Anti-Christian Propaganda
© Prakash J. Mascarenhas, 22nd August 2002.
The Sunday Times of India, Bombay, Sunday, 18th August 2002 carried an article on Dinesh D'Souza the Indian origin adviser of former US President Reagan, and a book review-cum-advertisement of Shashi S. Sharma's The Nature of Divine Faultlines. (See reproduction below)
As usual, the Times, has displayed its ideological partiality and not even made a pretense of objective neutrality in its article on D'Souza.
However, it is the book and the review that takes the cake: Besides displaying a contemptible lack of control over the English language, they are deliberately offensive to Christians and Christianity and makes patently false and malicious claims against the Christian religion.
We are not the defenders of the English language - however, it is evident that if you print in that language, you must use correct English.
Over the years I have seen that the English press in India, ostensibly secular and ostensibly controlled by liberal Hindus, is just as eager to provide a platform for anti-Christian propaganda as the vernacular press. The Jain sect, formerly a non-Hindu sect, but over the centuries degenerated and lost to its roots, provides a large number of extreme anti-Christians - such as the owners of the Times of India.
The Times think that it can get away with this mischief because, it thinks, that the Christians are a confused lot of pacifist idiots. While that is largely true, even a worm can turn.
The Times of India wants to show that it is brave and fearless; there is no courage in taking on the miniscule, pacific Indian Christian sector. Let it show its bravery, courage and fearlessness by exposing Hindu and Jain myths...
The contention that "modern scholarship has discovered Christ's events to be historically unverifiable" is all hogwash. Christianity is based on historical facts - not on a mythology. Those facts have been certainly proved, time and again. The "scholars" who make such contentions are not neutral investigators and students of the facts but overtly biased idiots. Those who support and consort with them are on the same level of intelligence.
But if it is true, then the further contention that Christians can restrict themselves to an emotionalist attachment to a disproved mythology is just more pap. As the Apostle St. Paul put it, if the claims of the historic events of Christianity are not true, then we want nothing with it - certainly, we do not wish to to delude ourselves with a disproved foolishness.
Right from the beginnings, Christianity has been acutely concious of the necessity of proving the truth of its historical claims.
As for Sharma's main proposition, it is nothing new, but was known right from the beginning of human history, and the Mosaic Revelation specifically addresses and refutes it. Therefore to make this contention as if it were some new discovery and a new challenge to Christianity is the greatest act of stupidity and mere wishful thinking.
Oh My God - The Nature of Divine Faultlines
Shashi S. Sharma. MRP RS. 495.00 Hardbound.
Indiatimes Bestsellers: www.Bestsellers.IndiaTimes.Com
The author undertakes a critical examination of the validity of religious claims regarding the exclusive truthfulness of an idea of the divine in suppression of every other idea. A comparative study of the idea of 'God' in the Judaic and Indian traditions has been used to underline the fact that mankind has described God in myriad forms over the past millenia. To put a spiritual presence in a theological straightjacket, therefore, would lead to religious narcissism.
Sharma has tried to break unchartered field as regards the concept of God in the world's established religions.
An Excerpt
The problem caused by the rejection of religious history and, therefore, of the foundational elements of Christianity also engaged the attention of European philosophy.
When modern scholarship discovered Christ's events to be historically unverifiable - a conclusion that made Christianity untenable - scholars like Rudolf Bultmann suggested divesting Christianity of its defining mythology in order to concentrate only on its message - the kerygma.
God as revealed in the words of scripture, the faithful were told, was enough for faith and salvation, even if Jesus on the mount was lost.
The words enshrined in the scripture are enough to save a sinner.