36028¥eYuNoHara Meanwhile in India, Dayananda ....
SARASWATI
HEADED A HINDU REVIVAL MOVEMENT,
WHOSE BASIC PRINCIPLE WAS THAT THE VEDIC SCRIPTURES ARE NEVER WRONG.
In 1875 he founded the Arya Samaj (Noble Society), dedicated to the spreading of Vedic knowledge -
though truth be told, DS often interpreted the Vedas in a surprisingly liberal way, supporting for example
equal rights for women long before the idea became popular in the West! Dayananda's contemporary, Pope Pius IX,
had much more conservative views about women, but shared Dayananda's admiration for superhuman authority. Pius
led a series of reforms in Catholic dogma and established the novel principle of papal infallibility, according to which the Pope
can never err in matters of faith (this seemingly medieval idea became binding Catholic dogma only in 1870, eleven years after
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species). Thirty years before the Pope discovered that he is incapable of making mistakes, a failed Chinese scholar called Hong Xiuquan had a succession of religious visions. In these visions God revealed that Hong was none other than the younger brother of Jesus Christ! God then invested Hong with a divine mission? He told Hong to expel the Manchu 'demons' that had ruled China since the 17th century, and establish on earth the Great Peaceful Kingdom of Heaven
(Taiping Tianguo). Hong's message fired the imagination of millions of desperate Chinese, who were shaken by China's
defeats in the Opium Wars by the coming of modern industry and European imperialism. But Hong did not lead them
to a kingdom of peace. Rather, he led them against the Manchu Qing dynasty in the Taiping Rebellion -
the deadliest war of the 19th century, which lasted from 1850 to 1864.
At least 20 million people lost their lives, far more
than in the Napoleonic Wars or the
American Civil
War!
Asih, man, 79 jaar
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