Why A Hindu Temple Is Not Like A Soho Phone Booth

[Sunder]

<!--QuoteBegin-Hauma Hamiddha+Sep 28 2006, 08:24 PM-->QUOTE(Hauma Hamiddha @ Sep 28 2006, 08:24 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->The standard response of Hindus to their enemies is to get defensive. They throw muck on us and we are busy cleaning up. Don't mind the muck and waste time with it. Be like a varAha. Simply throw muck back at them snd that too on their face and something will stick. Let them spend the time cleaning themselves.
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Hauma, behaving like a varaha may be one type of response. It may be done by one section of Hindus. But you very well know Hindu retorts have historically been multipronged. If we behave like varahaas we shouldn't complain being treated like one.

It is an uphill challenge, but shouldn't an effective response thwart and prevent further attacks? A Varaha like behaviour only encourages more muck thrown our way.

(quote) If all of india stands up and slings all the mud at the bottom of the indian ocean, it would not amount to an infinitesimal part of what the missionary are doing to us.. (/quote.)

[Guest]

I'm just surprised at the gaping difference between the way they treat Hinduism in the west and the way they treat Islam.
Nearly everyone, from politicians to reporters, carefully tread around Islam: "there's a fundamentalist 'fake' Islam, and a true peaceful Islam (didn't you know, Islam means PEACE!)" Intolerant Christo the Pope excepted, of course, as well as people who've woken up to true Islam.
Islam generally gets the benefit of the doubt, though perhaps things are starting to change.

On the other hand, without bothering to verify stereotypes and even completely false ideas created and propagated by the Christo British Empire, these same careful treaders of Islamic waters like to stomp on Hinduism for no real reason and completely out of the blue.

I can't help wondering if the author of that article <i>intended</i> to create a controversy thinking to prove that 'look, all religions are intolerant, don't scapegoat the musselmans', expecting Hindus to react the same way the ChristoIslamic Islamists did to the recent papal insult.
It must have been a sad let down for Kealey when the worst he got was foul language ... He might have to give up his hypothesis now: maybe not all religions are intolerant ... maybe Islam really is the religion of ISLAMIC PEACE NOW OR ELSE!

However if the suspicion I've expressed in the previous paragraph is all wrong and Kealey really meant what he wrote, I am just disappointed that yet again I find a bigot and pseudo-scholar at an institute that calls itself a university, instead of a <i>real</i> (and therefore unbiased) scholar. And that says a lot more that's damning about Britain and its education (merely because it is factual) than his improperly researched article - if he did any real research at all - littered with ignorant half-truths and whole lies, about Hindu temples.

Pseudo-scholar <i>and</i> bigot? Can't be good for people to call into question Kealey's very area of expertise and authority: his "scholarship AND professionalism".
Kealey: "Anything but <i>that</i>!"
But, as Dark Helmet says in Spaceballs, and I quote: "Yes, THAT!" <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif' /><!--endemo-->

Sorry, today is still Navarathri, so nothing can bring me down.

Happy Navarathri everyone. May Durga destroy the ignorance creating such false scholarship, may Lakshmi grant us all contentment and may Saraswati make us all the wiser that there may be no more untruth like that of Kealey's.

[Guest]

Husky, welcome back! It's been a month since you were last here.

[Guest]

Thanks Vishwas, although I have to abscond again for a few days. Will be back after that to read all the IF posts I've missed out on.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>HHR Press Release : 3/10/06</b>
http://www.hinduhumanrights.org/pressrelea...OfTheTimes.html
Sign of the Times: Soho wild fantasies of a University ‘vice’ Chancellor
In the week when religious controversy and violence led to calls for mutual respect and an apology from the spiritual leader of one of the great world faiths, the well established and normally respected Times newspaper decided to publish an article by Terence Kealey entitled “Why is a Hindu Temple like a Soho Phone Box? Must I draw you a picture?” Kealey begins this highly provocative article, reminiscent of the prejudices of colonial times, by drawing the reader's attention to the fact that there are some Hindu temples that have erotic sculptures and closes the paragraph by asking the question "How can a religion be so pornographic?"    Kealey then goes on to say that Hindu temples acted as brothels and writes as if temple prostitution and 'suttee', the self-immolation of widows on their husband's funeral pyre were a universal phenomenon, and a part and parcel of Hinduism in spite of the fact that these practices were not common even thousands years ago and find no sanction in Hindu texts. In a nutshell Kealey paints the picture that Hindu Dharma is the spiritual codification on sexual exploitation of women by a chauvinistic patriarchal power system. In needs to be noted at the outset that there is nothing actually unique in this slander of Hinduism, most notably from Chicago University’s self-professed Hinduism “expert” (sexpert?) Wendy Donigger who in seeing sexual license in Hindu texts looks like she is following in the footsteps of the city’s most notorious individual in her Al Capone like assault upon the very subject she ‘teaches’.

The first counter-question arises as to how can the example of a few medieval sculptures characterize Hinduism as a whole? The author fails to point out is that these erotic temples account for a very tiny proportion of Hindu temples as a whole. But in writing his article, he creates the impression that the vast majority of temples are like these. It is very poor 'science' to take a minority and use it to draw conclusions of the whole. The way the article is written, a lay British reader would think that the average Hindu temple is like a brothel, including the hundreds of Mandirs present in the UK. In fact, none of the numerous Hindu temples in Britain are particularly erotic, but as a result of Kealey's misinformation, many Britons will see these Hindu temples as possible centers of erotic cults, thus contributing to prejudice and misinformation.

Kealey is not just content with reducing Hindu spirituality to nothing more than a network of brothels and sexual exploitation. He goes on to give credibility to the highly debated Aryan Invasion Theory as if it were fact although volumes have been written, both for and against it, and many scholars believe that no such invasion ever happened, more so with the new information that is forth coming with technological advancement. However disregarding all that Kealey writes:

DNA testing has confirmed that upper- caste females in India are genetically indistinguishable from lower-caste females, because pretty hoi polloi girls have always been imported into the palaces. But the upper-caste males of India — who are the descendants of the Aryan conquerors of 5,000 years ago — have never allowed male proles to marry their daughters, and they remain genetically distinct. They have, therefore, retained the spoils of conquest for themselves and their sons.

The highly debated nature of the Aryan Invasion Theory aside, Kealey in fact contradicts himself within the couple of sentences that he writes. How can the males be distinct but the females not!? Did these genetically distinct Aryan men not have mothers? Well how can sons be genetically different from their mothers? But in Kealey’s world we have an Indian population with gender determining differential genetics.  This is the thoroughly unscientific way in which Kealey tries to get himself out of a fix, but in fact goes to display his lack of research and intellectual inability to write two scientifically coherent sentences consecutively.

Now anyone who thinks that giving academic respectability to disputed racist and eugenic ideas of Aryan race and “Aryan conquerors of 5000 years ago” is a harmless cerebral exercise and that Kealey should have the right to his views should remember that the Rwandan genocide. The genocide in Rwanda both in 1994 and the less well known one in 1959 just before decolonisation, was the result of Belgian administrators and anthropologists propounding the myth of inferior Bantu Hutus and the superior Tutsis, with the latter given all sorts of bizarre origins to “prove” their racial superiority: Hamite, Israelite, even Persian Magi. And To anyone who witnessed the mass killings of Tutsis by extremist Hutu militia that followed, pseudo-academic racist anthropological ideas manifested itself in the form of a blood soaked machete blade. Even today we find these race theories inspiring and giving ideological boosts to neo-Nazis, for example observe the recently rising phenomenon in Russia of neo-Nazi  skinheads.

Kealey may just have been putting across his opinions but one should realise that the sad and disturbing manifestations of the acceptability in vilifying and denigrating Hindus for spiritual, cultural and racial reasons leads to the apathy we witness when Hindus are ethnically cleansed from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir, when they are persecuted in Malyasia, and when they are the excluded right here in Britain from even low level participation in the process for social and community cohesion on a par with other communities. It is unfortunate that in the very week where the Pope’s remarks were deemed to have cause unacceptable offence, anti-Hindu prejudice can run rampant in the pages of a national newspaper as the Times which has reduced itself to intellectual tabloidism by publishing such a prejudicial and disoriented article, drawing far-fetched conclusions based on thoroughly unscientific methodology and that too as part of its 'Science Notebook' column, thus paraded as a rational and objective analysis. Is this the Sign of The Times?

Hindu Human Rights,
Serving Hindus Worldwide
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