature by burning and pulling a civilized nigger apart and bullwhipping the other to the point of death, all in her presence. By her being left alone, unprotected, with the MALE IMAGE DESTROYED, the ordeal caused her to move from her psychologically dependent state to a frozen, independent state. In this frozen, psychological state of independence, she will raise her MALE and female offspring in reversed roles. For FEAR of the young male’s life, she will psychologically train him to be MENTALLY WEAK and DEPENDENT, but PHYSICALLY STRONG.[/b] Because she has become psychologically independent, she will train her FEMALE offsprings to be psychologically independent. What have you got? You’ve got the nigger WOMAN OUT FRONT AND THE nigger MAN BEHIND AND SCARED. This is a perfect situation of sound sleep and economics. Before the breaking process, we had to be alertly on guard at all times.
Crossbreeding completed, for further severance from their original beginning, WE MUST COMPLETELY ANNIHILATE THE MOTHER TONGUE of both the new nigger and the new mule, and institute a new language that involves the new life’s work of both. You know language is a peculiar institution. It leads to the heart of a people. The more a foreigner knows about the language of another country the more he is able to move through all levels of that society. Therefore, if the foreigner is an enemy of the country, to the extent that he knows the body of the language, to that extent is the country vulnerable to attack or invasion of a foreign culture. For example, if you take a slave, if you teach him all about your language, he will know all your secrets, and he is then no more a slave, for you can’t fool him any longer, and BEING A FOOL IS ONE OF THE BASIC INGREDIENTS OF ANY INCIDENTS TO THE MAINTENANCE OF THE SLAVERY SYSTEM.
Additional Note: “Henty Berry, speaking in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1832, described the situation as it existed in many parts of the South at this time: “We have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which light may enter their (the slaves) minds. If we could extinguish the capacity to see the light, our work would be complete; they would then be on a level with the beasts of the field and we should be safe. I am not certain that we would not do it, if we could find out the process and that on the plea of necessity.” From Brown America, The story of a New Race by Edwin R. Embree. 1931 The Viking Press.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Kati »

New book on Italy's rape of Africa reveals Churchill's odious role in using poison gas against "uncivilised tribes"


http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/the ... blood#full



Book review: The Addis Ababa Massacre, when Ethiopia ran blood

Kapil Komireddi

March 21, 2017







Italy, at the dawn of the 20th century, was Europe’s poor man. Rome looked with bitterness at its European neighbours. They had vast colonial possessions abroad. Italy, recently unified, was an upstart. Its greatness lay behind it. An intense desire to reclaim what was lost ignited the imaginations of Italy’s most revered luminaries.

Gabrielle D’Annunzio, Italy’s greatest poet and dramatist, exhorted his compatriots to restore their nation’s illustrious past through territorial conquest. His play The Ship mixed sex and violence with an hypnotic message of empire and glory. Its premiere in 1908 culminated with crowds spilling out into the streets chanting the most memorable dialogue from the performance: "Fit out the prow and set sail for the world."

In 1911, on the 50th anniversary of the country’s founding, Italy proceeded to conquer Libya. Italy’s brutality stands out even in what became the most brutal century in human history. Italian forces in Tripoli, in the words of one observer, went "mad with the lust for blood.

All the Arabs they met, men, women and children, even babes at the breast – were shot down without trial." About 4,000 Arabs, it is estimated, were butchered by Italians in Libya over three days in October 1911.

The zealous rush to restore Italy’s lost greatness through conquest not only predated fascism by a decade but fascism, it might be argued, grew in part from the bruised national ego that prompted Italians to impose themselves on defenceless people in faraway lands.

"Remember," the Italian military commander Rodolfo Graziani told his forces as they "pacified" Libya by rounding up Arabs into concentration camps, "you are Italians, Romans, and remember that your forebears were once in this country".

Italy, in its self-conception, had not only been destitute by virtue of not having an empire. It had also to confront the humiliating fact that it had been routed by an African power when it set out to build an empire in the 19th century. Italy’s military defeat in 1896 to Ethiopia was a special wound in the long list of grievances that underpinned its renewed search for grandeur on the world’s stage. This time, it made extensive preparations before advancing on Ethiopia.

It built a chemical weapons factory on 30 acres of land near Mogadishu in Somalia. The quantities of lethal gases produced at that facility were so large that no fewer than 17 warehouses had to be propped up to store them. The Italians stockpiled 35,000 gas masks for their own safety.

Ethiopians stood no chance as the Italians showed up in 1935. They were gassed on the ground and strafed from the skies. Ethiopia was overwhelmed. Bruno Mussolini, son of the Duce, wrote newspaper articles about clusters of Ethiopians "bursting open like a rose" when bombed from above. He admitted to finding this spectacle "most amusing".

Despite its savagery, Italy regarded itself as an agent of civilisation in Africa. Tens of thousands of Ethiopians were exterminated, the journalist George Steer wrote bitterly, so "that civilisation should prevail".

Pope Pius XI congratulated Italians on a "beautiful victory by a great and good people". The defeat of 1896 was avenged and Italy now had an empire.

Much of this history forms the background to The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, Ian Campbell’s blow-by-blow account of the killings supervised and undertaken by Italian forces in the Ethiopian capital in 1937.

Empire, Campbell shows in this masterly history, did not temper the bloodlust of Italians. Ethiopia’s invasion, for all its horrors, had been swift. Its occupation was a protracted calvary. Ethiopian prisoners were frequently used for target practice, shot first in the testicles and then in the chest. Graziani, installed as fascist Italy’s viceroy in Addis Ababa, was under strict instructions from the Duce to execute all prisoners.

No self-respecting people could endure the sadism that passed for civilised governance. And in February 1937, grenades were hurled at Graziani as he delivered a speech before an Ethiopian audience. Graziani survived. No Italians were killed. But amid the confusion, Italian soldiers opened fire with heavy machine guns at the Ethiopian audience.

As the crowds dispersed, the exits were sealed off. What ensued, Campbell writes, was a holocaust. This was not a moment of madness. Throughout the day, Italian soldiers and Blackshirts ran amok in the streets and suburbs of the city. They split the heads of Ethiopians they captured with pickaxes and shovels. Every native was a target.

"Men, women and children were taken unawares and killed indiscriminately and without explanation. Going home for lunch or stopping for a chat, unsuspecting and defenceless, they were ruthlessly struck down in broad daylight in the main streets … among the eucalyptus groves and the hedgerows, around market stalls, on bridges, in tiny lanes and narrow alleys."

The killings were accompanied by loot. Italian Blackshirts made trips to the bank to cash in the jewellery they seized from their victims. Upper-class neighbourhoods of Addis Ababa were spared only because Italians coveted the properties.

More than 19,000 Ethiopians were killed in Addis Ababa by the time the Italians had exhausted themselves. (Across Ethiopia, the figure is north of 30,000.) Eyewitnesses to the massacre gathered ample evidence, including photographs of Italians posing with severed heads of Ethiopians.

The English suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst led an heroic effort to indict Graziani and the Italian apparatus of occupation. It was only when Britain went to war with Italy that Addis Ababa was liberated and Haile Selassie, the exiled Ethiopian emperor, made a triumphant return to his capital.

Campbell, in one of the most affecting passages in this arresting book, contrasts the magnanimity of the emperor with the conduct of the Italians, many thousands of whom still lurked around in Addis Ababa.

In a passionate speech that enumerated the many crimes committed by Italy, the man cast by Rome as a primitive barbarian urged his people not to "repay evil with evil". "Do not indulge in the atrocities which the enemy has been practising," he told them. "Take care not to spoil the good name of Ethiopia by acts that are worthy of the enemy."

A militia of 10,000 Ethiopians was among the crowd that listened to emperor Selassie; they went home without harming a single Italian.

Selassie sought justice through legal means. His efforts were frustrated by London. Campbell has unearthed a top-secret letter written by Winston Churchill in 1944, after the fall of Rome, instructing his envoy in Italy to protect Pietro Badoglio, the man who had gassed Ethiopians and was listed in Addis Ababa’s dossier of evidence as the top war criminal. The British government headed by Churchill went to extraordinary lengths to discredit eyewitness accounts of the Addis Ababa massacre and London eventually thwarted Selassie’s bid for Ethiopia’s inclusion in the UN War Crimes Commission.

The British government’s behaviour, in contrast to the solidarity and activism of its people, was a shameful coda to the story of Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia. Campbell delicately calls Churchill’s actions "curious". But the unwillingness to see white Europeans prosecuted for crimes against black Ethiopians was in keeping with Churchill’s overall world view. He was an unabashed white supremacist who mobilised his nation against Nazi Germany, and not, as his hagiographers relentlessly strive to portray him, a champion of universal freedom and neutral justice. An early advocate, by his own admission, of "using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes", Churchill would have seen Graziani and Badoglio as kindred spirits, not embodiments of evil.

The consequence of Churchill’s prejudice was that no Italian was ever prosecuted for crimes in Ethiopia. For its part, Italy, far from exhibiting remorse, clamoured in earnest for sovereignty over Ethiopia. And the United Nations, rather than throwing out this demand, debated it. And finally, when Italy and Addis Ababa restored diplomatic relations, the Italians did not feel the need to apologise for their past.

It’s as if the occupation of Ethiopia and the massacre of Addis Ababa never occurred. In 2012, a rightwing mayor in an Italian town erected a statue to Graziani. It has since become a site of protest, drawing crowds of Italians who want their country to own up to its record in Africa.

Ian Campbell has performed a tremendous service by rescuing from historical neglect and European propaganda the stories of the victims of 20th-century Italy’s homicidal push for greatness. Eighty years have passed since the massacre of Addis Ababa. It is still not too late for Rome to make a full apology to Ethiopia.

Kapil Komireddi is a frequent contributor to The Review.
sanjaykumar
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

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So? Just Christians being......
Austin
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

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From American evangelicals to Russian Orthodox, they're united against Islam. Is that enough to overcome all that divides them?

Steve Bannon's Would-Be Coalition of Christian Traditionalists
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

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Kati wrote:New book on Italy's rape of Africa reveals Churchill's odious role in using poison gas against "uncivilised tribes"


http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/the ... blood#full



Book review: The Addis Ababa Massacre, when Ethiopia ran blood

Kapil Komireddi

March 21, 2017







Italy, at the dawn of the 20th century, was Europe’s poor man. Rome looked with bitterness at its European neighbours. They had vast colonial possessions abroad. Italy, recently unified, was an upstart. Its greatness lay behind it. An intense desire to reclaim what was lost ignited the imaginations of Italy’s most revered luminaries.

Gabrielle D’Annunzio, Italy’s greatest poet and dramatist, exhorted his compatriots to restore their nation’s illustrious past through territorial conquest. His play The Ship mixed sex and violence with an hypnotic message of empire and glory. Its premiere in 1908 culminated with crowds spilling out into the streets chanting the most memorable dialogue from the performance: "Fit out the prow and set sail for the world."

In 1911, on the 50th anniversary of the country’s founding, Italy proceeded to conquer Libya. Italy’s brutality stands out even in what became the most brutal century in human history. Italian forces in Tripoli, in the words of one observer, went "mad with the lust for blood.

All the Arabs they met, men, women and children, even babes at the breast – were shot down without trial." About 4,000 Arabs, it is estimated, were butchered by Italians in Libya over three days in October 1911.

The zealous rush to restore Italy’s lost greatness through conquest not only predated fascism by a decade but fascism, it might be argued, grew in part from the bruised national ego that prompted Italians to impose themselves on defenceless people in faraway lands.

"Remember," the Italian military commander Rodolfo Graziani told his forces as they "pacified" Libya by rounding up Arabs into concentration camps, "you are Italians, Romans, and remember that your forebears were once in this country".

Italy, in its self-conception, had not only been destitute by virtue of not having an empire. It had also to confront the humiliating fact that it had been routed by an African power when it set out to build an empire in the 19th century. Italy’s military defeat in 1896 to Ethiopia was a special wound in the long list of grievances that underpinned its renewed search for grandeur on the world’s stage. This time, it made extensive preparations before advancing on Ethiopia.

.
They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.
- Tacitus
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

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"I do perceive that now as ever thy words are wise and full of reason, Macumazahn; that which flies in the air loves not to run along the ground; the white man loves not to live on the level of the black or to house among his kraals. Well, ye must go, and leave my heart sore, because ye will be as dead to me, since from where ye are no tidings can come to me.

"But listen, and let all your brothers know my words. No other white man shall cross the mountains, even if any man live to come so far. I will see no traders with their guns and gin. My people shall fight with the spear, and drink water, like their forefathers before them. I will have no praying-men to put a fear of death into men's hearts, to stir them up against the law of the king, and make a path for the white folk who follow to run on. If a white man comes to my gates I will send him back; if a hundred come I will push them back; if armies come, I will make war on them with all my strength, and they shall not prevail against me. None shall ever seek for the shining stones: no, not an army, for if they come I will send a regiment and fill up the pit, and break down the white columns in the caves and choke them with rocks, so that none can reach even to that door of which ye speak, and whereof the way to move it is lost. But for you three, Incubu, Macumazahn, and Bougwan, the path is always open; for, behold, ye are dearer to me than aught that breathes.


Ingosi's sadness and determination, King Solomon's Mines, H.Rider Haggard.

The wise among the white men sometimes put their own words in the mouths of the heathen.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Philip »

These are mere sideshows to the "Greatest game",which has been played out for over 1000 years even unto today,where the Vatican,the RC church,has been aging a 1000yr old war against orthodox Christianity ,whose centre moved from Byzantium/Constantinople to Russia. Political events like the formation of the EU 60 years ago when the "Treaty of Rome" was signed,where the Vatican plays a huge role behind the scenes,is why wars involving Orthodox Christain regions such as the Balkans,took place. The sinister Vatican-Islamic relationship is also revealed in the excerpt given below ,which will give a broader understanding of current events .

In Feb 2016 in Havana Cuba,Pope Francis and Patriarch Krill,head of the Russian Orthodox Church met,a meeting of the two heads after 1000 yrs!

http://www.reformation.org/vatican_agai ... html[quote]
The Vatican against the Orthodox Church
1965 by Avro Manhattan
Excerpted from the book: Vatican Imperialism in the 20th Century

GIANTS ACT like giants, hence their undertakings are on a gigantic scale. Years are reckoned by decades, decades by centuries. Geographical areas are made to embrace nations or even continents, while the histories of institutions and of races are seen in perspectives not easily comprehended. Because of this, their actions, being in harmony with their extraordinary magnitude, will escape the notice of individuals unable to size up the vast historical panoramas which, although clearly scrutinizable by retinas of gigantic forms, yet are partly blurred and often wholly invisible to others.

The Catholic Church, the greatest surviving giant in the world, is a colossus with no peer in antiquity, experience and above all, in her determination to dominate the human race. To reach such a goal, she will suffer no rivals, tolerate no competitors, put up with no enemies.

Giants who, like her, were found roaming in the deep valley of history, she fought with bloody claws and a ruthlessness to shame the Attillas, the Genghis Khans and all the other scourgers of civilization. Many she led to their destruction; others she subjugated for good; some were annihilated, but some resisted and escaped all her guiles. More than one survived, and even fought relentless battles that echoed with sanguinary echoes in the corridors of the centuries and that are still being fought as ferociously as in olden times, now, in the very midst of the twentieth century.

Vatican diplomacy is the oldest diplomacy in the world. Most of those it fought were either shrunk to nothing by time or blotted out by history, and to modern ears all its multifarious intrigues would sound as hollow and as unreal as they have become strangely unrelated to the ever-bewildering events of our day.

Yet not all the ancient foes of the Vatican have been reduced to mere landmarks of the past. Some have bridged bygone centuries to the present, and one of them, the most formidable of all, the Orthodox Church, a peer to Catholicism in antiquity, is as much a reality in our time as is the Vatican itself.

The antagonism of these two ancient colossi has produced the longest diplomatic war in the history of man, which is still being fought as fiercely, as ruthlessly and as unscrupulously as ever. Catholic intrigues against Orthodoxy, since its inception, are uncountable. They fill the annals of the first millennium; and from the beginning of the second, when in 1054 the Orthodox Patriarch, Michael Cerulanius, brought about the final breach between the Eastern and Western Churches, until the fall of Constantinople, they remained paramount in the history of medieval Europe.

The goal of this thousand-year war is simple: the destruction or subjugation of the Orthodox Church or its voluntary or forcible integration into the Catholic Church. The unscrupulousness of Vatican diplomacy to reach this objective, prior to and after the fall of Byzantium, is hardly matched by parallel exertions in history, its most blatant intrigues of the period being veritable masterpieces of diplomatic cunning and double-dealing. Councils, religious compromises, political bargaining, secret negotiations with Orthodox patriarchs, pacts with the Byzantine emperors - everything and every device was used at one time or another to put Orthodoxy in fetters. We can mention the pact struck with the last Orthodox emperor of Constantinople, who, to obtain a promise of help in the defense of the Orthodox capital against the gathering Mohammedan armies, pledged to the Vatican the mass conversion of the Orthodox Church.

From the smashing of the Orthodox Church's political pillar, the Byzantine empire, in 1453, to the crumbling of its political successor, the Russian Czarist Empire, in 1917, the Vatican-Orthodox relations were characterized by a period of comparative diplomatic lull. This was due to historical factors, the most outstanding of which was that, in the course of the centuries, the center of Orthodoxy had shifted en masse from the Near East to the West, where its former missionary lands became its new home - namely, to Holy Russia. There the Orthodox Church struck deep roots. More than that: as Rome had been the first Rome, Constantinople had been the "second Rome," so now Moscow became the "third Rome." Moscow, Philothey said in the fifteenth century, was the natural successor of Constantinople. Now that Constantinople had fallen, the only Orthodox empire left in the world was the Russian. The Russian nation alone, therefore, henceforward became the true repository of the Orthodox faith. The idea of an Orthodox empire became the Russian's paramount idea. Church and State were integrated, linked by a common messianic purpose. Having found such fertile soil, soon the Orthodox Church regained its old vigor and splendor. As of old, committing its ancient mistake, it identified itself as intimately with the Russian empire as it had previously done with the Byzantine. From about 1721, when Peter the Great, after his Spiritual Regulation, made the Orthodox Church a branch of Czarism, until the Bolshevik Revolution, Caesaro-popism made her invincible against the machinations of the Vatican and almost impregnable to its attack on the religious, diplomatic and political fronts. Her immense strength, however, was her fatal weakness, as the fall of Czarism would automatically entail the fall of the Orthodox Church - which, in fact, occurred in 1917.

From then onward the machinations of Vatican diplomacy were resumed with renewed vigor wherever Orthodoxy existed - in the Balkans, in Russia, in Northeast Europe, and, indeed, even in the Near East.

Catholic instruments used to hamper, undermine, boycott and subjugate the Orthodox Church have been extremely varied, ranging from converted White Russians to Turkish officers, beginning and ending with diplomatic or political intrigues of all kinds, as can easily be imagined.

A typical case occurred after the First World War, when the fortunes of war put the fate of Constantinople in the balance. Immediately following the outbreak of hostilities, Lloyd George, Zaharoff and Premier Venezelos of Greece, signed an agreement by which the Greeks were to get the former Orthodox capital, This provoked a storm of protest from various quarters. The strongest, however, did not come from any Western State, but from the Vatican. The British government, with whom the final decision rested, became the particular target of Papal displeasure. Constantinople should never be ceded to the Orthodox Church, was the Vatican's request. This was tactfully ignored. Thereupon, Catholic diplomacy having looked elsewhere for support, soon found an unexpected ally in an unexpected quarter, a Turkish officer by the name of Kemal, who in no time dispelled Rome's anxiety by a brilliant victory at Smyrna. Kemal's victory precluded any possibility of Greece getting the ancient Orthodox capital.

Kemal Ataturk was not slow to perceive that identification of the interests of the young Turkey and of the Vatican could be mutually beneficial, and a tacit but real alliance was unofficially agreed upon. The fruits that it bore were various. They ranged from the heavy punishment and even death of any Turkish soldier found harming Armenian Christians, to the granting of special privileges to the Catholic Church in Turkish territory. But in the eyes of Rome, its paramount result was that the Orthodox Church had been prevented from returning to its ancient seat.

As long as an independent Turkish nation existed, Constantinople, by remaining incorporated in it, would never pass to her, The new Turkish republic, therefore, must survive and prosper. Following this strategy, the curious spectacle of the Vatican supporting a Moslem nation ruled by an atheist dictator became a discreet feature of Catholic diplomacy. Kemal Pasha, in gratitude for the unofficial pressure exerted in his favor by Catholic diplomacy in many European quarters, maintained a tacit understanding with the Vatican throughout his tenure of office; an alliance, this, which, although almost unnoticed, yet more than once stultified various conflicting interests in the Middle East.

Kemal Ataturk, who had been the instrument of "a great victory for the Pope," as the Osservatore Romano triumphantly put it, commenting upon Kemal's military victory at Smyrna, a decade or so later became the instrument of a second, which symbolically was even more significant.

The center of the Orthodox Church since the foundation of the Byzantine Empire of Constantine the Great in A.D, 324 has been the great Church of St. Sophia, which for over a millennium had come to symbolize Orthodoxy perhaps even more than St. Peter's in Rome symbolizes the Mother Church of Catholicism, From St. Sophia the Orthodox Patriarchs ruled almost like Popes of the East, until the fall of Constantinople. After the fall, notwithstanding the shifting of the center of Orthodoxy, St. Sophia continued to be the greatest symbol of Orthodoxy: a link bridging her past with the present, and her present with a future when St. Sophia would become once more the Mother Church of all Orthodox the world over.

Such a dream, however, was soon to be shattered, at least for a comparatively short period, when in 1935 Kemal, in one of his boldest steps to modernize Turkey, converted St. Sophia into a museum of Romano-Byzantine-Christian and Ottoman-Muslim art. The humiliation of the center of Orthodoxy could not have been more bitter.

A thing worthy of notice is that, prior to Ataturk's decision, the Vatican was informally consulted about any possible objections to St. Sophia's transformation. The Vatican, which thunders so promptly whenever a nation threatens to secularize Catholic schools or churches, not only did not object, but actually tacitly approved and even encouraged Kemal in his scheme.

It was thus that, when finally the muezzin, having climbed the minarets of St. Sophia, called in echoing accents to the faithful for the last time and the great building became officially a museum, whereas in the East the Moslems exculpated themselves to Allah for the sacrilege and the Orthodox world heard of the change with a heavy heart, at the Vatican there were smiles. Enigmatic, it is true, but very clear to those who understood the secret code of diplomacy.

If the first upheaval created by the First World War had enabled the Vatican to score a significant victory against the Orthodox Church, that same world had unexpectedly opened up a tremendous vista of conquests for Catholic diplomacy by causing the simultaneous thunderous fall of two great empires which until then had partially dominated both the East and the West alike - i.e. the Turkish and the Russian empires. This meant not only the tumbling of two massive political units, but also - and for the Vatican this had an even more significant meaning - the tumbling of the caliphate as the supreme bead of Islam, and of the czar as the supreme head of the Orthodox Church.

The downfall of czarism, in addition to being a political event of the first magnitude, spelled the disintegration of the power of the Orthodox Church, centered in the person of the czar.

The centralization of political-religions power, by binding both, meant that the downfall of one would spell the downfall of the other. This is precisely what occurred. The Russian Revolution consequently, by sweeping away czarism, swept away also the established Orthodox Church. The latter fell, not only because of her ties with the civil power, but also owing to the intrinsic dead weight which she had grown within herself. The Orthodox Church, in fact, had become a formidable reactionary power in her own right, whose economic tentacles spread to every nook and cranny of Holy Russia, controlling with an iron grip the minds and bodies of its inhabitants. She had over 80,000 churches and chapels and an army of 120,000 priests, supplemented by thousands of monasteries and convents, inhabited by another 100,000 monks and nuns. She controlled enormous wealth in land and buildings, owning 20,000,000 acres of the richest land and, at the time of the outbreak of the revolution, a bank balance of eight billion rubles and an income of about 500,000,000 rubles a year.

Her influence was truly enormous and was at the service of the czar, whose absolutism was further advocated by priests who took to politics. Without mentioning the monk Rasputin, the clergy sent to Parliament were of the most reactionary kind. The Third Duma saw forty-five priests, none of whom belonged to the liberal party; the next Duma had forty-eight, forty of whom represented the most reactionary movements. Whenever there were elections, the Orthodox Church supported the czar and preached against any social or political reform.

The Bolshevik Revolution, when it came, swept away this formidable tool of reaction as ruthlessly as it did czarism. The immense church property was nationalized, schools were requisitioned, the clergy were brought to political impotence: in short, the separation of Church and State was made a reality, and the Orthodox Church, despoiled of her magnificence, was reduced overnight to the naked poverty of early Christendom.

All these portents were followed with sinister fascination by the Roman Curia. When, therefore, in 1917 the Bolsheviks took over, at the Vatican, incredible as it may seem, there was jubilation. If the Bolsheviks were a terrible menace, they were also a blessing in disguise. Had they not pulled down the Orthodox Church, Rome's seemingly immovable rival? Had they not become the instruments for her approaching total disintegration?

The Russian Revolution had thus opened for the Vatican an immense field for Catholic conquest. A bold policy might result in what Catholicism had attempted in vain for over one thousand years: the reunion of the Orthodox Church, via a mass conversion of the Russians, in addition to the spiritual incorporation of Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, the Polish Orthodox Ukrainians and all the other different Orthodox groups in Eastern Europe - in fact, practically the whole Orthodox world. Orthodox resistance against the soviets found no sympathy whatsoever in Rome. On the contrary, it was welcomed in the hope that, by defying the new atheistic government, the Church would be given a mortal blow and would be wiped out for good.

It was while waiting for the Orthodox Church to receive the last blow that would finally bury her, and while the whole of Europe kept repeating, "This Lenin cannot last" - and by Lenin was meant Bolshevik Russia - that the Vatican unobtrusively made the first moves directed at attaining simultaneously its two main goals: acceleration of the stab in the back for what it believed to be an already moribund Orthodox Church, and its grandiose scheme for the mass conversion to Catholicism of the Orthodox millions.

Count Sforza, a leading figure in the Italian Foreign Office was approached by Pope Benedict XV, via one of the Popes most intimate confidants, and, under the seal of secrecy, was asked whether he would facilitate the entry of a number of Catholic priests into Russia. "Seeing my surprise," Count Sforza afterward related:

Monti (the Pope's confidant) explained, and it was evident that he was repeating the very words of the Pope: "His Holiness thinks that even these crimes and this blood will one day be of service if it is going to be possible, when the wave of irreligion has passed, to attempt a Catholic evangelization in Russia. Orthodoxy no longer has any deep rooted life; its end as the official religion offers possibilities which would never have existed so long as a Czar, Protector of the Church, continued to reign."1

On receiving a favorable reply, on the orders of Benedict XV, "young priests began desperately studying Russian and the history of the Orthodox Church."1 Catholics with Russian experience and Catholic Russians overnight became top counsellors, chief among these being a Russian diplomat who, besides having become converted to Catholicism, had been ordained a Catholic priest: Alexander Evreinow, who was often consulted by the leading figures of the Vatican Secretariat of State.

From Rome, Vatican activities spread toward Russia itself. Negotiations between Rome and Moscow continued with varying fortune, the Bolsheviks being seemingly bent on pursuing crafty tactics. Yet at the Vatican the hopes that its patient efforts would eventually be rewarded by the conversion of "a country of 90,000,000 people to the true religion" remained very bright. "The moment has arrived propitious for rapprochement" (between the Vatican and Moscow),

--wrote the Osservatore Romano, "inasmuch as the iron circle of Caesaro-popism, which hermetically closed Russian religious life to all Roman influences, has been broken."

At this point one question might come to the fore, in view of subsequent events. Surely Vatican diplomacy could not possibly trust the promises of the Bolsheviks? And, if so, why did it go on negotiating? The answer is simple, the transactions were useful as preparatory ground for the eventual grand-scale conversion of Russia after Bolshevik Russia had collapsed.

For the key to Vatican diplomacy, then as now, was just this. It must be remembered that at that period expeditionary forces were being dispatched by various Western countries to kill the revolution; indeed, that Catholic Poland had invaded Russian territory, and that anti-Bolshevik armies, encouraged, sponsored and supported by the West, were roaming inside and outside Bolshevik Russia, in attempts to bring about its early downfall. The Chancelleries of Europe were buzzing with plans and counter-plans of all kinds to bring nearer the blessed day.

The Vatican, consequently, based its moves on a possibility which at this period was practically a certainty for diplomatic Europe" Actual political conditions [inside Russia] form a grave obstacle; but this obstacle," pontificated again the Osservatore Romano, "has a temporary character."

The climax of the Vatican-Bolshevik negotiations was reached in 1922, when the Conference of Genoa offered the most incredible spectacle of the Bolshevik Foreign Minister, Chicherin, and the Pope's representative, the Archbishop of Genoa, toasting one another in public. Vatican diplomacy thought it had scored a triumph, or, at least, was about to score one. Chicherin's "concessions," however, were but an amplification of the basic soviet rule that, as the separation of Church and State was an accomplished fact, there was the amplest scope for any Church zealous of proselytizing. The Vatican, whose scheme remained immense, interpreted this as favorable to itself, and plans for the "Catholicizing of Russia" were put forward. These, however, soon incurred great difficulties, owing to the delaying soviet tactics.

But what gave Vatican diplomacy a shock, and its understanding with the soviets a matter of urgency, was that the Bolsheviks, giving a literal interpretation to their constitution, had applied religious freedom with equal impartiality to various Protestant bodies, which had meanwhile made soundings for the Protestant evangelization of the Russians. This was not all. Atheistic and anti-religious organizations of all kinds were also flourishing everywhere, sponsored by the State itself. But, still worse, the moribund Orthodox Church, instead of resignedly giving up the ghost, was still alive - indeed, was giving alarming signs of recovering.

The incursion of the Protestants into what the Vatican had envisaged as its exclusive field, but, above all, the ominous recovery of the Orthodox Church, convinced it that time was pressing. Vagueness had to be replaced by concrete action, to force the hand of the soviets.

The Vatican changed its tactics. The phase of patient, secretive negotiations was over. That of the diplomatic mailed fist was initiated. This consisted of indirect pressure, via Catholic friendly or allied nations, upon whomsoever Vatican diplomacy decided to attack.

A Papal messenger arrived at the Genoa Conference. He bore a missive whose content was simple. It asked the powers not to sign any treaty whatsoever with Bolshevik Russia unless "freedom to practice any religion" was guaranteed. Freedom, the Vatican explained to the soviet representative at this juncture, meant complete freedom "for the Catholic Church." With regard to the other Christian denominations (Protestant and Orthodox), the Vatican would not object to any "restrictive" measures that the soviets might take against their exertions. Previous to this, the Vatican had made sure of the support of some of the countries participating in the Conference by discreetly "briefing" Catholic and anti-communist representatives assembled there.

The Vatican's efforts ended in nothing, the Genoa Conference having failed.

In 1927 the last semi-direct attempts at agreement between the Vatican and Moscow took place. The Vatican declared its dissatisfaction with "the soviet proposals," and relations with Moscow were broken off for good.

Something of paramount importance which, more than anything else, made the Vatican adopt another diplomatic policy had meanwhile occurred.

The Orthodox Church, although still stunned by the 1917 blow, had rapidly adapted herself to the changed situation. The separation of Church and State, which the Vatican had reckoned would kill her, had turned out to be a more invigorating factor than her former identification with the government which had caused her downfall. Orthodoxy, in fact, had begun to reorganize itself, and in the religious domain had already almost recovered its former strength.

In these conditions, the original grandiose scheme of the Vatican had become obsolete. The policy of conversion was therefore discarded and a new one adopted. This rested upon the forcible overthrow of soviet Russia via military attack.

The original plan, based upon the formula that the soviet regime was of a "temporary character," was re-adopted. The various Foreign Offices of the world were still conceiving different schemes for the overthrow of the Bolsheviks. Had these succeeded, the Catholic Church would have penetrated Russia in their wake.

It became increasingly evident, however, that to base a whole strategy upon this kind of "intervention" was to pursue an increasingly unrealistic policy. And within a few years, although the plan was once more discreetly dropped, it was nonetheless promptly replaced by another, no less grandiose: the total mobilization of the West against soviet Russia, to be carried out, no longer by direct military intervention, but by an ideological and emotional anti-Bolshevik crusade, preparatory to an eventual physical attack.

The scheme soon became a reality, thanks to the timely growth of a most sinister political portent: fascism, whose fundamental policy was war against communism. The Vatican, which had already concluded an alliance with its original founder, supported similar movements everywhere it could, with a view of converting the whole of Europe into a monolithic anti-Bolshevik bloc. Its ultimate objective: a military invasion of Russia.

By 1930-31 the West had already been "emotionally roused to war against godless Russia." Only three years afterward, Hitler, having gone into power, began to voice his ambition of acquiring the Ukraine; three more years, and the Anti-Comintem Pact was signed between Nazi Germany and Japan (1936). Russia was being swiftly enclosed in an iron ring, from the West and from the East. Two more years, and the first surrender of Europe to Hitler was made at Munich (1938), when the four powers - two fascist dictatorships, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, on the one side, and two democracies, England and France, on the other - tried to settle the fate of Europe by sacrificing Czechoslovakia at the altar of appeasement. It was the Vatican which, during this crisis, specifically asked the British Premier, Chamberlain, to exclude Russia from the Conference. This at a time when Great Britain was seeking a pact with Russia, to strengthen her bargaining weight against Hitler. The exclusion proved fatal. Hitler emerged wholly victorious, and the Second World War was made inevitable.

In the following year Hitler occupied the whole of Czechoslovakia. During the Finnish War in 1939, Great Britain and France, with the Vatican in the background, instigated the expulsion of soviet Russia from the League of Nations, and, in close cooperation with the Vatican, mobilized world opinion against her, speaking of this campaign as a crusade.

Two years later the Vatican's grand strategy bore its fruit. Hitler, backed by the might of a nazified European continent, attacked soviet Russia. The grandiose vistas dreamed of at the fall of the czar were dreamed of once more, to the chanting of hallelujahs in St. Peter's. The Institute Pro Russia, in Rome, which had been languishing for so long, now pulsated with feverish activity,2 and Catholics were urged to renew their devotions to Our Lady of Fatima. Yes, the promise of the Virgin, so curiously in harmony with the Vatican's grand scheme, at long last was coming true.

Within a few months, the Nazi armies had reached the outskirts of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Soviet Russia was about to be destroyed.

The Nazi armies and the Catholic legions fighting by their side, after their initial triumph, were hammered back. And ultimately, to the horror of the Vatican, it was the Russians who entered Berlin and not Hitler who entered Moscow.

Vatican diplomacy had received yet another resounding defeat. But even before this had been completed, with its typical suppleness it had already launched yet another anti-Bolshevik, anti-Orthodox grand scheme, in cooperation with a new partner, which was even more powerful than its former Nazi ally - i.e. the United States of America. The new campaign had been launched while the guns of the Second World War were still echoing in the battlefields of both

Europe and Asia, and the people of the world were looking forward with a prayer in their hearts to an era of tranquility and peace,

As, after the First World War, Vatican diplomacy operated simultaneously a many-branched anti-soviet strategy, so, after the Second, it launched another, no less formidable than the first.

The ultimate objective being the same, fundamentally its policy remained the same. In addition to its new main partners, playing the role of Nazi Germany vis-a-vis soviet Russia, new tactical moves directed at implementing it were carefully studied and carried out. These, although seemingly disconnected, in reality were closely knit into an inter-continental pattern embracing the whole world.

The principal tactical features of this new strategy took the form of: (a) mobilization of the Catholics of the Near East; (b) mobilization of the Orthodox Church outside Russia; (c) mobilization of Islam; and (d) general intensification and speeding up of the ideological and military mobilization of the West.

These four types of political machination were carried out almost simultaneously, with a technique which was greatly different from that used after the First World War, when the Vatican, having failed to carry on its intrigues against the Orthodox Church inside Russia, had shifted its operations against her outside Russia - that is to say, in the Balkans.

After the Second World War the Vatican began to mobilize all Catholics in the Near and Middle East.

It was thus that, as the various Balkan countries became sealed to Catholic diplomacy, the Vatican became increasingly active outside the Balkans - e.g. with the Chaldean Catholics, mainly centered in Iraq; the Maronites in Lebanon; the Copt-Catholics in Egypt; the Melkites, or Greek Catholics, and others to be found in practically all these territories, as well as in Syria, Trans-Jordan and Palestine.

Simultaneously with this, it approached the Orthodox Church outside the communist world with a view to inducing it to side with the Vatican, or, at least, with the Vatican’s political allies in their anti-Russian, anti-communist wars.

Unofficial negotiations were initiated, but, owing mainly to Orthodoxy's deep-rooted suspicion of the Vatican, these yielded very little result. Indeed, it looked as though they would prevent any real rapprochement altogether.

Vatican diplomacy waited for a while and then resorted to a master move. It sent to the Middle East, no longer Catholic diplomats, but the envoy of the two most powerful men in the West: Mr. Myron Taylor, the representative of the President of the U.S.A., and simultaneously, on this particular mission, representative of the Pope vis-a-vis the Orthodox leaders whom he went to meet.

It was thus that, at the beginning of February, 1949, when the cold war against Russia was at its height Myron Taylor arrived in Istanbul, where, in his dual capacity, he met the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagorar.

Mr. Taylor put forward concrete plans for the cooperation of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, in the face of the "communist threat to religion," at the same time trying to ascertain the "true" current status of the Orthodox churches in communist-dominated countries, and the ways in which communism might be using these churches to strengthen its position in Eastern Europe and in Near East areas. Having discussed such matters, both with the Orthodox leaders and with the Apostolic delegate in Turkey, Myron Taylor, to make his argument for Orthodox cooperation more convincing, stated in no doubtful terms that the "cooperation" of Orthodoxy was not only wished for by the Vatican but was "wanted" by the U.S.A. The whole point of the Vatican's choice of Myron Taylor, the representative of the American President, to meet the Eastern Orthodox leaders, was to lay emphasis precisely on this.

It was the trump card of Vatican diplomacy, so well screened behind the American envoy. For it must be remembered that Greece, where the Orthodox Church was at its strongest, had been saved by America from becoming a communist country only a short while before. Following the end of the Second World War, a bloody civil war between Right and Left devastated Greece for several years. Great Britain poured in troops to reinforce the anti-communist faction. The left, however, owing chiefly to the support of the population, was near to winning, and the U.S.A. had to intervene.

Military and financial aid was rushed to the country. The left was defeated. Extreme right-wing forces were installed in power. Throughout the civil war and the British and American intervention, the Orthodox Church played a paramount role. Indeed, at one time the Greek Orthodox Patriarch became head of the Greek government.

The Orthodox Church, having identified itself with the right and with the American interventionists, consequently had the support of the Greek government, sponsored by the U.S.A. Withdrawal of American protection would have meant the fall of the right-wing Greek government, in which case the fate of the Greek Orthodox Church would have been precisely a repetition in miniature of the fate of the Russian Orthodox Church on the fall of the czar.

The dispatch of the American envoy as the Vatican's representative, with his emphasis on the American desire to see the cooperation of the Orthodox Church, was political blackmail of the first order which the Vatican had accomplished by using political, non-Catholic pressure.

Precisely one year later the mission bore its first real fruit. In February, 1950, His Beatitude the Patriarch Cristoforos of Alexandria arrived in Athens to prepare with Archbishop Spiridon, head of the Orthodox Church in Greece, for an event of the greatest significance: the summoning of a Pan-Orthodox Synod.

The new Synod, once translated into less directly theological terms, meant a political council of the Orthodox churches to keep step with the anti-communist war of their protector, the U.S.A.

The Orthodox Church within the communist region countered soon afterward, when Patriarch Alexei of Moscow "extended" the Russian Church's jurisdiction to include Hungary (March, 1950).

This was followed by a counter-blow from the Russian Orthodox Church in the United States, which announced that it had officially broken all ties with the Orthodox Church of Moscow. Metropolitan Bishop Krimowicz, of Springfleld, Mass., was appointed Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in the United States, and Metropolitan Bishop Jaroshevich Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in foreign countries (October, 1950). In December, 1951, Metropolitan Leonty, the Orthodox Church's U.S. Primate, and the Bishops of Alaska and San Francisco, invested a one-time officer of the czarist army as the first Orthodox Bishop of Washington. 3

Moves and counter-moves followed one another in quick succession in the years that followed, until the bridges were totally burnt on either side.

The Orthodox Church had been split asunder, one part, the larger, in soviet Russia, the center of the communist world, the other in the U.S.A., the center of Western capitalism.

Division means weakness. The Vatican had maneuvered its opponent where it had planned to maneuver it, in readiness for reducing further its unity and thus bringing nearer its ultimate downfall.

Simultaneously with these moves, Vatican diplomacy was busy setting in motion one of the greatest religious-political forces in the world, Islam. Islam, the historic enemy of Christianity, had always loomed large in Vatican diplomacy's plans against the Orthodox Church.

Cautious unofficial exchanges between the Vatican and various Arab countries, particularly the most influential Islamic country in the Middle East, Egypt, were begun in the years that followed the Second World War. These bore exceptional results. In 1946 an Arab delegation, composed of Christians and Moslems, paid an official visit to the Pope, and in 1947 the Moslem East made its first official approach to the Vatican. Egypt exchanged representatives with the Pope, and sent to Rome a Minister Plenipotentiary. Other Moslem countries - e.g. Syria, Lebanon, Iran - followed Egypt's example, and soon even those Moslem lands which had not yet officially exchanged diplomats were unofficially in close touch with Rome.

The Vatican’s mobilization of the Islamic world culminated in 1950, when the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Salah ed Din, disclosed that Egypt and the Vatican had been conducting secret negotiations and had agreed upon the establishment of a "united Roman Catholic-Moslem front against communism." 4

The following year, Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, went to Rome for a whole week, where he saw the Pope and other Vatican dignitaries: "The time has come for us to collaborate loyally, both as a nation and a religious entity, in the rebirth of a common patrimony," he declared, speaking on Radio Rome, "and in . . . the creation of a united front between Islam and Christianity against communism." 5

The foundations of a Catholic-Islamic partnership had been skillfully laid by Vatican diplomacy. From then onward, particularly during 1951-52, and in spite of many vicissitudes, it continued to be solidified, to the present day. Islam is a potentially formidable religious-political unit. Whoever succeeds in exerting even a partial influence upon it will wield a power capable of provoking political and social repercussions in many strategically important parts of the world. From Spanish and French Morocco to Egypt, Persia, Pakistan, Indonesia, indeed, to within the very soviet Union itself, housing 25,000,000 Moslems, as well as within communist China, housing another 50,000,000.

The potentialities of the Moslem world as a formidable anticommunist, anti-Russian, religious-political instrument, did not escape the attention of another anti-communist power, the U.S.A. The American mobilization of the Islamic countries had been initiated by Roosevelt himself, who, just before his death (1945), had envisaged meeting Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Farouk of Egypt and others, for the amalgamation of the Near and Middle East into the framework of American global foreign policy.

Since then, Vatican-American interests ran ever closer, until, within a few brief years, they were transformed into a veritable Vatican American alliance. The material might of the U.S.A. and the spiritual power of the Catholic Church, by mobilizing the religious influence of Islam and the political energies of the Arab world, had encircled soviet Russia in a religious-political iron ring, the precursor of a military one.

It's objective: for the U.S.A., the destruction of a mighty ideological and economic.enemy; for the Catholic Church, the destruction, not only of communism, but of soviet Russia, the new protector of her religious rival, the Orthodox Church.

In bygone centuries the Vatican schemed stubbornly and tirelessly with the Turkish Empire, with the Austrian Empire, with Moslem, Buddhist and other potentates, to bring about the downfall of czarist Russia, so as to weaken the Orthodox Church.

In the twentieth century it schemed with equal pertinacity with the Europe which arose after the First World War, with fascism and nazism before and during the Second, in order, by causing the downfall of soviet Russia, to paralyze a regenerated Orthodoxy.

After the Second World War it continued in its relentless scheming with the U.S.A., with a "dollarized" Europe, with the Arab nations and other Asiatic countries, to annihilate the U.S.S.R., in order, once again, to subjugate its Orthodox rival.

Following the changed political world habitat, the Vatican renewed its attempts by wooing the Orthodox Church with plans of "Dialogues," initiated by Pope John XXIII - a policy of blandishment instead of the old one of intrigues. The new policy soon yielded unusual dividends. Relics were returned, e.g. the skull of St. Andrew,

which had rested in St. Peter's, Rome, since 1462, sent back in 1964 by Pope Paul VI, to its original place, Patras, following the request by the Orthodox Metropolitan of Patras to Pope John XXIII the previous year.

Cordial relations with the traditionally morose orthodoxy were established. With the result that even the world's largest orthodox body, the Patriarchate of Moscow, finally agreed to convoke a Pan Orthodox Conference to discuss "a dialogue" on equal terms with Rome.

This was preceded by an unique meeting: that of Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople with Pope Paul VI in Jerusalem (January 1964), followed in 1965 by the elevation of several Cardinals of the oriental churches in communion with Rome.

That same year the 14 orthodox churches participating in the Pan-Orthodox Conference at Rhodes sent a delegation to Rome, to establish the first formal contact with the Vatican since one of the last Union attempts in 1439.

The "dialogue" continued after the Second Vatican Council was over. And, although formal progress was made, the profound rivalry between the two Churches remained. The Orthodox Church's main basic fear of ultimate absorption by Rome being still the major obstacle bedeviling their relationship.

Catholic scheming, it should never be forgotten, has for its ultimate objective, not only the annihilation of an ideological enemy, represented by soviet Russia, but also the annihilation of a religious foe, which the Catholic Church is more determined than ever to reduce to total subjugation and, indeed, to wipe from the face of the earth: the ever-resurgent Orthodox Church, the millenarian enemy she has sworn either wholly to absorb or wholly to demolish and destroy.[/quote]
Agnimitra
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Agnimitra »

Philip wrote:These are mere sideshows to the "Greatest game",which has been played out for over 1000 years even unto today,where the Vatican,the RC church,has been aging a 1000yr old war against orthodox Christianity ,whose centre moved from Byzantium/Constantinople to Russia. Political events like the formation of the EU 60 years ago when the "Treaty of Rome" was signed,where the Vatican plays a huge role behind the scenes,is why wars involving Orthodox Christain regions such as the Balkans,took place. The sinister Vatican-Islamic relationship is also revealed in the excerpt given below ,which will give a broader understanding of current events.

In Feb 2016 in Havana Cuba,Pope Francis and Patriarch Krill,head of the Russian Orthodox Church met,a meeting of the two heads after 1000 yrs!

http://www.reformation.org/vatican_agai ... html[quote]
The Vatican against the Orthodox Church
1965 by Avro Manhattan
Excerpted from the book: Vatican Imperialism in the 20th Century
[/quote]
Philip ji, it is probably not a coincidence that the NGO that has won responsibility for transporting and resettling numerous Muslim refugees in the US is "The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops" - and they have lobbied hard for increasing the quota for Muslim refugees. They have been recipients of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars towards transporting and resettling refugees from those countries for the past several years, and have been in the forefront of advocacy. I always wondered about this.
Philip
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Philip »

Tx.Anni.Most illuminating.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Agnimitra »

Folks, request information if anyone is doing this:

Evanjehadi activity internationally is war by other means. In certain countries that are overt enemies of the West, such as Iran or N. Korea, missionaries who sneak in on the pretext of "charity" or "tourism" are put to death. The same treatment is not meted out to, say, Buddhism enthusiasts, who even hold classes for the public. The reason is that Buddhism or Hinduism is not an instrument of foreign domination.

India has been an especially soft target for Evanjehadis. They use direct missionary work, covert missionary work in league with violent subversive movements like Maoism, separatist militancy in the NE, etc. Plus the global "Human Rights" brigade. Yet, every month or two I meet some American or Korean-American missionary who has just returned from India - they usually visit the sensitive NE, and then some other parts.

Evanjehadi-sponsoring countries such as the US, Australia, Netherlands, S. Korea, etc have pretend "human rights" laws. Those can be used to tackle the source of this war.

Evidence needs to be collected to demonstrate that:

1. Missionary activity in India has links with violent movements.

2. Missionary activity has historically been directly associated with genocide.

3. Take legal action in US and Europe against missionaries, not just in India but also in Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, etc.

4. Create atrocity literature in the US against Christians. (Evanjehadis have well funded organizations that are intended to simply multiply atrocity literature against target populations, such as Hinduism, and to show that "Christians are being persecuted". A false report will be circulated widely, and then when it is proven to be false, there is no clarification in their publications. Millions are fed such prejudice.)

5. Associate Christianity with racism - plenty of reason to do this, historically, and also scriptural.

6. Christian orgs can be sued for LGBT rights and racism in present time, and for genocide, etc historically and even today (Voice of America Persian broadcasts is crusader radio - howmany taxpaying Americans know this?).

7. Take atrocity literature to US liberal courts in Hawai, ACLU, etc. Hawai's circuit court system has been good at crushing such orgs. They booted out missionaries from Hawai and numerous Pacific islands. Hawai and California courts love missionary blood.

8. Missionary NGO's have been taken to the law in India for corrupt practices. But apart from this, they can also be sued under FCPA:

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

This tackles them at source.

9. Europe has its own version of FCPA.

Do we have a repository for atrocity lit against Evanjehadis?

If you know anyone who does this, please suggest points #8 & 9 above.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by arun »

Archive of the Guardian dredges up on July 20th 20017 a July 20th 1956 story about Christist soul harvesting vultures denigrating Hinduism in India:
Christian missionaries under fire in India – archive, 1956

20 July 1956: A vile propaganda against the religion of the majority is being systematically and deliberately carried out

BOMBAY, July 19.

Missionaries in India are having a thin time again, particularly the Americans who have been singled out as being guilty of all the sins of commission Indians feel missionaries are capable of under the garb of priesthood.

The Indian attitude to missionaries has been well expressed time and again, whether by Mr Rajagopalachari, the elder statesman, when he told me that Hinduism could never tolerate a proselytising faith, or when Mr Ananthasayanam Ayyangar, the Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, stated publicly two years ago that “cultural aggression is more disastrous than armed aggression” and that he hoped the Government of India would take steps to defend itself against this cultural aggression.

Mr Nehru at that point wrote to the president of the Christian Council in India to clarify matters and stated:
“The question of foreign missionaries in India is not considered by us from the point of view of Christianity but from the point of view of foreigners coming to India.” Mr Nehru’s view is more urbane than that of his people and he waved aside, perhaps too lightly, the Hindus’ deep-rooted allergy to proselytisation.

Danger to the State

It is in this context of emotion and allergies that the report which has just been presented to the Madhya Pradesh Government on missionary activities in that state has to be read. The seven-man committee, led by a former Chief Justice of the High Court, has not minced its words. After visiting 77 centres and more than 700 villages, and hearing more than 1,100 people, it stated:
“Evangelisation in India appears to be part of a uniform world policy to revive Christendom, to re-establish Western supremacy and is not prompted by spiritual motives. The objective is to disrupt the solidarity of the non-Christian societies, with danger to the security of the State. Enormous sums of foreign money flow into the country, and it is out of such funds that the Lutherans and other proselytising agencies were able to secure nearly four thousand converts. Missions are in some places used to serve extra-religious ends. As conversion muddles the convert’s sense of solidarity with his society there is a danger of his loyalty to his country being undermined.

“A vile propaganda against the religion of the majority is being systematically and deliberately carried out so as to create an apprehension of breach of public peace. There has been an appreciable increase in the American personnel of missionary organisations in India. This increase is obviously due to the deliberate policy of the International Missionary Council to (exploit) opportunities opened in newly independent countries by mass evangelism through the press radio and television.

The committee members in their indignation are obviously anticipating events, for India, so far, has no television whatsoever and it is rather doubtful whether aboriginal and remote tracts of Madhya Pradesh even have electricity, let alone cinemas and radios. The committee ends by recommending nineteen measures to save the tribes from missionary clutches and the State from missionary fifth columnism.

The Moneylenders

The creation of a Department of Cultural and Religious Affairs, headed by a ‘backward’ Minister, is one of the recommendations. Another is that Indian churches should be economically independent from foreign churches and that Christians should pledge themselves to “confine their evangelistic activities within the limits of public order, morality, and health.”

Medicine must not be used to coat the pill of conversion, nor should the missionaries operate like labour exchanges for tea gardens or, as the committee alleges many Roman Catholics do, as moneylenders who put the gentle squeeze on their debtors to save their souls. They should not be permitted to run orphanages, even where the State is failing in its duty to orphans, nor should they distribute books free to their pupils to make religion more attractive. All religious literature should circulate only by special permission of the State Government, while no religious instruction in schools should be given without written parental consent.

What is happening in India to foreign missionaries is what is bound to happen with the achievement of independence. It has already happened in Burma and it is going to happen soon in Ceylon; nobody likes having an outsider show the way to God.
From the Guardian:

Christian missionaries under fire in India – archive, 1956
Philip
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by Philip »

When a tragedy strikes a country,the race is on with NGOs and religious fundoos from the West charging to grab "souls" whose lives have been shattered by earthquakes,tsunamis,etc.I saw it first hand in Sri Lanka after the tsunami,US fundoos at work and the same has happened in Nepal.However,the state must also reflect upon its failure to include marginalised sections of the nation,who have been ostracised by caste or other reasons. A drowning man will not ask whose hand it is which is offered to save him,or a religious group who promises a better material life as well as spiritual. That's human nature. We've seen it all over India ,religious conversions using the carrot of cash,etc. Time for Nepal to wake up as later on the pressure to act politically in the cause of interests of firang masters becomes evident.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... -for-souls
‘They use ​money to promote Christianity’: Nepal's battle for souls
Critics allege that it is not just caste discrimination leading many Dalits in Nepal to turn away from Hindu beliefs and become Christians
Worshippers at a Christian church in Thakaldanda, Nepal

Pete Pattisson in Manahari
Tuesday 15 August 2017
Ram Maya Sunar had two miscarriages. Then she had a daughter, who died of pneumonia when she was one. “My second child died from tuberculosis at just six months. I’m still haunted by it,” Sunar says, sitting outside her concrete block hut in the village of Thakaldanda, in southern Nepal’s Makwanpur district.

When she became pregnant again, Sunar sought out an unlikely remedy. Rather than call the local shamans, as she had done before, she joined a church.
The 35-year-old, a Hindu, converted to Christianity and gave birth to a healthy daughter, and later a son. “They are my gifts from God,” she says.

It is a story repeated across Thakaldanda, a village of about 50 households. “There’s a church here, and another church there, and another over there,” says Kajiman BK, who converted to Christianity after surviving an unknown disease.

Ram Maya Sunar became a Christian after her two children died
It is not just survival stories that Sunar and Kajiman have in common. They are also Dalits (formerly “untouchables”), members of the lowest Hindu caste, who continue to suffer discrimination and abuse.

It is Dalits, and other marginalised groups, who are leading a surge in the growth of Christianity in Nepal. More than a million people in Nepal identify as Christians, and the country has one of the fastest growing Christian populations in the world. The Federation of National Christian Nepal says 65% of Christians are Dalits.

Nepal, formerly the only Hindu state in the world, became a secular republic following the 10-year civil war, and the fall of the monarchy in 2008. Hinduism remains the country’s dominant religion, but the transition to secularism opened up space for other religions, even though proselytising is outlawed in the constitution.

The growth of Christianity is driven by motivations that appear to have more to do with health, discrimination and poverty than pure belief. And behind the conversions, critics say, is the presence of well-funded foreign missionaries.

Off the main road of Manahari, a town in Makwanpur, dozens of small churches have sprung up. Local Christian pastors estimate the town has two mosques, five Buddhist gompas, 10 temples and 35 churches.

Aid agencies accuse Nepal government of hampering their work
Many of the churches are led by Chepangs, one of Nepal’s most disadvantaged indigenous groups.

“After the earthquakes, Christian missions in Chepang areas became more and more active and the number of churches is dramatically increasing,” says Diana Riboli, an Italian anthropologist who has spent years researching Chepang shamanism in the area around Manahari. “Missionaries emphasise the healing aspect of Christianity, trying to put an end to the traditional rituals and charismatic power of shamans.”

Riboli says conversions are “creating an alarming situation” in Chepang communities, where internal conflicts are becoming more frequent.

Purna Bahadur Praja, a Chepang shaman, says many Chepangs are turning to Christianity just for the money. “They are greedy … after the earthquake, they got Bibles, rice, clothes, blankets, money to build churches. Pastors were getting motorbikes … They spend the whole time emailing foreigners to ask for money,” he says.

Mahibal Praja, a Chepang pastor, vehemently denies this. In a small shop off the main road from where he runs a cable TV business, dusty monitors, coils of wire and soldering irons lie scattered across the shop. “Look at this. If I was making lots of money would I be working here?” he asks.

His church is a small building made of concrete blocks and corrugated iron. On Saturday morning, when Christians worship in Nepal, it is packed with more than 50 worshippers, sweating in the humid air.

Mahibal gives an energetic sermon that seems to confirm Purna Bahadur’s accusation that there is some profiteering. “Many people are making money from Christianity, but they are not real Christians,” he shouts into the microphone, before closing the service in prayer. “This church needs a new building. God, please provide a nice building.”

In the nearby village of Ramantar, Dalit Christians already have that prayer answered; they worship in an airy two-storey building constructed with the support of American missionaries. The pastor, Jit Bahadur Sunar, says there are three other churches in the village. “Ten years ago there were just four or five Christian families here, but every day the number is increasing,” he says. “Virtually all the Dalits here are Christian.”

Mahibal Praja, a Chepang pastor, preaches at his church in Manahari

Mahibal Praja, a Chepang pastor, preaches at his church in Manahari
Caste discrimination is the main reason Dalits are turning to Christianity, he says. “The higher castes in the village used to treat dogs better than us … and generally they still do. [Upper caste] priests refuse to do marriage or death rituals for Dalits, but among Christians there is no discrimination … we are all equal.”

Hari Gopal Rimal, a local Hindu priest, accepts this. “Untouchability is a weakness in Hinduism … these things need to be changed,” he says.


But in the battle for souls, Rimal feels Hinduism is losing out to a more powerful force. “Different foreign organisations are providing funds when Christians are ill. And after the earthquake they provided help only to Christians. Bibles came in sacks of rice. Bibles came with everything … They are using money to promote Christianity and we have to compete with them.”

Purna Bahadur Praja agrees. “I’m unhappy because they are forgetting their culture and rituals in the name of money, which they are getting from outside.
“If it continues like this, there will be no more Hindus in this town.
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Re: Christianity, Evangelism & its geopolitical impact

Post by krithivas »

Steve Bannon's quote from "60-mins" on the business of Church- "Because unable to really to come to grips with the problems in the church, they need illegal aliens, they need illegal aliens to fill the churches".
//http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/11/politics/ ... index.html
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