Mother Teresa: Responses to my friends' comments on my facebook post

Recently, the RSS chief Bhagwat had this to say about Mother Teresa.


“Mother Teresa’s service would have been good. But it used to have one objective, to convert the person, who was being served, into a Christian,” he said while speaking at a function organised near Bharatpur by NGO Apna Ghar. “The question is not about conversion but if this [conversion] is done in the name of service, then that service gets devalued,” he said. “But here [at the NGO], the objective is purely service of poor and helpless people,” Mr Bhagwat added.

Source: "http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/mother-teresas-aim-was-conversion-says-bhagwat/article6926462.ece"

Many "noble-hearted" congressmen from India were full of tears immediately and asked Narendra Modi, the BJP, the RSS, the Bajrang Dal and everybody except themselves to apologize to everybody. My equally-noble fellow Indians immediately were up in arms thinking that this was the first time somebody dared to speak out against a noble soul and a "secular" government would have prevented such speeches from happening.

Here is an interesting post from the Washington Post blogs (just 3 hrs ago as of this writing).

Washington Post

and it says

"Many who support Mother Teresa dispute these accounts, of course, but they exist and are frequently debated. In fact, when compared to the criticism that already exists about Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity, Bhagwat's words look relatively meek: Multiple accounts say that Mother Teresa's nuns would baptize the dying and she had a reputation for proselytizing."

 
I posted a link Bhagwat's comments on  my facebook account (I only posted and I have a mixed opinion on what he said) and some of my friends commented on the post. 

One of them says, "service to human ,is service to God. i hope mother Teresa has not forced any body to convert. Every human being has the God given 6th sense to analyse what is right and wrong and to accept the logical and deny illogical matters. RELIGIOUS CONVERSION IS PERSONAL IT IS A MATTER OF ACCCEPTING A FAITH ON THE BASIS OF SCIENCE, LOGIC AND WISDOM. No body has the right to force any one to convert."

My friend, force can be physical or emotional. What if you had a pleasing voice and told someone that one cannot attain salvation unless one follows your religion? Is that forcing? 

Another says " Lol. There is fact and there is speculation!" and follows that up with this "Now here is a fact - hard data Indian Express
 A summary of that "hard data" can be found here

"
There were 745 Mother Teresa homes across the world and 19 in Kolkata. Over 90 per cent of all those who are treated at these homes are non-Christians,” spokesperson Sunita Kumar said.
Claiming that Bhagwat was misinformed, she added: “Among the Kolkata homes, Nirmal Hriday in Kalighat, Prem Dan near Park Circus railway station and Shanti Daan in Tangra are the prominent ones. When children are abandoned at hospitals and come to these homes, they are told about the faith they belong to. Only if abandoned children are found on the streets and their religion cannot be determined, they are raised as Christians.”

(1) How does this statement qualify as hard data? Just because they put a number (90%)to it?

(2) Assuming that I agree to this data, I ask "Yes. In India, you are supposed to find a huge percentage of Hindus from a random population (about 80%). The rest(10%), I assume is non-Hindu, non -Christian? ... Yes!. The point is not who you serve, it is what your motive is.. Obviously you need not convert the 10% non-non-Christians".

(3) What I think of Mother Teresa... I think she and her organization have done great work in alleviating the sufferings of the poor and it is not easy to do.... But, it DOES NOT change the fact that one of her/her organization's  motives was to convert. She may call it "illuminate people's lives by showing them the only way to salvation" etc etc... but .......


 I also encourage you to read this if you want to...
http://www.oshoworld.com/biography/innercontent.asp?FileName=biography7/07-67-teresa.txt

M.K.Gandhi, religious tolerance and the recent comments by a President: Part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

 

"You cannot understand the beauty of our religion. From what you say it appears that you must be brooding over your transgressions every moment of your life, always mending them and atoning for them. How can this ceaseless cycle of action bring you redemption? You can never have peace. You admit that we are all sinners. Now look at the perfection of our belief. Our attempts at improvement and atonement are futile. And yet redemption we must have. How can we bear the burden of sin? We can but throw it on Jesus. He is the only sinless Son of God. It is His word that those who believe in Him shall have everlasting life. Therein lies God's infinite mercy. And as we believe in the atonement of Jesus,our own sins do not bind us. Sin we must. It is impossible to live in this world sinless. And therefore Jesus suffered and atoned for all the sins of mankind. Only he who accepts His great redemption can have eternal peace. Think what a life of restlessness is yours, and what a promise of peace we have" 

Gandhi is taken aback. He writes;

"

The argument utterly failed to convince me. I humbly replied:

'If this be the Christianity acknowledged by all Christians, I cannot accept it. I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin. I seek to be redeemed from sin itself, or rather from the very thought of sin. Until I have attained that end, I shall be content to be restless.'

To which the Plymouth Brother rejoined: 'I assure you, your attempt is fruitless. Think again over what I have said.'

And the Brother proved as good as his word. He knowingly committed transgressions, and showed me that he was undisturbed by the thought of them. 

"

And then in the chapter on "Religious Ferment", he writes,

"

I listened to his discourse on the efficacy of prayer with unbiased attention, and assured him that nothing could prevent me from embracing Christianity, should I feel the call. I had no hesitation in giving him this assurance, as I had long since taught myself to follow the inner voice. I delighted in submitting to it. To act against it would be difficult and painful to me

"

"

The Convention lasted for three days. I could understand and appreciate the devoutness of those who attended it. But I saw no reason for changing my belief--my religion. It was impossible for me to believe that I could go to heaven or attain salvation only by becoming a Christian. When I frankly said so to some good Christian friends, they were shocked. But there was no help for it.

"
And, to me, the best part is here (gives you a deeper insight of the man)
"

My difficulties lay deeper. It was more than I could believe, that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God and that only he who believed in Him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were his sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. My reason was not ready t

o believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world. Metaphorically there might be some truth in it. Again, according to Christianity, only human beings had souls, not other living beings, for whom death meant complete extinction; while I held a contrary belief. I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the Cross was a great example to the world , but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept. The pious lives of Christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other

faiths had failed to give. I had seen in other lives just the same reformation that I had heard of among Christians. Philosophically there was nothing extraordinary in Christian principles. From the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that the Hindus greatly surpassed the Christians. It was impossible for me to regard Christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions.

"

Then he writes about the Hindu religion as well...

"

Thus if I could not accept Christianity either as a perfect, or the greatest, religion, neither was I then convinced of Hinduism being such. Hindu defects were pressingly visible to me. If untouchability could be a part of Hinduism, it could but be a rotten part or an excrescence. I could not understand the raison d'etre of a multitude of sects and castes. What was the meaning of saying that the Vedas were the inspired Word of God ? If they were inspired, why not also the Bible and Koran? 

"

I want to end this with 

"

As Christian friends were endeavouring to convert me, even so were Musalman friends.

Abdulla Sheth had kept on inducing me to study Islam, and of course he had always something to say regarding its beauty. 

"

There are many instances in the book that suggest that he is very uncomfortable with the idea of religious conversion! If at all he came back alive today, he will be infinitely more shocked with the pesudo-secularists (Indian National Congress and its stooges) than he will be with religious intolerance in India.

 

 

 

M.K.Gandhi, religious tolerance and the recent comments by a President: Part 1

Interesting and amusing were the comments made by the U.S. President in India (on religious tolerance!!!!) and much more interesting was what he said when he went back to the U.S. (“acts of intolerance” in India that would have shocked the country’s peace icon, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi).... so much so that it compelled me to write again!

I don't know how many people know that "Mahatma" was not his middle name or any part of his name for that matter... 

I don't know how many have actually read his works, so I am bringing in some excerpts from his oft-talked about autobiography...

In the chapter on "Glimpses of religion", he writes thus;
 all good works were useless
"
These many things combined to inculcate in me a toleration for all faiths.

Only Christianity at the time was an exception. I developed a sort of dislike for it. And for a reason. In those days Christian missionaries  used to stand in a corner near the high school and hold forth, pouring abuse on Hindus and their Gods. I could not endure this. I must have stood there to hear them once only, but that was enough to dissuade me from repeating the experiment. About the same time, I heard of a well known Hindu having been converted to Christianity.

....

I also heard that the new convert had already begun abusing the religion of his ancestors, their customs and their country. All these things created in me a dislike for Christianity.
"

Then in England, he reads Madame Blavatsky's works and writes thus;
" This book stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition"

He also meets a good Christian at about the same time in Manchester. The New Testament, especially, the Sermon on the Mount, he says, "went straight to his heart" because he was able to relate it to the Gita.

The chapter "Christian Contacts" (his life in South Africa) is also worth reading.
He attends prayer meetings with a family, where at one point of time, he is told: "Come, let me break the necklace" (necklace  made of Tulasi beads, a gift from his mother). He refuses!

The host is not able to tolerate M.K.'s argument. Gandhi opines further..

"He was looking forward to delivering me from the abyss of ignorance. He wanted to convince me that, no matter whether there was some truth in other religions, salvation was impossible for me unless I accepted Christianity which represented the truth and that my sins would not be washed away except by the intercession of Jesus, and that all good works were useless".

 Then, in the same prayer meeting, he comes across another sect and one of them confronts Gandhi with this (:) )

 (continued in Part 2)