"Yeshu's Spring"
©Lucio Mascarenhas.
Echoes of the Great Hypocrite and Christophobe, Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi! The thing is shot through with hateful blasphemy.
I do not know what can be more insulting — the gratuitous comparision to the innumerable charlattans who spring from nowhere to pretend to be incarnations, or the description of the image of the crucified Christ as an "idol", or the imbecilic identification of all Christians with the Protestant redacted "King James Version" of the Bible!
But who is responsible for this - the idea that the pagan Indians have developed that they can absorb Christ into their pantheon of devils? That they can absorb and pedestrianise Christianity as an inferior form of their hateful paganism?
The reduction of the Jealous God of Israel, incarnate Christ, to the level of a glorified Santa Claus?
It is that bastardised, hybrid species, the "Indian Christian" - a Christian who has yielded to Hindu culture and to the supremacy and superiority of the Hindus and of Hinduism. "Indian" is a mere euphemism for Hindu.
The "Indian Christian" as a being did not exist until the Revolution commenced by Roncalli in 1958, his "Aggiornomento" or Bringing-Upto-Date, the Robber Council "Vatican II"... He is an innovation, an invention, a hybrid contrived by apostate churchmen to appease the Hindu and to conform to Indian paganism.
Lucio
--- In [email protected], "mangalorrejoachim" <[email protected]> wrote:
> This is a column supposedly about Easter from the Indian Express. It is a pretext to assert hindu superiority. It implies Easter does not matter because hindus already have festivals which celebrate the resurrection of God.
> Yeshu's spring
> http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=43924
>
> The coincidence of festivals
>
> Christmas overshadowed Easter in our young lives as modern Hindus. Yeshu's earthly birth was a close echo of Janmashtami: a Holy Child born to distressed parents, persecuted by a cruel king who killed all the newborns in his country to pre-empt the unidentified baby from growing up into a Saviour. Plus, the trimmings of Christmas — carols, cake, candles, cards, presents and Charles Dickens — were such good fun. But Easter was "too sad", although we did love our chocolate or marzipan Easter bunnies and we happily painted Easter eggs (hardboiled inside) with watercolours or felt pens.
> In actual fact, Easter is the culmination of Christ's life, but when we could not bear the sorrows of Sita and Draupadi or Krishna's death (shot in the foot by a hunter's arrow) or Rama's (jalsamadhi in the river Sarayu), how could we could not feel traumatised by the tragic idol nailed to a cross, to which Christians knelt and prayed with lights, flowers and music, as we did at home and in temples? Many Hindus will remember how unhappy they felt as children when first told the story of Calvary, the torn and bleeding trail of the Son of God to his last, terrible cry: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani?" — My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me? We were too young to understand the symbolism of Yeshu's resurrection and honestly, we couldn't connect culturally with the prevailing calendar image of a blond, blue-eyed Christ.
> It took many years of de-racination to realise that Jesus was a Jew, that he was most probably dark-haired, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, as Mary and Joseph must have been. Perhaps we did not notice Easter beyond bunnies and eggs not just because of the sorrow of the Crucifixion but because so many of our own festivals, all to do with spring and new year, occur around then: Holi, Ugadhi, Gudi Padva, Vishu, Baisakhi. All of them are about Resurrection! Especially powerful is Holi, when God took an avatar to save His true believers.
> Though Christianity, like Islam, claims to be an exclusive pathway to God and powerful edifices like the church are constructed on the belief that all religion resides between the covers of the King James Bible, it's evident that Easter rides on older belief systems. At a calendar level, it coincides neatly with ancient spring festivals, when the earth resurrects after winter. Earlier, Easter was linked to the Jewish festival of Passover. Later, after the Council of Nicea (325 BCE), the festival was fixed to occur on the Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox, thus connecting with a deep, universal rhythm. In that sense, if we ignore the annoying use of intolerant terms like `Mumbai Crusade' by pop-evangelists like Benny Hinn, we celebrate Yeshu's spring anyway without needing to be churched.