Thanks for the thoughtful answer. I respect your opinion, and am definitely not trying to convince you of anything. Let us continue the dialog as an intellectual exercise (with Phyllis’ permission). Let me pick up topics in order of interest, and not necessarily as you wrote them:

1) Your statement: “and the concept of Grace is absolutely incompatible with the concept of Karma.”

Not so. The Bible “whatever you sow, you reap”, is Karma par excellence. Avatarhood, according to Hindu lore, and as explained in the Hindu Vishnu Puranas, and also, more importantly in the Bhagavad Gita, is verily an exercise of Divine Grace. In the Gita, Lord Krishna (God) states that every time ignorance prevails (Adharma), the Lord, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, bodies himself forth to correct and reset the course. If this isn’t Grace, what is Grace? Besides, in Sanatana Dharma, prayer is paramount, it is studied as Mantra, and constantly exercised, asking the Divine for grace. Grace is the ability of the Divine to set a new course, individually or cosmically. It is accepted that by the practice of Yoga and the help of Divine Grace, Karma can be changed and even erased.

1.1) I love Jesus, but I cannot accept him as the only Son of God, nor I accept that those that don’t follow one or another Christian Church are condemned to hell (Catholic Mel Gibson’ statement a while back about his protestant wife). Alas, I do not accept the Christian Hell either; this is the childish part I was referring to (but never offensive, this is your opinion, I don’t find others’ opinions or believes offensive). What kind of God would punish his son to eternal damnation? I can accept Jesus as an Avatar among several others (very few indeed). We are all sons of God.

2) Your statement: Your description of the Prince of Peace on the first paragraph:

I agree 100%. I even accept that he rose from the dead and lived; this is within the realm of Siddhas (powers) of Yoga.

3) Your statement: “Now: so far as I can see, unlike Muslims, ordinary Hindu people accept the idea of a universal ethic involving comprehensible concepts of justice, reciprocity, truthfulness, fidelity, etc; this means that on the day-to-day level, Jews and Christians and Hindus can comprehend one another’s behavior, do business with one another, and cooperate in resisting the Jihad”.

In regard to Hindus, I notice here (subconsciously perhaps), a little prejudice, or a lack of familiarity with the topic. We Hindus accept the idea of a One, Ineffable, Brahman. We are not idol worshippers, but worship many gods. Who is the say that a god with human body and an elephant head, Ganesh, does not exist? As the Christian church, and Judaism before, has always allowed for the existence of angels and cherubims. According to the Upanishad, in Sanskrit: “Brahma Ekam Eva Advitiyam”, meaning God is One without a Second. These lesser gods are lieutenants of God.

4) Your statement: “Look down your nose at me all you like: in my ignorance and weakness I *cannot* bow down to the Hindu gods”.

I definitely don’t look down on you. Everyone must experience his own experience. Alas, I wish you the best!

5) This is my experience after many years of meditation, mantra, and worship:

5.1 God is everything. There is not one thing that is not God. Alas, the solidity of the world can be proven illusory; bur still is part of Him. The Universe is a play, Lila, whereby God re-discover Himself as symbol and out of Ananda (bliss). Everything, as Bishop Berkeley suspected, is consciousness.

5.2 Evil is contained within God, but differently from the Absolute Truth and Love, evil is not an absolute, but a means to an end, and will be defeated at the end.

5.3 The Mother is the feminist creative power of the Lord. She verily is the womb of the Divine. And as such, we Sanatana Dharmis worship her.

5.4 Finally, man is not final, but a transition step towards the manifesting of God on earth, and a true Supramental Being.

And that said…Who is G-d? I practice Brahma-Abhyasa, meaning the thinking only of That, the cogitation on That, the prayerful attitude towards That. In going to bed, the last thought is God, and in awakening the same. I call Him with every blessed name, God, Dios, Brahman, Adonai, Elohim, Allah.

My main goal in life is to surrender to Him.

Now: so far as I can see, unlike Muslims, ordinary Hindu people accept the idea of a universal ethic involving comprehensible concepts of justice, reciprocity, truthfulness, fidelity, etc; this means that on the day-to-day level, Jews and Christians and Hindus can comprehend one another’s behaviour, do business with one another, and cooperate in resisting the Jihad.

Beyond that, though, there are great gulfs fixed, and it would be dishonest to pretend that the differences did not exist, or did not matter: for example – no Christian can ever accept any denaturing of Jesus by his reduction to the status of either guru or avatar (any more than they can accept the ghastly travesty of ‘Isa’ the lesser ‘prophet’ that appears in the Quran and Hadith); and the concept of Grace is absolutely incompatible with the concept of Karma.

As for Gnosticism: here, from ‘the descent of the dove’ is Charles Williams defining the difference between the Gnostics and the apostolic Christians -

“See, understand, enjoy”, said the Gnostics. “Repent, believe, love”, said the church – “and if you see something by the way, say so”.

And as for knowledge: it is the person and the works of Yeshua that *are*, that define, for a Christian, the meaning of knowledge and love and power.

“For the foolishness of G-d is wiser than men, and the weakness of G-d is stronger than men”.

Look down your nose at me all you like: in my ignorance and weakness I *cannot* bow down to the Hindu gods; instead I choose the weakness and folly of the Crucified and Risen Lord: this pesky first-century rabbi that the Romans put to death, obscenely, publicly; but who (I confess and believe) rose from death. It is between the scarred hands of that Jewish carpenter that I place my life and my death.

I am convinced that in the darkness and chaos of America’s prisons, it is He who *can* recreate the ruined lives of those who – if they do not encounter Him, – may well also be seduced, as these wannabe synagogue-bombers were, into killing and being killed in the service of the arab god of blood and war, allah.

Namaste Dr S McCosker!

[To say that is only to state a fact.]
This is your opinion.

1) [MiamaMan in his infinite barely disguised contempt for, and hostility toward, orthodox Christianity]

I do not have any hostility towards Christianity, orthodox or not. As per neutralizing, neither, Christianity is dwindling itself to naught, look at Europe: Czechs and others.

2) [by his nonsensical claim that early Christians believed in reincarnation! - a claim which is completely incompatible with traditional biblical theology, anthropology and cosmology]

This is fact not opinion, historical facts. You twists my words, I did not say early Christian believed in reincarnation, I wrote that some did, like father of the Church Origen of Alexandria, and the Gnostic sects. The influence of Plotinus, who believed in metempsychosis as many other Neoplatonists is obvious in the early Greek Christian Church Fathers. It is also a fact that metempsychosis was deemed “anathema” in the Council of Nicea AD 325, a fanatical ruling.

3) [as Betty Blue says, have its own spiritual vision, its own culture and its own power; and to be blunt, at its incandescent core that vision, that culture, and that power, which MiamaMan looks down upon and dismisses as inferior to, ‘weaker’ than, the ‘power’ he finds in ‘the East’, is totally in contradiction to the cosmology, theology and anthropology of ‘the east’]

I agree with BettyBlue, who can deny that the West have had its own spiritual vision, culture and power? That’s not the issue I was discussing.

As per the many books you quote, so as to help your argument, I guess. The mind is finally not an organ of knowledge. It goes round and round and there is no end to its arguments, its contraries, its gropings, its gaspings. This has been the main failure of the West, ultimately a failure of the intellect, which is inferior knowledge.

To all these books, I refer to you one of the shortest, but more concise and pregnant with knowledge, scripture of the world: The Isha Upanishad. It consists of only 18 verses, and forms a chapter of the Yajur Veda. It introduces the aspirant to the realm of spiritual Intuitive Knowledge, and then some.

Hari OM!

“Feminists created the fatherless society, and eventually they will reap what they have sown.”

Actually the fatherless society is rooted in the “me generation” – the hippy rebellion, “do your own thing” culture which preceded the rise of the feminist equality movement. The liberalization of sex removed strictures in place based on notions of morality. A term evicerated since from our general vocabulary. Prior to this time the culture of single mothers and babies born out of wedlock pretty much permeated welfare recipients, a generational phenomenon that rewarded single mothers, absent fathers situations as qualifier for welfare recipiency.

Hart’s ‘The Doors of the Sea’ is a magnificent restatement of the central scandal of Christianity (which is itself, in all sorts of ways, a re-presentation of the scandal that the Jews already presented to the entire world).

MiamaMan in his infinite barely disguised contempt for, and hostility toward, orthodox Christianity (and his attempt at the same time to absorb it and thus neutralise and nullify it, by his nonsensical claim that early Christians believed in reincarnation! – a claim which is completely incompatible with traditional biblical theology, anthropology and cosmology) is merely reiterating the sorts of accusations that always have been made by many a defender of the Way of the World, the World of the Wheel, against those irritating representatives of YHWH the liberator: against Jews first and then against the Christians also. It is very telling that in the ancient world both Jews and early Christians were often accused of being ‘atheists’. They showed no proper respect to the gods of this world. And they insisted on – they *were* – the scandal of the particular: the Jews in their claim to be the bearers of a unique and historic Revelation (it is no coincidence that Psalm 83, in which the Nations unite to destroy Israel, follows upon Psalm 82, in which YHWH marches into the ‘council of the gods’ and puts a flea in their collective ear); the Christians in their even more scandalous (scandalous even to many Jews) assertion that the Infinite-Personal G-d of the Jews, the One who calls and knows each star by its name (and one must assume therefore, also so calls each human person) had manifested himself, once and for all and for ever, uniquely, in one particular Jew, Yeshua of Nazareth.

The ‘West’ (Jerusalem or Zion, the Jews and the Christians) does indeed, as Betty Blue says, have its own spiritual vision, its own culture and its own power; and to be blunt, at its incandescent core that vision, that culture, and that power, which MiamaMan looks down upon and dismisses as inferior to, ‘weaker’ than, the ‘power’ he finds in ‘the East’, is totally in contradiction to the cosmology, theology and anthropology of ‘the east’ (just as it is also totally in contradiction to the cosmology, theology and anthropology of Islam). It cannot be assimilated to, or absorbed within, that ‘eastern’ worldview. To say that is only to state a fact.

I didn’t discuss Indian culture, for the obvious reason you mentioned. I kept it to spiritual power only. The caste system is a blot on Indian culture, no doubt. Your idea of the so-called “horrifying” life of endless rebirth is mistaken. Neither for Hindus or Buddhists is endless. For Hindus ends in “Moksha”, or liberation, the re-absorption into the One Brahman (God). For Buddhists, who are basically atheists, the re-absorption is into an impersonal Nirvana. So, Buddhism did not raise to challenge reincarnation, actually they took the whole thing from Hinduism root and branch. Buddhism arose to challenge Vedic lore and Brahmanism, which had become too rigid.

Reincarnation is the only way to explain spiritual evolution. I do not buy the Christian/Abrahamic concept of “one soul, one life”. By the way, this concept, which was prevalent among the Essene group in Judea, and later accepted by some fathers of the Christian Church like Origenes, was made “anathema” in the Council of Nicea AD 325.

I like and admire much about Indian culture, but we also need to remember things like the caste system, where Brahmins ruled, and the untouchables got to do all the dirty work, and a horrifying vision of life as an endless cycle of being reborn again and again, which Buddhism arose, to counteract.

The West has its own spiritual vision, it’s own culture and its own power.

Maybe kids at younger ages should be engaged in discussions about relationships. We seem to be stuck between sex now as long as you use birth control and no sex till marriage. We don’t seem to talk about teen years as a time to learn about who you are and what kind of partner you want. I recently read somewhere that some young women didn’t want to marry the fathers of their children because they were afraid he wouldn’t stick around. They wanted marriage but had idealized it and were afraid their partners wouldn’t make the grade. We are talking about kids who haven’t seen the ups and downs of a marriage and haven’t learned how to compromise. Perhaps some of the feminist you-go-girl attitude has led girls to believe that compromise is selling out in the same way that basic academic achievement for black boys has been classified as selling out to the man.

We have become so absorbed with the plight of single mothers that we have neglected to praise the married moms – especially if they choose to give up some career time to devote themselves to child rearing. The Ward and June Cleaver models have been reviled, but we haven’t offered new models for the average Joe and Jane. Our attention seems focussed on super achievers and celebrities.