ayudh.com

To
The Editor,
Sunday Times of India,
Mumbai, India.
E-mail: toieditorial@timesgroup.com

Dear Sir,

We would like to draw your attention to certain erroneous information that has been carried in The Sunday Times of India, Mumbai dated 10th January, 1999, about our Zarathushtri religion, under the title: “A tribe, a faith and an festering controversy”.

The information your paper has carried is grossly erroneous, presents the one-sided liberal and irreligious point of view, and is against the religious beliefs of the majority of the Parsi and Irani population in both India and Pakistan.

In the article, one Dr. Irani, a visiting “US-based scholar of philosophy” says “Zoroastrian texts contain specific injunctions that emphasise that it is a universal religion, open to anyone willing to receive instruction.”
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One of the teachings of Buddhism that is difficult for its adherents to explain to non-Buddhists, one that even long-time Buddhist teachers have a problem with, is the anwer to the following question: If Buddhism denies a creator God, then what does it say about the creation of the universe? How did the universe come to be? To answer this question, let us first review the principal postulates of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic version of the creation of the universe. In these religious traditions the creation story derives from two assumptions:

1. Creation is the work of a single agent: God.
2. Creation occurred in a single event, and relatively recently.
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by Aine MacDermot

Vedic Origins of the Europeans: The Danavas, Children of Danu

Note: This article shows how the Proto-European Aryans, like the Celts, were originally a Vedic people called the Danavas or Sudanavas (good Danavas) connected to Vedic kings, sages and yogis.

Many ancient European peoples, particularly the Celts and Germans, regarded themselves as children of Danu, with Danu meaning the Mother Goddess, who was also, like Sarasvati in the Rig Veda, a river Goddess. The Celts called themselves “Tuatha De Danaan”, while the Germans had a similar name. Ancient European river names like the Danube and various rivers called Don in Russia, Scotland, England and France reflect this, as do place names like Den-mark (Danava-Marga), to mention but a few. The Danube which flows to the Black Sea is their most important river and could reflect their eastern origins.

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This article was copied from “Hindus, Jews share bonds of Faith — An interfaith gathering for Hanukkah” by Steve Brunsman, which appeared under the rubric “Religion and Ethics”, The Houston Post, December 11
1993.

The ancient faiths of Hindu and Jew are not commonly linked, yet both
pull at India-born artist Bentzion Ben Yosef Yakof, an Israeli
immigrant who now lives in Houston.

Yakov, born in Bombay, India, was raised in a big Jewish
practising family. They regularly observed the eight-day Jewish
festival of Hanukkah. They burned oil in colored glass bowls. His
mother baked special cookies.
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European Vedic interpreters used the racial idea to explain the Vedas. The Vedas speak of a battle between light and darkness, between the Sun God and his manifestations and the demons of darkness. This was turned into a war between light-skinned Aryans and dark-skinned Dravidians. Such scholars did not bother to examine the fact that most religions and mythologies including those of the Ancient American Indians, Egyptians, Greeks and Persians have such an idea of a battle between the forces of light and darkness (which is the symbolic conflict between truth and falsehood), but we do not interpret their statements racially. In short, Europeans projected racism into the history of India, and accused the Hindus of the very racism that they them-selves were using to dominate the Hindus.

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Advanced Information

Panentheism is a doctrine of God which attempts to combine the strengths of classical theism with those of classical pantheism. The term is particularly associated with the work of Charles Hartshorne. Hartshorne contends, however, that other philosophers and theologians have elaborated panentheistic doctrines of God, especially Alfred North Whitehead but also Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber, Gustaf T Fechner, Mohammad Iqbal, Charles S Peirce, Otto Pfleiderer, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Friedrich W J von Schelling, Allan Watts, and Paul Weiss.

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