Free Republic

Converting people to another religion is illegal in Nepal, but missionaries are willing to risk prosecution to spread the Christian faith. "Victory to Jesus," Korean pastor Pang Chang-in cries as he blesses a new church in the village of Jharlang, in the foothills of the Himalayas. The congregation of the newly converted raise their hands in prayer. Most are from the indigenous Tamang community, who used to follow the Lama faith, an ancient spiritual practice. In Pang's eyes the Tamang people are "poor financially and spiritually". "So, a miracle takes place and the whole village converts," he says. Missionaries, many...

An Indian asceticism practitioner (sadhu) named Amar Bharati has been advocating for world peace for almost fifty years while holding up his right hand in the air without ever lowering it. A sadhu is a religious ascetic or holy person in Hinduism (in some cases Buddhism and Jainism) who has rejected all worldly desires. Bharati was a married man with three children who worked as a clerk in New Delhi until 1970, when he quit his job and left his family and friends to devote his life to Shiva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism, also called as “the...

A coalition of Christian and interfaith leaders in Texas are calling on members of U.S. Congress to condemn "anti-Christian hate and bigotry" from a local nonprofit they say is raising funds to demolish churches in India. The Federation of Indian American Christian Organization in North America (FIACONA) held a news conference Tuesday, warning that the Texas-based Global Hindu Heritage Foundation (GHHF) is raising money in the United States to level churches and forcibly convert Christians and Muslims in India to Hinduism. A Dec. 13 letter obtained by The Christian Post and addressed to U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn,...

Shraddha Madan eloped with boyfriend Aftab Amin from Mumbai and started living in Delhi.As per the major development, it is found that Aftab chopped Shraddha into thirty-five pieces. A major disclosure in Delhi's 6-month-old murder case has been made. Boyfriend Aftab Amin Poonawalla murdered his live-in partner and girlfriend Shraddha, cut his body into 35 pieces, and disposed of them in different areas of Delhi for 18 days. The police arrested the accused Aftab on Saturday. A year ago, Shraddha shifted from Mumbai to Delhi to be with Aftab. Shraddha, 26, was a resident of Malad, Mumbai. Here she used...

Rishi Sunak happens to be Hindu by faith, but this fact is unlikely to make him pro-India With Rishi Sunak becoming the third Prime Minister in two months, there are great expectations from him, especially because he has experience, as a former finance minister, to tackle the economic crisis that Britain faces. Just like his immediate predecessor, Liz Truss, he is a Thatcherite. “My values are Thatcherite. I believe in hard work, family and integrity. I am a Thatcherite, I am running as a Thatcherite and I will govern as a Thatcherite,” he wrote in a newspaper. But there is...

LONDON — Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor of the Exchequer, was poised to become Britain’s next prime minister as soon as Monday, after Boris Johnson pulled out of the race to succeed Liz Truss on Sunday evening. If Mr. Sunak wins, he will become the first person of color, the first person of Indian heritage and the first person of Hindu faith to lead Britain. Mr. Sunak, who lost a leadership contest to Ms. Truss this summer, is the clear front-runner, with the public backing of 192 Conservative lawmakers as of Monday afternoon, according to the BBC. That number represents...

As Rishi Sunak prepares to become the UK’s next prime minister at the start of the festival of Diwali – when Hindus pray to the goddess Lakshmi for prosperity and success – in India some Hindus celebrated the fact that someone sharing their religion had reached such high office in the UK. “To have a Hindu inside 10 Downing Street is something astonishing and of great joy, and that too on Diwali,” said Satish Verma, a supermarket owner in Delhi. “Although he is British, it will make us Hindus proud that one of us made it so big.” Sunak, who...

left residents living in fear Leicester had been upheld a one of the UK's most successful multi-cultural communities in Great Britain But violence erupted in the past few days with 25 police officers being injured and 47 arrests made in the city Riots blamed on a cricket match between India and Pakistan, but Nick Fagge says Leicester is a 'tinderbox' This week 200 Muslim men protested at in Birmingham against Hindu woman linked to extremism in India After the most recent clashes in Leicester, MailOnline sent reporter Nick Fagge inside a city at war Until a few weeks ago Leicester...

Loot, a despicable word, was evidently among the first few Hindustani expressions to enter the British lexicon. It aptly illustrates the brand of British colonisation like no other word. On a chilly evening in the first week of December in 1862, British Empire’s railway engineer E.B. Harris reached a small riverside market village called Sultanganj on the south bank of Ganges some twenty miles west of Bhagalpur. Here his 4,771 workers were excavating a vast mound of bricks on the hillside to build a railway yard. Harris, recognised among the railway engineers for the construction of the challenging Jamalpur tunnel,...

o Ankita Singh, 19, died after Shahrukh Hussain allegedly set her on fire in Ranchi o Shahrukh had been harassing Ankita for months and threatened to kill her o Her death has sparked protests after Hussain, a Muslim, is said to have wanted to convert Ankita, a Hindi, to Islam A teenage Hindu girl has been burned alive by her alleged Muslim stalker who poured petrol over her and set her alight as she slept at her home in India. Ankita Singh, 19, succumbed to her severe burn injuries and died on Sunday at a hospital in the city of...

He was arrested after a roughly 5-hour standoff with police Atlanta police have identified the man arrested last week after allegedly spray-painting swastikas on the city's rainbow crosswalks that honor the gay community. Police identified Jonah Sampson, 30, as the man who allegedly spray-painted swastikas on Atlanta’s Midtown rainbow crosswalks. Authorities believe he is also responsible for graffiti that was found on a monument at the Federal Reserve Building, Fox 5 reported. Sampson was arrested in Atlanta on Friday outside his apartment after a roughly five-hour standoff with a SWAT team. Jail records show Sampson is facing three charges of...

What was the shape of Noah’s Ark? For millennia Jewish and Christian clerics, scholars, and academics, as well as others with too much time on their hands, have pondered this question. Artist rendering of the one true shape of Noah’s Ark, scientifically provenILLUSTRATION: JON BERKELEY What makes it tantalizing is the precision of the numbers in Genesis 6 (here, in the King James translation): [13] And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. [14] Make thee...

Gyanchand Parakh is the Bharatiya Janata Party MLA from Pali, Rajasthan. During a recent discussion on the finance bill in the state assembly, Parakh compared Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi to Lord Shiva. Modi, Parakh declared, is an incarnation of Lord Shiva. "It came to me in a vision. I saw him as Lord Shiva," Gyanchand Parakh tells Rediff.com's A Ganesh Nadar. You described Prime Minister Modi as an incarnation of Lord Shiva. Why? I suddenly realised it. It came to me as a vision. Seeing his work, I said this. The surgical strikes... he has wiped out terrorism in...

Winner of Kerala State Film Award for Best Debut Director in the year 1988, filmmaker Ali Akbar who has directed more than 20 films, has announced that he is quitting Islam and converting to Hinduism. The director took this step after discussing with his wife, who too is converting to Hinduism. As he said, "They have lost faith in religion." he said, "Today, I am throwing away an attire I received by birth. From today onwards I am not a Muslim. I am an Indian. That is my reply to those people who posted thousands of smiling emoticons against India."

Until a few weeks ago, no one had given much thought to the car park in Gurgaon, a satellite city to India’s capital, Delhi. But for the last few Fridays the dusty, litter-strewn patch of concrete has become a religious battleground. This week as a Hindu nationalist mob assembled in their usual saffron, roars “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram) and “hail the motherland” filled the air. Then a cry rang out: “The Muslims are here.” And the mob began to charge. For more than a decade, this car park has been one of hundreds of sites that the Muslims...

Vice President Kamala Harris made history once again by becoming the first woman and Asian American to gain presidential power after President Joe Biden underwent a routine colonoscopy on Friday morning, according to the White House. Transfer of power: Harris, the first Black and South Asian vice president of the United States, became the commander in chief for nearly an hour and a half. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement that Harris took on presidential duties in her West Wing office while Biden, 78, went under anesthesia for the procedure around 9 a.m. local time at...

French actress Brigitte Bardot was fined to the tune of €20,000 — approximately $23,100 — for calling native Indian Ocean islanders “savages.” In 2019, Bardot, who is known for her acting in French projects, wrote a letter referring to the Reunionese — who inhabit the island La Reunion — as “natives who still have savage genes” in response to how they treat animals. According to the Telegraph, she specifically spoke about the Hindu Tamil population, criticizing them for “sacrificing goats” and using the “cannibalism of past centuries.”

An eight-year-old Hindu boy is being held in protective police custody in east Pakistan after becoming the youngest person ever to be charged with blasphemy in the country. The boy’s family is in hiding and many of the Hindu community in the conservative district of Rahim Yar Khan, in Punjab, have fled their homes after a Muslim crowd attacked a Hindu temple after the boy’s release on bail last week. Troops were deployed to the area to quell any further unrest. On Saturday, 20 people were arrested in connection with the temple attack. The boy is accused of intentionally urinating...

The fate of Lahore’s Hindu temples show the city’s shift from a cosmopolitan to monolithic culture In a city spread across 2,000 sq km, only two publicly-functioning Hindu temples remain. This is what social justice jihadis want to happen to Christians and Christian institutions. Tolerate a few institutions but deliberately chip away at them and destroy them so that nothing but THEIR culture remains

The same symbol whose sight would make me feel uncomfortable, even unsafe, back home, sparked in me some sort of relief and sympathy on this distant island onsidering that we would be in Taiwan for 24 hours total, my travel buddy and I didn’t worry too much about finding kosher food. We’d arrive on a plane in the morning and leave on another plane the following morning. We’d bring our usual picnic bag with challah rolls and other sorts of Jewish foods we always take with us when we fly abroad. Still, I wanted to make sure we’d easily find...