==== ROLE OF EAST IN THE EUROPEAN STRUGGLE FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ====
By Ram Swarup.
European Struggle for religious freedom and rationalism was not purely a European Enterprise. Even in their sorry plight, Buddhism, Chisese Taoism, Shintoism, Hinduism made their own contribution to it.
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NO-CRUSADES, NO-PROSELYTIZATION, NO-EVANGELIZATION:
While Missionary-Imperialist_Europe was contemptuous of the East, many thoughtful Europeans found in its religions and spirituality (eastern) a very different example and type.
1. A type which is deep, relaxed, wise, and tolerant.
2. A type which does not punish dissent (no blasphemous, heretics laws)
3. A type which does not worry wheather you hold that the earth
is flat or round, wheather it is five-thousand or five billion ear old. In all these things it wants you to follow your best reason and stands for free enquiry.
4. A Type in which has no heaven bound believers, hell baked infidels.
5. A Type in which there is no jealous God like Yehwe or Allah.
6. A type with no evangelization, no crusade, no Jihad.
7. A type with all gods, religions are equally respected.
This exerted a silent but persistent influence on European intellect even when this influence remained unacknowledged.
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THINGS TURNED OUT DIFFERENTLY:
Asia did not send missionaries. But God made use of European scholars and missionaries to spread its message. Missionaries translated Eastern texts often to use them against their own religions. But things turned out differently.
Many sensitive Europeans saw in them a deep intuition about spiritual things, an intuition they had not known before through their own religions. It is this influence that has been at the base of New Age movement.
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INTERIORTY, HUMANISM, RATIONALISM, BROADMINDEDNESS:
Eastern interiority, Universalism, and humanism rehabilitate reason as well as spirituality. Dogmatic and closed ideologies (revelatory creeds like Christianity, Islam) that are inimical to both feel subverted.
Irrational belief systems which are imposed through use of force and maintained through extensive indoctrination collapsed. Europeans finally emerged as rationalists and found that only SON and only SAVIOR is simply a myth in the BIBLE.
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RAM SWARUP (1919-1998):
graduated from the University of Delhi in 1941 and has been an original writer and thinker ever since. Around 1957, he took to a life of meditation and spiritual reflection, and since then he had made a deep study of the scriptures of different religious traditions.
He was a noted writer in many fields, and is a distinguished spokesman of renascent Hinduism which, he believes, can also help other nations to rediscover their spiritual roots.
His previous books and brochures include "Communism and Peasantry", "Foundations of Maoism", and "Buddhism vis-à-vis Hinduism". His " Gandhi's and Communism" stressed the need to raise the struggle against communism from a military to a moral and ideological level.
His magnum opus "The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods" is on Linguistics, Philosophy, Vedic Exegesis and Yoga. It shows how a religion of 'many gods' represents authentic spirituality.
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Mahayogi Ram Swarup is a foremost spokesperson of Hindu spirituality and culture in India. He is associated with Indan intellectual think-tank Voice of India (
http://www.bharatvani.org ).
His best-known books are:
-- The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods
-- Understanding Islam Through Hadis: Religious Faith or Fanaticism.
-- Hindu View Of Christianity and Islam.
-- Hindu Bhuddist Rejoinder to Poe John Paul II.
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