Sat Ma­haraj

For thou­sands of years Hin­duism has re­mained a re­li­gion prac­tised by in­di­vid­ual fam­i­lies, vil­lagers and com­mu­ni­ties across the In­di­an sub-con­ti­nent. The Hin­du pun­dits, swamis and oth­er high priests nev­er at­tempt­ed to co­erce of force any­one to em­brace Hin­duism as their per­son­al or fam­i­ly re­li­gion.

In fact for thou­sands of years Hin­dus in In­dia and across the world nev­er cre­at­ed or­gan­i­sa­tions for the pur­pose of win­ning con­verts. We re­fused the strat­e­gy of den­i­grat­ing the re­li­gious and cul­tur­al prac­tices of any hu­man be­ing for the win­ning of con­verts.Cam­paign­ers for Hin­du "souls" how­ev­er, have mount­ed re­peat­ed pro­grammes to "save" the Hin­du. We in T&T have not been speared the on­slaught of lies and mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of our re­li­gion.

In T&T, our con­sti­tu­tion guar­anties the free­dom of re­li­gion but over the years we have not been saved from re­li­gious at­tacks about our be­liefs and cul­tur­al prac­tices.In the process of re­spond­ing to our crit­ics we have had to cre­ate an "an­swer back" strat­e­gy where we cor­rect false im­ages of Hin­duism and al­so point to the in­con­sis­ten­cies in re­li­gious teach­ings of our crit­ics.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers