Did You Know? Type 1 Qs
What non Parsi-Irani academics and scholars have said
Foremost, is an extract from Bhagavad Gita Scripture.
| Para ref | Sanskrit | Said to mean |
|---|---|---|
| 1.40 | kulakshaye pranashyanti kuladharmaah sanaatanaah dharme nashte kulam kritsnam adharmo'bhibhavatyuta | Abandonment or ignoring religious tradition results in the destruction o f the person/family and spirituality whereupon irreligion (lawlessness) takes over. |
| 1.41 | adharmaabhibhavaat krishna pradushyanti kulastriyah streeshu dushtaasu vaarshneya jaayate varnasankarah | "When irreligion prevails, the women of the family become corrupted, resulting in the intermingling of castes." |
| 1.42 | sankaro narakaayaiva kulaghnaanaam kulasya cha patanti pitaro hyeshaam luptapindodaka kriyaah | "That admixture of castes (inferring mix-bred progeny) leads to hellish life for all, because the spirits of ancestors are pained (from seeing their honour and traditions broken)." |
| 1.43 | doshair etaih kulaghnaanaam varnasankarakaarakaih utsaadyante jaatidharmaah kuladharmaashcha shaashwataah | "Such sins create further confusion, and honourable duties of the caste and family are destroyed." |
| 1.44 | utsannakuladharmaanaam manushyaanaam janaardana narake niyatam vaaso bhavateetyanushushruma | "O, Janardana, we hear dwelling in hell for an infinite period is inevitable for peoples who abandon their religious and family duties." |
Dr William* & (wife) Ariel Durant, Nobel Prize Winners, Pulitzer Prize Winners, US Presidential Medal of Freedom winners who over decades of work composed a mammoth 11-volume masterpiece called Story of Civilization which led to another book called the Lessons of History, crystallized their conclusions as:
It is note-worthy that the Durants were not racist, but that they were realists learned people, who have called a spade a spade. Nobel Prizes do not get conferred on real racists.
‘A Study of History’, a 12-volume work by Arnold Toynbee’s cited 21 civilizations that perished.
‘The Clash of Civilizations’, a voluminous 368 paged book as recent as 1996 makes riveting reading. Cultural identity including but not limited to Religion, Ethnicity and Heritage protection is where the primary fault line of conflict is. As can be seen, the world itself is once again evolving that cultural identity matters, whilst us Parsi-Irani are stupidly squandering it.
‘Thoughts on Glorious Heritage’, a 1975 book by famed Indian scholar and philosopher Pandurang Athavale quoted some 48 cultures that had become extinct. In effect, back in those days without the web, scholar were finding the same truth, that cultures were become extinct.
Nobel Prize winner, American geneticist Dr. Barbara McClintock wrote, “In-breeding is the one & only method of ensuring the sustenance of a species of animal or insect. Cross-breeding not only leads to degeneration but may also lead to extinction”. Just as a person can die with the wrong blood type transfusion, even though all blood looks red.
Dr. Mary Leakey, an eminent Paleoanthropologist wrote, “Marriage amongst ethnic groups in every part of the world has been the normal rule from the time the first homo-sapiens walked on this earth”.
Martin Luther King said on the subject of mix-race marriage: “I would like every white man to be like my brother but not become my brother-in-law”.
Warns Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald of Lincoln Sq Synagogue New York, “assimilation though inter-marriage represents nothing less than a death knell. There has never been a community of Jews that has abandoned ritual/protocol and survived”. History is witness that refugee Zarathushtees who scattered outside our Persian homeland to escape persecution but who failed to marry within our Zarathushti Religio-Cultural fold, simply disappeared amongst the larger number of people they lived amongst in China, Konkan, Gujrat and Rajasthan.
Per Dr. Daniel Gordis, Author an expert on Israel & Judaism, “It is neither a racial or superiority issue. The only real way to transmit Jewish identity to Jewish children is for them to be raised by two Jewish parents”. As the author of this collation of references, I cannot emphasize more, that for adherent Zarathushtees (cruelly branded by so-called liberalists as Traditional, Orthodox or Conservative) – it is our sense of Loyalty to our Ancestral Religio-Culture which motivates us to ensure the Identity and Cultural DNA we inherited from our Ancestors is exactly what all our future generations get to avail and preserve. It needs to be vehemently made known like people of other Religions do, that we conservative Zarathushtees do not wish to be remiss at letting down the hopes and aspirations of our revered Prophet and our Ancestry.
Per Rabbi Andrew Straus of Temple Emanuel of Tempe: "before you get married & before you have the children to really understand what type of experience that you want your children to have. Don't let kids be the pawn in the fight between the couple, which too often happens."
Per http://www.micsem.org are the words “Change itself is not so much the problem as what it may lead to: the death of the culture. In the minds of many, cultural extinction can occur either through the cumulative effect of culture change or through the debilitating effect key changes may have upon the basic institutions of their society. Either way, the eventual outcome of intensive culture change could be the demise of the culture”.
“The watchword, then, is cultural preservation: keeping a close lookout for whatever might imperil the culture, eradicating anything that threatens to suffocate those cultural forms we know as customs, employing the same measures we have learned to take to preserve our wildlife. But doing so with redoubled diligence since we would be losing not just some form of life symbolic of the culture, but the culture itself”.
“Therefore, we man the watchtowers and keep a vigilant eye out for massive change–that last attacking force that will overwhelm the citadel, or the final towering wave that will wash away the remainder of our culture”.
Per National Geographic of June 2012, the world used to lose a language every 14 days until that time, meaning that its host Culture was withering, if not dying. Much of which was attributed to not being proud of one’s own Culture. A bad trend bucked by New Zealand Maori being smart enough to work out the value of their language.
Prof Almut Hintze of SOAS University of London (mid-2015) has a stark warning to Parsi-Irani with words, “I don’t think conversion or mix-faith marriage is so significant in terms of boosting the numbers of the Zarathushti community. It is more important that those who are Parsi-Irani take care of their Religion & Customs to become fully aware of what they represent. I think Parsis are tearing themselves apart & barking up the wrong tree with their conversion debate. You cannot exist without your Religion. And it would be awful for the world to lose the Parsis and the Zarathushti Faith”.
As per research conducted into divorce statistics by American journalist Mrs Naomi Schaefer Riley, mix-faith marriages are more at risk compared to same-faith marriages. A survey in 2001 of 35,000 respondents found that people in mix-faith marriages were 3 times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-faith marriages.
Till Faith do us PART is the title of one of her books indicating differences in Faith lead to divorce. While Riley offers solutions, they are not without a warning “Interfaith couples tend to marry without thinking through the practical implications of their religious differences.”
One of the main problems noted by Riley is that many people enter into interfaith marriages without much consideration of the fundamental spiritual, doctrinal, and practical issues that divide them. “Couples tend to marry in their twenties and thirties, a time when religion is diminished in importance, but invariably the importance of religion returns as couples grow older, raise children, suffer the loss of a parent, or experience other major life challenges”.
When interviewed by FOX News, Riley identifies that fights between mix-faith couples invariably come down to differences in Religion & Faith with each spouse typically trying to assert their own traditions when raising children, thus burdening children with turmoil.
In a lecture rendered by the Great Swami Vivekananda at the First Parliament of Word Religions circa 1893 in Chicago, the learned Saint had reportedly responded to a question on Religious differentiation and conversion with “We should be accepting of all Religions. However, the Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. Each much assimilate the Spirit of the other and yet preserve his own individuality and grow according to his own Religions laws”.
Found in Dancing with Siva, a book by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami on Hinduism’s contemporary catechism (principles in the form of questions and answers), a recommendation under the chapter Must we marry within our Religion? “The mutual spiritual unfoldment of man and wife is the central purpose of a good marriage. When we marry outside our religion, we create disharmony and conflict for ourselves and our children. Such a marriage draws us away from religious evolvement instead of deeper into its fulfilment. For marriage to serve its spiritual purpose to the highest, husband and wife should hold the same beliefs and share the same religious practices”.
Per Prof. Gadgil, referred to as one of India’s top scholars and described by foreign authors as a "savant of extraordinary profundity and brilliance, who illuminated whatever he touched" is known to have written to a Parsi gentleman called Mr. Golwala “You are not a caste, a fraction of a whole. You are an independent religion, a whole in itself. To preserve that religion, which gives you your particular identity, your ancestors left their native land and came to us in India. No, I would be loath to see you disappear. No, don't merge, maintain your identity and continue to be even more useful to India as a whole than you have been in the past”.
Kundan Kashmiri, President of the Kashmiri Brahmins Conference in October 2013 warned “Avoid inter-caste marriage. This dilutes our community ethos”. Incidentally there were 58,697 identified Kashmiri Brahmin families at that time whereas we number far less at 60-70,000 people. This raises the question that if Kashmiris are asked by their leaders to put their community’s interest ahead of their own personal, why shouldn’t Parsis be?
As per Advocate J Sai Deepak, ‘A community’s first right is to protect itself and to preserve itself, not to surrender itself at the altar of mythical unity, or at the altar of peace’. We cannot be so tolerant to anti-community conduct from within our people, that we lose sight of what our Religion represents in its original form, and sideline if not totally be forgetting the sacrifices were made over several centuries for its survival”. Words to the effect, we have reminded of, and which will one day dawn on him.
