Posted on 05/17/2014 1:40:42 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Not too many of those around here ....
Wonder if steve86's wife is Moslem .... like Grover Norquist's. (And soon, George Clooney's, if the deal holds up.)
Hi, lj. As I may have mentioned before, my sister married a doctor from Bombay .... they did two weddings, one over there and one here in the States. Over in India, they got married in his mother's church, which is precisely that Christian community of which you speak. The priest's vestments were white and he wore a tall white crown or "trash-can" headdress very similar to the Maronite Catholics' (the Indian community there also is in communion with Rome), and the ceremony was in Syriac (successor language to Aramaic, about 300 years younger), Hindi, and English. The doctor's father's ascending line were Church of India, or Anglican.
The Thomasine (my made-up word) communion in India is about 20% of the Indian Christian population, the rest being either Roman Catholic (missionized through Goa) or Anglican.
The Portuguese priests who served in Goa brought back the first Sanskrit grammars in Western languages; they recognized the similarities to Greek, and so did Western scholars. The discovery kicked off the study of philology and linguistics.
All the languages of the world are now thought to be related, and Greek, Sanskrit, and both the Romance and Germanic families, as well as the Baltic and Slavic languages, are all part of the Indo-European family, which began on the north shore of the Black Sea in what is now the Ukraine and Moldova.
What link is that? Is that what the BJP says about itself or others say about it?
Oh, so the Vatican Insider says the BJP is like that. One language? Which one? Hindi, Oriya, Bengali, Telagu, other? Don’t make me laugh.
Hindi.
I recognize the names of the others from my wife using the terms and from streamed Indian TV.
in my humble opinion, the PLO still is to some extent nationalist rather than Moslem in orientation. Of course, terrorism is terrorism. The 1930 to 1949 Jewish groups fighting the British in the Palestine Mandate were democratic to some who would be labelled terrorists. In the Tamil LTTE case their cause was never spouted as religious but Dravida.
Sorry, but you can transfer money quite easily with banking systems to India. Why send checks? A Money order can do it — I’ve never heard of anyone sending checks from the US to India
Goa, Bombay, Tamil Nadu etc. all have lots of Christians who live alongside their neighbors, there would be no problems
In Bombay there are enclosed buildings where they will not allow a Moslem to buy a house, but Christians are ok -- Christians don't slaughter and cut up goats and cows in the building
They were not personal checks, they were bank checks, equivalent to cashier’s checks. I do not know where they were cashed. The recipient family did not have a bank account. Now, with the help of the one friendly Hindu teller, they have a bank account and receive bank wires from my wife.
They were not personal checks, they were bank checks, equivalent to cashier’s checks. I do not know where they were cashed. The recipient family did not have a bank account. Now, with the help of the one friendly Hindu teller, they have a bank account and receive bank wires from my wife.
In Mumbai is exactly where my SIL is harassed by her Hindu neighbors.
Hindus have a deep hatred for Islam, due to 800+ years of persecution, but there is nothing like that for Christianity.
On the contrast, Christians are part of the landscape -- most go to Catholic schools or colleges or hospitals, they have Christian friends who nowadays have Indian rather than Western names, and the British were not big promotors of Christianity so it does not come as "the religion of the conquerors"
Hindus cannot be riled up by the BJP with the slogan "let's attack Christians" -- but say "let's attack Moslems" and you'd get a following. Even the most rabid Hindus find it hard to work up the ire to attack Churchs
People on FR must realise that Hinduism, while very different from Christianity, is an ally against Islam.
You need to read up on the emboldening that the Hindutva proponents are feeling just like Holder’s people do here.
"Age of enlightenment" is a nice term bandied about for French anti-religiosity. that's let to the militant atheists in the US. So India escaping that is fine.
Women in Hindu India are not treated the same as women in Iceland, but that depends on which parts of India -- there are myriad cultures from the patriarchal to the matriarchal in India
until the late 70s the dominant party was the Indian national Congress -- a party of Gandhi and Nehru which presided over Indian independence. It was left of centre but then veered heavily left in the 70s (after Nixon threatened India with the USS Enterprise).
From the 80s onwards there have been different parties -- most are based on socialism, then on casteism, and now there are many regional parties -- remember that India is a continent, not a country, a place with at least 30 to 50 different "nations", so the "regional parties" rule over "states" that are countries in terms of separate languages, culture, even religion
At the top, in the late 90s there turned out to be 4 "coalitions" of parties:
So, for the current elections the only options were 1 and 2. But the Congress had run out of ideas after 10 years of rule. Arguably it ran out of ideas in the first 2 years. AFter that it had coalitions and had to pander to various allies of the moment from groups 3 and 4
Plus, it was led and projected as it's prime ministerial candidate, Rahul Gandhi -- a well-meaning guy, who had no qualifications besides being born right. And Indians it seemed are not fools to elect an Obama-wannabe
The BJP on the other hand had a strong candidate -- a former chief minister (de facto "president" in US terms) of the nation of Gujarat.
Gujaratis are known to be good at business and Modi enabled hte state to have a 10% year on year growth with pro-business, anti-corruption and pro-infrastructure policies
in addition, he was from a lower (not lowest) caste, not the Brahmins who normally run the BJP (like Vajpayee or Advani) and very decisive
The Congress had been relegated to supporting Moslems, cynically as it's other bases eroded. They played on non-religiou Moslem fears of the RSS, but cynically. The Congress calls itself secular but it used and uses religion to further its corrupt rule -- case in point the Babri Masjid -- instead of resolving the issue, it let it fester for political purposes
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Modi was the best choice for any Hindu -- most Hindus I know would hesitate if there was a choice between a "Hindu from the BJP" and a "HIndu non-BJP" who were both as good as Modi. But in this case, R Gandhi was a useless choice
For a Christian there was a slight dilemma due to the BJP's links with the RSS, but that has died down recently and as I pointed in a post above, the RSS realises that whipping up anti-Christian sentiment doesn't work, leave alone win elections
For a Moslem, if you were religious, then the Congress. if you were corrupt (which tend to be Islamic in India), then the Congress. If you were an Ahmaddiya or Bohri or Ismaili Moslem, then you would be torn, very torn
I gotta agree with MBT. Steve — the threat to Christians in Bombay are from Moslems. The former Christian dominated districts of Mazagoan and Bandra have been bought over by Moslems and Christians chased out.
secondly The only Christians not welcomed by the BJP -- to be specific, the vociferous ones. No members of a majority community like to have large conversion ceremonies where their community leaves. Small conversions are fine. Even large ones as long as they don't go about saying Hindu gods are demons -- it's a bit irritating to hear that.
Catholic priests have been converting people one by one by the simple act of living like Christ and preaching. For that, there is no issue
There is no “Hindu Shariah law” - the laws of Manu are not even obeyed by most Hindus. Hinduism is a meta-religion which allows various thoughts.
The PLO has only been even loosely Muslim in political orientation in the past few years. It had many Christian and openly atheist leaders for years, alongside Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Hamas was founded in no small part to give Sunni purists a political place to go.
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