King duryoDHn, of
kuru side in the 18-day
mHaa-bhaart war used to go to get blessing for victory from his
mother every day in the morning before proceeding to the battlefield....his
mother used to bless him thus: "LET THE SIDE ON WHICH
DHARm IS WIN"....
The mHaa-bhaart war killed 1.7
billion people...people who are aDHaaARmik
according to SHRii kruSHAN....who
took the 8th avataar (incarnation) of
viSHANu-dev = Creator bRHmH..to bring about the clean-up of
aDHARm perpetuated by these 1.7 billion people...End
of mHaa-bhaart war was the beginning of the
veDik time era of
Dvaapr-yug of 864,000-year duration
and start of kli-yug of 432,000
duration....in veDik time cycles of
4-yug of 4.32 million years.....
According to veD,
DHARm-shkti which sustains the
universe from self-destruction operates only at 25 percent strength in
kli-yug.....DHARm-shkti
provides all the creations with the knowledge how to co-exists and also not to
ever hurt any fellow creations verbally, mentally or physically....this is done
to the four parts of DHARm which are
Dyaa (compassion),
Daan (charity),
tpsy (penance) and sty
(Truth).....
We are presently in the 5104th year of the 430,000-year
kli yug....DHARm will
keep on diminishing as kli-yug proceeds in its cylce....and that
means..... mankind will have increasing tendencies to
hurt others and self-destruct by not living the veDik lifestyle of living
by DHARm.....An example of how DHARm
saves mankind from destruction is in the adoption of
DHARm by President Lincoln of USA in 1865 where the civil war
in USA was even deadlier than the Hiroshima A-bomb destruction....Please click
on the next line to see President Lincoln's following meditation based on
DHARm that led him to abolish slavery
and lead USA to its democratic lifestyle...
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'The Almighty Has His Own
Purposes'
In times of war, whose side is God on?
By Mark A. Noll
from
BELEIFNET.COM
During the Civil War, American theologians made many efforts to interpret the
religious meaning of the conflict. But it was Abraham Lincoln, who never joined
a church in his life, who presented the most profound theological
interpretation, articulated in his Second Inaugural speech of March 4, 1865.
The poignancy of this speech, as the martyr-president’s last defining utterance
on the nation’s ultimate defining experience, no less than its magnanimity
toward the South and the force of its religious meditation, has placed it among
the small handful of semi sacred texts by which Americans conceive their place
in the world. If, however, we set the address in its own times rather than
consider its importance for the Meaning of America, we find it defines a major
historical puzzle concerning the character of theology.
The puzzle is posed by the fact that none of America’s respected religious
leaders – as defined by contemporaries or later scholars – mustered the
theological power so economically expressed in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.
None probed so profoundly the ways of God or the
response of humans to the divine constitution of the world. None penetrated as
deeply into the nature of providence. And none described the fate of humanity
before God with the humility or the sagacity of the president. The
contrast has several dimensions.
First, Lincoln expressed remarkable charity to the foe. In hindsight it is clear
that, when Lincoln delivered his address on 4 March, the South was tottering on
the brink of defeat. But Lincoln himself did not believe that Lee would soon
surrender, and the South was still filled with leaders promising to fight on as
guerillas in the mountains or from new bases west of the Mississippi. In these
circumstances, after four years of a war in which the South had extracted a
terrible toll from the North and in which North and South had both promoted a
degree of destructive violence hitherto unknown even in America’s never genteel
history, Lincoln’s magnanimity was as striking as it was singular.
Second, almost alone among his contemporaries, Lincoln
did not presumptuously assume that the moral high ground belonged to only his
side. By questioning the righteousness of the North and by failing to
denounce the South in absolute terms, he joined a very small minority in the
spring and summer of 1865. If Lincoln’s magnanimity and his moral
even-handedness were generally religious, his view of providence was distinctly
theological. More than any other feature of this address,
Lincoln’s conception of God’s rule over the world set him apart from the
recognized theologians of his day.
Views of providence provide the sharpest contrast between Lincoln and the
professional theologians of his day. Almost alone among public figures,
Lincoln’s concept of providence combined the conventions of his age with a much
more primordial vision.
To be sure, earlier in his presidency Lincoln used a much more common language.
At his first inaugural, in 1861, he talked of divine realities as if their main
purpose was a utilitarian one to serve the nation. At the time his trust in
America had been nearly complete:
“Why should there not be a patient
confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better, or
equal, hope in the world?” He even spoke as if God existed as a kind of
celestial umpire waiting only to dignify the decisions of U.S. citizens: “If
the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on your
side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth, and that justice,
will surely prevail, by the judgment of this great tribunal, the American
people.”
In the dark hour Lincoln’s solution was civil religion pure and simple:
“Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and
a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are
still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.”
But before the war had progressed very far, Lincoln evidently began to rethink
these conventional views. As early as 1862, another theme rose in Lincoln’s
consciousness. It was the idea that perhaps the will of God could not simply be
identified with efforts to preserve the Union. Such thoughts he committed to
paper in September 1862, at one of the darkest moments of the conflict. The
North had suffered another defeat at Bull Run, and Lincoln had seriously begun
to ponder the radical step of proclaiming the emancipation of Confederate
slaves. In response, he penned a “Meditation on the
Divine Will,” which his secretaries later recalled was meant for
Lincoln’s eyes alone. It was the most remarkable theological commentary of the
war:
The will of God prevails. In great contests each
party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one
must be wrong. God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time.
In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something
different from the purpose of either party – and yet the human
instrumentalities, working just as the do, are of the best adaptation to
affect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true – that God
wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet
power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or
destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having
begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest
proceeds.
The reasoning that led to this private meditation evidently continued,
for it was the reasoning that pervaded the Second Inaugural. That reasoning
shared the traditional Christian opinion that God ruled over all events. But to
this conventional belief Lincoln added two most unconventional convictions.
First was the notion that the United States might not necessarily be a uniquely
chosen nation, or at least that the moral constraints operating on American were
the same as those for other nations, and that these universal standards of
justice were of greater consequence than any supposed chosenness of the United
States. Second was Lincoln’s belief that the ways of providence might be
obscure, difficult to fathom, hedged in by contingencies, or otherwise not open
to immediate understanding and manipulation.
This combination of convictions – confidence in providence along with humble
agnosticism about its purposes – transformed the central section of the Second
Inaugural into a theological statement of rare insight. Lincoln began by stating
a thesis: “The Almighty has His own purposes.”
He then quoted Matthew 18:7 to suggest the moral character of life under God:
“Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must
needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”
Then he looked foursquare into an abyss that few of his contemporaries could
bear to contemplate: “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of
those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which,
having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that
He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those
by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those
divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may
speedily pass away.” The abyss was the suggestion that responsibility for the
war must be shared."
Finally, Lincoln concluded by acknowledging that the progress of the United
States was as nothing compared to the mysterious will of God:
“Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the
wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil
shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be
paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so
still it must be said ‘judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous
altogether’ [Psalm 19:9]”
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