Religion & Reform
Given that the Roman Catholic Church had become corrupt, instead of removing the excrescences, the foundations themselves were tampered with by Martin Luther. He threw out the baby (of spirituality) along with the bathwater (of corruption.) As preached by Moses in his Ten Commandments & confirmed by Christ in his Sermon on the Mount, the first duty of mankind was to love & obey God. All others like honouring parents & helping the poor & sick were only secondary & aids to the above, like the Computer aiding most human activities now. Incidentally this fundamental truth exists even in the youngest Semitic religion, Islam (the meaning of which is surrender to the Will of God).The fall-out was, the earlier Christian Saints were those who were in communion with God (mystics) like St.Teresa (of Avila) & the later ones only social service providers under a religious garb, like St.Teresa (of Kolkata). This led to a loss of spirituality & a corresponding increase in worldliness. Worse, demonising the Pope & Catholics was institutionalized by others even after significant reforms in the Catholic Church, symbolically stoning them like the Muslims do during Haj in Mecca. The schisms among the Christians were brilliantly parodied in Jonathan Swift's satire, "The Tale of a Tub."
Fortunately in Hinduism, the oldest of them all, any minor aberrations were taken care of by periodical appearances of religious reformers. In the nineteenth century, the most dramatic of them, Sri Ramakrishna, was the first to proclaim that all religions are true, putting to rest irrational ideas like "One True religion" & "Chosen people", propagated by the Semitic religions. This Universal Truth of all religions got global currency first by his disciple Swami Vivekananda & later in the twentieth century by Sri Satya Sai Baba, who by his charisma & miracles gave a quantum jump to the inclusiveness of Hinduism.
Given that the Roman Catholic Church had become corrupt, instead of removing the excrescences, the foundations themselves were tampered with by Martin Luther. He threw out the baby (of spirituality) along with the bathwater (of corruption.) As preached by Moses in his Ten Commandments & confirmed by Christ in his Sermon on the Mount, the first duty of mankind was to love & obey God. All others like honouring parents & helping the poor & sick were only secondary & aids to the above, like the Computer aiding most human activities now. Incidentally this fundamental truth exists even in the youngest Semitic religion, Islam (the meaning of which is surrender to the Will of God).The fall-out was, the earlier Christian Saints were those who were in communion with God (mystics) like St.Teresa (of Avila) & the later ones only social service providers under a religious garb, like St.Teresa (of Kolkata). This led to a loss of spirituality & a corresponding increase in worldliness. Worse, demonising the Pope & Catholics was institutionalized by others even after significant reforms in the Catholic Church, symbolically stoning them like the Muslims do during Haj in Mecca. The schisms among the Christians were brilliantly parodied in Jonathan Swift's satire, "The Tale of a Tub."
Fortunately in Hinduism, the oldest of them all, any minor aberrations were taken care of by periodical appearances of religious reformers. In the nineteenth century, the most dramatic of them, Sri Ramakrishna, was the first to proclaim that all religions are true, putting to rest irrational ideas like "One True religion" & "Chosen people", propagated by the Semitic religions. This Universal Truth of all religions got global currency first by his disciple Swami Vivekananda & later in the twentieth century by Sri Satya Sai Baba, who by his charisma & miracles gave a quantum jump to the inclusiveness of Hinduism.
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