Religions and Followers

Copyright © 2016 by Naiter Mohan Chopra.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016908118

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5035-8774-8

   Softcover   978-1-5144-0068-5

   eBook   978-1-5144-0557-4

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Rev. date: 08/08/2016

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 The Shady Sides of Religions. Families of Religions

Chapter 2 Women, Marriages, Harems, and Chastity

Chapter 3 Jews and Judaism. Spread of Judaism. Anti-Semitism. Persecution of Jews. Formation of Israel. Israel-Palestine Problem

Chapter 4 Communism, Freedom, and Democracy. Wars of Freedom, Power, and Hegemony

Chapter 5 Christians in the Middle Ages

Chapter 6 Muslims, Spread of Islam, Crusades, and Slavery

Chapter 7 East Meets West I. The Decline of Hindus and Muslims, Popes, Inquisition, and Renaissance

Chapter 8 Popes and the Kings

Chapter 9 East Meets West II. Mathematics, Movable Printing Press

Chapter 10 Christian caste system, the Lawgivers, Evolution of Parliaments

Chapter 11 Evolution of Secularism, Persecution of the Irish Catholics, Religious Intolerance, Massacre of Huguenots

Chapter 12 West Meets East. The Expansion of the Europeans (Christians) in the World. The British in India. The Evolution of Nationalism, Secularism, and Wahabiism in India. Two Nations Theory. Aligarh Movement. Fate of India’s Princely States

Chapter 13 Decline of Muslim Regimes. English, French, and Russian Drang Nach Osten. The Great Game and the Cold War. The Eastern (Balkan) Question

Chapter 14 Setbacks to Secularism. US-Iraq and US-Taliban Wars. Arab Spring

Chapter 15 Religions. Spread of Religions. Religion Customs and Rituals. Marriages, Dowries, Sex, Circumcisions, Yoga, and Swastika. Religions, Arts, Architecture, Engineering, Science, and Human Behavior

Chapter 16 Questions and Answers. The Existence of God. What Science Tells Us. Intelligent Design. Spiritual Vacuum

Bibliography

Dedicated to all the victims of religious violence.

PREFACE

I am a retired professor of chemistry of the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro. I am a native of India and a citizen of the USA. I was born in Amritsar. I have lived twenty-seven years of my life in India of which I have lived for twenty years in what is now Punjab, Pakistan; two years in England; two years in Ireland; ten years in Canada; and the last fifty years in the USA. I am ninety-two years old. I got my MSc (Hons) from the Punjab University, Lahore, and PhD in chemistry from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. I have published several papers in top American and international scientific journals, such as Journal of Chemical Society (British), Chemistry and Industry (British). Analytical Chemistry (USA), Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry (USA), Journal of Economic Entomology (USA), Tobacco Science (USA), Journal of Elisha Mitchell Society (USA), Soil Science (USA), Canadian Journal of Botany (Canada), and Beitrage Zur Tabakforschung (Germany). I have presented papers on my researches at several American and international scientific meetings, such as International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry at Tel Aviv, Israel; International Symposium of Polyhalogen Compounds at Barcelona, Spain; and CORESTA (International Tobacco Scientific Congress) meetings at Williamsburg (USA), Tokyo (Japan), Manila (Philippines), and Vienna (Austria).

I am from the East and I am a scientist. The scientists are mostly objective. They are unbiased and free from their personal feelings and prejudices. In writing this book, I have tried to be objective and represent how a man from the East views the religions and their followers.

Last, I wish to thank my nephew-in-law Prof. Robert Aitken and my niece Gita for helping me find a publisher (Xlibris); my wife, Santosh, and my sons, Ashok, Hersh, and Siddharth; and Charles Freemont and Kay Benavides of Xlibris for their suggestions and assistance in getting this book published.

The Author

CHAPTER 1

The Shady Sides of Religions. Families of Religions

To understand what is happening in the troubled world, it is necessary to comprehend the nature and the characteristics of the world’s religions and their followers without any political correctness, since political correctness always glosses the harsh realities and deficiencies. Franklin Graham, son of the American evangelist Billy Graham, calls Islam a wicked and evil religion. Sadly, all religions have a split personality: they have both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in them. They are, at once, sublime and wicked and evil.

All religions actually teach us that all human beings are not equal. In Hinduism, there is a caste system. There are four castes: the Brahamins (the clergy), the Kshatriyas (the warriors and the rulers), the Vaishyas (the businessmen), and the Shudras, the rest including the farmers, laborers, cowherds, menials, and the untouchables. The untouchables include the cobblers and the human waste carriers. With the Brahamins and the Kshatriyas being high and mighty and the Shudras being the lowly and the lost, the untouchables are supposed to stay away from the members of the higher castes. If by an accident an untouchable touches a Brahamin, he gets a sound and sometimes a fatal beating. Even the shadow of an untouchable should not fall on a Brahamin.

The caste system, though not called as such, is also present in other religions. In Christianity, they are called the estates.¹ Christianity had three estates: the clergy (Lord Spiritual), the nobility (Lord Temporal), and the laity, which included the tradesmen, freemen, villeins, and serfs. These estates have a great resemblance with the Hindu caste system, with clergy, nobility, tradesmen, and freemen corresponding with Brahamin, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas, and the serf corresponding with Shudras. Interestingly, there is one more estate, the fourth estate: a term coined by Lord Thomas Babington Macauly in AD 1828 to describe the writers, press, and the media.

In Islam, there is the super caste, the Saiyyads, the descendants of the Prophet Mohammad.² They claim to be God’s most exalted creation with the bluest of the blue blood in their veins. They even claim to have inherited some of the divinity and nobility of their prophet. Then there are the Deen Dars, the Muslim equivalent to the Hindu Shudras, and Alvi and others somewhere in between the Saiyyads and the Deen Dars.

In the Muslim countries, there are three categories of citizens: the Muslims, who are at the top of the totem pole, followed by the People of the Book: the Jews and the Christians. The Jews and the Christians (along with the Muslims) accept Moses and Abraham as their prophets but do not accept Mohammad as their prophet. Consequently, in the Muslim eyes, Jews and the Christians are God’s people but of a lesser quality than Muslims. The third category of the citizens, right at the bottom, are the Kaffirs, atheists, the nonbelievers, and the people of other religions, such as Buddhists and Hindus. The non-Muslims had to pay a poll tax, Jazia. According to the Hanafi doctors, Jazia was to be paid by the non-Muslims, the Zimmis, as compensation or in lieu of being spared from execution for being Kafirs or nonbelievers.³ The non-Muslims never had the full citizen rights or protection such as given to the Muslims. Very recently, in the Taliban Afghanistan, the non-Muslims were required to wear a yellow badge much the same as the Jews, who were required to wear the yellow Star of David in the Nazi Germany.

Religions are antisocial. They discourage and forbid their followers from mixing and interacting with the followers of other religions. Paul reproaches Peter from having eaten, in Antioch, with Gentiles (Gal. 11:12, 13). A Muslim food touched by a Hindu, or vice versa, becomes polluted food and needs to be thrown away. Inter-religious marriages are a family calamity and disgrace. In a marriage involving a Catholic and a non-Catholic, the non-Catholic person must become a Catholic before the marriage can take place. Similarly, a marriage involving a Muslim and a non-Muslim, the non-Muslim party must become a Muslim before the marriage. In Judaism, the progeny of a Jewish and a non-Jewish marriage must be Jewish.

Religions teach us to hate the people of other religions. It is ironical that Jews, Christians, and Muslims, even though they all are the children of Abraham (Christianity is sometimes called the daughter of Judaism),⁴ they all hate each other. Anti-Semitism is the hatred shown by the Muslims and the Christians towards the Jews. The Jews were persecuted all the times. Pogroms were carried against them by the Christians in Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, and Poland. Hitler’s Germany gave a Nazi twist to the Christians’ hatred for Jews. Hitler wanted to arrive at the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem. According to Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the USA, it was thou shalt not live here in Spain and thou Shalt not live in Germany. Before the World War II, there were 3.5 million Jews in Poland. In 1987, there were six or seven thousand Jews left in Poland.⁵ The rest either had fled the country or were murdered by the Nazis during their occupation of Poland. Still anti-Jewish pogrom have not completely stopped in Poland even after the World War II. Then there is the Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadinezad, who declared that there was no holocaust and that Israel should be destroyed. In Egypt, with a population of sixty-seven million in 2004, there are about two hundred original Jews left in Egypt.⁶ Since 1947, the Egyptian Jews have voluntarily or involuntarily left Egypt. Most of them have gone to Israel. The partition of the British India in 1947 was strictly on Muslim and non-Muslim basis. About one million people were murdered during the religious rioting that took time.⁷ Pogroms were not confined against the Jews. In Pakistan, there were pogroms against Ahmadiyas, a Muslim sect, which was declared to be non-Muslim by the Pakistan government because the Ahmadyas do not accept Mohammad to be the last of the prophets (both the Sunnis and the Shias maintain that Mohammad was the last of the prophets). This mutual religious hatred is a problem of a Himalayan magnitude. Even though Ulster (Ireland) is a modern state with nearly 100 percent literacy, the Catholic and the Protestants there are still fighting a religious war for nearly a century. What then can be expected of half-literate people who live in the world of Islam and elsewhere?

Followers of all the religions are told that the followers of other religions are evil and unclean: they are infidels, kafirs, and maleechas. Churches, mosques, and temples are supposed to be the houses of God. Yet in Salt Lake City, there are sanctuaries into which non-Mormons are not allowed. In the Grand Mosque in Mecca (Kaaba), it is a capital crime for a non-Muslim to enter, and there are several Hindu temples, though not all the temples, into which non-Hindus and Shudras are not allowed.

All religions are antiprogress. They believe and are afraid of zero-sum. They do not want anyone to question their authority and preaching. Galileo, in his A Dialogue on the Two Principal Systems of the World propounded Copernican doctrine of the universe being heliocentric; that is, the earth was round like a ball and not flat and that it revolved around the sun. This doctrine was directly opposite to the Ptolemic doctrine of the universe being geocentric; that is, the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it, and which was also held by the Holy See.⁸ Galileo was lucky. Even though the then Pope Urban VIII was Galileo’s erstwhile friend, Urban ordered Galileo to be tried for heresy.⁹ But because of this friendship Galileo was treated leniently. Galileo had to recant to escape the rack or worse. He was put under a house arrest for the rest of his life. Another astronomer, Giordano Bruno, was not so lucky. He was tried for heresy for the crime of propagating the heliocentric theory, and burnt at the stake in 1600.¹⁰ According to Islam, Mohammad is the last of the prophets, and the Koran, the last of the spoken words. Further, it claims that the only authentic Koran is the one which is written in Hijazi Arabic, and that all the words, letters, and even the punctuations in all the Korans are the same, and any translation of the Koran in any other language produces less than authentic Koran, and that the Islamic Code of Law, the Sharia, does not need any change or improvement.

There has been an eternal war between science and religions.¹¹ Between reason and faith, and according to Max Weber, faith in the typical religious sense does not necessarily intend facts and teachings to be true—A religion of faith implies the religious devotion, the unconditional trust and obedience and the orientation of one’s entire life to a god or redeemer.¹²

Religions are great destroyers. A conqueror always wants to secure his conquest. He declares himself to be the supreme and destroys everything which could have the possibility of jeopardizing his conquest, including anything which could become the rallying point of the conquered. Thus according to the First Commandment, I am the Lord thy God—thou shalt have no other god before me; and the Second Commandment, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image—Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I thy Lord thy God am a jealous God. In the sixteenth century, when the Protestants overthrew the Spanish domination in the Netherlands (Holland), they changed the Catholic churches and cathedrals into Protestant churches and cathedrals. All the beautiful painted walls of these churches and cathedrals were painted white. The Spanish Conquistadors, including Christopher Columbus, not only massacred the Native Americans but also destroyed their shrines, melted the gold and silver images of their gods, and looted them. That is what happened to the Inca, the Mayas, and the Aztecs. Prophet Mohammad, when he returned to Mecca as a victor, destroyed all the statues there, including that of the Meccan moon goddess, al-Lot, al-Manat (the dark), and al-Uzza (the union of the two).¹³ Before the Afghan king Mahmood Ghazni (Ghaznavi) sacked the Somnath Hindu temple, he was begged by the temple devotees to spare the temple from destruction in lieu of whatever he wanted. His reply: he would like to be known as the destroyer of the idols and not the seller of the idols. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the 175-foot and 120-foot-tall statues of Buddha in Bamian, notwithstanding a worldwide clamor to spare them. According to the Talibans, these statues were an affront to Islam, and it was their religious duty to destroy them.¹⁴ The world clamor be damned. The Muslim invaders wrought frightful destruction to Hindu and Buddhist temples in India. They broke the arms, heads, legs, and noses of the idols, and in the case of female idols, their breasts. Oftentimes, they built a mosque in place of the destroyed temple. The famous Christian cathedral, Hagia Sophia, was converted into a mosque. One of its walls was demolished and replaced by a Mihrab (pulpit) facing Mecca.

The Muslim conquerors sought to destroy all the strata of the conquered, especially the monks. Bakhtiyar Khilji, one of the generals of Sultan Mohammad Ghauri (Ghori, Ghuri), destroyed the world-famous Buddhist Nalinda University in Bihar, India, and massacred all of its denizens.

There are three families of religions: first, the Middle East religions consisting of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; second, the religions which originated in India: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism; and, third, the religions of East Asia, which include Confucianism, Taoism, and Shintoism.

The Middle East religions are all related to each other with Judaism being the grandmother and Islam being the granddaughter. All these three religions have common prophets. Moses and Abraham are the prophets of all the three religions (the Jews and the Christians also consider Issac as their prophet; the Muslims, however, consider Ismail instead as their prophet). In addition to these prophets, Jesus Christ is considered as a prophet by both the Christians and the Muslims, and Mohammad is considered as a prophet by Muslims. However, whereas the Jews and the Christians believe that someday a Messiah will come to earth to redeem them, the Muslims consider Mohammad to be the last of the prophets. The Jewish Old Testament is also a part of the Holy Bible, and both of them have also impacted the Koran. All of the three religions are monotheist and very intolerant religions. Though, in theory, there is only one God, in actuality the Jewish God, Adonai, the Christian God, God, and the Muslim God, Allah, are not the same person (in 2009, in Malaysia, the Muslims attacked the Christians because the Christians used the word Allah to describe their [Christian] God; the Christians are not supposed to use Allah instead of the word God). This translates to mean that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims have different Gods, with Jews, Christians, and Muslims each claiming that their God is the real God and that all other Gods of all other religions are fake Gods and their followers unbelievers, infidels, and kafirs. Pope Benedict XVI reasserts the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church approving a document released Tuesday that says other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches and only Catholicism provides true path to salvation.¹⁵

Christians and Muslims consider it to be their religious duty to bring non-Christians and non-Muslims, respectively, to accept their God and religion. Thus the Jihadist Abu Ghaith claims that the only way there can be peace in the world is when all human beings become Muslims. The whole world will then become Dar-ul-Islam with the Sharia laws reigning supreme; and the Christians say that the only way a person can be saved is if he accepts Jesus Christ as his savior and that it is the duty of the Christian Church to save the soul of every man.

Of the second family of the religions, the followers of Hinduism can be monotheists, polytheists, agnostics, and even atheists. Buddhism and Jainism are basically agnostic religions; they neither accept nor deny the existence of God because according to their thinking, there is no proof for the existence or nonexistence of God. For them, God is just an irrelevant entity (cf., Basham).¹⁶ While Sikhism is a monotheist religion, of the third family of religions, Confucianism, Taoism, and Shintoism, Confucianism is an agnostic religion, Taoism is a polytheist religion, and Shintoism involves the worship of the ancestors.

The Middle East religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are cruel and bloodthirsty religions. The Jewish king David massacred all of his opponents. Pope Innocent III, in alliance with the king of France, waged a war on heretic Albigense. All of them were massacred to the last man.¹⁷ Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortes, and the Conquistadors came to the Americas, with cross in one hand and sword in the other hand and raped, looted, and massacred the Native Americans. In the European Thirty Years’ war (1618–1648), the Protestants and the Catholics butchered each other, and on August 24, 1572, the Saint Bartheolomew Day, began the massacre of thousands of Huguenots in Paris and elsewhere in France. Prophet Mohammad, while in Medina, was all the time at war with his neighboring tribes who were mostly Jewish. All of them were defeated. The defeated were given the choice of accepting death or embracing Islam. All the male members of the Jewish tribe, Bani Kuraizha, were massacred, and their women were given to his followers as slaves by the victorious Prophet. The Prophet also got his share of the beautiful war booty, a Jewess named Raihana, who some claim became his wife.¹⁸ In the seventh century, most of the North Africans were Christians, and the peoples of the present-day Central Asia and Afghanistan were Buddhists. They were also given the choice of accepting death or embracing Islam by the conquering Muslim armies. There were massacres and conversions on a mass scale. In the closing years of the World War I, about 1.5 million Armenian Christians were massacred by the Muslim Ottomans. Recently, in AD 1947–48, when the Muslim raiders from Pakistan invaded Kashmir, they killed all the non-Muslims men in the territory they ran over, raped their women, and later sold them as sex slaves in Peshawar and Rawalpindi bazaars.¹⁹ Pakistan occupied Kashmir’s population, is now 100 percent Muslim.

Buddhist and Hindu kings of India and Southeast Asia, though constantly at war with their neighboring kings, followed an honor code. The defeated kings were not put to death, nor the subject and the women in the defeated kings kingdom molested. The treaties and promises made were honored, and the defeated king was allowed to go into exile, become a monk, or even accept a subordinate position in the court of the victorious king. The adherence to the honor code had a fatal flaw. In AD 1191, the Muslim Afghan king Mohammad Ghori (Ghauri) invaded India. He was defeated by Prithvi Raj Chauhan, the Hindu king of Delhi. Mohammad Ghori was captured by Prithvi Raj but let go. Next year, a better prepared Mohammad Ghori again invaded India. This time Prithvi Raj was defeated, captured, and executed. The Muslim king did not observe any such honor code, and India, for the next six centuries, saw a Muslim domination. About the seventeenth-century Hindu king Shivaji, the English historian Rawlinson writes: He was never deliberately or wantonly cruel. To respect women, mosques, and non-combatants to stop promiscuous slaughter after the battle, to release and dismiss with honor captured men and officers—these are surely no light virtues.¹⁹

One feature present in religions of India and East Asia that is not present in the Middle East religions is that the followers of the Indian and East Asian religions can also be followers of another religion. Thus, a Hindu can be a follower of Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism. He can go to the shrines of any one of these religions and join with the followers of these religions in their prayers and religious rites. In Japan, births and weddings are celebrated according to Shinto rites; while at deaths, Buddhist rites are performed.²⁰ In Cambodia, the Hindu Vishnu temple at Angkor Wat also has a Buddhist shrine in it. Ellora (Maharashtra, India) has a group of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist cave shrines, noted for their sculpture all over the world, located side by side. The Indian emperor Harsha (Hersh), a devotee of Shiva, had a strong predilection for Buddhism. The famous Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, Hiuen Tsang, witnessed two general assemblies called and attended by Harsha at Kanauj and Prayag (now Allahabad) in 643. Images of Buddha, Aditya Deva (sun god), and Ishvara Deva (Shiva) were installed at both these occaisions.²¹ A Muslim will never go to a Christian church or a Jewish synagogue, a Jew to a church or a mosque, and a Christian to a synagogue or a mosque and join in prayers there.

Another big difference between the Middle East religions and the religions originating in India and the East Asia is in their codes of laws. Those of the religions of Indian origin are very gentle. Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism believe in ahimsa (not taking of life) and in tolerance. In fact, as late as the sixth century AD, the kings of the Punjab, where Buddhism was the dominant religion, did not eat meat and did not mete out the death penalty.²²

As against the code of laws of the religions originating in India and East Asia, the Judeo-Christian and Sharia laws are very cruel and draconian. Blasphemy, apostasy, heresy, denial of the existence of God, adultery (cf. Lev. 20:10), cursing the parents (cf. Lev. 20:9), not being respectful to the religion and its prophets, and working on Sabbath (Exod. 35:2) are all capital crimes. In 1539 England, a man was hanged for eating meat on a Friday²³ (Catholics are required not to eat meat on Fridays). The English queen Anne Boleyn was beheaded on a trumped-up charge of adultery, and another English queen Catherine Howard met the same fate on charges of incest and adultery. In Lima, Peru, there is a museum of Inquisition which exhibits what awaits the deviants of the true faith (Catholic faith). Recently, death fatwas (Muslim religious decrees) were issued against Salman Rushdie, an Indian-born British subject, by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual head of Iran, for not being respectful to the Prophet Mohammad. He issued another fatwa against Taslima Nasreen for writing that Islam and Koran have been repressive to women (blasphemy). In 2005, in Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan, an Afghan, Abdur Rahman, was sentenced to death by the Afghan courts for changing his religion from Islam to Christianity (apostasy). This created a problem for both the Karzai government and the US President George W. Bush’s administration. Fearing that if released somebody would murder him for the crime, Abdur Rahman was spirited out of the country (Afghanistan) and given asylum in Italy. Earlier, Theo van Gogh, a Dutch activist and a relative of the world-famous painter, Vincent van Gogh, was murdered by a Dutch Muslim because Theo was critical of Islam, and in 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian Nobel laureate, was savagely stabbed for writing a thinly disguised allegory on the life of the Prophet Mohammad and other Muslim religious leaders. A Pakistani lad in Saudi Arabia was caught and convicted of a petty theft. He was sent back to Pakistan minus his right hand: a payment for the crime he had committed.

Contrary to the popular assertion, the US Code of Laws is not based on Judeo-Christian code of law. It is primarily based on the English Common Law and on secular principles, though there might be a smattering of Judeo-Christian principles in it.

The closest example to how a country under the Sharia laws might look like is that of the Taliban Afghanistan: no music, no television, no movies, no kite flying, no relics of other religions. According to Talibans, the Buddhist statues at Bamayan were an affront to Islam. For women, there is no education and no going outside the house without the written permission from the male head of the family. In the event of a sickness, the woman patient could only be examined by a female doctor; too bad if a female doctor is not available to do the job. Both men and women must conform to the strict Muslim dress code. There were Moral Police (Muttawwin in Arabic) on patrol with power to whip or arrest those who broke the Islamic dress code and customs. The Kabul soccer stadium became a public execution ground where those who had broken the Sharia laws were beheaded in public. So terrible was the enforcement of the