| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Dr. Jai Maharaj" |
| Date: |
10 Apr 2005 12:15:54 AM |
| Object: |
HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
Hindu Gods & Goddesses
http://www.vandemataram.com
A human being cannot conceptualize anything without some
sort of a mental image. A Hindu tries to attribute all
good qualities to the image of God and worships them.
While worshipping he wants to concentrate his mind,
therefore he created images of God. Thus the concept of
image worship came into existence. In Hindu religion we
come across many images of Gods and Goddesses which are
worshipped by different people on various occasions.
The ancient rishis discovered that there are many ways of
conceiving the Supreme reality and numerous means of
approaching it. According to the Hindu view, the Supreme
reality can be viewed from two aspects: Transcendent
(impersonal) and Immanent(personal). In its transcendent
aspect, the Supreme Reality is called Nirgun Brahman that
is Brahman without attributes.
It is not an object of prayer but of meditation and
knowledge. It is unborn, self existent, all pervading,
the ground and the essence of all things and beings in
the universe. In its immanent aspect, the Supreme Reality
is called Sagun Brahman, that is Brahman with attributes.
Sagun Brahman is the personal God, the creator, the
preserver, the controller of the universe. In Hinduism
the immanent aspect of Brahman is worshipped in both male
and female forms. In the male form he is called by
various Sanskrit names, such as Ishvar, Praneshwar,
Maheshvar and Pitrush.
In the female form, God is called as Divine Mother,
Durga, and Kali. Here we can say that the concept of God
in Hinduism is the same as the concept of God in
Christianity. The only notable difference is that God in
Hinduism is not the creator of the individual soul. The
atmaan is divine and eternal. In Christianity, the God is
the creator of the individual soul.
Hindu Deities: Hindus believe in the existence of one and
only one Supreme being but they worship Him in various
forms known as deities or Gods. The Hindu worship of many
deities is not polytheism, but monotheistic polytheism.
The monotheistic Hindu pantheon is an affirmation that
the Supreme Being can be known in many ways and
worshipped in many forms.
The tradition of worshipping many gods or deities is
based upon the following logic: Hinduism recognizes the
diversity of the human mind and the potential for a
different level of spiritual development in each
individual. Hinduism does not therefore, thrust everyone
into the pigeonhole of a single creed.
The Mahabharat declares "Just as the rain water that
falls from the sky eventually reaches the ocean, so also
all the worship offered to Him, by whatever name you
wish, or in whatever form you like, ultimately goes to
the one, ultimate infinite, Supreme Reality."
The thought behind this is as follows: God is the creator
of the innumerable forms in this universe, so He should
be able to assume any form to please his devotees. In
addition to this, the Supreme Being cannot be said to
have only one name because that would imply putting
limitations on His infinite power.
Therefore, the Hindus worship various names and forms of
the Supreme God. All names are equal because they are
various manifestations of one Supreme Being. It is like
the same person wearing different outfits suitable to
various roles he performs everyday.
When a person chooses to worship one form of the Supreme
Being the chosen deity is called Isht devataa or Isht
devi. It becomes the object of the devotees love,
admiration and spiritual longings. The concept of 330
million deities is believed to emphasise the thought that
as per the fundamental doctrine of the Hinduism, God
lives in the hearts of all beings.
What is worship? Some of the forces are beyond the
knowledge of man and he is unable to conceive or reach
them. So he must have started adoring them with humility
which became worship later. It implies the act of
veneration which is applied to the whole range of
religious behaviour.
Indeed the sense of adoration and worship springs from
the feeling of dependence upon other powers, from the awe
caused in man's mind by the perception of supernatural
agents, which influence his or others welfare. Thus
worship is a devotion that is called bhakti.
More at:
http://www.vandemataram.com/
TRIBUTES TO HINDUISM
1. Mahatma Gandhi:
"Hinduism has made marvelous discoveries in things of
religion, of the spirit, of the soul. We have no eye for
these great and fine discoveries. We are dazzled by the
material progress that western science has made. Ancient
India has survived because Hinduism was not developed
along material but spiritual lines.
"India is to me the dearest country in the world, because
I have discovered goodness in it. It has been subject to
foreign rule, it is true. But the status of a slave is
preferable to that of a slave holder."
2. Henry David Thoreau:
"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous
and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in
comparison with which our modern world and its literature
seems puny.
"What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like
the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes
a loftier course through purer stratum. It rises on me
like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading
through some far stratum in the sky."
3. Arthur Schopenhauer:
"In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and
so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the
solace of my life -- it will be the solace of my death."
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson said this about the Gita:
"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was as
if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but
large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old
intelligence which in another age and climate had
pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which
exercise us."
The famous poem "Brahm" is an example of his Vedanta
ecstasy.
5. Wilhelm von Humboldt pronounced the Gita as:
"The most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical
song existing in any known tongue ... perhaps the deepest
and loftiest thing the world has to show."
6. Lord Warren Hastings, the Governor General, was very
much impressed with Hindu philosophy:
"The writers of the Indian philosophies will survive,
when the British dominion in India shall long have ceased
to exist, and when the sources which it yielded of wealth
and power are lost to remembrances."
7. Mark Twain:
"So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left
undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most
extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds.
Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.
"Land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of
human speech, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of
tradition. The land that all men desire to see and having
seen once even by a glimpse, would not give that glimpse
for the shows of the rest of the globe combined."
8. Rudyard Kipling to Fundamental Christian Missionaries:
"Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle
the Hindu brown for the Christian riles and the Hindu
smiles and weareth the Christian down; and the end of the
fight is a tombstone while with the name of the late
deceased and the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here who
tried to hustle the east".
9. Jules Michelet, a French historian, said:
"At its starting point in India, the birthplace of races
and religions, the womb of the world." This is what he
said of the Raamyana in 1864: "Whoever has done or willed
too much let him drink from this deep cup a long draught
of life and youth .. . Everything is narrow in the West -
- Greece is small and I stifle; Judea is dry and I pant.
Let me look toward lofty Asia, and the profound East for
a little while. There lies my great poem, as vast as the
Indian ocean, blessed, gilded with the sun, the book of
divine harmony wherein is no dissonance. A serene peace
reigns there, and in the midst of conflict an infinite
sweetness, a boundless fraternity, which spreads over all
living things, an ocean (without bottom or bound) of
love, of pity, of clemency."
10. Shri Aurobindo:
"Hinduism.....gave itself no name, because it set itself
no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion,
asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single
narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or
cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the
Godward endeavor of the human spirit. An immense many-
sided and many staged provision for a spiritual self-
building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of
itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion,
sanaatan dharm...."
11. Will Durant would like the West to learn from India,
tolerance and gentleness and love for all living things:
"Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and
spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and
gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the
unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit,
and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things."
12. Joseph Campbell:
"It is ironic that our great western civilization, which
has opened to the minds of all mankind the infinite
wonders of a universe of untold billions of galaxies
should be saddled with the tightest little cosmological
image known to mankind? The Hindus with their grandiose
Kalpas and their ideas of the divine power which is
beyond all human category (male or female). Not so alien
to the imagery of modern science that it could not have
been put to acceptable use.
"There is an important difference between the Hindu and
the Western ideas. In the Biblical tradition, God creates
man, but man cannot say that he is divine in the same
sense that the Creator is, where as in Hinduism, all
things are incarnations of that power. We are the sparks
from a single fire. And we are all fire. Hinduism
believes in the omnipresence of the Supreme God in every
individual. There is no 'fall'. Man is not cut off from
the divine. He requires only to bring the spontaneous
activity of his mind stuff to a state of stillness and he
will experience that divine principle with him."
13. Sir Monier-Williams:
The Hindus, according to him, were Spinozists more than
2,000 years before the advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians
many centuries before Darwin and Evolutionists many
centuries before the doctrine of Evolution was accepted
by scientists of the present age.
14. Carl Sagan, (the late scientist), asserts that the
dance of Nataraj signifies the cycle of evolution and
destruction of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory). "It
is the clearest image of the activity of God which any
art or religion can boast of."
15. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a professor of Eastern
Religions at Oxford and later President of India:
"Hinduism is not just a faith. It is the union of reason
and intuition that cannot be defined but is only to be
experienced. Evil and error are not ultimate. There is no
Hell, for that means there is a place where God is not,
and there are sins which exceed his love."
Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org
The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate
The terrorist mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not so send
peace, but a sword.
"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the
daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in
law.
"And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
- Matthew 10:34-36.
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| User: "Jez" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
10 Apr 2005 09:05:44 AM |
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Dr. Jai Maharaj wrote:
Hindu Gods & Goddesses
http://www.vandemataram.com
A human being cannot conceptualize anything without some
sort of a mental image. A Hindu tries to attribute all
good qualities to the image of God and worships them.
What possible relevance could this have to an atheist newsgroup ?
--
Jez, MBA.,
Country Dancing and Advanced Astrology, UBS.
'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable
notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often
led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what
that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be
skeptical of someone else's description of reality.'-
Howard Zinn
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| User: "Anonymous" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
10 Apr 2005 01:14:10 PM |
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Simple, Dr Jai Maharaj wants atheists to become believers of Hinduism.
"Jez" <iced_spear@NODAMNSPAMpipex.com> wrote in message
news:AYKdnR5OF5T-ccXfRVnyuA@pipex.net...
What possible relevance could this have to an atheist newsgroup ?
--
Jez, MBA.,
Country Dancing and Advanced Astrology, UBS.
'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable notion
that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often led to
accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what that
reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be skeptical of
someone else's description of reality.'-
Howard Zinn
.
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| User: "Jez" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
10 Apr 2005 02:16:22 PM |
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Anonymous wrote:
Simple, Dr Jai Maharaj wants atheists to become believers of Hinduism.
Gawd ! We already get enough Christian idiots doing that !
"Jez" <iced_spear@NODAMNSPAMpipex.com> wrote in message
news:AYKdnR5OF5T-ccXfRVnyuA@pipex.net...
What possible relevance could this have to an atheist newsgroup ?
--
Jez, MBA.,
Country Dancing and Advanced Astrology, UBS.
'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable
notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often
led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what
that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be
skeptical of someone else's description of reality.'-
Howard Zinn
.
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| User: "dangdangdoodle2" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
10 Apr 2005 05:06:30 AM |
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Pardon me, but what would sit with yourself for a minute or two and post
a short paragraph about what exactly your purpose is in this
communication?
--
the dang
In article <YUAvA4887UwGGe@TzoUt>, (Dr. Jai Maharaj)
wrote:
Hindu Gods & Goddesses
http://www.vandemataram.com
A human being cannot conceptualize anything without some
sort of a mental image. A Hindu tries to attribute all
good qualities to the image of God and worships them.
While worshipping he wants to concentrate his mind,
therefore he created images of God. Thus the concept of
image worship came into existence. In Hindu religion we
come across many images of Gods and Goddesses which are
worshipped by different people on various occasions.
The ancient rishis discovered that there are many ways of
conceiving the Supreme reality and numerous means of
approaching it. According to the Hindu view, the Supreme
reality can be viewed from two aspects: Transcendent
(impersonal) and Immanent(personal). In its transcendent
aspect, the Supreme Reality is called Nirgun Brahman that
is Brahman without attributes.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
10 Apr 2005 07:32:01 PM |
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You need absolutely NO imagery to worship The Lord God Dr Jai.
If you want to lead your people on God's pathway of righteousness then
you must know your own saviour and theirs.
"There is one thing which came to me in my early studies of the Bible.
It seized me immediately. I read the passage: 'Make this world the
Kingdom of God and His Righteousness and everything will be added unto
you'." Mahatma Gandhi
Jesus said in John 8:12 " I am the light of the world: he that
followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of
life."
Gandhi said that Jesus was the greatest teacher humanity has ever had.
Jesus tells you to Love the Lord God with all your heart, mind, soul
and strength and love your neighbours as yourself.
"You shall not make idols for yourselves; neither a carved image nor a
sacred pillar shall you rear up for yourselves; nor shall you set up an
engraved stone in your land, to bow down to it; for I am the Lord your
God." Leviticus - Chapter 26:1
In Christ's love
Carol T
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| User: "Michelle Malkin" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
11 Apr 2005 05:43:31 AM |
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<cteasd5941@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1113161521.306668.267220@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
You need absolutely NO imagery to worship The Lord God Dr Jai.
If you want to lead your people on God's pathway of righteousness then
you must know your own saviour and theirs.
"There is one thing which came to me in my early studies of the Bible.
It seized me immediately. I read the passage: 'Make this world the
Kingdom of God and His Righteousness and everything will be added unto
you'." Mahatma Gandhi
Jesus said in John 8:12 " I am the light of the world: he that
followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of
life."
Gandhi said that Jesus was the greatest teacher humanity has ever had.
Jesus tells you to Love the Lord God with all your heart, mind, soul
and strength and love your neighbours as yourself.
"You shall not make idols for yourselves; neither a carved image nor a
sacred pillar shall you rear up for yourselves; nor shall you set up an
engraved stone in your land, to bow down to it; for I am the Lord your
God." Leviticus - Chapter 26:1
And, 'Dr' Jai said, "Rama lama ding dong."
In Christ's love
Carol T
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
11 Apr 2005 06:49:08 AM |
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wrote:
You need absolutely NO imagery to worship The Lord God Dr Jai.
One doesn't but you do; you seem to need Jesus in order to worship "The
Lord God".
If you want to lead your people on God's pathway of righteousness
then
you must know your own saviour and theirs.
"There is one thing which came to me in my early studies of the
Bible.
It seized me immediately. I read the passage: 'Make this world the
Kingdom of God and His Righteousness and everything will be added
unto
you'." Mahatma Gandhi
Excellent; Jai, follow your savior Gandhi.
Jesus said in John 8:12 " I am the light of the world: he that
followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of
life."
Gandhi said that Jesus was the greatest teacher humanity has ever
had.
Jesus tells you to Love the Lord God with all your heart, mind, soul
and strength and love your neighbours as yourself.
"You shall not make idols for yourselves; neither a carved image nor
a
sacred pillar shall you rear up for yourselves; nor shall you set up
an
engraved stone in your land, to bow down to it; for I am the Lord
your
God." Leviticus - Chapter 26:1
No crucifixes, eh?
In Christ's love
Carol T
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
11 Apr 2005 08:26:07 AM |
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Dear Ranjit,
On reading The Word you come to realise that Jesus is one and the same
with His Father. It's not something 'religion, taught me, but God's
Word.
I read spiritual text for the enlightenment I can withdraw out of
them. I read them in a context of the; culture, world, individual and
humanity and I look for the message of greater good as all things kept
sacred through love for the good of another, above the self, has great
things to teach us.
Gandhi, Mohamed, Krishna's and all the great prophets for God bore
their people's pain to an extent, but not as Jesus did and even they
themselves understood this. Giving over their pain to God in repentance
in order to do His work is giving over to the greater Spirit than the
self, the Spirit greater than all others and all things. As Gandhi
pointed out there was a man even greater than he, therefore even if he
had given his life as Jesus did he could not achieve the greatness of
Jesus and complete oneness with God. Mohamed never claimed to be
absolutely and spiritually pure, he made his prayers for forgiveness of
his wrongs public, Krishna explains to you why people have to be
forgiven to come before God on His terms and not theirs.
Falling short of God's greater glory because of our sin is humanity's
realisation of the distance between God and ourselves. Jesus Christ did
not have this distance between Him, His Father and The Holy Spirit. It
was God's presence people feel before them.
The great sense of righteousness for God and the world, and inner self
righteousness are not one and the same. Satan is self righteous and all
his desires are for himself! Righteousness for the greater good of the
world and humanity is part of the cross a believer has to bear; but as
Jesus has already come and lifted that cross there is no man to come in
His place, only great men and prophets to lead you to Him. The
realisation of who He truly is to you, us, and even the great prophets
who unwittingly carry the weight of the cross but won't let go, is part
of the road to your salvation and freedom.
There is no doubt that Gandhi loved Jesus as He loved God and knew He
still had much to learn from Him. He thirsted for more.
In Christ's love
Carol T
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
12 Apr 2005 05:27:53 AM |
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wrote:
Dear Ranjit,
On reading The Word you come to realise that Jesus is one and the
same
with His Father. It's not something 'religion, taught me, but God's
Word.
That would mean that Jesus ordered these genocides, wouldn't it?
"Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of
the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the
cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword." (Deuteronomy 13:15)
"Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children" - Ezekiel
9:5-6
Mohamed never claimed to be
absolutely and spiritually pure,
Jesus: "Why do you call me good? No one is good-except God alone"
(Mark 10:18).
There is no doubt that Gandhi loved Jesus as He loved God and knew He
still had much to learn from Him. He thirsted for more.
.... but alas, Jesus didn't show up to teach him.
In Christ's love
Carol T
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| User: "Quizz" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
12 Apr 2005 12:26:44 AM |
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On 11 Apr 2005 01:26:07 -0700, "cteasd5941@gmail.com"
<cteasd5941@gmail.com> wrote:
On reading The Word you come to realise that Jesus is one and the same
with His Father. It's not something 'religion, taught me, but God's
Word.
That is your interpretation. Others read it and do not conclude that
they are one and the same. Does 'gods word' teach them to contradict
your belief system?
I read spiritual text for the enlightenment I can withdraw out of
them. I read them in a context of the; culture, world, individual and
humanity and I look for the message of greater good as all things kept
sacred through love for the good of another, above the self, has great
things to teach us.
The context and culture was Judaism hence monotheism not a duality or
trinity. Later context was Roman/Greek (supposedly pagan) hence
duality/trinity.
-Snip a weak attempt of a theological synthesis-
In Christ's love
Carol T
Q.
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| User: "Dr. Jai Maharaj" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
10 Apr 2005 07:38:34 PM |
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The terrorist mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not so send
peace, but a sword.
"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the
daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in
law.
"And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
- Matthew 10:34-36.
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| User: "=?windows-1252?Q?Le_G=E9ant?=" |
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
11 Apr 2005 07:50:50 AM |
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Blood Thirsty Honour
By Githa Hariharan
11 October, 2004
The Telegraph
Eve teasing. Voluntary sati. And now, honour killings. These
oxymoron-ridden phrases wreak violence on our language every day. They
also mirror flesh-and-blood violence. Coercion, assault or murders
continue to be exactly that, no matter how much they are whitewashed
with euphemisms about teasing; no matter how well they are dressed up
with qualifiers like voluntary and honour.
In the contemporary definition of an honour killing, a woman or a man,
or the couple, are victimized for marrying outside their caste or
community. It is like a familiar script with the wrong ending. Every
other film made in India has a couple in love who are not allowed to
marry. Invariably, whether the difference between boy and girl is class,
caste or religion, the end is happy. The marriage takes place, and the
narrow-minded opponents of the marriage benefit from a lesson on the
equalizing powers of love.
Our transgressing young lovers in real life find the story often ends
quite differently. Their marriages lead to punishing ostracism, and to
violence in a sickening variety of forms. A convention against “honour”
killings and violence held in Delhi earlier this year identified some of
the types of punishment the couple may be subject to. Public lynching.
Or murder. Or, taking a leaf out of the case of “voluntary sati,” murder
camouflaged as suicide — say by forcing the victim to drink poison. Less
drastic than murder but almost as painful is a long list of
honour-driven violence: sexual assault on the women members of the
accused family, usually belonging to the lower caste or the “other
community” as “revenge;” public beating, stripping, blackening of the
face; shaving of the head; forcing the couple or their families to drink
urine or eat excrement; incarceration, huge fines, social boycott or
being driven out of the village.
What is this terrible “honour” that wreaks such pain and terror on
people simply because two young people have exercised their right to
choose their partner? It’s an honour that tends to attach itself to
rigid codes, usually caste or religious codes. It also tends to be a
code formulated by the male elite so their “honour” can flourish in the
patriarchal framework. This is the sort of honour that celebrates women
committing jawhar or mass sati; I remember an obnoxious sound and light
show I took my children to years ago in Gwalior which placed the
achievements of Tansen and women committing “suicide” on an equally
glorious footing.
It is a useful thing to perpetuate a tradition of martyrdom, especially
when women’s bodies are vulnerable to being viewed as the vessels of
national honour. It was this unholy honour that provided the motive for
otherwise “normal” men to kill their own sisters and wives and mothers
during the Partition — “disappearances” and murders which have been
covered by a conspiracy of silence, and by the more acceptable belief
that these women were abducted or killed by men from the other side. In
her book The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia takes on this myth
that the perpetrators of violence were always “outsiders”. She writes
about a man she interviewed in Amritsar, Mangal Singh, whose family
killed seventeen of its women and children. He refuses to use the word
killed; he says they became “martyrs” in keeping with Sikh pride. The
women, he says, were willing to become martyrs. “The real fear was one
of dishonour.” But, asks Butalia, who had the pride and the fear? It is
not a question Mangal Singh was willing to examine. Similarly, in
Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, Ritu Menon records
the account of a partition survivor, Durga Rani. In this account, two
types of honour killings occur: one in anticipation of dishonour; the
other as a way to cope with dishonour. Consider, on the one hand: “In
the villages of Head Junu, Hindus threw their young daughters into
wells, dug trenches and buried them alive. Some were burnt to death,
some were made to touch electric wires to prevent the Muslims touching
them.” On the other hand, Durga Rani gives us an idea of what happened
to many women who had been abandoned after being raped and disfigured.
They could not be “kept” any longer because their “character” was now
spoilt. In some cases, as in that of a girl who was raped by ten or more
men, the only way to deal with the dishonour was murder; the girl, says
Durga Rani, was burnt by her father.
All these years after Partition, this dishonourable honour still stalks
the land, wreaking its barbaric violence on both men and women, but
preferably on women. Most cases are reported from Punjab, Haryana and
parts of western Uttar Pradesh. The statistics are disturbing;
twenty-three such murders were reported during 2002 and 2003 in
Muzaffarnagar alone. Thirty-five young couples were declared “missing”.
And in Punjab and Haryana, one out of every ten murders is an honour
killing. In most of the cases where the girl is from an upper caste, the
boy is the target of violence, usually by the girl’s family. Often,
girls who are murdered for “destroying the honour of the family” are
cremated without any legal formalities and the deaths concealed.
Behind the statistical wall is a collection of stories that tell of
violence and fear unleashed on the basis of a shameful rationale. In
Hoshiarpur, Punjab, twenty-two-year old Geeta Rani, a Rajput woman,
married Jasvir, the son of the only Jat family in the village. Her
parents did not object to the match. But the Rajputs in Jasvir’s
village, including a suspended police officer, decided to “teach him a
lesson” for marrying one of “their” women.
Within two months of the marriage, he was killed after his hands and
legs were cut off. One hand was thrown into Jasvir’s aunt’s house. Now,
the widowed Geeta and her widowed mother-in-law live in fear, struggling
to pay security guards to keep them safe. “Not even the nightmare of the
1984 riots was this bad,” says the mother-in-law.
In Jhajjar, a Jat woman from Talav village married a Dalit. She was
forced to return to her father’s home, and there both she and her sister
were murdered. So were a Dalit woman and a man who were accused of
helping the girl to elope. The villagers who recounted the story were
clear about one thing: the administration was careful to protect the
upper castes.
Several of these cases illustrate not only the violation of the right to
choose a marriage partner, but also the role caste panchayats play in
perpetuating illegal and inhuman social codes. In other states — Gujarat
being a good example — increased communalization has led to more
intolerance, and more violence in cases of Hindu-Muslim marriages. In a
country that is blessed with all kinds of communities, intermarriage is
not only a constitutional right of every adult citizen, but also the
inevitable way to celebrate the bonds among us. There’s very little
point in sending our children to schools or allowing them to vote — in
short, in pretending they are adults — if they cannot marry who they choose.
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| Title: Re: HINDU GODS AND GODDESSES |
11 Apr 2005 08:45:11 AM |
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This Word of The Lord is as sharp as a two edged sword, it will cut
into your heart, mind and soul, and it can divide your family setting
them one against the other; and if His Word is not preached and heard
in your household now that you know there to be none more at one with
The Lord God and His Holy Spirit it will be to your folly.
His Word is The Word of love and salvation for all men, He is the light
of the world. Repent and believe in the Gospel.
"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all
these things shall be added unto you." KJ Matthew 6:33
"But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of
God is come unto you." KJ Matthew 12:28
"And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand:
repent ye, and believe the gospel." KJ Mark 1:15
"And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth
again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that
trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! " KJ Mark10:24
In Christ's love
Carol T
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