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ISKCON devotees in Allahabad |
It is these I.D.-creationists who are leading the current barrage of anti-evolution lawsuits… They have found enthusiastic allies among the Hare Krishnas… who have been actively propagating their theory of “Vedic creationism”, “Krishna creationism”, or “Hindu creationism”, as it is sometimes called…
Earlier this year, the Hare Krishnas filed an amicus curiae brief supporting I.D.-creationists… Hare Krishnas appealed to the court to keep the anti-Darwinian warning stickers. As the stickers only attack Darwin without endorsing a specifically Christian God, Hare Krishnas see them as an opportunity to introduce Vedic creationism into American schools. They know that once one religion gets its foot inside the door, all others will automatically get equal time to bring in their own creation stories and cosmologies into science classrooms in America. [Link]
The ID’ers don’t mind since it gives them multi-culti camouflage:
`I.D.’ is often accused of being a scientific-sounding cover for Christian creationism. The ID-ers conveniently use the support of Hare Krishnas to paint themselves in multicultural colours. Prominent I.D. theorists (Philip Johnson, Michael Behe) and some Catholic creationists have endorsed Vedic creationism. Any enemy of Charles Darwin is their friend… [Link]
ISKCON creationism sounds just as nutty as the ID’ers:
The intellectual force driving Vedic creationism is a pair of American Hindus, Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, both resident “scientists” of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, the research wing of ISKCON. Cremo recently published a huge book, Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory… While Cremo insists he is offering a “scientific” alternative to Darwin, almost all of his evidence comes from paranormal phenomena, including studies of extra-sensory perception, faith-healing, reincarnation and past-birth memories, UFOs (unidentified flying objects) and alien abductions…
But here’s the kicker: instead of believing in the fundamentalist Christian idea of a 6,000-year-young earth, the Hare Krishnas believe in yugas, and that humans have been around for two billion years. So the political allies start with a fundamental contradiction from day one.
… Cremo and Thompson accept the notion of the “day of Brahma” lasting some 4.32 billion years as literally true. They also accept as fact the idea that the “current day of Brahma” began two billion… years ago. A literal reading of the Ramayana convinces them that humans and monkey-like hominoid creatures coexisted… they come up with the fantastic notion that the ancestors of modern human beings have existed for two billion years. They want us to believe that human beings walked the earth at a time when fossil records show that only bacteria existed on the earth. [Link]
I love the mind-expanding Vedic concept of time. In a dialogue with most religions, it sounds like it was written by Topper:
