Idle Worship

Except for the names of the gods, the religion of India has never really changed. It absorbs everything, accepts everything, and as a result stands for nothing. Hinduism is quite literally a religion of everythingness and nothingness. So too is the faith of its first and foremost offspring, Buddhism. To demonstrate that little has changed, let us begin with some modern quotes from the quintessential "guru" or "great soul" of India, M. K. Gandhi, and then we will move on to the deepest roots of both Hinduism and Buddhism in the source religion of Sumeria. This has nothing to do with Gandhi’s success as a wily lawyer engaged in civil rights, any more than it has to do with the aims of the "reverend" Martin Luther King. Do not confuse worldly political movements or religion with the truth as those men so cleverly did to further their causes. This is an investigation into what is counterfeit, earthly and temporary compared to what counts in the real kingdom which is eternal and not of this world.

"As for idol worship, you cannot do without it in some form or other…what do the Roman Catholics do when they kneel before Virgin Mary and before saints, quite imaginary figures in stone or painted on canvas or glass? Even so, it is not the stone we worship, but it is God we worship in images of stone or metal, however rude they may be." (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Harijan Weekly Journal, 13/3/1937, p.39) "And the worship of the image of Child Krishna or Virgin Mary may become ennobling and free of all superstition. It depends upon the attitude of the heart of the worshipper." (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Young India journal, Navajivan Publishing House, 5/11/1925, p.378) "Images are an aid to worship. No Hindu considers an image to be God. I do not consider idol worship a sin." (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Young India journal, Navajivan Publishing House, 6/10/1921, p.318)

Gandhi said repeatedly that he was neither for nor against idol-worship, even tree-worship, since he viewed that as a form of reverencing the god who made the plant world. This two-faced Janus-like approach is a defining characteristic of Hindu thought, leaving the options open. Some Janus idols actually had four faces. So did some of the Celtic gods. Hinduism has no limit to its faces and will mix right with wrong at every opportunity. Gandhi was right; there is no difference between the veneration of Krishna or Mary. He was wrong when he employed the classic excuse for idolatry: that it is really the god behind the cherished pagan item that one adores. That is exactly the justification every Christian uses for bringing an Osiris tree into his house, saying it is now there to signify truths about Jesus. Check it out on the Internet. There are countless church sites of every denomination defending the great Christ-mass pagan-fest with precisely this rationalization. The Biblical judgment for this devious ploy is, as we have seen repeatedly in Scripture, death, be it by worldwide flood, fire raining on a city, plague or invader’s sword. You shall not confuse the LORD who created heaven and earth with anyone or anything else: not a golden calf of Apis, a sacrament of the Queen of Heaven, a Tammuz spring festival, not even with a hankering for a cloak or other memento from Babel. You shall serve and worship the LORD alone and keep yourself clean from these abominations. Gandhi worshipped the goddess Lakshmi and who knows how many other Hindu deities. He hated the concept of serving one god to the exclusion of others. He called it gross, fanatical, a deadly form of idolatry, worse than the worship of stone and metal idols.

"I am an iconoclast in the sense that I break down the subtle form of idolatry in the shape of fanaticism that refuses to see any virtue in any other form of worshipping the Deity save one’s own. This form of idolatry is more deadly for being more fine and evasive than the tangible and gross form of worship that identifies the Deity with a little bit of a stone or a golden image." (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Young India journal, Navajivan Publishing House, 28/8/1924, p.284)

Gandhi likewise saw nothing wrong with temple reverence. He rightly identified this as an inherent characteristic of the natural man and a craving shared by Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Moslems worldwide. According to Scripture, the natural man is unregenerate, dead to God, and cannot inherently please Him. (John 8:34, Ephesians 2:1,5; 2:2, 1 Corinthians 2:14, Romans 6:20; 8:8) That is precisely why man builds temples, in ignorance, groping after his own unenlightened heart. If Gandhi had paid attention to the Word of God instead of the Hindu gods he would have found out that he was absolutely in the dark, thinking that churches were houses of god, mistaking Jesus for a mere "reformer" and saying that Jesus did not discard such structures forever. Jesus died to do that, to save his elect from all the temples and priests that the dark lord has invented since Babel. The New Testament makes this abundantly clear, from Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well to the truly royal Book of Hebrews. But in the darkness of religion, such truths are not welcome.

"Why does a Moslem give his life for defending a mosque which he calls a house of God? And why does a Christian go to a church, and when he is required to take an oath, he swears by the Bible? Not that I see any objection to it. And what is it if not idolatry to give untold riches for building mosques and tombs?" (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Harijan Weekly Journal, 13/3/1937, p.39) "I do not regard the existence of temples as a sin or superstition. Some form of common worship and a common place of worship appear to be a human necessity. Whether the temples should contain images or not is a matter of temperament and taste." (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Young India journal, Navajivan Publishing House, 5/11/1925, p.378) "Temples or mosques or churches...I make no distinction between these different abodes of God. They are what faith has made them. They are an answer to man’s craving somehow to reach the Unseen." (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Harijan Weekly Journal, 18/3/1933, p.6) "I know of no religion or sect that has done or is doing without its house of God, variously described as a temple, mosque, church, synagogue or agissari. Nor is it certain that any of the great reformers including Jesus destroyed or discarded temples altogether." (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Harijan Weekly Journal, 11/3/1933, p.5)

Church building and idol worship are essential foundation stones in the religion of the natural man. Both espouse faith in the wrong house of god. Both result in veneration of a baal, the wrong lord. Both are counterfeits, and both come from the original source in Sumeria. Even the Israelites fell into this trap, desiring a temple that they should not have asked for, and which was first built for them by Solomon, the king who started out wise but ended his life in the idolatrous worship of Asherah (Ishtar). India was one of the earliest to receive its portion of the temple-building religion from Babel, later than Egypt but before Greece and Rome. First, the people built their cities (c.2500 to 1700 BC), and then, after an invasion, they revered what are called the ancient Vedic gods introduced from Persia (c.1500 to 400 BC), and finally they refined the triads which most people today recognize, trinities very similar to those of the Greco-Romans and Celts (c.200 BC to 200 AD). This three-stage development is in reality three rolled into one, triple faces of the same old coin first minted in Mesopotamia. The place the people chose was similar to the flat plain and delta of the Euphrates or the Nile, the valley of the Indus  river.

Remains of a “city” under the sea have been discovered in the Bay of Cambay, off the coast of the border between India and Pakistan, which some have claimed was built around 9000 BC. But carbon dating is notoriously inaccurate beyond a few thousand years. It is also based on a system that already presumes the world is very old and assumes that radioisotope degeneration has been continuously uniform over time. We have no idea what aging or disintegration was like before the Flood. It is not impossible that these ruins may be of a pre-Flood urban area, a kind of Indian Atlantis, in which case it will the first of its kind to be found, but it could hardly be older than 5000 BC. Scripture tells us only about the first post-Flood cities founded by Nimrod, the grandson of Noah. Since all other descendants of Adam perished in the judgment by water, Sumer remains the post-Flood cradle of mankind. Inland from this underwater city we have the definite evidence of ancient urbanization in the valley of the Indus  River, but this is not as old as that of Mesopotamia or Egypt. The Indus is the land settled by the people who migrated east from Babel, and it is the source of the words Hindu and India.

"The Indus Valley culture, one of archaeology’s newest finds, apparently had strong ties with Sumer…it seems logical to suppose that the older culture of Sumer influenced the younger culture of the Indus Valley." (The Cradle of Civilization, Kramer, p.158) "Indus civilization, also called Indus Valley civilization, or Harappan Civilization, the earliest known urban culture of the Indian subcontinent, first identified in 1921 at Harappa in the Punjab and then in 1922 at Mohenjo-daro, near the Indus River in the Sindh, now both in Pakistan…decidedly the most extensive of the three earliest civilizations, the other two being those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, both of which began somewhat before it." (Encyclopedia Britannica, Indus Valley Civilization, Std.Ver.1999) Prominent among their deities were the bull-horned man from Sumeria, the mighty Nimrod-Dumuzi, and many copies of the goddess Ishtar.

The Indus civilization clearly shows much of the influence of the Mesopotamian model, but it is also distinctly Hindu, just as Egypt was distinctly Egyptian in flavour. Archaeologists noted, for instance, the love affair that Hindus had (and still have) with multiple circle of life ornaments, the many bangles on their wrists and ankles and rings in their noses and ears. They decorated the cattle they worshipped in a similar manner. The main walled cities covered large urban areas that would rival Nineveh and yet instead of temples or pyramids, which came later, the earliest people built monumental bathing houses for spiritual purification. One reason given for the building of pyramids in Mesopotamia and Egypt was to withstand another Flood and even build higher than its top level so that men might have a refuge from the flat land around them. Harappans chose instead to attempt to wash away the sin that might incur another Flood, and such public ritual bathing is still a cornerstone of Hinduism. Worship of trees, plus numerous terracotta goddesses similar to Ishtar, as well as clay seals inscribed with script, sacred cattle and a popular fish scale pattern, all reveal the Indus Valley to be a Mesopotamian replica that resembled the original more than Egypt did, but with traces of Egypt also found in the picture.

"The Harappa culture (often called the Indus Valley civilization), located in modern Pakistan, has produced much evidence of the cult of the goddess and the bull. Figurines of both occur, with the goddess being more common than the bull. The bull, however, appears more frequently on the many steatite seals. A horned deity, possibly with three faces, occurs on a few seals, and on one seal he is surrounded by animals…No building has been discovered at any Harappan site that can be positively identified as a temple, but the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro was almost certainly used for ritual purposes, as were the ghats (bathing steps on riverbanks) attached to later Hindu temples…There is clear evidence, however, of the worship of sacred trees or of the divinities believed to reside in them…and the horned god has been interpreted as a prototype of the Hindu god Shiva…The fact that Harappans buried their dead with grave deposits, a practice not followed by the later Hindus, suggests that they had some belief in an afterlife." (Encyclopedia Britannica, Hinduism, Religion in the Indus Valley, Std.Ver.1999)

The Indus civilization fell prey to an invasion that brought this culture’s original form to an abrupt end. At about the time that the Israelites were being freed from Egypt, the Indo-Europeans from northern Persia and the Caspian Sea poured into India, driving the original inhabitants, known as Dravidians, into southern India. At the same time, the Aryans also moved west into Europe, and this explains the similarities between their gods as well as between the languages of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. The oldest written texts of these Aryans in India were called Vedas, four main books of which the oldest, the Rig-Veda, was probably finished around 800 BC. Attached to these were the Brahmanas (commentaries and directions for the rites performed by Brahman priests) and later the Upanishads (End of the Vedas) written between 800 and 400 BC.

 

"Vedic religion, also called Vedism, the religion of the ancient Indo-European-speaking peoples who entered India about 1500 BC from the region of present-day Iran; it takes its name from the collections of sacred texts known as the Vedas. Vedism is the oldest stratum of religious activity in India for which there exist written materials. It was the starting point of (modern) Hinduism. The earliest Vedic religious beliefs included some held in common with other Indo-European-speaking peoples…it is impossible to say when Vedism eventually gave way to classical Hinduism, a decrease in literary activity among the Vedic schools from the 5th century BC onward can be observed, and about this time texts of Hindu character began to appear." (Encyclopedia Britannica, Hinduism, Vedic Religion, Std.Ver.1999)

 

Vedism brought with it fire worship and Persian sungods like Mithra (Mitra) and Rudra (Sanskrit, "Howler," who later became the Hindu Shiva) the destroyer, divine archer of vengeance yet also a god of healing. Heaven or the distant sky god was called Dyaus (identified with Zeus) and his female consort Earth was called Matr (Mother, Matres). Prajapati (Pashupati), the bull-horned deity, was worshipped as the Lord of All Creatures and regarded as a god of gods. Akin to Cernunnos of the Celts, he was portrayed as a master, keeper and protector of the animals, like Noah, and yet also as their hunter, like Nimrod. Prajapati was later incorporated into Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. The Vedic gods were said to number 33,333 but in the texts they are simply referred to as “The Thirty Three.” These are all merely multiples of 3, all Sumerian clones replicated and blended ad nauseum.

 

"Generally speaking, Vedic gods share many characteristics: several of them (Indra, Varuna, Vishnu) are said to have created the universe, set the Sun in the sky, and propped apart heaven and Earth. All of them are bright and shining…The three most frequently invoked gods are Indra, Agni, and Soma. Indra, the foremost god of the Vedic pantheon, is a god of war and rain. Agni (a cognate of the Latin ignis) is the deified fire…and Soma is the intoxicating or hallucinogenic drink…Indra is cast in a warrior mold and the breaking of the monsoon is viewed as a cosmic battle. The entire monsoon complex is involved: Indra is the Lord of the Winds, the gales that accompany the monsoon; his weapons are lightning and thunderbolts." (Encyclopedia Britannica, Hinduism, Vedic Religion, Std.Ver.1999)

In the Vedic period of the Upanishads, around 500 BC, the concept of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls in the "circle of life" spread throughout the Indo-European peoples, and the universal symbol they chose, from the Celts to the Hindus, was the zero or zzar seed and sun-wheel. In the Indian concept, the individual self (atman) and brahman (supreme reality) became the basis of the metaphysics in this circle, the goal being to escape the cycle, to lose one’s atman in the brahman altogether like a drop in a bucket of water. This, if achieved through meditation and sufficiently good karma, would enable the devotee to escape the wheel of rebirth and instead enter the bliss of impersonal nothingness.

This entire philosophy is as unscientific and ludicrous as the theory of evolution, and yet every bit as popular. By observation alone, a child knows that a tree is not the seed that falls from the tree. The acorn that grows anew is not the original oak from whence it came. Each is according to its kind, and it carries its seed, but is not one and the same as its seed. That is true science as declared in the Book of Genesis and it is the complete opposite of the "knowledge" of the Vedas ("veda" means knowledge in Sanskrit). Every living creature is as unique as one’s fingerprint. A son is not his own father, no matter what the dark lord has fabricated with tales of Tammuz or Osiris reborn as Horus. You are you, reader, and no one else. You do not return to this earth reincarnated in some insect or bird. When you step on an ant or worm you have not accidentally killed a past relative. That confusion of man with animal spirits is a ploy that is constantly repeated in the religions that came from Babel. When you die, you do not become spiritually recycled in some other creature, but you will be resurrected, as yourself, just once. You live once on this earth, and then, for better or worse, you will be raised to meet the real Son of God.

"And just as it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly awaiting him…See to it that you do not refuse him who is speaking…let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire." (Hebrews 9:27,28; 12:25-29) "He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man…the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the Evil One, and the Enemy who sowed them is the Devil; the harvest is the end of the age…the weeds are gathered and burned with fire…there men will weep and gnash their teeth." (Jesus, Matthew 13:37-42, 49) "When the Son of Man comes in his glory…before him will be gathered all the nations; and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats…And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." (Jesus, Matthew 25:31-33,46)

The escape from sin and this troubled world is not through focussing on your navel or hoping that your karma or "lot" will be better "next time around." There is no next time. That is why the apostles of the LORD said, listen to this, and listen very carefully if you want to avoid the coming wrath and break away from your own "crooked generation." (Acts 3:38-40) It cannot be achieved through following the teachings of a fictional and substitute son of heaven, or hoping for such a "reborn" myth to reach down and free your soul. You must belong to the real Son of God. An eyewitness of Jesus Christ, the apostle Peter says, "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12) And Jesus’ closest friend, the apostle John says, "Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the anti-christ (substitute), he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father…He who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne his Son. And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son does not have life." (1 John 2:22,23; 5:10-12)

The Hebrew prophets were announcing the coming of this Son of God loud and clear between 800 and 500 BC, at the very same time that the dark powers were propagating counterfeit seeds like Zoroaster, Mithra and Buddha. No wonder Jesus identified them all as false shepherds, saying, “All who came before me are thieves and robbers.” (John 10:8) Nevertheless, the eastern peoples chose the sungods and their sun-wheels. The Buddha is simply another weed sown by the Adversary; yet another version of the sungod, this time blended with the subtle philosophy of the Upanishads around 500 BC. Every image and monument from India to Java or Japan proves this to be so. So let us have a good look at him in the next section, the Far East.