[James C. Bennett]

Thank you very much for the “diagnosis”, but while you were busy prescribing:

Steelfish: “…deity-mandated violence…”, “…mandatory rituals…”, “…noble rationale…”, “…psychologically proven…”, etc.

Physician, heal thyself!

Now about 1 Samuel 2-3:

The argument that the clear and distinct order to kill and maim infants of another tribe, is justified because of a “new covenant ” in the “new testament” is ridiculously silly because the Jews don’t subscribe to any “new testament”. If the New Testament ties links of bondage to the Old, then it is the former that suffers the liabilities, and not the latter. For the millennia during which the Old was the sole arbiter, there is no excuse for the violent barbarity. As for Witch Burning, you assume that the period between 1400 AD and 1700 AD, which consumed innocent lives with religious sanction, of estimates going up to 100,000 women, seats itself in the Dark Ages? Do you know to count?

British rule in India was largely through the mode of the Princely States, where religious law was not the purview of the Criminal Code (for example, did the British criminalise Muslim polygamy? I didn't think so, either). When the same came into force in the period licking at the early 20th century, it did not bring any cataclysmic change in Indian society, for it to have affected religious practices as significantly as you falsely portray it to have been. And this, you emphasise for an issue that did not even make for more than a statistical aberration, compared to the tolls from the Witch Burnings. When Macaulay drafted the Code, it was in consultation with the religious leaders of the time, and not in their absence.

About the Gita being part of another body of literature, mnemonic devices have been a commonly utilised aid to facilitate oral transmission of teachings, in the period when writing was yet to be invented.

For you to consider it fictitious, is neither surprising, nor shocking, for it merely throws light on your abject failure to understand what constitutes belief. To elaborate, the Jews consider Christianity to be an illegitimate corruption of their faith. Among Christians themselves, the Protestants hold Catholics to be ritualistic idolaters (the habit passed off as "veneration" or "canonisation" while worshipping dead body parts, vials of dried blood, dead people and statues) and Romanists, probably for good reason:

Feast of Cocullo (Saint Domenico)

Protestants are in turn, labelled “heretics” and ridiculed, and the counter-charge appears in the form of comparisons of the fate and status of Catholic-dominated hell-holes in the Western Hemisphere, almost all of them susceptible to violent dictatorships, compared to free Protestant bastions of progress and civilization, such as the United States. It took, by the way, Protestant Reforms to cleanse Christianity of the evils of the corrupt papal office, which in the past, participated in such crimes as commissioning sinful behaviour through the sale of "indulgences", trading foreign lands and carving empires, and the like.

"Cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received 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."

- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814.

"Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?"

- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821.

Note the unique susceptibility of Catholicism-dominated countries, to dictatorships: France (De Gaulle), Spain (Franco), Italy (Mussolini), Argentina (Pinochet), etcetera, before attacking the views of the two aforementioned Founding Fathers.

It was also interesting, by the way, that you could not really attack the contents of the Gita, and that forced you to resort to attacking its legitimacy as a religious text.

Additionally, you seem to ignore that Bobby Jindal, before he began to adopt the Catholic faith (at the "early" age of what, 20?), was still more or less an upright citizen, holding to his Hindu beliefs. So too, were his parents. What's your explanation for all of the three not turning into vicious savages, Inquisitors or witch-burners as you accuse Hindus of being?

So, besides your circular logic until now, the whole argument would begin to see some progress on your behalf if you could answer, for starters:

1. Why the hereditary priesthood in Judaism is justified (I'm not asking for a rationale, but an explanation).

2. How you would account for the barbaric violence of the Old Testament, for the period that it was held valid, according to you.

[Steelfish]

In his book “Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar”, Paul Griffiths refers to “enclosure by sequestration” where atomized pieces of knowledge are manipulated, controlled and used out of context and where facts, theories, ideas,, and all the elements of intellectual life become delicious morsels carefully trimmed off from truth as a whole. And this is exactly what you do.

You push a line of witch burning as having Christian origins when history is replete with such practices in non-Christian and pagan cultures as well. But why does this have any connection to the central tenet of the main thread that the evils of casteism are a part of the systemic belief and practice of Hindu clerics and Hindu India? Your method of defense is to point to ancient practices or summon up an indignant defense that the Gita, in its “pure form” eschews such vile beliefs and rituals. The first is irrelevant and the second (as Gov. Bobby Jindal has lucidly pointed out) is untrue because the Gita in its “pure form” explicitly validates Deity-sanctioned mass murder.

With respect to British rule in India, they left intact customary local laws as relating to marriage and inheritance but not at the expense of public order. Sati- was Hindu sanctioned murder by arson, and this barbaric rituals was outlawed.

Finally, in typical Griffithian “enclosure by sequestration” the distinction between Catholic “worship” ; “adoration”; and “veneration”; appears to have lost on you. As if to reinforce this method of shallow discourse, you pluck contra-Catholic doctrine quotes from John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to work a tangent in buttressing your explanations of why filthy Hindu rituals from Sati to casteism and beliefs in deities whose prowess is conveyed in animal incarnations befitting the full spectrum of a modern day zoo including avatar-like aliens with elephantine trunks and gods with octopus-like limbs are deserving of serious intellectual inquiry. This is outside the realm of serious scholarship.

Nor have you understood the relation of the New Convenant (Douay-Rheims Bible: “But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you”) to the Old Testament (Matthew 9:17: Douay-Rheims Bible:” Neither do they put new wine into old bottles. Otherwise the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish. But new wine they put into new bottles: and both are preserved”)

It would have been much simpler had you at the outset readily acknowledged that these evil offshoots of casteism and Sati were regrettable extensions of a mytholgy that has long run its course and hold on illiterate masses of what constitutes Hindu India. While India may have missed out on the Period of Enlightenment and the Post-Renaissance era and blanked out on the forceful intellectual inquiries of Aquinas and Augustine, it is, as the saying goes, never too late. But an honest admission of this much is apparently too much to expect. Hinduism and Islam are two side of the same coin with differing emphases of worship that clash at the gates of modern civilization and are intrinsically incompatibles with the norms of the west. An observation worth more than My Two Copper Coins.