I don’t like telling personal stories, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Almost by serendipity, or shall we say cosmic design, I came to study the deeper and broader history of Abrahamic religions, and what I found stunned me. This is the story of what sent me in that direction, what I learned about Abrahamic faiths, and how that understanding crystallized and clarified my understanding of Vedic philosophy.
Table of Contents
The Story Before My Abrahamic Journey
The Discovery of Pagan Religions
For most outsiders, the story of Abrahamic faiths is very simple. It involves a Prophet who arrived among the impious masses, and gave visions of the divine, which became a religious scripture, and thus arose a new religion. Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad are the prophets, and the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran are the scriptures. That is the extent of knowledge about Abrahamic faiths in most Indians, and I was no better.
About a decade ago, I chanced upon a video that talked about a predecessor religion called Mithraism prevalent in Europe before Christianity. The name Mithra sounded familiar to me because he is one of the 12 Aditya in the Vedic demigod pantheon. Aditya are one of three groups of demigods, the other two being Rudra and Vasu. Mithraism thus immediately piqued my interest. Watching the video, I learned that Mithraism worshipped the sun-god similar to Egyptians and Christianity borrowed many Mithraic practices and weaved them into Christianity. One such practice, the video claimed, was the celebration of the birthday of the sun-god on December 25th, which became Christmas. I don’t remember all the details, but there were at least a dozen important parallels between Mithraism and Christianity.
This was my first encounter with what I came to know later as “pagan religions”. The word “pagan” denotes a religious belief different from that held by the mainstream. More specifically, the term (Lat. paganus) was used by the early Roman Christians to designate the rural non-Christians living in the countryside. As I dug into the details, I realized that they were descendants and relatives of Greek, Roman, Babylonian, and Egyptian systems of demigods, collectively called “polytheism” by the Abrahamic religions. Today, paganism and polytheism are used interchangeably by most people.
In all pagan religions, different aspects of nature were personalized. There were gods of water, air, and fire. There were gods and goddesses of love and war. Important planets like Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Saturn were personalized. Each of these gods had their own rituals and practices. However, fundamentally, there was no animosity among them. They all existed in harmony with people having the freedom to worship their chosen deity. Today, we would call this “religious freedom”. I have recently learned that early Jews had pagan friends. They would visit the rituals and ceremonies of pagans. They did not perform the rituals and ceremonies themselves but there was friendship between them.
A Childhood of Religious Pluralism
Growing up in India, I have seen so many religions, and the freedom to practice religions. In my school, I had Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Zoroastrian, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist friends. We could identify them by their different names. But there was no animosity between us. Religion was never discussed and we studied and played together like we were one people. My parents never said anything adverse about any religion. My mother would sometimes go to a Church and get books about Christianity and Jesus. We all lovingly called Jesus “Yesuh Masih”. I attended many Church services because I loved to listen to the organ being played followed by the choir singing. I did not know the word secularism or what it meant. But we were living and growing up like there was no difference between any of the religions.
I was completely ignorant about the religious violence in all parts of the world, the destruction of native cultures, and their overtake by Abrahamic religions. Thanks to the Indian education system that washed away all religious crimes from history books, India’s colonization by the British was a political event, not a religious one. Even Islamic invasions were political rather than religious projects. Since I had mentally separated religion from society, politics, economics, and science, I thought everyone was doing the same. Parents all over the world tell their children about their past. But my parents never said anything about the past. It never occurred to me that I should ask them about it because there was no reason to.
Writing of the Book Cosmic Theogony
Therefore, in all innocence, I wrote the book Cosmic Theogony where I talked about the pagan histories of Abrahamic religions and subtitled it “The Personalization of Nature”. Theogony is the name of a poem written by the Greek poet Hesiod describing the genealogies of Greek gods and goddesses around the 7th century BCE. I saw that the pagan religions personalized nature by talking about demigods controlling various aspects of nature but Abrahamic religions did not. Overtly, they were quite different.
But due to the pagan antecedents of Abrahamic faiths, there were pagan traits left over in all Abrahamic faiths. Jews symbolized their religion by stars because there was a preceding religion of Vasus who are symbolized by stars in the Vedic tradition. Christians drew a halo around Jesus because there was a preceding religion of Adityas that worshipped the Sun with halos around his deities. Muslims symbolized their religion with the moon because there was a preceding religion of Rudras that performed Tantric practices, worshipped Shiva-Shakti in many forms, and saw the moon as a heavenly place.
The connections that seem obscure to most people become crystal clear if we know the Vedic system of demigod worship. I discussed in Cosmic Theogony all world religions coming from a pantheon of demigods summarized into three groups called Vasu, Aditya, and Rudra, emanating from Brahma, Viṣṇu, and Shiva, respectively. This trinity in turn represents the three features of a person called sat-chit-ānanda. The worship of one form of divinity, therefore, uplifts the soul by one of its features, like lifting a person by the head, the torso, or the legs. A person can be lifted in many ways so they are valid methods of lifting. I talked of a religious unity based on the history of many religions coming out of one system.
This unity has been recognized in the West too. Carl Jung saw the similarities between Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian religious systems. He created the theory of Jungian Archetypes to explain the recurrence of similar religious systems in geographically disconnected lands by claiming that they were all part of the collective unconscious. By embedding these deities in the human mind as forms of purity and perfection, he hoped to explain religious diversity through latent structures of the human mind.
I had not imagined that I would go any deeper into any religion. But I was hoping someone else would. I was particularly keen on knowing why feminine divinities were removed from Abrahamic religions and why they rejected reincarnation. The Dead Sea Scrolls include reincarnation and feminine divinities. I was hoping that someone would find out why these were excluded and I would learn from them.
The Turning Point in My Journey
The turning point came through my interactions with Western devotees. A group of devotees, who were otherwise appreciating my writing over emails, invited me to a conference and I agreed. A day before the conference, I asked for the conference schedule and I realized that they had made me the last speaker. Their conference was from 9AM to 5PM EST, which meant that my slot came at around 2:30 AM IST. I work a day job, so the time was inconvenient. When I asked for another slot, they offered me a lunch slot. All the other invited speakers had respectable slots. I was the wildcard to fill in the blanks.
Another group of devotees, who had reached out to me, organized a conference promising me a 60-minute slot, and I agreed. I told them that I cannot cover a difficult topic in a short time. I needed at least an hour if I was to talk. I was happy to not participate if that slot wasn’t available. So, I wasn’t seeking validation. But I did not get the minimum that I had requested. It was reduced to 30 minutes just a day before the conference and then I was given a reminder to end the talk at 20 minutes.
Slowly I began noticing overt racism. There was a large movement of Western devotees claiming that Indians were contaminating their temples by Indianness although they were their primary source of donations that were maintaining the temples. They wanted white-skinned Kṛṣṇa Consciousness. They claimed that Prabhupada had come to the West for white people and white people did not feel comfortable with brown people. The temple of God wasn’t open to all. Black and white people had separate churches.
I saw some Western devotees reviling Indians as thieves although any government statistic anywhere in the world would show that Indians have the least crime rates compared to any other ethnicity. Even those Western devotees who had previously lived in India for years and enjoyed the hospitality of Indian temples seemed to become anti-Indian the moment they returned to their home country.
Things reached a tipping point for me when I saw a Western devotee say that his American guru was better than Prabhupāda because the said guru brought the money to build a temple and community when that temple and community did not exist during Prabhupāda’s time. All the things that came after Prabhupāda were now Prabhupāda’s failures. New-found glory could not be attributed to Prabhupāda because he was already gone. It solely belonged to the new generation. However, all post-Prabhupāda inglorious failures were not attributed to the new generation with the same enthusiasm. In fact, when I reminded them of those failures, the same people claimed to be offended by such recollection.
Every time Prabhupāda was asked about his success, he simply said: It is all the mercy of my spiritual master, referring to Bhaktisiddhānta Saraswati Thakur. Sometimes he would attribute it to Kṛṣṇa, sometimes to Lord Chaitanya, and so on. He always gave credit to others and never stole any credit. But here was a new generation that wanted to minimize a glorious personality for personal glory.
My interactions with Western devotees showed me racism, arrogance, narcissism, selfishness, and cruelty. I used to think that devotees of Kṛṣṇa were beyond such meanness. But their superficial dresses, titles, and smiling faces decorated with Tilaka hid a darkness of unimaginable proportions. This turning point sent me in search for what causes this darkness. In theory, the causes of such darkness can be known without personal experience. But I would not have looked for it without such an experience.
Origins of Religious Fear and Violence
My Discovery of a Violent History
I am rarely satisfied by what I observe. I go deeper to search for its causes. When I learned computer networking, I began by going back to DARPA (a US defense agency) research to discover how the internet was invented to electronically coordinate nuclear attacks from multiple sites. When I studied radio communications, I went to the work that Bell Labs was doing in the early days, driven by the demands of military communications. When I studied computers, I went back to the work of Alan Turing who was assisting the British secret service and military on how to break German encryptions. The backstory tells me the reasons why things are the way they are when it may not be obvious to everyone.
I started digging into Western history to find the sources of its present reality. Everywhere I looked, I found heinous violence. The Goa Inquisition burned Sanskrit and other language texts, ravaged temples, forcibly converted people to Christianity, banned the local language, and killed countless people who resisted this destruction. Over 100 million excess deaths occurred in India during 1840-1920 during British Colonialism. The Bengal famine killed 4 million Bengalis during WWII because Winston Churchill redirected food grains as reserves for British soldiers even as Bengalis were dying of starvation.
The same story of mass genocides repeats again and again in thousands of places over three centuries across five different continents. I then started reading about the same type of history of Islamic violence. The killing of women and children, demolition of temples and deities, burning of libraries, levying of religious taxes, and forced conversion into their religion. Muslims were no better than Christians. I saw a recent calculation that summed up their genocides over the last 2000 years—Muslims 100 million and Christians 600 million. Christians are the victors in the competition for greater human disaster.
I had seen science-religion debates where the religious proponent would argue the impossibility of establishing morality based on science because science is incapable of value judgments like right and wrong. It seemed like a good argument, especially because the proponents of science seemed to have no good counter to it. But I found no morality in Abrahamic faiths. Instead, I discovered inhumanity and barbarity. I was shocked to discover that all these crimes were being sanctioned and instigated at the highest level of religion—such as the Pope issuing Papal Bulls authorizing the conquest of non-Christian lands. Christians would read the Papal Bulls aloud to the hapless natives before killing them, justifying their acts as the commands of the Pope. Any distinction between religion and murder was a myth.
Discovering Ethics and Covenants
I eventually discovered the difference between ethics and morality. Morality is defined by universal principles such as truth, kindness, austerity, and cleanliness. All these are not always upheld but even a temporary sacrifice of one principle requires the justification that all four will be upheld better over the long run by such sacrifice. Ethics is defined as a law ordained by an ecclesiastical (or government) authority. A Papal Bull that sanctioned the killing of millions was ethical although not moral. Ethics had completely replaced morality in Abrahamic religions. Ethics applies to a sect of people who believe in some system of rules and commandments. For instance, “thou shalt not kill” is not a moral injunction. It is an ethical injunction, confined to a sectarian group. It means that those who believe in Christianity should not kill other Christians. But, as the facts of history show, they can kill everyone else.
My search for the origins of ethics brought me to covenant theology. Babylonians used covenants while trading. One man could verbally promise to give another man something as the receiver promises to give something equivalent in return. To make these verbal promises enforceable at a later point in time, they were written down and signed by the contracting parties. Babylonians called them covenants.
Jews took this concept from the Babylonians and created a covenant between man and God. According to the Bible, God gave Moses and his group of followers—who had escaped persecution in Egypt and were wandering in the desert for 40 years—the land of Israel in exchange for the promise that they will follow the ten commandments. It was a contractual agreement solemnized in a book that came to be known as the Jewish Law. But as I found out, there is no evidence of Jewish immigration from Egypt. When several thousand people wander in the desert for 40 years, they ought to leave some evidence. But there is none. The Jews were always living in Israel. The story of God giving land to Moses in exchange for the ten commandments is fiction. A religion emerged from a fabricated man-God covenant.
Problems of Covenant Theology
While covenant theology has been extended from Judaism to Christianity to Islam, there are serious problems with the covenants being broken in all these religions. For example, in the Jewish covenant, God asked Moses to follow the ten commandments in return for the land of Israel, but Jews subsequently lost the land of Israel to Babylonians and Assyrians, indicating that God had broken His promise to the Jews.
There are numerous similar problems with all covenants. Why does God allow some followers of covenants to suffer while others are enjoying? Seems like God is unfair or unequal. Why don’t sick people get cured despite praying to God and promising to do something for Him in return? Seems like He isn’t listening to our prayers and promises. Why hasn’t the kingdom of God on earth promised in our covenant arrived yet? Seems like most of the erstwhile followers have left our faith even as we are trying to get new ones. Why hasn’t the Messiah promised in our covenant returned to put an end to the world when more than two thousand years have passed since? Seems like he is never going to arrive.
These problems are known to have made believers into atheists. They are not problems between religions. They are the problem that the verifiable promises in the covenants have not been fulfilled.
Then how do you keep the religion alive? There are two methods—(a) reduce what you have to do for God, and (b) increase what God will do for you. When Jews did not get their land back from the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the Jewish covenant was expanded to include going to heaven after death. This wasn’t a part of the covenant between God and Moses. It was added when the problem of suffering forced the faithful into a difficult choice: (a) Either we never had a covenant so God did not break His promise, or (b) we had a covenant but God broke His promise. In the former case, religion was never true. In the latter, God is not a trustworthy person to make a covenant with. The problem was solved by modifying the covenant—God will give us a place in heaven in lieu of a place on earth.
This is a remarkable precedent for many reasons. First, if the covenant has been revised once, then it can be revised again. Second, if the covenant can be revised, then new covenants can also be created. Third, even the new covenants can be revised. As doubts about a covenant arise—since the promises made in that covenant haven’t been fulfilled—we can replace a promise with an even bigger promise.
A borrower who can’t pay the principal right now, promises to pay a small penalty now, gradually pay interest over time, and eventually pay the principal at a future date. An unfaithful husband buys his wife gifts and takes her on a vacation, where he promises to be faithful to her in the future, and tells her about how the new business deal he is working on will enable her to buy the house she always wanted. These are methods to keep something going even after a serious relationship default has occurred.
We see examples of previous covenants being expanded into new covenants in Christianity and Islam where you not only get a place in heaven but also a rule over the whole world. In Catholicism, one had to pay money for sins but in Protestantism, all sins are forgiven for those who believe in Jesus. As time passes, you reduce what you do for God and increase expectations of what God will do for you.
Prosperity Gospel is a recent example in which preaching the message of God makes the preacher rich. Money spent in preaching the gospel is like an investment in a stock market. This incentivizes people to donate money to preachers under the belief that greater money will come back to them, which is an incremental improvement over time, eventually leading to a worldwide Christian empire. The religion moves forward by replacing an unfulfilled promise (a worldwide Christian empire) with immediate appeasement (news of recent Christian victories), small improvements over time (God will gradually make you richer), and eventual fulfillment of the original promise (a worldwide Christian empire).
Thus, to summarize covenants, religion began with God giving Moses some land in return for the promise to follow the commandments. Then when the land was gone, religion was upgraded to a place in heaven. When religious vows were broken, one could go to heaven if they paid money for their sins, with the additional benefit that followers of vows can rule over the world. Then when people did not want to pay the money, they could go to heaven just by faith, while still getting to rule the world. Their wealth was then said to increase through evangelical donations like investment growth in the stock market.
The Causes of Societal Neurosis
Abrahamic faiths have no spirituality. There is no concept of acquiring the perfect knowledge of reality, purifying the senses and the mind to see what you could not see before, practicing renunciation by doing one’s duties selflessly, or becoming an unconditional servant of God. Religion is motivated by pleasure. A long history of violence for material resources shows that they are materialistic. It is also very hard for a person to believe that contracts between man and God have been created. As the contract gets more one-sided, covenants slide into ever more preposterous claims. No intelligent person would accept such ridiculous contracts. And yet, the faithful expect God to accept such contracts.
But what happens if you reject an Abrahamic faith? Even the laws of modern science are based on the Judeo-Christian idea of contract law. The fundamental principle underlying a natural law is called the Least Action Principle where “action”—the thing that you give in return for something else—should be minimized until the contract breaks down. A good technology is one that takes the least and gives the most. A good theory is that which minimizes what we have to give and maximizes what we get in return.
All social laws are also based on the Judeo-Christian concept of contract law. A marriage between a man and a woman is a contract of give and take in which each party tries to minimize the giving and maximize the taking. An employer-employee relationship is a contract of give and take in which each party tries to minimize the giving and maximize the taking. A citizen-government relationship is a contract of give and take in which each side tries to minimize the giving and maximize the taking. All of these contracts can be created, terminated, and renegotiated, just like the religious covenants are amenable to revision.
Since everyone wants to minimize what they give and maximize what they take, hence, in the ideal case, they have to give nothing and they can take everything. That is called theft. When the ideal scenario is theft, then everyone following religious or secular covenant ideology will eventually be a thief. If they are not currently thieves, it is because they haven’t got the opportunity to enact the ideal scenario.
This is the cause of societal neurosis—everyone is worried that they may be cheated by people acting in their self-interest trying to reduce what they give and increase what they take. Everyone is worried that their contracts with God are just empty promises that will never be fulfilled. You cannot trust anyone because everyone is selfish. You have to constantly watch your self-interest. You distrust others. The escape from neurosis requires blind faith in a covenant, trusting that even if you were cheated in this world, even if people were selfish and deceitful, you still go to heaven after this short life is over. When people get tired of a world of selfishness and trickery, they seek the solace of a religious community. When they get tired of religious claims, they enter the world of selfishness and trickery to fight.
The Truth and Lies of Western Society
How Civilized Were Europeans?
In the 1800s, Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Versailles did not have toilets. The kings and queens were defecating in corridors. The palaces were cleaned once a week and the feces were decaying until then. Royalty did not bathe. When they occasionally undressed, clothes worn for months had to be peeled off their bodies, painfully plucking the hair on the skin. Undressing was the mother of waxing.
Some rich people wiped their bums with pages torn off books. Books were the mother of toilet paper. The illiterate poor did not have the luxury of books so they did not have the luxury of cleanliness. People living in houses without corridors urinated and defecated in pots and threw the product on the streets through their windows. It often fell on the unsuspecting passerby. Wealthy women walked on streets with umbrellas because they did not want to be the gracious recipients of such gratuitous gifts.
Romans bathed every day in public bathhouses. But after the fall of the Roman empire, the Church forbade public nudity and people stopped bathing. Priests bathed once a year before Easter. There was a religious theory about it. Cleanliness made people attracted to each other and they pursued carnal pleasures. Staying unclean reduced such carnal pursuits. Everything disgusting to man was therefore pleasing to God. There were chastity belts to reduce carnality. Women were urinating, menstruating, and defecating in them. The result of uncleanliness was syphilis and gonorrhea. Infectious diseases—called plagues—became common due to filthy living conditions. They killed millions.
When Jews were forbidden from leaving Egypt by the Pharaoh, God brought a series of ten plagues on them. But European plagues were attributed to the Devil. People suffering from infectious diseases were locked and burnt alive in their homes because their homes had been visited by the Devil.
Pagan women in Europe—called witches—knew herbal cures to these plagues. But if they tried to cure people, priests captured, tortured, and killed them. One happy priestly ritual was stripping the pagan woman, shaving her pubic hair, applying oil on her body, and burning it with candles. When Europeans traveled to other lands, plagues would often spread on ships. The sailors were not bathing on land so they were not bathing at sea. The ship’s captain would then order the infected sailors to be killed and thrown overboard to save the rest. When sailors landed on shores, they brought their infectious diseases with them. When they abducted and raped local women, they gave them syphilis and gonorrhea.
It was the miracle of science that taught Europeans that plagues were the result of uncleanliness, not God or the Devil. But millions of people had died by that time as the result of Church doctrines. Until the 20th century, Christians were the dirtiest civilization known to mankind. Jews were bathing regularly. So were Muslims. Romans and Greeks had public bathhouses. Christianity made Europeans dirty. Millions were killed in the process and the whole world got the gift of infectious diseases from infected travelers.
When Europeans came to India, they saw people bathing with soap every day. They had warm water and drainage systems. Many underwent a head massage before their bath, which they called Champu. It was rebranded in Europe and came to be known as Shampoo. Even the Harappan Civilization, which had ceased to exist at least 3500 years ago, had internal plumbing, drainage systems, and toilets. Not just in some imperial palace or public bathhouse. Every single house had the same facility for cleanliness.
The Western Plunder of the World
There are 195 countries in the world. All except the European countries have their separate defense arrangements. But Europeans have an alliance called NATO. It exists to prevent Europeans from killing Europeans. Its main clause is that any nation that wages war on one European country is waging war against all European countries. NATO was formed after two world wars to prevent another war. Both these world wars were largely European wars. But, of course, a European war is a world war.
The US is the top dog in NATO because Europeans don’t trust other Europeans with their security. They are not convinced that they can resolve the disputes among themselves like mature adults. They are sure that they will go to war with each other again unless someone with far greater power stops them. Europeans need adult supervision. They have chosen the US to do that. But they also resent someone who supervises them. Europeans don’t want Russia to come into the NATO alliance because of the historical East-West schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism going back to 1054 AD. This is a godsent for the US which gets to rule Europe because Europeans prefer the US over Russia.
There is also a grouping of nations called the Western Alliance. It is supposed to protect these nations from other hostile nations. There is no Eastern alliance, Southern alliance, or Northern alliance. Nobody in the whole world is so terrified of being attacked as the West. For all its supposed individualism, the West herds together when nobody else does. Its unity is forged by its collective fear of extinction.
The main cause of the two world wars was the German insecurity about being sandwiched between Russia, France, and England. Germany did not exist as a unified nation until 1862, by which time, Russia, France, and England were already very powerful. When Germany came into existence in 1862, after the conquest and unification of smaller territories around Prussia, it developed the ambitions of becoming a colonial power and started colonizing Africa. Italy, looking at the emergence of Germany, followed suit—unify into a bigger country and then conquer Africa. It was only a matter of time before these colonial ambitions would clash. Eventually, they did. Over 50 million Europeans died in these two wars.
Both wars were driven by jealousy, insecurity, and greed. Jealousy that others have power. Insecurity that they will eventually conquer us. Greed that we should conquer them before they conquer us. The fact that Europeans were all white, did not matter. The fact that Europeans were all Christians, did not matter. Hence, any talk about a modern White-Western-Christian alliance is just lipstick on a pig. They are divided by jealousy, insecurity, and greed. They are united by jealousy, insecurity, and greed.
The main problem with Europe is that it doesn’t have anything required for building a civilization. Europe is not the top producer of anything essential needed to sustain a civilization. Below are some details.
- Nourishment Needs
- China, India, and Russia are the top three wheat producers.
- China, India, and Bangladesh are the top three rice producers.
- China, India, and the US are the top three vegetable producers.
- China, India, and Brazil are the top three fruit producers.
- India, China, and the US are the top three milk producers.
- Clothing Needs
- China, India, and the US are the top three cotton producers.
- China, India, and Uzbekistan are the top three silk producers.
- Construction Needs
- The US, India, and China are the top three timber producers.
- India, China, and the US are the top three stone producers.
- China, the US, and India are the top three lime producers.
- The US, China, and India are the top three clay producers.
- Industrial Needs
- Australia, Brazil, and China have the top three iron ore reserves.
- Guinea, Vietnam, and Australia have the top three aluminum reserves.
- Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Canada have the top three oil reserves.
- The US, Russia, and Australia have the top three coal reserves.
- Russia, Iran, and Qatar have the top three gas reserves.
India is food sufficient because it is among the top wheat, rice, vegetable, fruit, and milk producers. India is clothing sufficient because it is among the top cotton and silk producers. India is construction sufficient because it is among the top timber, lime, clay, and stone producers. India was selling spices, cotton, and silk and collecting gold and silver, from which beautiful ornaments were made. Everyone had enough food to eat, clothes and jewelry to wear, and houses to live so they would give wealth to charity. Due to abundance, Indian rulers constructed numerous temples. India did not need industrialization to develop its economy because it had everything it needed for living a healthy and spiritually inclined life.
Europe could not be civilized on its own because it was not food, clothing, and construction sufficient. Europe could not industrialize on its own because it did not have enough iron, aluminum, oil, gas, and coal. Europe could not buy these things from other lands because it did not have anything valuable to give. Europe today produces industrial equipment, drugs and chemicals, motor vehicles, and computer and electronic equipment. It has to rely on iron, aluminum, oil, gas, and minerals purchased from other lands. That wasn’t always the case. Europe stole everything from other lands to industrialize.
In the 19th century, Britain was producing the world’s most textiles. But it did not produce even a scrap of cotton. All the cotton was exported from India to England, used to produce textiles in English factories, and the manufactured cloth was imported back into India. The Indian textile industry was destroyed for the British to build the British textile industry. India was forced to buy inferior British cloth in order to pay for British factories. India had to lose its textile industry to build the British textile industry.
Europe is a land for people living in small nomadic tribes pasturing animals. This is what Europeans were doing for the longest period of time after immigrating from Central Asia. The situation is worse for Arab countries where the main useful natural resources are oil and gas. Europeans could maintain herds of cows, horses, and dogs. Arabs could mostly maintain a herd of goats. Every time a nomadic tribe moved from one place to another with their herd of animals, they ran into another nomadic tribe grazing their herd, and the two tribes fought fiercely. The staple diet for Europeans was meat and potatoes. They got meat by killing something in their herd and they did not need farming to grow potatoes in the ground. Arabs could not grow potatoes in the desert. They were living on meat and dates.
We have to understand the geography from which Abrahamic faiths have originated to understand their ideology. These religions are born in places of scarcity, which are not suited for any civilization, let alone advanced civilization. Until recently, Christians began their meals with the prayer: God, give us our daily bread. That is because bread is a late addition to their staple diet of meat and potatoes. Abrahamic faiths were born in places where people were fighting for survival. They were ferocious, insecure, greedy, jealous, and violent. They did not have enough to eat. We cannot expect them to think.
When Europeans came to America, Australia, Asia, and Africa, they lost their minds because they had never seen abundance. The same thing happened when Arabs came to India. People living in abundance are not ferocious, insecure, greedy, jealous, or violent. They have everything they need. They did not make covenants with God to give them a good life. A good life was easily available to them. They did not think of a God who demands, punishes, or kills people. God had given them everything. Their universe did not just comprise Earth and Heaven. It had numerous more well-to-do places than Earth.
The mentality of Abrahamic religions is that of a man who was starving to death before he found a mountain of food. He wants to swallow the mountain because he is not sure if he will ever see food again. He lies, cheats, and deceives to keep the mountain to himself. He is violent, aggressive, and insecure because he thinks that someone will take away his mountain. He creates a fictitious religion to claim that God gave him exclusive rights over the mountain. He thinks that because he discovered the mountain after a long period of starvation, he has been uniquely and exclusively blessed by God. He murders everyone who was nibbling small amounts from the mountain before he even arrived.
The Superiority-Inferiority Dualism
When Europeans first came to India, they were enthralled and impressed by the Vedic civilization. They read some of the books and they were amazed at the expansiveness of Vedic thought. European ideas seemed significantly inferior. The early travelers went back to Europe with high praise for India. This made the Church nervous. Keeping Christianity alive was already a struggle for the Church because most of its claims were indefensible. There were continuous threats that the contradictions in their claims would be discovered and exposed leading to people abandoning Christianity. This threat magnified significantly when European travelers returned to Europe with high praise for the Vedic civilization. If people discover an alternative religion free of the flaws of Christianity, then it would end the power of the Church. Therefore, something had to be done to destroy Hinduism and preserve Christianity.
The British East India Company was not initially interested in religious incentives. They just wanted trade. They hindered the involvement of Christian Evangelicals in India for some time. Then Evangelicals came up with the idea of Sati. They went to the British parliament and started telling MPs fictitious stories about Indians burning their women and how it was the sacred duty of Christians to protect women. To fulfill this duty, Christian Evangelicals claimed, they had to start converting Hindus to Christianity.
A colonial project to translate Sanskrit texts into English was launched by recruiting academics favorable to Christian Evangelicals. This project created fake dictionaries, fake translations, and fake propaganda to make the Hindus hate their culture. A caste system was created by forcing second names on Indians just like Englishmen had patrimonial names such as Goldsmith, Blacksmith, Mason, Carpenter, Taylor, and so on. Second names were compulsory and hereditary. By making the name hereditary, the caste became hereditary. Censuses counted people by their patrimonial names. Different kinds of jobs—such as clerk, policeman, sweeper, etc.—were reserved for people based on their patrimonial names. Once this system became entrenched, each caste was made to fight the other castes under a divide-and-rule policy.
When a poor man looks at a rich man, he becomes aware of his poverty. When an ugly man looks at a beautiful man, he becomes aware of his ugliness. Sincere people accept their shortcomings and try to improve. Insincere people try to destroy the better person. People with vested interests are not just scared of being replaced by better people. They go about destroying them. The Church was and is a collection of scared and jealous people. They are incapable of improvement. They cannot accept that someone else is better. They destroy the better. Jealousy is a tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.
This is how inferiority becomes superiority. Early Europeans who came to India recognized that India was a far superior civilization. Evangelicals, afraid of losing their power and standing in society, then launched a massive project to destroy India. They could not accept their inferiority. They went about destroying the superior society by telling fairy tales of their greatness. To date, these Evangelicals peddle the same false stories about Sati and the caste system and pretend to be a superior society even when nobody is asking for their opinion. They have zero data to back Sati. They created the caste system by applying the European caste ideas to India. But such is the insecurity in the Christian faith that it will peddle any deception to stay in power.
Pervasive Use of False Propaganda
It takes a twisted mind to claim that plunderers are a better society and those from whom they plunder are the worse society. It requires propaganda. The stolen wealth is used to disparage those from whom it was stolen. Stealing is not enough. A twisted mind also disparages those from whom he stole it.
This is a psychological war technique in which you demoralize the opponent by downgrading him in the eyes of others. The more people you can influence by this propaganda, the more you will demoralize the opponent because as the opponent loses credibility in others’ eyes, he will find himself without friends. He will then resign quietly to his misfortune. Even if he retaliates, his insinuations will be ignored as the rantings of a discredited man seeking validation. Since the wealth is coming via loot, therefore, the looters are free to generate false propaganda. They don’t need to work to produce the wealth. They can steal it, claim it as their own, attribute it to their superiority, and then use it to disparage the owner.
In sporting terms, this is called sledging—deliberately insulting an opposing player often by talking about his wife, sister, or mother in disparaging terms. A culture or civilization is a person’s mother. When she is disparaged, a person is designated the offspring of a bad mother. It demoralizes the opponent.
The proper technique of fighting a psychological war is a psychological war. If your mother is disparaged, then you have to disparage the opponent’s mother. It destroys the opponent if it is true. But most people who respect their mothers are disinclined toward disparaging other mothers. By adhering to their moral virtue of respecting all mothers, they fail to defend their mother’s honor. This is how the thief gets away with false propaganda. He has the stolen wealth to finance false propaganda about others but the people from whom it was stolen are unable to stoop to his level to counter such propaganda.
The imagined superiority of plunderers is the result of centuries of unopposed false propaganda. False propaganda is not a recent invention. Only the medium of propaganda has expanded from the church to the classroom to the newspaper to the radio to the movies to the television to the internet. The people are constantly fed false propaganda about their superiority to continue their support for falsehoods.
Hollywood action movies show an American hero saving the world during a crisis when Americans have not won a single war. Americans did not win the war with the Nazis. The Russians did. The Americans did not fight the Japanese army to victory. They dropped nuclear bombs on civilians. They lost the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Iraq War, and the Afghanistan War. Now they are arming Nazis in Ukraine to fight a proxy war with Russia. They don’t have the courage to fight a war themselves. But they call themselves the land of the brave. The reality on the ground is very different from the imagery in the movies.
The West is very good at propaganda. We can certainly appreciate their knack for imaginary storytelling. The Jews started the system of imaginary storytelling. They have had the longest time in history to analyze how propaganda can control a society for centuries. They are mostly atheists today. But they know religion, I mean false propaganda, better than anyone else. This is also a favorite Jewish profession.
The Unscientific Approaches to Religion
The Unity of Science and Religion
The Vedic system is the only traditional system of knowledge in the world with a concrete description of the material world. There is a detailed understanding of the body, senses, mind, intellect, ego, morality, and the unconscious. There is a comprehensive formulation of logic and reasoning. There is a full-fledged theory of atomism. There is an elaborate theory of linguistics and meaning. There is a system of music, rhythms, meters, mudras, and postures contiguous with this understanding. There is a full-fledged cosmology. The Vedic system of medicine is still widely practiced today. Its system of architecture has built massive and wonderful temple architectures. There is a fantastic system of time calculation that was used for ritual timing. The West took this Indian-origin system to create what it calls calculus. Algebra, geometry, and arithmetic were all created in India and taken to other parts of the world.
When the Vedic system talks about the soul, God, reincarnation, and transcendence, it establishes its credentials through the above-mentioned sciences. Since the above-mentioned sciences work, therefore, what we say about the other topics is also true. That is not the case with any other religion. They just make claims about the other world without establishing their credentials or trustworthiness within this world.
The word Veda simply means knowledge. We can also call it the truth. There is no ism, belief, or faith because everything is established by reason and observation. Even that which we cannot experience immediately is experienced by a suitable practice. If you lack trust in this process, you can study the dozens of above sciences to reestablish trust. The Vedic tradition has no equivalent for “philosophy”. The word is Darśana which means vision. Those without the vision have a process to develop the vision.
But an Abrahamic faith never talks about developing perception. They talk about revelations that nobody can confirm. If the evidence against these revelations is discovered, then they claim that the infinite glory of revealed truth cannot be understood by the human mind.
According to modern science, the earth is billions of years old, not just 6,000 years old as in Abrahamic faiths. But this evidence doesn’t refute the Abrahamic faiths. The Jews never immigrated from Egypt to have a covenant with God, so there is no foundation for covenant theology. But this fact doesn’t refute covenant theology. Every child is born with different talents, inclinations, and predispositions. But according to Abrahamic faiths, this is the first birth of all humans. All animals have cognitive, emotional, intentional, and relational abilities. But according to Abrahamic faiths, only humans have a soul. Europeans immigrated from Central Asia but Indians did not. But Abrahamic faiths push Aryan Invasion Theory on Indians contrary to the evidence of genetic and cultural commonality in India. Killing anyone for the crimes of another person is blatantly immoral. But Jesus dying for the sins of others is the cornerstone of Christianity. Egyptians built massive pyramids and Indians built massive temples that people cannot build today despite all their technological advancement. But according to Abrahamic faiths, there was no superior civilization in the past. Societies have been created and destroyed cyclically over history and thus time must be cyclical. But according to Abrahamic faiths, their civilization will continue linearly till the end of time.
Abrahamic faiths are the enemies of evidence, reason, and common sense. They are not just blind faiths without evidence. They are rather blind faiths against evidence. Anyone can believe anything without evidence. But if they believe something against evidence then they show that they are not interested in the truth. Continuous disregard for evidence to perpetuate blind faith is their only agenda. This disregard for evidence, reason, and common sense constitutes the separation between religion and science. It is also a false religious dogma meant to preserve the false dogmas of religion. The false dogma of science-religion separation immunizes religion against all reason and evidence.
The Rejection of Scientific Approaches
The Brahmanas were always judged by their knowledge. Yasmin vijñāte sarvam evaṁ vijñātaṁ bhavati (Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 1.3). If you know the Supreme Truth, then you know everything else. But we can test what the priests in Abrahamic religions know. Factually, they know nothing. They cannot even explain sense perception, which every single person has been having from the day they were born.
Since the priest knows nothing about this world, and yet, he wants to claim that he knows something about the other world, therefore, he agrees to a science-religion separation. Abrahamic faiths perfected the hypocrisy of personal revelation, imaginary contracts, blind faith in scripture, and the God-ordained power of religious institutions because they are completely immune to any type of questioning. What they can see every day they don’t understand. But they claim to understand what they have never seen.
Hence, my argument against these faiths is their science-religion separation. We don’t accept a priest who cannot explain this world. If you don’t know this world, then you also don’t know the other world.
The new problem is that people coming to the Vedic tradition in modern times have disregarded the Vedic scientific system. They follow the Western science-religion separation. Science is for scientists and religion is for religionists. A guru, sannyasi, or preacher is a religionist. He doesn’t need to know science. Thereby, none of these gurus, sannyasis, or preachers can explain this world, which they can see every moment. But they claim to know something about the other world which they have never seen. By co-opting the Western science-religion duality, they have become Abrahamic priests who also could not explain anything in this world but falsely claimed to know something about a world they had never seen.
The Vedic tradition raised the standard for religion. Buddhism and Jainism could not survive in India unless they had a comprehensive view of reality. Buddhism had to develop a four-valued logic and Jainism had to develop seven-valued logic to debate with the Vedic tradition. Each of these religions had to develop a comprehensive cosmology to talk about various levels of spiritual progress. If you don’t have a level in cosmology then you don’t have a level in spiritual progress. The two are inseparable. Then you have to know precisely what happens at each level in cosmology to know the rungs of progress.
But when people come to the Vedic tradition at present, they directly go from earth to the topmost heaven. All the intermediate levels where one progresses from a lower to a higher stage of realization are ignored. Even if they can see that the same book talks about both science and religion, they quietly ignore the science and focus on the religion. Even if they see that religious topics follow scientific topics, they quietly neglect the lower step and claim to have gotten an understanding of the higher step.
When gurus, sannyasis, brahmanas, and preachers start doing that, then every newcomer learns at their feet and repeats the same mistakes. In a short span of time, ignorance is normalized. You can’t say that one person is ignorant because everyone is ignorant. The ignorant find solace in collective ignorance. Through collective ignorance, the Vedic tradition is transformed into yet another Abrahamic faith.
Deep Attachment to Western Ideas
Some years ago, there was a movement of Western devotees trying to fit Kṛṣṇa Consciousness into the Western worldview. They came up with a separation between religion and culture. Religion was limited to rituals, and culture included dress and food habits. They were arguing that religion is essential and culture is incidental. Effectively, any religion can be fitted into any culture. This dualism of religion and culture reminded me of the mind-body, spirit-matter, and science-religion dualisms in the West.
People think that the dress doesn’t affect the mind. They don’t know anything about sattva, rajas, and tamas. Dress is also in sattva, rajas, or tamas. When you wear a dress in one mode of nature, your mind will be in the same mode. Those who have transcended the three modes, can wear any dress. Those who prefer a sattvic dress, but have to accept a tamasic dress for a higher purpose, can conditionally wear that dress. But those who want a tamasic dress, because they feel comfortable in it, will continue the tamasic mind. It will be harder to change our minds if we are unable to change our dresses. But that hardship has to be compared to the hardship a person feels in changing the dress at the outset.
While this debate about dresses was going on, I was watching it intently to see if anyone makes an argument based on guna. Nobody did. Their arguments were about how Christian Pastors wear different kinds of dresses. In over a decade of interacting with Western devotees, I never once saw anyone analyze anything in terms of guna. Beliefs are just beliefs; they are not beliefs in sattva, rajas, or tamas. Things are just things; they are not things in sattva, rajas, or tamas. Everyone should be respected regardless of whether they are in sattva, rajas, or tamas. Nobody is interested in knowing Prakṛti.
In every conversation about Vedic cosmology, I found that space was the domain of body-movement rather than soul-movement. Even when people draw models of the Vedic cosmos, they cannot explain: (a) why we do not see the higher and lower planetary systems, (b) why we see the planets as lifeless objects, and (c) how a soul is transported from one planet to another. If we say that the soul moves in a space created from the combination of three modes, so moving your hand is also the soul moving from one mode combination to another, nobody accepts it, despite the fact that Kṛṣṇa in the Bhagavad-Gita equates motion in this life (childhood, birth, and old age) to motion across lives (reincarnation).
People firmly hold on to their Abrahamic ideas in which the body carries the soul like money in the pocket. But Abrahamic faiths never had reincarnation. If we adopt their idea of soul and body, then body motion within a planet will be based on a natural law and the soul motion across different planets (such as to heaven or hell) will be based on a moral law, and never the twain shall meet. The criticisms of religion by science that led to present-day atheism will now apply even to the Vedic system. After all, if we don’t change the assumptions, then we don’t change the conclusions. Rejecting Abrahamic ideas means rejecting their rejection of reincarnation and accepting an alternative idea of motion. But if we cannot accept an alternative idea of motion, then we will never be free of the atheistic conclusion.
I haven’t found a single Western devotee who talks about a solution to the mind-body problem or the soul-matter interaction problem. Not one. They just assume that there are multiple things but how they coexist, how they interact, and how a different mind produces a different body is never discussed. Why would anyone take to a different religion without seeking answers to the problems of the previous religion? I haven’t been able to find an answer to this question, but my guess is that it doesn’t matter. The mind-body problem did not matter to those in Abrahamic faiths and it doesn’t matter to those who leave it.
Most people think that when someone from the West comes to the Vedic tradition, he has rejected all the bad ideas of that society. I certainly used to believe that. But I have come to realize that it is false. Most people who change their dresses or rituals are still living with their Abrahamic ideologies. Because they previously separated every subject from every other subject, they assume that life is a set of Lego Blocks to be combined by each person in their personal way. They don’t want to understand if those Lego Blocks even have matching contours. They just ignore the discrepancies whenever they arise.
Absence of Objective Measures
There is a widespread myth at present that nobody can measure spiritual advancement due to Western science-religion, body-mind, and matter-spirit dualisms. This is false. Spiritual progress is measured by one’s ascent from tamas to rajas to sattva to transcendence. Tamas is the least productive, rajas is more productive, sattva is even more productive, and transcendence is the most productive. Tamas is the least knowledge, rajas is more knowledge, sattva is even more knowledge, and transcendence is the most knowledge. Spiritual progress is measured by its sensory manifestations, namely, through the demonstration of greater knowledge and productivity.
I have produced 20 books and 275 articles in the last 10 years while working a full-time job and doing family duties, without any monetary or institutional support. I have given a comprehensive rebuttal of the Western scientific system, demonstrated how any scientific system rooted in the ideology of objects is full of holes, and why the answer to that problem is modeling all of reality in terms of persons. Prabhupāda produced 10 times more content than me in the same duration. He was managing a large number of people, traveling constantly, while writing books, at a much more advanced age. By these measures, he exhibited far greater spiritual advancement than me.
By the same measure, we can ask: What have the others claiming to be spiritually advanced produced during the same time? The answer is almost nothing. They don’t have full-time jobs. Their family duties are little to none. They have money, personal servants, and institutional support. They have delegated people’s management to others. Nobody travels like Prabhupāda. They are not as old as Prabhupāda was. They have taken money, servants, institutional support, and time but they neither demonstrate knowledge nor productivity.
The discrepancy between objective advancement and subjective claims is not noticed if objective measures are not used. Those who are not advancing by objective measures use institutional standing to peddle influence. This is how priests in Abrahamic faiths have projected their power for centuries. The same pretentious fakery now permeates the Vedic system. The priests have reduced the Vedic system to the Abrahamic practice of claiming to be in touch with the Supreme Truth without demonstrating knowledge and productivity.
Depravity in Modern Western Society
Endless Exploitation of Poor People
The most skilled jobs in modern society are pure science and math. A little less-skilled jobs are medicine and engineering. Even less-skilled jobs are operations, project management, sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and law. And the least-skilled jobs are nursing, driving, construction, services offered by electricians and plumbers, and what is now being called the gig economy of working as delivery boys and girls.
In all Western countries, wealthy white people are in the third tier which involves neither the highest level of skill nor the highest level of labor. Most people in the first and second tiers are skilled immigrants from other countries. Poor white people are in the fourth tier. If we look at income distributions, then the first- and second-tier people are paid moderately and the fourth tier is paid the least. The highest-earning population lies in the third tier which requires neither the highest skill nor the hardest work.
Rich white people invented jobs like sales, marketing, human resources, finance, law, operations, and project management to take wealth disproportionate to their contributions from every other tier of society. Startups don’t have all these roles. The person who builds the products does all the other things. At most, a lead-generating salesperson is hired to call and set up meetings with potential customers. All key sales and marketing pitches are done by product developers. All hiring and compensation decisions are made by product developers. Finance comes down to keeping a line of description against every line item in your current account statement. At the end of the year, you give all this information to a tax consultant who prepares your annual tax returns for a fee. You need legalities when you open or close a startup and it generally takes a day of your time. You do all operations and project management yourself.
But when that startup is sold to a large corporation, the corporation hires dozens of people to do sales, marketing, human resources, finance, law, operations, and project management, which the product developer was earlier doing as an extra-curricular activity. The corporation then gives all these unnecessary people power over the product developer. By downgrading product developers and redistributing wealth to unnecessary functions, the corporation takes wealth from smart and hardworking people and gives them to those who are neither smart nor hardworking. The corporation becomes Robin Hood stealing from useful people and gifting it to useless people.
Product development requires unique domain-specific skills. We cannot replace a person who makes medicines with one who makes engines. Product developers are locked in one domain of expertise. But the skills of sales, marketing, human resources, finance, law, operations, and project management are easily transposable across products. As technologies come and go, and products become obsolete, the product developers become outdated. But the people doing sales, marketing, human resources, finance, law, operations, and project management move to another product domain and never become outdated. To maintain their job roles, the product developers with hard skills have to acquire new skills but everyone else with soft skills needs no such effort.
White women are even worse than men. I have seen corporate marketing departments comprising 85% white women. They organize one three-day marketing event per quarter. All the logistics are done by contracted third parties. The job of white women in these departments is making PowerPoint slides, clicking photographs, taking lots of printouts from a printer, and writing reports that nobody has any use for. Their salaries and bonuses are coming out of the pockets of hardworking and talented product developers. But white women cry about gender discrimination all the time.
These discrepancies are not fortuitous accidents. They are the result of rich white people inventing easy job roles for themselves, offloading difficult job roles to others, and giving themselves power over others. Rich white people continuously steal wealth from others through careful organizational design. The poor people are working much harder. The immigrants are more skilled. But they are not the highest earners. Most of the wealth is stolen by the people who do work that requires neither hard work nor great skill. A modern Western corporation does exactly what slave owners were doing previously.
The System of Endless Falsehoods
During colonial times, Indians would take holidays during festivals but otherwise, they would work on Sundays. Indians were not going to the Church on Sunday, so they did not need a Sunday holiday. But their productivity was higher than the British workers, which lowered their prices. British factory owners were losing business to Indians despite the higher taxation on the Indian industry. Then these owners influenced the British colonialists to introduce mandatory holidays on Sundays in India just to force the Indian worker to become less productive than the British worker. This is how they saved their factories.
At the end of colonialism, they could not sustain this process because the other ethnicities were always more productive and more intelligent than white people. They were being marginalized and demoted by the colonialists. But if you take away that exploitation, then white people were never a competition for other ethnicities. Therefore, at the end of WWII, the Western imperialists devised new forms of colonialism such as petrodollar, puppet regimes, economic sanctions, and institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations that operated under Western control. This is how the West preserved its hegemonic status despite its lower intelligence and productivity.
Indians get jobs in the West because they are intelligent and hardworking. They always pay their taxes. They contribute to some or the other charity. They are not involved in criminal activities. They save and invest. They stay steady in life due to their family-oriented culture that supports each other in times of need. The combination of all these factors has made Indians the wealthiest ethnicity in many countries. If the world was a level-playing field, then the combination of the best qualities in a group of people would naturally enable them to come on top. But this always makes white people insecure.
Numerous Indian professionals have told me that their Western counterparts ask them not to work on weekends. Indians think this is a good thing. They don’t know that the British used the same trick during colonial times to save their factories. They also don’t know that rich white people are doing the calculus to measure where to move the jobs to gain the most productivity. Rich white people use Indians to get the work done while paying them little and pocketing the profits. Those who fear losing their jobs to such competition tell Indians to work less and enjoy more so that they can keep their jobs. White people don’t rise to the higher standards of other people. They try to lower others to their standard.
But poor white people don’t want to accept facts. They say that immigrants are stealing their jobs when their ancestors were thieves who stole land, labor, and life from others. They don’t call their ancestors thieves. They call hard-working, honest, giving, and moral people thieves. If the jobs of the poor white people are sent overseas, they call it the stealing of jobs, when the reality is that jobs are going overseas because those people take a little and give back a lot. Poor white people cannot accept that almost every other culture is more intelligent and more productive. No other world culture feels as entitled as they do. Everyone else understands that they have to earn their wealth honestly.
Rich white people are involved in opening up immigration for cheap labor (both highly intelligent and hard-working) to reduce their costs and increase their profits. Immigration was opened for higher-tier jobs because rich white people were not skilled in that and for low-tier jobs because rich white people did not want to pay as much to poor white people. Rich white people created a system to offload the skilled and difficult jobs to others at low wages while pocketing the wealth from the work of others.
But rich white people also use media propaganda about immigrants stealing white people’s jobs to intimidate the immigrant workers so that they will remain on the societal fringes, not demand high salaries, keep their heads down, and allow the rich white people to pocket their profits. Poor white people assimilate this propaganda and think that it is the cause of their problems. They cannot see that the rich white people are taking wealth away from all segments of society to enhance their status.
Poor white people are gullible. They are not as well-educated as the top-tier immigrants. They are not as street-smart as the rich white people. They are unable to work as hard as the bottom-tier immigrants. The rich white people created the system of immigration to benefit themselves. But the same people go into politics and tell false stories about how immigrants are the cause of all poor white people’s problems. The rich white people operate at both ends of the spectrum to benefit themselves from both sides.
New Forms of Societal Exploitation
There is a lot of talk about AI these days. It is believed that AI will automate many jobs and make poor people poorer. Despite its societal threats, neither businesses nor governments are stopping it. One has to wonder why. When the threats are great, why not stop something that is so dangerous to society in its tracks? To answer this question, we have to look at the four tiers of jobs. The lowest tier of labor work will get automated first by AI. Then medicine and engineering will get automated. Finally, pure sciences and math will be automated. The professions of operations, project management, sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and law will not be automated. In fact, they will benefit even more from the advent of AI.
AI uses mathematics, mechanization, and industrialization. Industrialization is the fourth tier of society; mechanization is the second tier of society; mathematics is the first tier of society. All these things can be automated because they are the “hard” aspect of modern society. Operations, project management, sales, finance, law, marketing, and human resources are the “soft” aspect of modern society. Rich white people want to do the soft aspect although it requires neither great skill nor hard labor while other people excel in the hard aspects. If AI is used to automate and replace jobs, then rich white people will dominate the world.
AI is continuously advancing because rich white people want their supremacy. They want to keep their jobs and wealth, run corporations and governments, giving little and taking a lot. AI can be used to wage new kinds of war on those societies that are lagging in AI. The focus of education can be slowly shifted from hard subjects to soft subjects because those graduating in hard subjects will not get jobs. Over a short period of time, the rich white people will be the only ones left educated. They will control the corporations and the government, marginalizing and subordinating all other types of people. But they peddle this overtaking of society by one race as the inevitable march toward greater progress.
Perverse Forms of Entertainment
It is not just that white people want to work less and enjoy more. It is also that they want perverse forms of enjoyment. There is a steady rise in violent forms of pornography at present. This includes both sadistic and masochistic men and women. The sadistic man or woman enjoys degrading other men or women. The masochistic man or woman enjoys being degraded by other men or women. The sadists wear horrible masks and carry instruments of torture in their hands to display their power over others. The masochists are bound and gagged to make them feel helpless in the face of their subjugation.
Children are now playing violent video games in which their avatars carry deadly assault rifles, grenades, and other types of weapons. They fight the enemy to conquer lands and take hidden treasures. The new generation of kids has mastered the handling of various types of weapons through video games. They are now enacting these fantasies in reality because fantasy is generally a precursor to reality.
People are progressively graduating to more and more severe forms of intoxication. Drugs that could easily kill a person are now in abundant supply in Western countries. Consuming these drugs is not even frowned upon. They are essential ingredients of parties that include violent games and sexual mores. Various kinds of prescription medications used for pain relief are being abused by addicts for pleasure. Making these drugs, and sometimes growing them in your backyard, are cottage industries now. Their severe adverse effects on a person’s mental health are totally disregarded by their consumers. Is it any wonder that as the consumption of drugs rises, the mental health of consumers is steadily declining? But the answer to that mental illness is even more drugs rather than deaddiction from all such drugs.
Almost all movies now show key protagonists suffering from various kinds of emotional and relationship problems. Their morality is not black and white. It is somewhere around the middle in a broad spectrum of grays. The protectors of society are not much better than those from whom they are protecting society. Through such movies, Western media is deeply ingraining in the population the idea that nobody can be moral, that there is no objective truth, and that everyone is depraved, selfish, and wily. Life has no meaning or purpose. People just create fictitious meanings of their choosing to survive.
Prostitution is on a steady rise in many countries, but prominently in Western countries. Sex tourism is now a thing in Europe. Germany has emerged as one of the hottest destinations for sex tourism. Recent sex scandals in the US have revealed the existence of a large network of top politicians, businessmen, and other elites involved in sex with minors. Anyone who can expose this ring of pedophiles dies under inexplicable circumstances. Others keep quiet. Princes and Presidents have been part of pedophile rings. But as usual, the law doesn’t apply to the lawmakers. Nobody is expecting them to be questioned. The child sex trade is suspected as one of the ways that secret agencies have made money. We can add this to their other extra-curricular activities like arms smuggling, money laundering, and drug trafficking.
Trends and Patterns of Western History
Endless Prevalence of Cheating
There are four basic human flaws. They are called hallucination, misperception, misinterpretation, and cheating. Of these four flaws, the cheating propensity is the cause of the other three flaws. The weak link in Abrahamic societies is their cheating. From this basic flaw, arise the other three kinds of flaws.
Cheating began in Abrahamic faiths when they claimed to have entered into a contract with God. God does not enter into a contract with anyone. A contract is signed between parties who need something from each other. God needs nothing. He has everything. Why would he sign a contract with anyone?
God teaches the truth. Those who accept the truth get a better life. Those who reject the truth get a worse life. There are many levels of better and worse lives based on how close or far they are from the truth. The truth is not up for contract negotiation, modification, upgradation, and so on. The truth is eternal. Cheating began in Abrahamic faiths when they replaced truth with a negotiable contract. This plunged them into the darkness of blind faith because all epistemologies fail for imaginary contracts.
Natural, social, or moral laws are not contracts. They are all duties. Every duty requires a bare minimum of giving for any taking. There is a market price for every biscuit, soap, or pickle. You can pay the price and take it. That is the bare minimum duty. If we give the bare minimum, then we get the bare minimum. We cannot expect the most by giving the least. It is only when our giving has no upper limit that there is no upper limit to our receiving. God’s home is that place where there is no upper limit to giving. There is no admission for contract negotiators in that place because far superior people are already living there.
If we minimize what we give and maximize what we take, then we have become criminals. If we want to take the most valuable things and we want to pay less than the market price for those things, then we can forget about going to God’s home. There is no place for us even in a shopkeeper’s store. The only legitimate place for us is in a prison. But since this minimax principle is used across natural, social, and moral laws therefore they are all the routes for long-term incarceration as the result of endless cheating.
How Rare Truths Are Discarded
Many people say: There are so many good things in Abrahamic religions and Western culture. Why can’t we appreciate them instead of looking for their faults? The answer is: A chain always breaks at its weakest link. It doesn’t matter if we have a hundred other stronger links. After we fix the weakest link, then the chain will break again at the next weakest link. In this way, if we go on fixing the weakest links, after some time the chain will become unbreakable. But people cannot understand this simple logic. When faced with the reality, they bury their heads in the sand. That includes finding solace in rare events of goodness while ignoring catastrophic problems. It doesn’t make things better. It just ensures that the truth will be lost.
In the Vedic texts, we find numerous narrations of sages who perform sādhanā for a long time and then gather around a great person to inquire. They ask numerous questions and get their answers. Then they go back to their sādhanā to realize everything that was discussed. This process repeats over and over. Inquire about something, understand it theoretically, and then try to realize it by practice. Then inquire some more, understand it theoretically, and then try to realize it by practice. This is what we call science. Theory, practice, and confirmation. More theory, more practice, and more confirmation. Anyone who tries to bypass this scientific process becomes a laughing stock and makes a mockery of his guru.
At every juncture in Western history, we find this mockery occurring again and again, because everyone wants a shortcut. They don’t have patience. They cannot apply themselves to a process. They want quick results or they will abandon the process. If they find that the results are slow, they abandon the correct path and start doing something else driven by their neurosis, insecurity, and fear.
Success depends on how we deal with failure. A sattvic person deals with failure by continuously performing his duties at the same pace even if results are not forthcoming. A rajasic person deals with failure by doubling down on the effort to ensure that the results will come faster. A tamasic person deals with failure by abandoning the duty and starting trial and error. I watched with horror one guru talking about pragmatism. Try this experiment. Try that experiment. See what happens. This is a clear indication that this guru is tamasic. They don’t know the theory. They don’t want to practice. They just want the results. When they don’t get the results, they start trial and error. This happens in Western history frequently because people are neurotic and they cannot trust anyone. They choose the path of failure.
What happens next? The cheaters and the cheated are reborn into the same society, but this time, the society has moved a little further away from the light into darkness, from the truth into delusion. Since they lacked the courage to fight cheating before, they lack the courage to fight it in the next life. Over a few lifetimes, such a society is completely lost in delusion and darkness again. A rare moment of clarity and truth may come again after a while, but by then there may be a greater supply of cheaters.
Covering Failures Through Lies
There are moments of truth and insight in Western history, including the appearance of Jesus or Prabhupāda. There is an opportunity to move in the right direction. But there is an abundant supply of cheaters who quickly pervert the truth into cheating. Jesus brought morality. But his teachings were disregarded and his death was elevated to the central principle of Christianity. Prabhupāda brought dharma. But the West could not reject its two-thousand-year-old propensity of cheating in the name of religion. The priests became emperors to enjoy life, calling themselves the sources of salvation.
When dharma is mixed with deception then dharma dies. That has been the fate of Kṛṣṇa Consciousness in the West. The reason is that dharma was mixed with deception. Unqualified novices became gurus. They coopted other influential people in their game. Eventually, most people quit, and the process of slow decline began. However, they will never accept deception as the cause of failure. They invent new explanations for it. One such explanation is that Kṛṣṇa Consciousness failed in the West because the devotees were not woke enough. When failure is misattributed, then the failure continues.
Sometimes the cause of failure is Indians contaminating the temples with their Indianness. Then again, the cause is the absence of gay marriage. Sometimes, the cause is the lack of female gurus. Then again, it is the regressive rejection of moon landings, evolutionary theory, and so on. Sometimes the explanation for failure is wearing Indian clothes and eating Indian foods. Then again, the failure is due to sex scandals.
In this way, the blame is shifted from the real cause onto fictitious causes. The real cause is that dharma cannot coexist with deception. Morality is the first step in religion. Knowledge comes next. Bliss comes last. If we cannot be honest, then real dharma cannot exist. It can be another Abrahamic faith that accepts all kinds of deception in the name of religion while forgiving and rewarding the sins. But people don’t want to accept the truth. They want a convenient answer rather than a truthful answer.
Debunking the Lies of History
Thus, despite occasional truths, by and large, almost everything in Western history is a myth, lie, or deception. It is sustained by relentless propaganda, the destruction of something better, to preserve the illusion of supremacy. Those being destroyed in the process are unable to match the barbarity being rained upon them. They are caught in the moral dilemma of not abusing other mothers and they fail to defend their mother’s honor. But Abrahamic faiths interpret a moral dilemma as a person’s weakness. The only way to debunk the myths of false propaganda is to truthfully expose the other mothers.
The Abrahamic opposition to pagan religions did not arise because monotheism was a greater truth. It arose simply because some people wanted to take a lot and give a little. Priests and emperors wanted power and wealth greater than they deserved. They invented religions to get that power and wealth. They did not teach morality, duty, responsibility, fairness, and spirituality. They taught something simpler: If you do as I say, then you will go to heaven; if you don’t do as I say, then you will go to hell. This works because “doing what I tell you to do” involves stealing, killing, and lying. It is easier than honest work. Thus, a mutually beneficial arrangement between people and their rulers was created.
We cannot solely blame priests and emperors for the problems of Western society. Almost every person in this society is part of the same problem because there is a sustained supply only when there is a sustained demand. Priests and emperors may supply lies. But they won’t sell unless there is demand for such lies. If people stop buying lies, then those selling the lies will go out of business. Hence, there is no reason to solely blame one group of people to the exclusion of all the other groups. The seller rewards the buyer and the buyer encourages the seller. Proverbially, they are just as thick as thieves.
There is no separation between Abrahamic religions and violence. These religions are violence itself. People today say that the terrorism of terrorists is different from their religion. That is a lie because these religions have been terrorism from the outset. Those who don’t wage that terror are called apostates. As long as these religions exist, there will be no end to violence. Henry Kissinger once said: “One who controls the food controls the people. One who controls the oil controls the wealth. One who controls the seas controls the world.” Everything is about controlling a few things, doing what little one has to do to get that control, and enjoying life. Religion exists simply to forgive and reward the sins incurred in this process. When religion is the forgiveness, rationalization, and justification of sin, then it is simply irreligion.
Pagan religions had freedom of religion. They were not persecuting each other. Abrahamic faiths destroyed that religious freedom by persecuting pagan religions and later reinvented it as a supposedly new concept pertaining to the freedom to practice a subsect of their chosen Abrahamic faith. Secularism and religious freedom today do not mean the freedom to practice your chosen religion. It is the freedom to practice one subsect of one Abrahamic faith. Those writing modern-day constitutional laws talked about religious freedom thinking that it meant the freedom to choose one of the sects of Christianity. It does not equate to the freedom to practice your chosen religion. Hence, some religions are selectively reviled for their freedom while the choices of other religions are defended under freedom. The intended meaning of secularism is not respect for other religions. It is respect for sects of one religion.
Immense Darkness in Western Society
The Technical Meaning of Darkness
The Vedic texts talk about four kinds of Puruṣārtha or meanings of human life—dharma, artha, kāma, and mokśa. The first step is to give something of value, which is called dharma. In return, you can get something of value, which is called artha. Using this artha, you can enjoy a little, which is called kāma. If you maximize the value of what you are giving and minimize the value of what you are taking, then you get mokśa. Hence, nobody is forced to renounce everything at once. But they are required to begin with fair transactions, and then slowly increase the value of giving and decrease the value of taking.
Renunciation is about giving more value than taking it. It is the beginning of religion. From renunciation comes self-knowledge. From that self-knowledge comes complete devotion to the divine. The soul has a spontaneous nature. It is like a fountain that spouts water endlessly, happily, and unconditionally.
The ideology of taking without giving is called darkness and that of giving without taking is called light. We can think of the sun and a black hole. Light comes from the sun but the sun doesn’t take back light. Light enters the black hole and it never comes out of it. The true nature of the self is like a sun—giving but not taking. If someone takes without giving—like a black hole—then they are darkness. According to the Christian idea of individualism, the self is like a black hole rather than a sun. This is darkness.
Darkness is called tamas in Vedic texts. The ego is also called tamas but there are three further divisions. The sattvic ego is proud of charity and duty. The rajasic ego is proud of ability and work. The tamasic ego is proud of its capacity to exploit and enjoy. The tamasic ego is most false, rajasic ego is less false, and the sattvic ego is least false. The pride in being Kṛṣṇa’s servant is the true ego. The designation of ego as tamasic prominently pertains to the pride taken in exploitative enjoyment. It is the opposite of the truth where a person takes pride in giving happily, voluntarily, limitlessly, and unconditionally. This truthful spiritual nature is progressively reduced and inverted by the influence of sattva, rajas, and tamas.
If people are tamasic, they believe in exploiting, cheating, stealing, and killing. Prabhupāda called the Western society Demoniac while the Western society calls Indians Satanic. The fact that similar words are used on both sides doesn’t mean that the truth is mysterious. The truth is knowable if we can grasp the meanings of divinity and evil. Divinity is happiness from unconditional spontaneous volunteerism. Evil is happiness from exploitative narcissistic consumption. The distinction is clear and easy.
Natural Aversion to the Truth
Most people think that the West is opposed to the Vedic culture because they are just different kinds of religions or that they are culturally different or that there is historical animosity between these societies. That is hardly the truth. The truth is that the Western opposition to the Vedic civilization is the natural conflict between evil and good, darkness and light, materialism and spiritualism, demonic and divine.
But we have to also note that good and evil have different definitions in the Western and Vedic terminologies. In the Western description, good is whatever the West is and whatever serves the West is good to the extent that it serves the West. Evil is that which doesn’t serve the West. It has to be brought under the control of the West to establish the supremacy of good over evil. However, in the Vedic notion of good and evil, good is that which is self-satisfied. It doesn’t want supremacy over evil. It wants to be with itself. The good doesn’t care two hoots about evil. The evil may exist, it may not exist, it may prosper, it may not prosper, it may be powerful, or it may not be powerful. The good doesn’t care.
If the West was factually good, then according to the Vedic definition, it should be self-satisfied. It should not aspire to dominate others. It should not attack other societies or cultures. It should just let them be inferior and remain satisfied with its own superiority. If the West is so convinced about its superiority, then what is the need for proving it again and again? The fact is that the West can never be self-satisfied. It claims to be superior but it is not convinced of its own claims. Hence, it tries to prove its superiority again and again by destroying others. Without repeated proof, the West gets no satisfaction.
Western satisfaction lies in dominating, controlling, exploiting, and subjugating others. If you can rape and kill others then you have proved your superiority. Without raping and killing, you cannot be called superior. This is the symptom of evil in the Vedic notion. Hence, the West cannot be good. It is actually evil. There is a battle between good and evil, but they are defined in totally different ways.
Both good and evil call themselves supreme. But good is convinced of its supremacy and hence totally self-satisfied. However, evil is not convinced of its supremacy and hence never self-satisfied. Such is the fundamental difference between Western and Vedic civilizations that we cannot even agree on the definitions of good and evil. Whatever the West considers good is called evil by the Vedic civilization.
Even as the good is self-satisfied in the Vedic conception, the evil attacks it. Even as the good wants to fight no battle with the evil, the evil wants to fight a battle with good. The good responds in kind. The demigods never attack the demons. They are content and happy living with other demigods. But the demons always attack the demigods and the demigods respond to the demons in self-defense.
The good is the truth independent of the evil. But the evil is the lie that depends on the truth. This is succinctly noted by saying that a lie is not the truth. Most people think that this is a binary opposition but it is not. Truth can exist without the lie. But the lie cannot exist without the truth. Whenever there is a lie, its foundation is truth. If the truth did not exist, then the lie would not exist. The lie is a parasite and the truth is a host. The parasite feeds on the host. If the host dies then the parasite dies. Hence, the truth is svādhīna or under its own control. But the lie is parādhīna or under someone else’s control.
Let’s apply this idea to AI. The person who produces AI cannot eat AI. But the person who produces food can eat food. Therefore, the person who produces food is the host and the person who produces AI is the parasite if he tries to kill the host. If the person who produces AI helps the person who produces food, then both can live symbiotically like the hand and stomach of a body. But if the hand stabs the stomach or the stomach starves the hand then both of them will die but the soul will not die because it doesn’t depend on the body and hence it is not parādhīna. It is, relatively speaking, also svādhīna.
Ultimately, Kṛṣṇa is the only svādhīna and everyone else is parādhīna. Among these parādhīna, there are two types of living entities—(a) those that are like the body of Kṛṣṇa, and (b) those that are parasites on the body. The Vedic civilization invites everyone to be a part of Kṛṣṇa’s body, live in symbiotic harmony with each other like the different parts of the body and collectively serve the soul—Kṛṣṇa. But it cannot convince the parasites. The parasites cannot be changed through logic. They want a host to feed on.
The Nature of Inclusivist Religions
Vedic cosmology describes the present universe in terms of 14 levels. The top four levels are in sattva, the middle three are in rajas, and the lower 7 are in tamas. Each level can exist with the ideologies of the higher level, but not with the ideologies of the lower level. Therefore, in this planet, we can worship nature, demigods, or various forms of the Supreme Lord. We can seek self-realization or eternal sleep.
The tamasic practices given in the Vedic system are also a marginal but permitted system in which each person degrades himself in different ways—rubbing filth on his body, having sex with a corpse, or eating dead animals. Sometimes, hallucinogens are used in a tamasic practice to separate the self from the body to become convinced that the self is indeed separate from the body.
Abrahamic faiths look at these tamasic practices and say that Hindus worship the devil. They don’t know how steel cuts steel. We cannot cut steel with copper, silver, or gold. We need to cut steel with a harder form of steel. Hardness is the result of tamas. It can be cut by even more tamas, if we follow a prescribed process. In that prescribed process, there is no permission for using hard steel to cut copper, silver, or gold. Hence, a person degrades or intoxicates himself but not others. Therefore, it is a form of upliftment that can coexist with others.
The animistic religions worship nature. The pagan religions worshipped demigods. There are Advaita and Buddhism for personal salvation. There are self-degrading tamasic practices. And there are systems of worshipping the Supreme Lord in many different ways. All these religions can coexist peacefully. They have coexisted harmoniously in the past. None of these religions try to convert people into their system. Nobody wages unnecessary wars on others. They just try to perfect themselves in different ways.
The tamasic attitude in Abrahamic religions pertains to a false sense of superiority without any goodness. Those who degrade themselves by tamasic practices don’t have that false sense of superiority. They are cutting down their tamasic tendencies using tamasic practices. Everyone else factually reveres, worships, adores, or serves someone better than himself and by that process, he gradually uplifts himself.
Therefore, the opposition to Abrahamic faiths is not religious exclusivism. The Vedic system, and all genuine systems of worship and practice, are not exclusivists. They accept each other. They are friendly and generous to each other. They appreciate what each person is doing and try to understand why they are doing it. The Abrahamic faiths don’t understand anything or anybody else. They don’t have a process of uplifting themselves. They just have fictitious claims of contracts with God. Since no such contract exists, no purification occurs by claiming such a contract, but the religion oppresses others, therefore, these religions are not worthy of existing among people who want to uplift themselves.
Tamasic ideologies are suitable only for a compatible pairing between sadists and masochists. The demons are both sadists and masochists. While a person who performs tamasic practices wants to get rid of his desires through self-degradation, sadists and masochists enjoy degrading others and being degraded by them. Humans don’t want to beat, rape, or torture. But demons are sexually stimulated by these acts. A human if beaten, raped, or tortured loses faith in the justice and meaningfulness of life. A demon if beaten, raped, or tortured becomes sexually excited and finds this activity pleasurable. These are not human traits. Even animals don’t have these traits. These are the traits of the demons.
Therefore, we have a very clear definition of what a tamasic, rajasic, sattvic, or transcendent religious practice is and how it is different from the ideology of tamas. That ideology has no compatibility with any other uplifting system. All uplifting systems, however, are mutually compatible with each other. It is with this understanding of their compatibility, the suitable places for each type of ideology in the universe, and the ultimate nature of truth and good, that I say responsibly: Abrahamic religions are alien.
Almost everyone has heard of psychopathic killers or watched movies about them. Almost all of them have a history of childhood rape, violence, or humiliation. Their moral fiber and belief in the goodness of life are upended during their childhood. But it happens because they have committed similar atrocities on others in the past. As they grow up, they get back the same atrocious tendencies. They justify their actions by telling horrifying tales of their childhood. But if they open up in an interview, they will often say that they were born this way and their childhood had little to do with their adulthood crimes.
Demons are created by butchering and eating animals. In some religions, children are taught how to butcher live animals to desensitize them to violence. Initially, they are told that God has ordered them to do these things. As they get used to it, they start enjoying it. Over lifetimes, a normal child develops sadistic tendencies and starts enjoying killing humans. While we are not very interested in it, criminal psychology is the area to focus on if one wants to study demonic mentality. It is created from a human mentality over a long period of time. As butchering and eating animals becomes normal, the entire society of meat-eaters is transformed from humans into psychopaths and demons. Religions that accept and propagate meat-eating are the birthing grounds of psychopaths and demons among humans.
Most people who are rising to the top levels of business and politics at present are psychopaths. They feel nothing when they lie, cheat, deceive, manipulate, or destroy others. They trample on others to get ahead in life. The devil dresses in the best suits. Sometimes they talk about religion and God to trap gullible people into their schemes. They can be known by one trait—they feel no remorse for their evil deeds. Prabhupāda warned us about cold-hearted psychopaths walking around in saintly dresses.
Living in a Society of Darkness
The appearance of the tamasic ideology is rare, but not impossible. Demons sometimes gain control over the higher planetary systems. Similarly, a tamasic ideology sometimes gains control over the earth.
Everyone born in this society is not necessarily of their nature. From Vedic texts, we know that great devotees like Prahalāda and Vibhishana were born in demonic families. Births are the result of both guna and karma. Sometimes a person with bad guna and good karma is born in a demonic society to enjoy that society. Sometimes, a person with good guna and bad karma is born in a demonic society to suffer through that society. Hence, we never condemn a society as a whole. We always distinguish people based on their guna and karma. We always show the same respect to genuine devotees in that society as those born in pious societies, although we understand their unfortunate situation.
Prahalāda and Vibhishana tried their best to reform Hiraṇyakaśīpū and Rāvana but they failed. Even as they were humiliated, they tried to improve them. When Hiraṇyakaśīpū and Rāvana were killed, they were not sorry. They never tried to defend their actions or justify the wrongs as rights. This is the symptom of devotees. They wish everyone well. They try to help everyone to the right path. But they don’t justify the wrongs or defend the actions of demons. And they are not sorry if the demons are killed. By studying the lives of Prahalāda and Vibhishana we understand how to live in a demonic society.
Kaṁsa imprisoned his father Ugrasena and his sister Devaki due to his fear psychosis. He killed five of his newly born nephews by smashing their heads against a wall. Therefore, we should never underestimate the barbarity that demons are capable of. Their hearts are filled with fear and it makes them commit the worst atrocities. Bhasmāsura tried to kill his boon giver, Lord Shiva. Demons are like snakes that will bite the hand that feeds them. Rāvana had his loyal brother and son killed before him. Kaṁsa had his loyal friends killed before him. The demons sacrifice their friends and relatives for their self-interest.
But they don’t exist forever. With that understanding, the devotees of the Lord take shelter in His lotus feet and wait for the time when they will be freed of their atrocities while accepting the atrocity as a boon of the Lord to purify them from their previous sinful reactions. They don’t harbor hatred. But they do their best to correct demons and when that fails, they try their best to protect everyone from them. They warn everyone about the dangers of the demonic ideology and expose their heinous acts.
Lies serve a positive purpose for the truth—by studying the lies, we can clearly demarcate them from the truth. Then we are not confused about what the truth is, we don’t accommodate lies as yet another type of truth, and we don’t make truth and lies equal personal choices. Therefore, my study of the Abrahamic religious history has served a positive purpose for me. I can clearly see the distinction between good and evil. I am not confused that evil is yet another type of good. When I write about this distinction, I’m trying to help others who might not have done a similar type of study. But I harbor no hatred. This evil is also the mercy of the Lord. By undergoing its tribulations, we are purified of our past sinful deeds. By understanding the difference between good and evil, we refuse to commit such deeds again.
There is a clear distinction between dharma and kaitava-dharma (cheating in the name of dharma). The kaitava-dharma has to be completely rejected and replaced to practice dharma. There are many paths of dharma. But there is adharma too. The cheater wants to claim that adharma is yet another path of dharma because people are open-minded about other paths. This is why the path of dharma also requires segregating dharma from kaitava-dharma. Dharma is not appreciation for everyone. Truth cannot be equalized to cheating.
