THUS SPAKE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON THE FUNDAMENTALS OF
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM
Answering a pestering Christian missionary
Prophet cult- hatred reaps success
Religion is between ‘Me’and ‘My’God
Heaven is merely materialistic
Christian Heaven and Hell –only a
child’s dream
child’s dream
Fear of God is superstition
Sky sitting God is materialistic, not
spiritualistic
spiritualistic
A kettle calls a pot black
The sky sitting God is the God of an ignorant
Was God Sleeping with Time?
1.Answering a pestering Christian missionary
(Swami Vivekananda’s Speech at Sanfrancisco, 8th April 1900)
There came a Christian to me once and said, ‘You are a terrible sinner.’
I answered, ‘ yes I am. Go on.’
He was a Christian missionary. That man would not give me any rest. When I see him I fly.
He said, ‘I have good things for you. You are a sinner and you are going to hell.’
I replied, “Very good, what else? Where are you going to heaven or hell?”
“I am going to heaven”, The missionary answered.
I said, “Then I want to go to hell only”
That day he gave up pestering me.”
2.Prophet cult-the more you hate men the greater is your success rate
“A philosopher arises, promises all kinds of rewards to those who will follow him and eternal doom to those who will not follow him. Thus he makes his ideas spread. All existing religions are tremendously fanatic. The more a sect hates other sects, greater is its success and more people it draws into its fold.”
*In Semitic religions, the fear of hell is customary. The ‘Hell fire phobia’ might have earned Islam more followers than its noble blade. When the fear of ‘hell fire’ spiritualizes a Muslim, it is the absolute love that supplements a Hindu’s spirituality.
3.Religion is between ‘me’and ‘my’god
( Swamiji’s speech at San Francisco in 1900)
“If you want to be religious, enter not the gate of any organized religions. They do a hundred times more evil than good, because they stop the growth of each one’s individual development. Study everything, but keep your own seat firm. Religion is only between you and your God and no third person must come between you. If I and you organize we begin to hate every person. If you love your own people means hating everybody else, it is the quintessence of selfishness and brutality. Therefore, better die working out your own natural religion than following another’s natural religion, however great it may appear to you.”
4.Heaven is merely materialistic.
“Spirituality can never be attained unless all material ideas are given up. What is in the senses? The senses are all delusion. People wish to retain them in heaven even after they are dead-a pair of eyes, a nose. They want to see God material body of God. Such men’s desires are for the body, for food, and drink and enjoyment. It is the materialistic life prolonged. Men cannot think of any thing beyond this life.”sitting on a throne through all eternity-the
*The sky sitting God is a Semitic finding. Islam sneers at pantheism- the general Hindu belief that God is present everywhere and in everything. Islam teaches that God is above the heaven. (Bilal Philips)
5.Heaven and Hell- only a child’s dream
“Eternal happiness and misery are a child’s dream. The Upanishads point out that the goal of man is neither misery nor happiness, but we have to be master of that out of which these are manufactured. We must be the master of the situation at its every root, as it were.”
6.Fear of God is superstition
“Vedanta proposes no sin or sinner. No God to be afraid of. He is the one being of whom we shall never be afraid, because He is our own self. There is only one being of whom you cannot possibly be afraid; He is that. Then isn’t it really the most superstitious person who has fear of God. God is man’s very self. He is the one being you can never possibly fear.
What is all these non-senses, the fear of God entering into a man, making him tremble and so on?
Sky sitting God is materialistic, not spiritualistic
Vedanta knows no sin
These are what Vedanta has not to give. No book.No man to be singled out from the rest of mankind-“You are worms, and we are the Lord God!”-none of that. If you are the Lord God, I also am the Lord God. So Vedanta knows no sin.There are mistakes but no sins.
No Satan-none of this nonsense.
Vedanta believes in only one sin, only one in the world, and it is this: the moment you think you are a sinner or any body is a sinner, that is sin.
The sky- sitting God is down right materialism
What is the idea of God in heaven? - Materialism.
The Vedantic idea is the infinite principle of God embodied in every one of us.
God sitting up on a cloud! Think of the utter blasphemy of it!
It is materialism-down right materialism.
When babies think this way, it may be all right, but when grown up men try to teach such things it is down right disgusting-that is what it is. It is all matter, all body idea, the gross idea, the sense idea. Every bit of it is clay and nothing but clay. Is that religion? God is spirit and He should be worshipped in spirit and in truth.
8.A kettle calls a pot black
“You come with your dualistic idea of God to pick a quarrel with a poor man who is worshipping an image, and you think you are wonderfully rational, you can confound him. But he turns round and shatters your own personal God and calls that an imaginary ideal, where are you?, You fall back on faith and raise the cry of atheism-the old cry of a weak man –whosoever defeats him is an atheist.
If you are to be rational be rational all along the line, and if not, allow others the same privilege which you ask for yourself.”
9.The sky-sitting God is the God of an ignorant
“Everything here in the sense world is dependent and independent, relative and correlative, the existence of one depending on the other…..
The first idea of God with the ignorant is that this God is somewhere outside the universe, that is to say the conception of God is extremely human. The God does just what a man does, only on a bigger scale.”
10.Was God Sleeping with Time?
“The first is the question of creation, that this nature, Prakriti, Maya is infinite, without beginning. It is not that the world was created the other day, not that a God came and created the world and since the time has been sleeping; for that cannot be .The creative energy is still going on. God is eternally creating-is never at rest. Remember the passage in the Geetha where Krishna says,” If I remain at rest for a moment, this universe will be destroyed.”
*This is absolutely in contradiction with the Biblical God taking rest after the creation process
No comments:
Post a Comment