Our battle is not against . . . symptoms of sins such as poverty and disease. It is directed against Lucifer and innumerable demons which fight day and night in order to drag the human souls into an eternity without Christ... Viewing the effects of pagan religions on India, I realised that the masses of India are starving because they are slaves to sin. The battle against hunger and poverty is really a spiritual battle, not a physical or social one as secularists would have us believe. The only weapon that will ever effectively win the war against disease, hunger, injustice and poverty in Asia is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The key factor—and the most neglected—in understanding India’s hunger problem is the Hindu belief system and its effect on food production. Most people know of the ‘sacred cows’ that roam free, eating tons of grain while nearby people starve. But a lesser-known and more sinister culprit is another animal protected by religious belief – the rat . . . The devastating effects of the rat in India should make it an object of scorn. Instead, because of the spiritual blindness of the people, the rat is protected. Mature Christians realize the Bible teaches there are only two religions in the world. There is the worship of the one true God, and there is a false system of demonic alternative invented in ancient Iran. From there, Persian armies and priests spread their faith to India, where it took root. Hindu missionaries, in turn, spread it throughout the rest of Asia. Animism, Buddhism and all other Asian religions have common heritage in this one religious system.

“Poverty in India is not just an economic category, it is a religious value as well. Caste, even in its most degrading form of untouchability, is legitimized by India’s dominant religion and tolerated by others, Christianity included!” (Soares-Prabhu, “Interpreting the Bible in India Today,” CWG 4, 6.)

Tragically, the fundamentalists target tribals who originally are not even Hindu. These tribals are extremely poor and depend entirely on the majority community for their livelihood, so they are an easy target for pressure and intimidation from those who want to force them to participate in these re-conversions.

Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics?

It is the indignity of being treated as disposable that pushes people towards religious fundamentalism in order to retrieve a sense of self, of meaning, of significance. This is why globalization breeds religious fundamentalism and free markets create terrorism and extremism, not democracy. (p80)

Hindus and Muslims can both be fanatics, but it is only Muslims (and Christians) who can be fundamentalists.

I am aware that the following verdict is extremely unpopular among both politicians and intellectuals, but they should learn to face facts at last. The division of guilt for India's Hindu-Muslim conflict is extremely uneven. Hinduism may be guilty of social inequality, superstition and other evils, but intolerance of differences in religion is not one of them. It is unambiguously Islam which has brought religious persecution to India. It is Islam and Islam alone which has caused the Hindu-Muslim conflict with its many millions of mortal victims. Even when individual Hindus strike at Muslims... they are merely playing a part in a drama which Islam alone has inflicted on India...

All fundamentalists - whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or otherwise - are partners in the attempt to breed division, strife, racism and sexism; they help international imperialism to maintain its control and to overcome popular resistance to policies that lead to war and increased exploitation. It is known that the Mafia of today in Italy and the USA and Canada has close connections with some international fundamentalist groups, some of which are Islamic. The economic resources of such groups are, like those of the Mafia, drawn from the sale of arms, trafficking in drugs, and speculation in foreign exchange; these activities

The Western media often give the impression that the embattled and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as "fundamentalism" is a purely Islamic phenomenon. This is not the case. Fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced in every major faith in response to the problems of our modernity. There is fundamentalist Judaism, fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Hinduism, fundamentalist Buddhism, fundamentalist Sikhism, and even fundamentalist Confucianism.

One of the ways Islamic fundamentalists have demonstrated their moral backwardness, bankruptcy and ignorance is through gross human rights violations.

God has not created poverty; it is we who have created it. Before God, all of us are poor . — MOTHER TERESA Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven . — JESUS, MATTHEW 5:3 RSV Poverty doesn't only consist of being hungry for bread, but rather it is a tremendous hunger for human dignity. We need to love and to be somebody for someone else. This is where we make our mistake and shove people aside. Not only have we denied the poor a piece of bread, but by thinking that they have no worth and leaving them abandoned in the streets, we have denied them the human dignity that is rightfully theirs as children of God.

I claim that jihadis are really motivated neither by religion nor by a Leftist sense of justice, but by resentment, which in no way puts them on the Left, neither “objectively” nor “subjectively.” I simply never wrote that Islamic fundamentalists are in any sense on the Left—the whole point of my writing on this topic is that the “antagonism” between liberal tolerance and ethnic or religious fundamentalism is inherent to the universe of global capitalism: in their very opposition, they are the two faces of the same system. The true Left starts with the insight into this complicity. A good example of how religious fundamentalism is to be located “in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism” is Afghanistan. Today, when Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that, 30 years ago, it was a country with strong secular tradition, up to a strong Communist party which first took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Afghanistan became fundamentalist when it was drawn into global politics (first through the Soviet intervention).

and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

A great measure of world poverty today and African poverty in particular is due to the continuing dependence on foreign markets for manufactured goods, which undermines domestic production and dams up domestic skills, apart from piling up unmanageable foreign debts. Gandhi's insistence on self-sufficiency is a basic economic principle that, if followed today, could contribute significantly to alleviating Third World poverty and stimulating development.