Ishwar
Sharan is the pen name of Canadian author Swami Devananda Saraswati, a Smarta
Dashanami sannyasi who took his Vedic initiation from a renowned
mahamandaleswar at Prayag in 1977. His purvasrama family were middle class
professionals and God-fearing Protestant Christians. He did not complete high
school and is self-educated through reading books on all subjects, with a
special interest in religion and history. He has traveled extensively in
Canada, USA, Europe, North Africa, West Asia and India. His experiences during
these wandering years include service in a communist kibbutz during the Six Day
War in Israel and some months spent in retreat in a Franciscan hermitage near
Assisi, Italy. Enroute to India by road in 1967, he visited the places that his
child-hood hero, Alexander the Great, had visited on his expedition to India in
the 4th century BCE. Later he tried without success to visit Babylon near
Baghdad, where Alexander had died, and Ctesiphon on the Tigris where his
beloved spiritual hero, Julian the Apostate, had been martyred by a trusted
Christian officer.
The
author’s experience of Christian institutions, West Asian Muslim society, and
Israeli kibbutzim helped to turn him against the monolithic Abrahamic creeds
which he saw as imperialistic, belligerent, and life-threatening. He came to
India in search of spiritual direction and because Hindu civilization still
gave an honorable place to the Mother Goddess. The fact that Hindu civilization
had withstood centuries of Muslim and Christian aggression and survived where
other civilizations had failed, was to his mind a very impressive cultural
achievement. He is a great lover of Hindu culture and religion and is deeply
saddened that Hindus today have become second class citizens in their own motherland
because of a pusillanimous and weak-minded religious and political leadership.
He says that as long as Christianity continues to wage a socially destructive
war of aggression on Hinduism and take prisoners in the form of unsophisticated
credulous converts, its curious theories and unique claims must be thoroughly
investigated and challenged by Hindus of integrity and conviction.
Under
the name Ishwar Sharan, Swami Devananda wrote the comprehensive study of the
St. Thomas in India legend called The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore
Shiva Temple published by Voice of India, New Delhi. 卐
卐 卐
Please
read his mind:
What
Ishwar Sharan perceptively stated of the betrayal of Hindus to the Portuguese
Catholic invaders by Syrian Christians applies to him in its totality: “… [The]
Christian religion … harbors in its heart a demon that divides mankind into
friend and foe on ideological grounds.”[2] The Qur’an, which is but the “Bible
in Arabic” insofar as its basic contents are concerned, bettered the instruction
by summarily and firmly reinstating the original Yahvist spirit by abolishing
all hints of Jesus’ divinity and Mary’s phantom gestation that, according to
Christians, resulted in a case of human parthenogenesis.
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