Is Andhra entering the dark ages?
The recent victory of Jagan Mohan Reddy has given a Constantine like hope to Christian missionaries of Andhra to put the state in the path of Rome when it went from the pursuit of knowledge to utter darkness of zealous religious ignorance.
I was prompted to write this after viewing the series of events unfolding in Andhra Pradesh lately. The multipronged attack on Tirupathi ranging from the official Tirumala website carrying songs on Jesus to Tirumala crypto-Christian workers surfacing in churches, there is no let up in the relentless Christianization of Tirupathi and of Andhra in general. This reminds me of Rome and Europe in the early centuries of Christianity. The Christians of Alexandria, though a minority, were not happy with the sight of the biggest temple of the western civilization for the Pagan God Serapes and an adjacent library like that of Nalanda in India. Through a series of incidents of bickering and taunting like the ones happening in Tirupathi today, the Christians precipitated matters and on one fine day, brought the entire temple down and burnt the majestic library with it. It would be worthwhile to remind ourselves that no pagan went and broke a church in Alexandria before or after this incident.
The dark ages didn’t seem far away when I watched this recent video by another one of these zealot pastors, Praveen Chakravarthy who is boldly claiming hundreds of villages for Christ – https://youtu.be/zxmTfgzvfy0
The interesting part of this video is how Praveen, knowingly or unknowingly, re-enacts the scene of St. Boniface violating the sacred oak tree of the pagans of Germany. St. Boniface was an English monk, who preached among the pagans in Germany. He became angry and frustrated by the reverence the pagans held for their sacred oak tree. Legend has it that his rancor was so deep-seated that it just took one hard blow with his axe to bring the mighty oak down with a big thud. He then shamelessly flaunted his trophy oak atop the church steeple and delighted in annihilating the pagan belief to dust. This incident of religious violence demonstrated by St. Boniface culminated in the cultural appropriation of the Christmas tree that many Hindus so proudly display in their homes as a symbol of their religious acceptance of other faiths.
Even though Pastor Praveen did not quite have an axe handy at the crime scene but did not fail to give the sacred tree of the heathen Hindus a good blow with his foot to demonstrate its unfitness to qualify for veneration. It is ironical that even after 1300 years since St. Boniface, the Christian zealots in their blinding ignorance of religious faith have failed to see the connectedness of humankind with the cosmos that results in the reverence towards trees and nature.
Another sign of the dark ages is the never-ending blame of Christian persecution by the heathens. The innumerable exaggerated stories of martyrdom in Rome as a response to the Christians breaking the temples and idols of pagans and burning their books of philosophy and religion are recorded with great diligence by the Church historians. A similar effort of documenting Hindu atrocities through various media are happening all over Andhra Pradesh today. The formula is simple – go provoke the Hindus with several efforts to convert them and then when they retaliate, the Christian missionaries resort to calling foul play by the Hindus.
When we read the history of Rome and Greece, one wonders about the apathy shown by the literate communities while the peasants were getting converted to Christianity at an alarming pace. Few Roman philosophers have also made fun of the Christians for their blind faith and how it can only influence the ignorant downtrodden peasants of Rome and how the learned and the discerning are immune to it. The philosophers didn’t quite realize what hit them till the movement gained critical mass and crippled them from even having the fundamental right of expression. The evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries have gained this critical mass and their Constantine in Andhra. What is coming next are the dark ages. If history can teach us something here, it is the lesson of how our indifference and inaction can bring us the European dark ages again to Andhra first and all over India next in the 21st century. However, are we willing to learn from history?
– Editorial
