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96 : Śramaņa, Vol 65, No. 3 & 4, July-December 2014 He rejected the view that some people are the chosen of god (Deutronomy 7:6) while others are pagan; that if Jesus Christ is true, all other prophets must be false. Without denying the purity of character of Jesus Christ and the nobility of his ethical teachings he observed that he had been preceded by many spiritual masters like him."
'I have to say that no Christian minister can point to a single moral truth or ethical statement in his new testament of Jesus the Christ that I cannot duplicate a thousand times with even greater emphasis from the sacred books and teachings of our religion antedating as they do the Christian era by thousands upon thousands of years.'18
In one of his historic lectures, 'Have Christian Missions to India been successful?' delivered at the Nineteenth Century Club in America, V R Gandhi presented a critique of Christianity and missionary methods. He argued that Christianity does not have fixed doctrines as it has grown through the ages - from the times of Christ to that of the Fathers of the Church to that of the Middle ages, to the Age of Reformation down to the present times. Christianity has not come 'direct through Christ' but through the layers of superstition and bigotry, of intolerance and persecution, of damnation and eternal hell-fire.' It has thus lost 'the standard of apostolic days.20 The fact that Christianity has borrowed its cosmogony, festivals, liturgies and sacred paraphernalia, from previous or older religious traditions, shows that it does not have a 'divine origin’.21 Its doctrines of Original Sin and of vicarious atonement are not convincing.22 The gullible are made to believe theological half-truths and miracles, like the immaculate conception of Mary and the resurrection of Jesus after crucifixion. The Church has been offering inducements to convert the poor with foreign money. It has used education and social work as means of proselytisation, something ‘repulsive to our conscience.223 Instead of improving moral standards, or raising the position of women and the masses, Christianity has introduced social evils with its western lifestyle and values, which overemphasize the gratification
