SV: Vicious Debate

[DEVARAKONDA VENKATA NARAYANA SARMA]

At 11:15 AM 12/5/98 +0530, you wrote:
>DEVARAKONDA VENKATA NARAYANA SARMA wrote:
>
>> To call Swami Vivekananda a racist taking some select quotations from
>> his writings without reference to the circumstances prevailing at that
>> time is bad and without doubt motivated analysis.
>
>You will surely remember that at that time I wrote that I was not
>looking for such statements, nor did I wish to see them. I mentioned
>them as a necessary corrective to a totally uncritical adulation of
>Vivekananda which is based on a highly selective reading of his writings
>-- selective in a different manner.

What you wish to see or do not wish to see does not make any difference
to me. I have a right to say what I want to say.

>> We should not forget Swami Vivekananda was
>> a great admirer of American people and a number of westerners and
>> Americans in particular became his devotees. Some of them adopted
>> India as their country and did selfless service to India. If Swamiji
>> was a racist they would not have done that.
>
>Things are not so simple as that. We know of coloured people in South
>Africa who faithfully went to the churches that advocated apartheid and
>who quietly sat in the pews allotted to them. Apparently they wanted
>that kind of religion. An eye-witness just recently told me how in a
>public lecture Lakshman Joo of Kashmir told some female devotees of his
>that they were ugly because they were Americans, and they were
>delighted.
>

This has absolutely no relevence. In your eagerness to denigrate Swamiji
you do not even notice the asbsurdity of your argument. In S.A. there
was political & economic coercion. Swamiji did not and cannot coerce
independent Americans.

And finally I will give you one example.

A person who is venerated by many as son of god said

"But he answered, and said, it is not meet to take the chidren's bread,
and to cast it to dogs." Matthew 15.26

The dogs in the above statement are Canaanites.

Do you call Jesus racist. (I do not.)

Do you call him a child of his times and not ahead of his times.
( I do not.)

regards,

sarma.