I beg to differ TruthWins. And I see you come here often and declare a mood of defeat. This forum exists to show how they abuse, what they abuse, what they stand for, and believe in and how this is all damaging and crippling to society at large. If your final word here is "the don't care about this forum", then leave. Please. Leave this space for those fighting the good fight with authenticity, rational thought and a verve for truth. Because I can assure you your approach fuels them in the end. They do care. They have fought vigorously to subvert this forum. But rest assured, as long as here, young butler kids will come here and realize quickly they have been fed this biggest line of bullshit in history about this cult they are a part of.
“The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.”
—Salman Rushdie
"At the age of 12 his mother arranged his marriage with a five year old girl named Sayamani who was a resident of Ranaghat..."
Bhaktivinodes first wife died at childbirth. Aged 14. The most common cause of a mother dying at childbirth is her age. "The youngest mothers—those aged 14 and under—faced the greatest risks. Research from Bangladesh showed that the risk of maternal mortality may be five times higher for mothers aged 10 to 14 than for mothers aged 20 to 24."...
The great nitya parishad Lalita Sakhi, direct associate of the radha krishna gods apparently had no problem taking birth and just going along with barbaric hindu customs of the time?
While in the rest of the developing world this was called pedophilia and abhorrent, the "bhaktas" thought it was totally "normal" and acceptable. This is the culture this religion sprouted in. Over-sexed, rape-filled faith, with gods incarnating as penises and vaginas (shiva ling), all manner of blunt sexually deviant references in their scriptures and yet they delude themselves that it's "transcendental" and "pure" and "beyond the mind". Fucking delusional people. They then pretend that it's just about "chanting" some mantra that is literally not found anywhere but ONE fringe, questionable scripture.
These people have the balls to talk about "codes of conduct and ethics". They are delusional. They follow delusion, They preach delusion. They spread delusion. The worship of a blue smurf playboy god that should have been abandoned eons ago persists to this day by sheer force of idiocy. Nothing more.
Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard built her political career for Butler by aligning with their newfound "Hindu" garb and Modhi's India.
Jai Bharat Varsha Ki Jai! [
www.nytimes.com]
Mark my words, in the name of a blue cowboy sex god these freaks will continue to abuse, take money, confuse and cripple the critical thinking skills of generations of people. If allowed and not fought against, we will have versions of India 2.0 everywhere. Fascist governments in ruin and social turmoil for no good reason other than mindless adherence to archaic scriptures and pure sentimental nonsense.
TruthWins:
"They all try to do their best and ultimately they are much kinder than the average person out there."
By what measure? Some of the biggest assholes I met in my life including Butler were hare Krishna devotees. I have met thousands of people nicer and more sane than most "average devotees". Being a hare krishna does not make one magically "nice".
"My years spent at SoI are not lost. And of all the krishna groups, it is still the one that fit me the best."
You sound like an abuse victim who says, "But he still had the most beautiful eyes of any man I ever met...:. Give me a fucking break. These assholes filled your brain with pure garbage nonsense that you can disprove and discredit in 3 words, and somehow you feel they are the best fit for you of Krishna groups. The only reason any brainwashed asshat would prefer Butler compared to other krishna groups is cause he doesn't have the "authentic" traditional approach to the whole nonsense package. Trust me, your years in SoI were LOST.
In India you see the real deal. Like in Gaudiya Math. Those guys are serious and the 'real" deal for all that it's worth (no less delusional, but they gobble it up hook line and sinker without modifying and bending their own rules to ft the whim of the time). Then you have ISKCON and its offshoots. And finally, you have the likes of Butler. The diluted dahl of the Gaudiya Vaishnava cult. If it was not for the fact that they literally worship the chaitanya saint, you'd be hard-pressed to even figure out what they really are about. Butler looks like some sort of Chinese zen master the way he dresses.
Listen guys, please don't ever feel bad for ever calling these clowns on their total charade bullshit shit show. There has never been, nor will there ever be, a "trustworthy" religious group. Let alone hare krishna groups. History shows it.
Do you honestly think Brahmanism and Vaishnavism throughout the history of India was some pretty picture? It was a caste-based system of misogynistic abuse. Prabhupada was abusive to his wife. Bhaktivinoda and all these other people were abusive to their wife and kids. If fucking a 14 year old was "kosher" by their social standards, trust me, hitting your 13 kids and emotionally abusing them was an everyday affair.
Since then into modern times the Hare Krishna cults have been riddled to this day with some level of abuses. The whole gabbard campaign revealed just how recent and persistent it was. ISKON is barely now putting out a "Code of Ethics", you know, cause it was high on their priority list.
What did you honestly learn in the krishna cults that all other religions do not basically promote? You are not your body, you are a soul? All religions state this. NEXT! God is a male. NEXT! Karma and Reincarnation... Taught in all eastern traditions to one extent or another. NEXT! Eat vegetarian. Countless religions promote this. NEXT! Singing of praise to the god/teachers/saints etc—all theistic faiths and even atheistic traditions have some element of sing-song meditation or style of worship. NEXT!
You can go down the list. The only unique thing is the Puranic gods and myths. Which, unless you fell on your head or are seriously delusional, you cannot take at face value in any way. You think Jayadevs Gita Govinda or any other so-called radha krishna stories are "Bonafide"???? How? The goddess radha is not even mentioned in the Bhagavtam. So any saint that wrote about this stuff was pulling it right out of their ass. They were not referring to scripture. They were writing stuff that pleased their mind.
The only reason most religions do not walk around on the street with megaphones and loud instruments is that they are considerate of the general public and do not want to IMPOSE their faith on others. It's called respect for others' faith. No one likes the guy standing on the corner with the megaphone telling everyone to surrender to Jesus!!! Even people who like Jesus don't like that guy.
Modern-day Krishna followers try to covertly hide the real gaudiya tradition of "Manjari bhava" as the top goal and offering of their tradition. In fact, many will go as far as saying it's so esoteric—you should not ever hear it or speak of it. Yet, somehow, the great "vaishnavas" had a hard time not spilling the beans. And needless to say we all know what radha and krishna are doing in the proverbial bushes. You think Narayan Maharaj got a bunch of disciples cause he was telling people they are not their body????
One can tout so-called transcendental and mystical experiences. It never holds up. It's never universally applicable, and it NEVER is truly "beyond the material world". Anything that you can conceive of happens because you have a material brain in your skull and senses to perceive stuff. Anything suggested beyond that is speculative, conjecture and bullshit till proven otherwise. And guess what? No one has proven it even an iota. No Indian tradition, no western, Chinese or Mayan traditions either. Thousands of years have passed. Demons worse than Hiranyakashipu have come and gone and yet no Narasigha dev is popping out of pillars to save the day.
What is unique and cool is cultures, how myths captivated us and how we continue to tell the human story with books, art, music and so on. Anyone practicing some garbage religion in this day and age is a lost cause. There is much amazing things to wonder and sort out in the universe, in our own head without resorting to the mumbo jumbo hare krishna crap. And that is what it is. Crap.
Culthusiest. I get it, Guna Theory is interesting, Karma, Yoga etc. These are all philosophical ideas practiced by both atheistic and theistic faiths. Samkhya, from which much of these ideas sprang from is to concerned with blue smurf gods and goddesses fooling around in a medieval indian cow amusement park for eternity. It rejects it.
Any later developments in Purnaic hinduism were directly correlated to bramanism and brahman superiority and caste social structures. Bhakt and other devotional movements arose mostly from socio-political and religious atmospheres that rejected Brahmanism as a superior faith. To not lose a foothold on the public and gain support in unifying a religious identity, they wrote books like Ramayana, Mahabharat and so on that continued to establish the so-called "vedic" and "revealed" nature of the moral and ethical systems that were traditionally present in Indian culture. Much of it as an affront on the dominion of Buddhism in India and abroad. Brahmins wanted to stay in power.
Today, Gaudiya groups and people like Bhaktisiddhanta did the EXACT same thing. The reinstated "brahman diksha" brahman threads and brahman superiority. They promote and adopt scriptures like Gita that actively promote the Caste system and structure and they chant the names of puranic/brahman neo-vedic gods. And hence India, under Modhi and the like, is still under the sewage of such ideologies. To this very day causing social issues beyond your wildest dreams. Like letting a bunch of Hindu rapists back on the streets. Men who raped Muslim women. And Dalits and other so-called "untouchables" are still living under the uneducated religious fanatical dogmas that hare Krishna devotees love pretending has nothing to do with them while they worship Rama and Krishna, the originators of such systems of oppressive ideology.
[
www.jstor.org]
[
indianhistorycollective.com]
Don't just gobble up Prabhupadas books. Study the actual scriptures if you are interested in how they evolved, the social climates they evolved in and how various myths, gods, and stories, saints and religious cults and groups arose as a direct reaction to an evolution of post vedic ideas (which if you have ever read, needed some elucidation to even be taken seriously at a certain point):
[
www.exoticindiaart.com]
[
www.researchgate.net]
So you know, put on some running shoes and...
RUN.