India—A faulty foundation! (Part 1)

(By AiG[US] speaker Geoff Stevens, who conducted a speaking tour of India in December)

February 19, 2001

Imagine a country one-third the size of the United States or Australia yet with four times the population–over one billion people! The busy streets of India’s central and northern cities are full of animals like cows, oxen, sheep, and vehicles like bicycles, rickshaws and noisy scooters, motorcycles, cars, trucks. And then there are all the children, feverishly going somewhere. The people seldom smile.

Streets are lined with open sewers and stacked with garbage. The sickly yet sweet stench is revolting. Naked children wander in garbage piles in search of food. Most spend their day working hard for food. The extreme poverty is shocking. This is a large part of India.

AiG sent me and AiG volunteers Brandon Criner, Dr. Cherian John, and George Samkutty to India to bring the much-needed message of Creation/Gospel to the world’s second most populous nation (almost one out of every six people in the world lives in India). We held several pastors’ conferences, Bible college lectures, church meetings, and evangelistic outreaches in villages. Dr. John, a medical doctor, even hosted a camp where he provided much needed medical attention to several hundred people. Yet with the many meetings we held, we reached so few in comparison to India’s billion people—97-98% of whom, I’m told, don’t know Christ.

It is said that the rats eat more than the people do. People starve, yet there really is enough food--most Hindus are vegetarian because they consider animals sacred and not to be eaten. So the crippled beg for food but are shown little compassion. Why? Karma.

According to Hindu beliefs, karma has to do with the fact that your present condition is the result of something you did in a previous lifetime. So if you help a beggar, you are interfering with the process he must go through to have it better in his future life. Not only are people to be reincarnated in this belief system, but the animals as well. (That’s why people don’t eat them — what if that cow you just ate was great-uncle Benny in his next life?)

Hinduism is built on death, suffering, and dying over millions of years. To the Hindu people, death is something good and natural. Even now as a result of the recent devastating earthquake in India, people will somehow try to accept the death of loved ones as a good thing, since now they are hopefully free to go on to a better life.

One other basic tenet of Hinduism is the belief that truth is not absolute. There is no authority about right and wrong. This is because there is no such thing as sin, which follows from the belief that there is no single authority to set the rules--which comes from the mindset that there is no Creator, which comes from rejecting the Bible as the source of truth.

Without the Bible, the Creator and His rules cannot be revealed. People make up their own rules. Whether it is the practice of ‘suttee’, in which a widow jumps on the funeral pyre of her husband, to the way people drive, it is all the result of a theology that claims there is no personal Creator God to whom they are all accountable.

(Read part 2 of this commentary)