Some of my friends in the USA–the country of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, and a land par excellence of liberal humanism–have drawn my attention to your recent fulminations against Hinduism, Hindus, and India.
My first reaction was sheer amusement at this latest spectacle of patent Christian tantrums. I am quite familiar with what Christian theologians, missionaries and windbags have been saying about our religion, our people, and our country since the days of St. Hippolytus (230 ce), more particularly since 1542 ce when that Patron Saint of Pirates, Francis Xavier, reached our shores. Thousands of shelves in hundreds of Christian seminaries in India and abroad are laden with the pornography which soldiers of the Only Savior have produced down the centuries.
I also know that you have to make a living for yourself, and collect money for maintaining the giant missionary apparatus in this country as well as for keeping within your fold the rice Christians you have managed to collect during the past four hundred years. I can see that the only way you can do it is by selling to your gullible people the Big Lie that we Hindus are an accursed rabble hungering for Jesus Christ. You are neither the first nor likely to be the last in this cynical enterprise. I have witnessed how Mother Teresa has flourished and become a world figure by plying the same trade with a straight face.
On second thought, however, I have decided to pen the lines that follow. Firstly, I plead that we are living in an age when sinners are coming forward to apologize to the sinned against. I cannot believe that you are unaware of how the Germans have apologized to the Jews and the Japanese to the Koreans. And I think it is high time for Christians to apologize to the Hindus. The crimes which Christian missionaries have committed in this country since the days of Francis Xavier have been documented by Christian scholars themselves.
Secondly, I wish to point out that you have got your priorities wrong. Instead of trying to save the Hindus, you should try to save whatever has survived of the totem by which you swear. I have airmailed to you a copy of Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggressionin which I have compiled the conclusions of Christological research in the modern West. It is too late in the day for you to exercise yourself about Hinduism and the Hindus. It may be more profitable for you to address your own dwindling flock in what was once known as Christendom.
Thirdly, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that we Hindus are an ancient people and have survived many storms including those mounted by Islam and its elder brother–Christianity. We were here long before your Jehovah and Jesus.
Hinduism is a spiritual culture which is intrinsic to the human species, and has never been in need of big battalions, or big money, or big media in order to back it up. Hinduism knows how to find its way to humans hearts, no matter how desperate the efforts of contrived creeds to shut them tight against all higher aspirations. Hinduism is Sanatana Dharma,the Perennial Wisdom and Virtue. It is no use spitting at the Sun.
Sita Ram Goel, of Delhi, is a well-known renaissance writer on Hindu subjects. He is associated with the Voice of India–a publishing house which guides understanding through enlightening tracts, books and articles.