RMF Summary: Week of March 11 - 17, 2013

March 12
worship of Jesus child
Maria posts: .... Freising near Munich: Seelenkind (Soul child). When a new nun went to the monastery, she brought a Jesus child (doll) with her who was looked after by her during her whole life in her room with fancy dresses, toys, even changing napkins and fondling it. They discovered several Jesus children which used to belong to nuns from our convent school. We never knew about it.



March 12

My new blog on Tibet Uprising Day: China delayed it by 4 days after Rajiv shares his new blog on HuffPost:  Please post comments THERE AND NOT HERE. You can post a link here to your comment... .....BTW: My Wharton blog first went into 48 special editorial review, and I had to escalate the matter to higher ups, complaining that HuffPost should live up to its public image of intellectual freedom. Once I did that it went thru fast. On the Tibet blog, it took 4 emails to various levels of management, and well over 4 days... March 13 Kant's rigid and abstract categorial imperative versus Indian contex Subra shares a link: .... Rajiv ji tweeted yesterday:  The post uses ideas from BD to study how Kant's 'categorical imperative' rigidity is less useful in practical conflict resolution (e.g. in modern decision-support systems) compared to the contextual ethics developed in Dharmic thought systems, and is illustrated using Asimov's sci-fi robotic laws. March 14 US Catholic Church a $170 billion business Srinath shares: Hindus too have been watching the choice of a new Pope, perhaps with a faint anticipation of a more "liberal" Pope and a softening of the views of the Church... it's sheer folly to think that a business that spends $170 billion annually in the US alone will change its tactics or philosophy any time soon. March 15 Re: Manipal's Mohandas Pai wakes up to India's shabby treatment, say Ganesh shares:....visit to IISc, Bengaluru for the launch of Sri Rajiv Malhotra's book Being Different. His speech in IISc, clearly showed his understanding of the western universalism and how many of the Indian academicians, with their left leanings, were influencing top US universities in a manner that can only be called retarding progress. Hoping to hear more such top notch names of Indian industry come out in open and voice their support for the right cause, without fear of media and the ruling party. Renu adds: "....Let us resolve to not just be the World Guru but also a strong power that will stand for no nonsense and small acts of silly disrespect from the West or the East any more. That is our YUGA DHARMA now."   March 16 Shri Rajiv Malhotra's Talk at New Delhi on 23 March Jalan invites: ... 7th Chamanlalji Memorial Lecture which Shri Rajiv Malhotra will be delivering. Details as below:     Event:                     7th Chamanlalji Memorial Lecture     Main Speaker :     Shri Rajiv Malhotra     Chief Guest :          Dr.Subramanian Swamy     Time:                       Saturday March 23, 4.00 pm     Venue:                    Constitution Club, New Delhi   March 16 Shiva-worship-not-a-religious-act-income-tax-tribunal-says Kiran shares a link. Arun shares an alternative link: ....The Economic Times has it much better.   In brief, the IT department had gone after an institution claiming it was a religious, not a charitable institution; and the IT Tribunal said, no, it was a charitable institution... Venkat comments: "....Expense on worship of Hindu Gods & Temple maintenance cannot be regarded to be for religious purpose The core issue the definition of Hinduism and giving importance and preference to the western term "religion" The answer will be a vigorous propagation of indigenous Hindu friendly terms while showing why foreign descriptions are not suitable for our society. . Rajiv adds: "A major problem has been caused in India by the legal use of the term "religion" in giving special tax treatment and other concessions. The above article is the latest of a series of rulings that some aspect of Hinduism is not entitled to religious treatment. So to get equal rights in our own country, we must prove we are a "religion" as per Abrahamic criteria, because that's the definition enshrined in our laws. I wish someone would litigate in the Supreme Court that the legal provisions made for "religions" should equally apply to dharmas as well. Otherwise we are at a disadvantage when we show our distinctiveness, and to claim parity we must get ourselves digested into "religion". What a joke! What a circus full of clowns!!"  [We have noted Rajiv ji's comments on the sad state of affairs  in the wikipedia page. This website now has a collection link to Rajiv Malhotra's works. Click Rajiv ji's picture on the right to access]. March 17 My Wikipedia entry is obsolete, misleading Rajiv comments: ... In [the] .... Wiki post (on differences between dharma and religion) also, he has "digested" my works into a sundry of misc articles by several persons. There is virtually nothing I wrote and certainly not a deep appreciation of the differences between dharma/religion as expounded in BD [this directly relates to the book BD. We hope to collect this discussions and summarize in a separate post] March 17 Special issue on Being Different in the International Journal of Hindu Studies Several critical reviews were written. Here is Rajivji's rebuttal to those reviews. ... [depending on the trajectory of the discussions in this thread, we may cover this in depth later.] March 17 ISKCON: Push Marketing? Sunday March 10, 2013, Hindu Temple of Atlanta had special Mahasivaratri puja & events. The premises has separate temples for Shiva & Vishnu (Balaji). I was...