Talk:Root of Religious Persecution and Fear Psychology of Abrahamic Religions
Islam and Christianity allow us only one life. They also exhort their followers to spread their religion. Great rewards are promised by the Bible to Christians and by the Koran to Muslims if they spread their religions. Finally, both Islam and Christianity declare that their religions alone lead to salvation and that people who do not subscribe to their beliefs are condemned by God and are destined for eternal Hell. The first factor, combined with the rest, has made a deadly mix ever since these religions were founded. In every nook and corner of the world, one can see Christian priests chanting "Repent ye for the hour is at hand. Acknowledge Christ as your savior and ye shall be saved." The Muslims do the same and state- "For the Kafirs, Allah has prepared a blazing fire whose fuel is men and idols." The Muslims and Christians see a sense of urgency to convert the whole world to their faith and thus "save the damned souls" before they die. Such an ideology has led to countless bouts of persecution of unfortunate men and women by Christians and Muslims. The histories of these two faiths are soaked in the blood of millions of innocent men and women who suffered for not adhering to these religions. In the Americas, the Christians worked millions of ‘heathen’ American Indian Natives to death and then ‘honored’ them with Christian burial. The Muslim chronicles boast of countless campaigns of Muslim rulers and of ordinary Muslims in which several thousand infidels were dispatched to hell.
In contrast, the record of Hinduism and other religions believing in rebirth after death is much more honorable, and religious persecution by members of these faiths is more of an exception rather than a rule. Even the most fanatical Hindus will declare that good Christians and Muslims will be reborn as Hindus and then attain salvation. So where is the question of religious persecution or forcible conversions?
A belief in rebirth is incompatible with the fear psychology that Abrahamic belief in resurrection promotes. For this reason, Christianity and Islam have suppressed the former,
“Why were the reincarnationist beliefs suppressed? The obvious answer is that such beliefs threatened authority. In promising multiple rebirths, reincarnation rendered the proclamations of the Pope or the Grand Mufti or whoever was the ruling head at the time transitory and, truth be told, irrelevant. The religious authorities were dependent upon the single-life scenario for their very livelihood, making the belief in multiple lives far too dangerous to allow to stand. As a result, reincarnation remained largely outside of Asia for a better part of the last twenty-one centuries.”[1]
Ian Stevenson repeatedly noted that among Muslim households in India and elsewhere, children who reported remembering previous lives were scolded and asked to suppress these memories because Islam did not believe in the theory of rebirth. Belief in a single life followed by the Day of Judgment and an eternal hell or heaven thereafter is a fundamental or core doctrine of Abrahamic faiths that is controverted by the Theory of Rebirth and the related evidence,
“….While the scientific community has little to lose if reincarnation should ever be proven (and, indeed, much to gain in terms of acquiring a means of assessing historical knowledge from the past), Western-style religion would have much to lose. It would mean nothing less than a rethinking of thousands of years of orthodoxy, and so it should come as no surprise that some of the reincarnation’s most formidable attacks come from the religious community. To many of the faithful, it’s not merely a question of testing a hypothesis, but of keeping order. So firmly entrenched in Western theology is the concept of the single life and final judgment that there is the fear that reincarnation might well overturn the whole apple cart, so to speak, and threaten the very mechanism by which Western religion functions. Without a fear-based theology to maintain the religious hierarchies of Christianity and Islam (and, to a lesser extent, Judaism), control over the faithful could well be jeopardized, and presumed chaos would follow. Missionary work would grind to a halt if the natives ever got wise to the fact that they could “repent” in the next life, and by extension, it was always imagined many a church pew would grow cold if the congregation caught similar wind of the idea. In effect, if reincarnation were ever to be proven true, it would mean nothing less than the death of traditional Western religion as taught over the last two millennia.”[2]
A loving parent has infinite patience with his recalcitrant prodigal child. He could never smite him or condemn the child to everlasting pain no matter how disrespectful and disobedient the child is. In Hindu Dharma, Brahman gives us not just one but many lives, so that we have several chances to understand the true nature of things, or ourselves and reach the Final Goal. The Abrahamic God gives the finite human being with finite understanding and a finite karma that results in an infinite reward or retribution – all this just does not sound fair or logical.