Hindus, the last of the Pagans?

Koenraad Elst writes: The term Pagan, is generally used for people not belonging to the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Like its Germanic equivalent Heathen, the Latin word Paganus literally means: rural. Christianity started as a strictly urban movement, and only after it had taken power in the Roman Empire in 313 A.D. did it start to conquer the countryside.

Paganism sees the sacred in manifestations of cosmic order, cosmic power, cosmic beauty. The distinction which Hinduism claims is that through yoga, it has refined human sensitivity and made man receptive to subtler cosmic laws, such as the ultimate oneness of all sentient beings, hence the need for daya or karuna, compassion."

What is called paganism, heathenism, and polytheism is in fact the Natural religion of humanity. In areas where it has survived the onslaught of anti-human ideologies with their ego gods, it has retained its self-respecting name. In Japan it is Shinto, in Taiwan. Confucianism And Taoism, and in India as Hinduism.

When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constatantine, the natural humanistic beliefs were proscribed. With the spread of Christianity after the fall of Rome, the story was the same across Europe, the Maghreb and the former Roman Middle East. The high philosophy of the Greeks, the ancient beliefs of ancient nations like the Armenians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Celts, Teutones, Norse, Slavs, and last of all, right up to the thirteenth century, the Lithuanians, fell to the rapacious jaws of iconoclastic and dogmatic Christianity. Under both the dominant Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, manifestations of the natural religion was condemned as sorcery, Satanism, and witchcraft.

India is the spiritual mother of natural religion. Without India the natural beliefs of humanity can never be fully realised.

Can the pagans of Europe thus sit back and let happen in India what they have taken almost two thousand years to throw off themselves? These are not issues for the next few years, but ideas long overdue for now. It must be understood that a renewed fundamentalist church in India would threaten the physical existence of neo-pagans of Europe. The battle between rationalism and dogmatism is not yet over.

(source: Hindus, the last of the Pagans? - Hindu Human Rights.org and Who is a Hindu? - Koenraad Elst p. 37 - 39 and An European Pagan and Non Western Perspective – by Von Christopher Gérard

Conversions have an unedifying history. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says, “Christianity from its beginning, tended towards an intolerance that was rooted in self-consciousness. Christianity consistently practiced an intolerant attitude in its approach towards Judaism and paganism as well as heresy in its own ranks.” The advent of Christianity into entire continents, the Americas, vast parts of Africa, some parts of Asia razed local cultures to the ground.

(source: Conversions! - By Dasu Krishnamoorty - sulekha.com)