“SHE REMAINS HERSELF AND INFINITE!!!!”

There is no point of argument in this issue. The Divine Mother of our hearts is the Divine and our human limits don’t even have the slightest imagination of it!

That aside, I do not think early Christians in Israel were persecuted by their orthodox Jewish neighbours because they continued to observe Jewish religious prohibitions such as not eating pork or remaining uncircumcised. The conflict arose with Paul, who was an educated alienated Romanised Jew who wanted traditional Jewish religious prohibitions abandoned so that converted Gentiles—Greeks and Romans—who ate pork and were not circumcised (circumcision was abhorrent to the Greeks for aesthetic reasons and because, like Hindus, they regarded it as mutilation) could be included in the new Christian community. The conflict was between Paul and James (another brother of Jesus) who led the Christian community in Jerusalem and was a Jewish cultural traditionalist.

There is even a tradition that the conflict between the two, traditionalist James and moderniser Paul, became so violent that Paul had James murdered.

Paul won the day with his ideology of faith (over Jewish law and tradition) and Christianity as we know it today is more or less his creation.

Christians use their invented historical persecution as a form of emotional blackmail in order to get special privileges from other communities. This persecution blackmail works well on liberal intellectuals in every society who come down on the side of the “poor Christian” in every debate.

On the other hand, I do think that the early Christian *Jews* endured significant persecution from their fellow Jews – this is most clearly admitted in the Pauline account. It could not be otherwise, given that the prophetic-monotheistic view becomes narrower with each succeeding prophet, and it becomes more and more difficult to innovate unless one can muster more street power than the preceding ‘mouthpiece of god.’ As Shri Goel wrote:

http://voiceofdharma.org/books/htemples2/ch13.htm

…And so on, the story snowballs through the rest of the books in the Bible. The common people in the two kingdoms relapse into polytheism and idol-worship, again and again. More prophets appear on the scene and do what Elijah and Elisha had done. Each succeeding prophet turns out to be a gangster greater than the preceding one. They curse and torment their own people, and invoke calamites on them. But as the people remain indifferent to them, they feel utterly helpless and console themselves by praying for the “great day” when the Lord will destroy all other gods together with those who worshipped them.

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So, it’s not impossible that the early Christian Jews were persecuted by their ‘brethren’ of whom Saul/Paul confesses to being one. Paul’s genius was to start recruiting among gentiles which turned the tide by shoring up numbers for the inevitable run-ins with the paleo-Abrahamics and non-Abrahamics. Recorded history tells us that he succeeded only too well.

Archbishop of Mumbai Oswald Gracias becoming an advisor to Francis is not in India’s interest. The man is a untruthful dissembler who has no sympathy for Hindus–he is a Goan Catholic after all–and no respect for Hindu Dharma.

According to the Mumbai Catholic laity, there have been land scams in the Mumbai diocese. And there are the usual sex scandals (which are still kept well hidden in the Indian church).

Oswald Gracias was involved in producing the New Indian Bible which contained numerous Upanishadic quotations and a drawing of Jesus dancing on the cross. It was subsequently withdrawn and Oswald Gracias also denied knowledge of it though he was allegedly behind its production.

But it has already come out!

Guha has written book on Elwin. His obsession with Elwin is so much that he has carried it over to his book Makers of Modern India. Guha is a real fool.