“Conversion is a sin”

Cmde Medioma Bhada’s letter "Conversion is a sin” (Readers’ Forum, Parsiana, May 7, 2008) makes strange reading.

Joseph Peterson became a Zoroastrian because that is what he wanted to do. He had the right to live his life as he thought fit, just as others do. Whether he still wears the sudreh and kusti or whether he goes to a Christian church is not any of our concern. This is a matter entirely between him and his creator, who alone will judge.

The reason why issues such as those of conversion, entry into fire temples, disposal of the dead or even the correction of our deviant calendars will never find a resolution in our community is because the seeming majority of Parsis, influenced by priests desperate to keep their grip on the community, take it for granted that these are religious issues whereas they are entirely secular in nature. They cannot be decided on the basis of ancient texts which relate to the social circumstances of the time they were written and may have no bearing on circumstances today. If God has placed us in the 21st century, it is our responsibility to live in this century, not some other, and to redefine these questions in accordance with the perspectives, compulsions and needs of our day. We cannot hide behind old texts. All scriptures are not equally binding.

Because of the seeming incapability of Parsis to distinguish between the religious and the secular, what started as an inspirational vision of the Prophet is now riddled with practices which are deeply offensive not only to members of other communities but to many Parsis as well.

For example, when a Parsi man marries a non-Parsi woman the children are brought up as Zoroastrians in the Bom­bay/Poona environment. But we have created a situation where a woman who has done likewise cannot take her own children into the fire temple to pray. This is a rank injustice. When God has witnessed the union of two people as one person and one flesh, I fail to understand how any human institution can seek to create fissures and artificial differences in the mutual bond of marriage and still somehow call itself a religion.

God is for all people and all times. To think that a small group of people, of the cult in which we claim to believe, living at a remote point of time in the distant past knew the full will of the Almighty on every issue is to reduce our vision of Him to the narrow ambit of the human mind of that time. This will cause us to fall into the debility of self-adulation, eventually self-adoration, which as we will find in the end is the definition of hell, the state of otherness from God.

CYRUS S. RUTTONSHA

Poona

cyrusruttonsha@hotmail.com