Hinduism, evolution and child abuse

Listening as is my habit to ‘Thought For The Day’ on BBC radio 4 this morning, I reflected that I wouldn’t mind having atheist contributors on as so often requested IF they were balanced by REAL Christians, uncensored. The status quo is hardly threatened by the usual BBC approved TFTD vicars like Reverend Giles Fraser and Canon Lucy Winkett (both fully signed up to the gay rights agenda, as it happens). As it was, a Hindu priest and theologian Akhandadhi Das presented TFTD this morning. He began by mentioning a comment made by the Narcissistic homosexual singer songwriter Stephen Morrissey, in which he apparently compared eating meat with child abuse. I immediately thought of Richard Dawkins’ similar analogy, for he has repeatedly said that for parents to teach their children that the Bible is true and/or to doubt Darwin is ‘tantamount to child abuse’.

 

I’m not surprised to find the right-on author of songs like ‘Meat is Murder’, ‘Heaven knows I’m miserable now’, ‘I have forgiven Jesus’, ‘I’ll probably never see you again’, and ‘I’m so in love with myself’ (*) coming out with such a view. He is the only person in history to have persuaded Penguin books to issue an autobiography as a Penguin Classic (see above). No surprise to find him using such an offensive analogy.

Anyway, Das continued his monologue by saying that although he wouldn’t go as far as Morrissey, he could as a strict vegetarian and Hindu see his point. He then treated us to some Hindu theology (as a Hindu theologian, one would expect him to) stressing the point that humans and animals were all the same really.

Hindus of course believe in reincarnation, that we are souls on an endless cycle of rebirth and perhaps would live as a worm, a whale or a woman, all depending on what karma we had earned in our past lives.

It’s easy to see why such a belief system would embrace evolution from a common ancestor, since snails, bacteria, plants and people were all in this philosophy derived from the same kind of spiritual and atomic material. It is however radically different from the teachings of the Bible, as Andrew Sibley has written in his recent book 'Cracking the Darwin Code' in which he explores the connections with pagan religions and evolutionism.

As I thought this, Das went on to cite the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in support of his pantheist beliefs. Again, no surprise to me, I have read Teilhard and the man was certainly no Christian but a pantheist. He was also one of the fathers of theistic evolutionism, with his ‘Omega Point’ musings, His book ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ (which I mentioned here in a recent post before the radio 4 broadcast which stimulated this post) is widely recognised as an attempt to blend Biblical Christianity with molecules to man evolution. Very much at the expense of Christianity, as any reader can see.

Teilhard was certainly present at the Piltdown dig which led to the notorious Piltdown Man fraud (typically dismissed as a ‘hoax’) and there iscircumstantial evidence pointing to him as the chief fraudster, as investigated by Malcolm Bowden. We may never know the facts about this skilful and effective deception (it was 40 years before it was found out, during all that time it was part of the 'mountain of overwhelming evidence') but there is no doubt that Teilhard de Chardin worked hard in his writings to persuade people that evolutionism and Christianity could be combined.

Phew! A complicated web of thoughts from one short broadcast, but I'm not making any of this up.  Webs of deceit are complicated things. Everything is indeed connected, the trick is to understand how, by whom and to what end result. Stephen Morrissey and Richard Dawkins are connected by their belief that they have the right to say that people who disagree with them are as bad as child abusers. Hindus and other pagans are connected with theistic evolutionists by a belief  that we are descended from animals. And the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and modern theistic evolutionists are agreed that evolutionism can be imposed upon Christianity without harming either.  

As the poet hath said

 

'Oh what a tangled web we weave

when once we study to deceive.'

 

(*) the last of these titles was made up but in my opinion describes Morrissey's work accurately.