Invasions and Destruction of cultures.

23. Invasions and Destruction of cultures.

Hinduism also believes that all nations share God’s grace. It does not believe that there are pagans and infidels waiting to be converted to a particular system of beliefs and ideas, or a race of the damned waiting to be saved. Hinduism respects differences and sees God’s working in different peoples and nations.

For example, in its own tribals, Hinduism saw God working. It lived happily with them for thousands of years without trying to convert them. If it lent them anything, it also borrowed from them in silent communication. But all this changed with the advent of Christianity, which is now working overtime in giving them a sense of sin, a readymade saviour with all its other ideological trappings. The rich, white missions are making use of the nation’s poverty to further their ends. They offer temptations, a cardinal sin, in order to effect conversion. The Baptist missionaries in the North-Eastern belt, for example, reward with cheap polyester trousers those tribals who change their religion, with motor-bicycles if they also help their brothers to be converted. In Madhya Pradesh, as the Neogy Report shows, the missionaries give small loans of say five or ten dollars to the tribals on interest, loans which they know can not be easily paid back but the payment of which can be waived off if the debtors accepted Christianity. On another, more sophisticated level, they run schools and dispensaries and engage in so-called social work. But we must know that social work has now become big business and ominous politics. For itself the West has rejected Christianity, but it is still keeping it for export. The Western friends must realize what they are doing.

What is happening in India is also happening elsewhere. In America, even the vestiges of once a rich spiritual culture of the Indians are no more. In Africa, the blacks continue to be under the double attack of Christianity and Islam. The attack is both economic as well as political. But the cultural attack of monolatory is even more deadly than the political and economic attack- It completely cuts off the people from their spiritual roots, and it makes them sterile, spiritually speaking. Their own religion taught the blacks to see life in everything; now under different religious aegis, they are learning to see every­thing dead and lifeless. Their psychic life is being impoverished.