ISKCON CULT UNVEILED

ISKCON is building a massive "Temple of the Vedic Planetarium" in West Bengal to showcase its founder's belief that Vedic cosmology--though obviously a compendium of ancient myths--is factual. What follows is the reaction of the Hare Krishna cult's founder, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, to the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969: So they never worshipped Chandra [the moon-god], and how can they go to the Chandra planet? Then Krishna is false. Krishna is imperfect. They are defying Krishna's instruction. They have gone to the moon planet. THEN OUR WHOLE PROPAGANDA, KRISHNA CONSCIOUSNESS, BECOMES BOGUS. Any student of comparative religion knows that the cosmology of major religions share many similarities and, however ingenious and complex, are all products of the human imagination. They are all as "scientific" as fortune-telling and astrology. ​ It goes without saying that modern-day Hindus, who are well-represented internationally in science, medicine, a...

Idol worship is to religion what the Stone Age is to the 21 st century. Whether caveman or  computer programmer, the general motivation is the human tendency to get something one desires with as little effort as possible.Typically worshippers offer flowers and incense accompanied by repetitive chants or prayers with the ceremonies led by a high-born priest. If conducted in what is believed to be a holy place of pilgrimage, the pious effect is generally held to be magnified exponentially. In general, attendees are taught from childhood to believe that worship in such a place will cleanse them of sin and grant them direct communion with the deity. Many also exhibit a type of religious euphoria akin to possession and display passionate and violent displays of emotion. On the other hand, ISKCON uses the uneasy familiarity of its Judeo-Christian converts with religious notions of pilgrimage sites of their own heritage to get them to engage in worship of deities without having the sl...

If you’re thinking about joining the Hare Krishna temple in your area, you’ve probably heard about the “four regulative principles” every devotee is expected to follow. Here’s a objective look at what they involve in practice from somebody who joined as a 14 year old and followed them for the next 13 years: 1. No eating of meat, fish, and eggs. No garlic or onions or mushrooms. According to the ridiculous propaganda that newcomers are fed along with the Sunday Feast, these vegetables “grow in dirty places and increase passion.”    COMMENTS Vegetarianism in various forms is practiced by millions of people world-wide for reasons that are religious or ethical, and sometimes both. Buddhists and Jains, for example, are even more stringent in their vegetarian practices than the tiny minority of Hindus who avoid the above-mentioned foods. Other than proscribing the eating of beef due to their cultural reverence for cows, most Hindus include animal protein in the...

In considering the after-death fate of particularly evil people, I have often thought that some of the real soul-killers who attempt to rob others of their hopes and dreams actually lose their souls after they die. In other words, they suffer complete annihilation, a just recompense for what they attempted to do to others during their lifetimes. Another aspect of such people is that, in truth, no matter how destructive a force they were in the lives of some people, to others close to them they were often quite the opposite: loving parents and spouses, attentive neighbors, and models of ethics in their dealings with their colleagues and friends. Twentieth-century history is littered with the bones of many such demons whose double-dealing practices with politicians and soldiers alike led to the deaths of untold millions. In our own time, names such as Kim Jong-un, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi come to mind. Each is an example of the modern day cult of personality, which ...

This posting is in response to the numerous attempts at hacking that have plagued my blog and websites during the past year. Most of these appear to originate from Russia; others from various spots in Europe and North America. Regardless of their sources, these cowardly acts are clearly attempts by the disciples of Gopal Krishna Goswami to obliterate blog postings that contain potentially damaging information about their beloved guru. Phoenix Rising from the Ashes A few have been attempts to damage the formatting of my blog, all of which are exercises in futility since my blogs were created and updated on Google. Any attempt at interfering with Google products—truly the backbone of the Web—is doomed to failure in any case. Another more common attempt at bringing down my blogs is through submitting virus infected comments.These nuisances are easy to detect and my response is to simply press the delete key.Those of you who have read any of my postings know that they are genera...

The primary method the founder of the Hare Krishna (ISKCON) movement used to quickly gain disciples in his quest to disseminate Gaudiya (Bengali) Vaishnavism to the West relied on confusing the gullible with promises he could not possibly fulfill. A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s arrival in New York in 1966 coincided with the hippie phenomenon and its participants’ experimentation with LSD and other psychotropic drugs and a general disillusionment with what they deemed an excessively restrictive social order.  Conditions were ripe for taking advantage of the hippies’ flirtation with Eastern mysticism. The guru, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, quickly attracted many such followers, as did numerous other Indian gurus. Disgust for materialism of all kinds remained a feature of his new disciples, but the agent of escape from it was shifted from mind-altering drugs to a mind-altering mantra. Specifically, the chanting of the “maha mantra” or Hare Krishna mantra was used as a means to...