This segment will serve as the Let My People Conform???
This essay will be parsed into the following segments:
Part 1: What’s In A Name???
Part 2: What is Prayer???
Part 3: Teach Us How to Chant???
Part 4: Is There a Magic Word???
Part 5: Let My People Conform???
Part 6: Thou Shalt Not “Kill” or Not “Murder”???
Part 7: Is it All Our Fault???
Part 8: What Do You Mean “Suffer”???
Part 9: Christ the Temporary???
Part 10: Does the Bible Say???
Parker/Prabhupada wrote:
“Therefore, the Christian clergymen should cooperate with the Krsna consciousness movement. They should chant the name Christ or Christos and should stop condoning the slaughter of animals. This is not some philosophy that I have fabricated; it is taught in the Bible. If the Christians follow these principles, the world situation will improve. If they simply stop killing animals and chant the holy name of Christ, everything will be perfect. The Bible also demands this. So the Christians should cooperate with us and chant.”[2]
God sent Moses to tell Pharaoh “Let my people go” that they may worship God, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the one and only God, to worship Him and Him alone (see Exodus 5:13). The conclusion Parker/Prabhupada has come up with is that God sent him to tell us “Let my people conform.”
If we get hooked into accepting this new interpretation we are simply told that the best thing we could do is to chant not just any chant but a chant, which is a Krsna mantra.
“By practical experience also, one can perceive that by chanting this maha-mantra, or Great Chanting for Deliverance, one can at once feel a transcendental ecstasy coming through from the spiritual stratum…There is no need, therefore, to understand the language of the mantra, nor is there any need for mental speculation nor any intellectual adjustment for chanting this maha-mantra. It is automatic, coming from the spiritual platform…But there is no doubt that chanting takes one immediately to the spiritual platform, and one shows the first symptom of this in the urge to dance along with the chanting of the mantra.”[3]
Apparently ignorance really is bliss. Here we are taught that there no need to even learn what we are chanting nor is there need to speculate on what we are doing—personal subjective experience is all that counts.
Parker/Prabhupada also wrote,
“The main point is to chant the name of God…So the Christians should cooperate with us and chant.”[4]
Apparently, we should conform to their side. We Christians believe that there is one God. When there is only one there is no choice to be made between two or more. Millions of Christians and Jews have lived and died for the belief that there is only one God who has given us His word in the Bible.
We must, by definition of those beliefs reject all other gods and scriptures as false. If it is all the same, why does not the Krsna Consciousness Movement teach its devotees to chant solely to Christ? Why do syncretists always expect conversion to their practices?
[1] The whole article that is being commented on is called “Christ, Christians, & Krishna by Nathan Parker. Srila Prabhupada Speaks Out: On Christ, Christians, and Krsna.” (BTG—Vol. 12, No. 12, Dec. 1977)
[2] Ibid.
[3] A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Search for Liberation (Los Angeles: The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1981), pp. 44-45
[4] BTG—Vol. 12, No. 12, Dec. 1977
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1 comments:
Dear Nathan,
While I appreciate what you are saying, I think you are missing one of Prabhupada's key teachings in that the Hare Krishna movement also teaches that there is just one god. The essence of the main scripture is that krishna is god and all others come from him. Also, yes it is good to know what you are chanting about, but the point being made is that god's name is so powerful that even without know what you are chanting about you are receiving benefit.
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