Tuesday, September 11, 2018

How would Adhi Shankaracharya respond to the Punjab legislation on Blasphemy laws?

 How would Adhi Shankaracharya respond to the Punjab legislation on Blasphemy laws?

You think  Gopayya AKA  Bhakta Ramadas should have been imprisoned for life for cursing God Rama?

I was watching Trevor NoahNewYorkk Special Comedy show only yesterday"Afraid of the  Dark" .His take on the exchange between the fist Indian to the First colonial British was Hilarious.

Maybe he should be invited to perform for the Punjab legeslative assembly. They can learn some  wisdom,
Stop wasting  time  on such stupidy and  concentrate  on  improving the lot of the common mane
What does blasphemy mean to a Hindu, and what is “the holy book” that is being blasphemed against? On whose authority does the Punjab government pronounce that the Bhagvad Gita is to the Hindu what the Bible is to the Christian or the Quran to the Muslim? How did the view of a certain, and to a considerable extent Anglicised, element of the Hindu middle class about the Gita come to represent the view of all Hindus? How does one even begin to understand that every faith, and not only Hinduism, began to be shaped in the image of Protestant Christianity commencing from the late 18th century? We have here another instance of how our thinking takes place without any awareness of the fact that the intellectual legacies of the Judeo-Christian tradition are unthinkingly deployed to frame very different experiences.
I am reminded, finally, of an anecdote from the life of Vivekananda. It is reported that on a visit to Kashmir, some of Vivekananda’s followers swore, upon seeing the broken images of the goddess strewn over the countryside, that they would henceforth not permit her images to be defiled. Vivekananda turned to them with a retort, “Do you protect the Goddess, or does the Goddess protect you?” The chief minister and the other self-appointed guardians of religion can usefully take home a lesson from this story.
It is arrogant for them to believe that the great faiths of India require the protections of the Indian state; and this is, of course, apart from any consideration of whether the Indian state has any moral standing to uplift these faiths. On nearly every ground that one can think of, the Punjab and Central governments would be well advised to withdraw the amendment to Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code.

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