A belief system that accepts Christ as the incarnation of God and then allows for gods incarnated as monkeys and baboons makes a mockery of Catholicism and its central tenets. The clear fact is that Catholic belief posits itself as the one true religion. See below.
Of course you could dispute this, as do all the 20,000 plus other Christian sects as did the early pagans and today’s New Age followers.
So it is quite natural and logical that embrace of the Catholic faith must reject all other faiths as false. We do not believe the simplistic notion that “there are many paths to Heaven” because this would make the birth, death, and resurrection of the Christ meaningless. Why add one more path?
So long as missionary work is peacful, it is part of the fabric of democratic traditions that allow for freedom of worship and freedom of belief. If India’s Hindu communities cannot abide by this, then as an aspect of comity they ought not to be allowed the reciprocal benefits of practising their faith without interruption in western democracies. Yet, the constitutional structures of western societies are exploited by Hindu and Moslem faiths to set up religious centers here to practrice their faith, but this is not extended to Catholic Churches and missionaries to practice their faith- proclaiming the one True God- in other countries.
In short what you seek, is that for the Catholics to practice their faith, they must shed their core belief. This is a fallacy exposed by its own internal contradiction.
Hinduism has a better claim of being the "one true faith' of the Indian people, as it evolved out of various faiths that existed on the subcontinent prior to the invention of Christianity.
I seem to remember a certain other faith that (among the hierarchy, not necessarily among intellectuals and laypeople) violently denounced Republicanism and religious pluralism until the 1960s.
You love to paint Catholics as gentle little lambs, don’t you?
Violence halts Da Vinci Code screening in Hyderabad
IANS 23 June 2006, 09:52pm IST
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/India/articleshow/msid-1674892,curpg-2.cms
HYDERABAD: The screening of controversial Hollywood movie “Da Vinci Code” was suspended at a theatre here after a group of Christians,
protesting against the release of the film, ransacked the theatre.
The movie was to be released at Prasad Imax following a direction by the Andhra Pradesh High Court, quashing the state government’s order to ban its screening.
However, dozens of activists under the banner of the Christian United Front raided the theatre and damaged the property extensively forcing the management to suspend the film’s screening.
The protesters, who were carrying banners and placards describing the film as “Devil’s Code”, barged in to the theatre located near the Hussain Sagar lake in the heart of the city even as hundreds of people eager to watch the movie were standing in queues for the tickets of the first show of the movie.
Police said the mob shattered the glass panes and damaged furniture and ticket counters. The protesters also raised slogans against the court’s order lifting the ban imposed by the state government on the film.
Prasad Imax was the only theatre in the state, where the film was scheduled to be released on Friday.
The court, on petitions by the film’s distributors, Wednesday quashed the June 1 government order banning the screening of the movie in the state. The movie was to be released in the state on June 2.
The government move came following protests by various Christian and Muslim groups that said the movie would hurt religious sentiments. The government, in its order, contended that the film might lead to law and order problems.
Following the court order, the distributors had announced plans to release the English and Hindi versions of the movie next week.
The movie, based on Dan Brown’s bestseller with the same title, remains banned in several Indian states.
Hanuman is not an incarnation of a monkey, but plenty of human beings have the monkey nature.
So long as missionary work is peacful, it is part of the fabric of democratic traditions that allow for freedom of worship and freedom of belief. If India’s Hindu communities cannot abide by this, then as an aspect of comity they ought not to be allowed the reciprocal benefits of practising their faith without interruption in western democracies.
You lose. (sniff, sniff)
Thank God for the Constitution or we'd all be Catholics.
Many peoples and traditions of the world consider proselytizing to be essentially non-peaceful. Hindus do not proselytize, and simply want to abide in their own villages without their children or their faith subject to proselytization. And though it is against Hinduism, some Hindus feel so threatened by Catholic proselytizing that they feel their violence is a response to what they perceive as a relentless and generationally unending Catholic violence towards their minds, faith and culture. In short, they just want to be left alone to practice their own religion, in their own villages, in their own country.
As far as this desire to simply be left alone somehow violating Catholic core beliefs, and amounting to a violation of "comity," an unfair "exploitation" of "western democracy" and an imitation of Muslim religion-sanctioned murder, such contentions are utterly bigoted in favor of a Catholic-centric application of definitions and rule of law for the entire planet, as well as a slander against Hinduism specifically, and thus are dismissable on their face. And as you are well aware, they also absolutely do not represent the official positions of the Catholic Church towards Hindus, Hinduism, or India.
A belief system that accepts Christ as the incarnation of God and then allows for gods incarnated as monkeys and baboons makes a mockery of Catholicism and its central tenets. ...We do not believe the simplistic notion that “there are many paths to Heaven” because this would make the birth, death, and resurrection of the Christ meaningless. Why add one more path?
Your simplistic interpretation makes a mockery of Hinduism and it's central tenets. As well, Hindu beliefs existed thousands of years before the coming of Jesus Christ, and therefore hardly represent any reaction whatever towards Christianity. However, for a Hindu, once Jesus came He was hardly meaningless, but seen as a genuine incarnation of God who was and is utterly crucial to the saving of the human race, and deserving of the highest and most solemn veneration and worship. What other religion on the planet so absolutely accepts the stature of Jesus Christ as God, besides Christianity? You know not of what you speak.