One often sees in the media, presumably with left liberal leaning, articles and opinions to malign the image of spiritual and/or religious icons.
The pattern of attack remains the same no matter what media outlet promotes such malicious gossip.
In the name of progress, scientific thinking and rationality, all such nefarious attempts ultimately reveal their underlying prejudices, biases and to a large extent, hatred towards people who promote spirituality and religion in society.
But if one looks closely at such articles then few peculiar things emerge.
These not only reveal the standard or system of thinking these so called media want to promote and judge the society with, but also hint at the agenda of their puppet masters.
What do we mean by this?
If for example, you see the words self proclaimed God man or woman in such articles then you can very well assume that the article is written with Christianity or a central institution like Vatican, whose decree makes someone a saint or not, is considered the right way to carry out religion.
Obviously, such power plays have been exploited by people suffering from sheer wanton power lust. Many cruel Kings have been made saints in the past for this reason.
But when it comes to traditions like Hinduism, where there is no central pontiff or religious head, it is difficult for those power hungry people to control the masses through religion.
Hence such traditions and their diverse icons, become easy target of attack. Especially when they want those masses to convert and to be controlled easily like meek lambs.
The left liberal media on the surface may claim no association with a particular religion. But their language, vocabulary and mindset is already conditioned by the above propaganda- whether they are aware of it or not. For example the need for a Pope or supreme religious head to declare other junior Godmen and God-woman. Or to use the word “self proclaimed” to hint that one is to be proclaimed by that pope or supreme religious head.
When the mind of the masses will reel under such propaganda vomited by the various media outlets then the line dividing the truth and false will be blended, bended and blurred.
A prophet can very well be a false prophet for some while others consider him or her as a true prophet. Even in non religious context, false prophet is used for scientists promoting unverified hypotheses.
So most of the time, maligning a prophet respected by others as false prophet is usually an attack on a perspective or way of living to comply with certain other propaganda.
All it takes is a false or unproved criminal charge and one has a fertile ground to attack any person and spread poisonous propaganda.
A true media has a duty nonetheless to bring out the truth and expose hypocrisy in the name of spirituality and religion as much as in any other field. But when one sees a biased or paid media frequently and selectively targeting religious icons of a particular religion then we as people must be cautioned.
There are few more tools one can use, apart from discerning, based on common attack words as shown above. These are more cognitive exercises, but nonetheless, very potent.
First is to know that in today’s world, such propaganda is all around us. Just like a fish in dirty water does not know about the dirty water, we may be unaware of such propaganda since we are fed the same propaganda in our schools, universities, news channels, television series, movies and social media.
Then once one has internalized the propaganda that all religious heads, spiritual icons or even babas are bad then no matter how flimsy the attack on the next spiritual icon, one will be prone to assume that this person is also bad due to their bias in belief. Often we don’t care much about the reasoning if we are subconsciously convinced of the conclusion.
Often such biases makes one read and believe only those media sources that one has already agreed to in conclusion of perspective. Also consider the fact that negative news spread faster and makes more lasting impression in mind. So, news about few rotten apples of spirituality makes one prone to believe falsely that most icons of spirituality must be bad.
These are few things that one must analyse and see through to critically understand the information world we live in, with its high, misinformation propagandas in it. One must try to find out about the truth. False prophet and true prophets are both possible in this vast world. At least probabilistically. So we must open our minds and examine each scenario without biases.
At least that is our responsibility in order to develop the society.
Since prophets are people who wants to help society. So we must enable the right ones to express their ideas freely. They must not be bullied. Today, you need to support such attempts by true prophets even more. Since the society definitely needs original thinkers and people who wants to make the world a better place.
But also, those prophets or spiritual icons needs our support since the media, the judiciary and government are all ignoring them and often are the perpetrators and bullies themselves.
In conclusion, if we want spirituality to survive and nurture society then we must enable and create a healthy environment for spiritual icons to thrive.
We are not here to give a few bullet points, on which you should judge those spiritual icons, to verify if they are true or not. We have talked about a few cognitive tools and tried to expose a bit about the propaganda against spirituality. These are your rational tools.
But as spirituality itself is a matter of faith and experience, we leave it for you to experience personally and urge you to not close your mind and heart by succumbing to the one sided biased propaganda.