'Evil' Hindu Practices

[Husky]

Returning to this bit from from the previous post:

[color="#0000FF"]indiatoday.intoday.in/video/mumbai-tantriks-quacks-anti-superstition-law/1/310961.html

Tantriks thrive in Mumbai despite anti-superstition law[/color]

After reading the first line at the link (didn't read the rest, don't need to): Curious, how "quack" and "tantrik" are hereby becoming permanently associated in christolaws/media. Of course the christomedia will no doubt present pictures of quacks whenever speaking of the matter (but that's not whom they're after, and anyone with an iota of sense would know that).



I had earlier this month or so read news that the stOOpid-times-infinity [color="#0000FF"]BJP declared that "black magic should indeed be prohibited" ('but not other kinds', by implication or perhaps even vocalisation/explication on their part), [color="#0000FF"]but the silly nationalists don't seem to recognise that in christianism's view, all Tantra/all Hindoo heathenism IS black magic.[/color] (BJP missed the logical conclusion in that. How they managed to miss it, I don't know, when it was in print in the 4th century CE and onwards already.)[/color]

When looking up something else, found the following among others. It explains - in words I could not find - the exact reasons for why the above is truly scary in very real, practical terms. And why - as christianism deliberately intends - Hindus will misinterpret what these laws mean, whereas christianism intends something else and something very sinister by them altogether. It was so imperative for those claiming to bat for the Hindu side - BJP, nationalists, vocalists - to know what "superstition" means in christian parlance vs how christianism means heathens to misinterpret this, especially before "nationalist" politicians blindly chimed in with anti-superstition laws. People walked right into that one. And wow, will they make everyone else sorry in time.



giornopaganomemoria.it/superstitioen.html

(Don't know the site, not endorsing it therefore. Just linking to it for the following stuff)

[color="#0000FF"]The Latin word superstitio, from which the common word superstition derives, actually had different meanings across centuries and has been used to define (also) Christianity and later Paganism. But what we are here to underline is that the possibility of misunderstanding has been used to deceive the Pagan under the juridical aspect in late antiquity; from what you can read below, even modern Pagans have a lesson to learn from that about how much important is to understand the meaning that a word has according to the person we are talking to.[/color]



The first meaning, in order of time, of the word superstitio is "divinatory practice": with this meaning we can find the word used in Plautus, Ennius and later Pliny. From the 1st century b.c.e. there is another meaning, a very important one for this piece of writing, that is "practice outside official religion": that meant not only a religious practice that didn't belong to official religion because of its different origin (a private practice of a particular family, or one coming from abroad), but also an excessive and unreasonable religious belief, or a practice implying an excessive and unreasonable fear of the gods. This is why Livy uses this word to define the Bacchanalia forbidden by the Senate and Pliny defines Christianity through it; Varro, Cicero, Seneca and Servius used it to call Roman practices outside official religion.



The word enters the juridical language with this meaning. When a word enters the legal language and is used to write laws, it becomes a technical term to define what is legal and what it's not; while a word used in a philosophical or literary context can be explained by the writer or by the context itself, a word used in writing a law should be clear and with one meaning only. We'll see that this wasn't true for late antiquity laws.



At first, we find the word superstitio in laws against those who lead weak-minded people to excessively fear the deity (a law by Marcus Aurelius) or who practice a religion that terrifies people. This excessive fear is what is called superstitio. So now it's clear why some authors call Christianity a superstitio.



Christian polemicists and apologists of the first centuries found themselves labeled as superstitiosi and so assimilated the meaning of superstitio as "unreasonable belief" and started to apply it on Pagans. In their writings, superstitio becomes a synonym of Paganism. Lactantius writes that religio veri dei cultus est, superstitio falsi, religion is the worship of the true god, superstition of a false one (Divinae institutions, 4.28.11). The same idea can be found in Tertullian, writing of gentilicia or romana superstitio, gentiles' or Roman superstition, and in Orosius.



During the 4th century, when Christianity took more and more importance until it became the state religion, both the meanings of superstitio coexisted: according to Pagans, it meant all excessive religious practices, while according to Christians it meant the whole paganism. In a law dated 319, the word superstitio still means divination.



[color="#0000FF"]This ambiguity at the end turned against pagans since it has been used against them. This didn't happen only under the legal aspect:[/color] even the panegyrist writing the praise of Constantine who defeated Maxentius (in the famous battle at Ponte Milvio, when the vision of the cross should have occurred, from what Eusebius wrote) uses ambiguity not to displease anyone, saying that Constantine won thanks to divina praecepta, divine teachings, and Maxentius lose because of its superstitiosa maleficia. A Pagan reader could then understand that Maxentius had lost because he had practiced superstitious or illegal magic, trusting on it for victory, while a Christian reader could understand that Maxentius had lost because he was a Pagan and so god had helped the emperor instead. Constantine could act against Pagans only in the Eastern part of the Empire, but not in the Western one, where Pagans were much more and more powerful. In an inscription from Hispellum, Umbria, Constantine forbids the temple to be used in a superstitious way: once again, a Pagan could understand that only unreasonable practices were forbidden, a Christian that all the Pagan rites were. Maybe this is the reason why Eusebius affirms that Constantine forbade sacrifices and temple worship, while we there is no law about that yet.

[color="#800080"](^ Important example to study the christian meaning. It's a code christians understand.)[/color]



[color="blue"]Obviously, an ambiguity in a legal text is far more dangerous than an ambiguity in a literary text as the praise to Constantine was, because it can be used for advantage of one party. Constans, who was a Christian, used the misunderstanding of the word in the famous law issued in 341: cesset superstitio, sacrificiorum aboleatur insania, superstition shall cease; the madness of sacrifices shall be abolished. Today it seems clear to us that the law was going to abolish sacrifices, but when it was issued, the law could be applied in two different ways: a Pagan administrator would have prevented people from doing too many, useless, sacrifices for superstitious (in modern sense of the word) reasons, a Christian one would have abolished pagan sacrifices at all. In this way, Constans could satisfy the Christian will to abolish Paganism without provoking a strong Pagan reaction he couldn't have been able to face yet, because Pagans understood the law differently from Christians even approving it because it recalled preceding laws against superstitious (unreasonable, outside the official religion, strange and made with boast) practices. In facts, regular sacrifices took place in Rome even before this law; there's another Constans law against the superstitiones, directed to Catullinus, prefect of Rome, who was pagan, and this law too could be interpreted in two manners.



After Constantius enforced his rule by defeating Magnentius, he didn't need to keep good relationship with Pagans anymore: the laws issued from 356 to 360 forbade image worship, closed temples and forbade divination. None of this law uses the word superstitio.



The word appears back again in 5th century laws, but this time it's clearly defined as sacrifice and worship of temples: Christianity has already taken over the empire and affirmed the equivalence between superstitio and everything different from Christianity. From the 5th century, the word is used also to define Judaism and heresies.[/color]

Next to the Codex Theodosianus, the Italian(?) lady who authored the above also mentions as references:

Michele R. Salzman, Superstitio in the Codex Theodosianus and the persecution of pagans, in



"Vigiliae christianae", 41(1987)

L. F. Jannsen, 'Superstitio' and the persecution of christians, in "Vigiliae christianae", 33



(1979)

But this is why English is so dangerous to Hindus: English - when it comes to matters pertaining to ideology and religion - is a *loaded* language. People don't really know the real (i.e. christian) meaning of seemingly-general/"secular"-sounding words. But christianism will get you to acquiesce to the secular meaning that crucial words have at their superficial level and will thereafter nail you with the true, christian meaning.



By letting the anti-superstition law pass, Hindus essentially did the equivalent of a victim signing their name to a paper they didn't understand. And hereafter, the "Anything you say can and *will* be used against you" rule applies. It is with such thoughtless actions as these - which recur regularly in India today - that Hindus have narrowed down their future and thus got themselves cornered.





Oh, and the following alludes to another tactic of christianism well-recognised for what it is by other heathens (but not by all Hindus):



giornopaganomemoria.it/lupercaliaeng.html

THE ABOLITION OF LUPERCALIA





While in other cities pagan festivals had already been deleted and some temples destroyed, in Rome still during the 5th century c.e., the festival of Lupercalia was still celebrated, even though its religious meaning wasn't known anymore: the survival of the festival still one century later than the Theodosian edict which made Christianity become the state religion, is witnessed by Gelasius and his letters against the Lupercalia. In facts, in January 495 c.e., Gelasius forbade Christians to take part to the festival that was near to begin because in that festival demons were worshipped.



This is the period in which pagan gods are identified with demons, due to Augustin and Gelasius himself, who followed Augustin's track: in facts, most of early Christian writers used to identify the worship of the Pagan gods with the worship of statues or of men who had lived many centuries before and had been deificated because of superstition. In his letters and masses, Gelasius underlines a lot the bound between the festival of Lupercalia and feminine fertility, but the celebration of the festival during the month of February, the blood on the boys' foreheads, the laugh make us think more to a purification festival, maybe intended as a purification from every obstacle to fertility. Under the emperor August, the festival had been reinstituted, and only then the features related to feminine fertility had been emphasized; moreover, the festival became one of the many festival underlining the emperor's sovereignty. So it became part of the state religion: in this case when we say 'state religion' we don't mean the only religion in the state, but a series of practices that the citizens were expected to follow to enforce their belonging to the state. For sure, this affected both the survival of the festival and the hate Gelasius showed against it.



So Gelasius was really bothered about the Lupercalia, because they were a very ancient and long -lived festival, related both to the feminine fertility (that means sex, too) and to the awareness of being Roman citizens. Of course Gelasius rationalized, saying that the festival was a non-sense, because if its aim had been to promote fertility, then there would have been no fertility in Africa or Gaul where people didn't celebrate it. Rationalization is a common instrument in the hands of those who wrote against pagans until Middle Ages and this is true also for what concerns witchcraft: in facts, opposite to what is commonly believed, during the Dark Ages the church didn't accept the idea of a witch as a woman with magic powers used to harm people, because according to Christian theology, only god can have or give those powers, which can't be gained even through a pact with the devil. So the church put itself in a rational position towards pagan cults, which were charged of being just superstition.

(Note: the bit on witchcraft is not true. Joseph McCabe demonstrates from his survey of medieval church records concerning the inquisition and torture of witches over several centuries, that the church - or at the very least the lower rung/implementing side of the church - most definitely believed that the so-called "witches" were in league with devils/demons/non-existent christian spooks and had gained "demonic" powers as a result. It is the defunct christianheritage site that showed that the practical "achievement" of the church's genocide of about 9 million women + men - a great many of whom professed to be christian until the end - was to wipe out all those women and their families who knew how to prevent or terminate pregnancies. I.e. that the church wanted knowledge of contraception exterminated in order to explode the numbers of christians by force. <- A policy which came in handy to christianism when it was time for the church to take over the "new world" etc and populate it with christianism by genociding the natives. I.o.w. the church was building a christian army of conquest and settler populations.)



This way of thinking remained until these days in the minds of many who dealt with paganism. The main difficulty lies in look at paganism as a religion, but with a completely different meaning of 'religion'. It's true also that, as the pagan state religion spread, as we said before, the personal attention in religious practices began to diminish and this made way for a superstitious behavior. From a Pagan point of view, the statalization of Roman religion can be considered some kind of decadence, because the religio, that is the attention needed during religious practices that allows us to feel the gods around us, was no more needed in celebration. All it was needed was a formal adhesion, to prove the good will of citizens to be good citizens.

Note that christianism only tries to pseudo-rationalise heathenism. Christianism will not rationalise itself, especially since christianism can't stand up to scrutiny. Its jesus is not even a deified historical character, but a deified fiction, which - reducing it further to its bare essentials - remains a mere and pure fiction and nothing more.



But repeating the first highlighted statement to re-emphasise this next statement:

This is the period (Pope Gelasius' et al's time when Lupercalia got banned) in which pagan gods are identified with demons, due to Augustin and Gelasius himself, who followed Augustin's track: in facts, most of early Christian writers used to identify the worship of the Pagan gods with the worship of statues or of men who had lived many centuries before and had been deificated because of superstition.

That is to say, Christianism's initial tack was to impute that the Hellenes had committed apotheosis to "generate" their Gods by deifying men. And from there derived the christian statement that Hellenes did not have actual Gods* (which still fits the christian allegation of "false Gods" that was used against heathens, but the "false Gods" incrimination got changed to mean demonic - i.e. finding a place in *christian* cosmology - and/or else not real or historical in any sense).



* This is a form of that "rationalisation" mentioned above which the church used to demote Hellenismos. It is still a christian tactic in great use - seen in how christianism alleges that all Daoist Gods were apotheosised heroes, by twisting Daoist literature about historical Chinese heroes into becoming a universal statement on all of Daoism: that all Daoism's Gods are allegedly no more than deified heroes. Of course the Daoists don't stand for the christian rewriting of their Gods/religion/cosmology/history in this manner, and have always taken pains to distinguish between their human heroes and the "avataras" of their Gods/Gods.



[It's true the Romans had deified emperors - but this was a Roman state policy at one point in time, and the laity did know to distinguish between their ancestral Gods and their suddenly deified emperors. However, the christian imputation was that *all* GrecoRoman Gods were merely deified by the GrecoRomans. But Herakles etc was not "deified". Herakles was always the son of Zeus, even when reading the traditional narratives concerning him as "myth". He was not a person of whom people *later* decided that he'd be Zeus' son and that he therefore must have ended up in Olympus upon his death. Instead, the very narratives that originally spoke of him already contained all these features about him. As a consequence, the Hellenes worshipping him as both earthly divine-origin hero and as the divine God residing in Olympus thereafter is correct. And where the Hellenes meant for their Herakles to be historical, they don't mean that only one part of his life-story was historical and the other mythological: both his earthly life and his taking his place in Olympus are both to be considered equally historical or else equally mythical. He was always *meant* to join the Olympic Gods, if he was the one meant to vanquish the Titans by standing alongside the known Olympians. Which he did, of course.]