Belief and moralism in Sathya Sai Baba’s “5 human values”

Surely we should never let our beliefs stop us from doing what is right and good. Religious beliefs are founded on uncertainty – not on knowledge, but on believing – and are therefore no secure or final criterion of what is right or good. Actions motivated by religious beliefs often conflict with knowledge, and religious morals are often distorted by the hegemony of faith and incomplete moral doctrine over common sense, consensus and shared human values. The nature of human values is much less simplistic than Sathya Sai Baba’s five badly-distinuished and limited values. Values are human ideals which vary in emphasis and application throughout the many cultures and sub-cultures of the world, not set in stone by any divine agency. They have universal features, but are not monolithic and clearly separate values, unlike the vaunted ‘five human values’ of Sai Baba. Those are explained in relation to very traditional and mostly religious examples and the moralizing manner in which they are presented by SB reminds more of a set of biblical Commandments than living ideals working within changing society and world civilisation. See HUMAN VALUES AS COMMON IDEALS AND PRACTICAL RULES OF BEHAVIOUR

Remaining Sai Baba devotees are not facing up to the values of truth, nor of righteousness and even love in that they continue to ignore those who have been harmed by Sathya Sai Baba’s actions (see here and here). As soon as one honestly examines the known facts, one can no longer believe that Sathya Sai Baba’s will should overrule all his followers’ actions and nullify their moral consciences.

The murders again – 1993 in Sai Baba’s private quarters and  The Murder evidence viewed and interpreted in detail

Faith Schools – Sathya Sai Baba ‘Educare’

Sathya Sai Baba schools – his so-called ‘Educare’ institutions figure among the many ‘faith schools’ which have increasingly been adopted in many Western democracies. These ideas have even been partly included in the British educational system, despite the guru being under the shadow of many accusations of crimes and deceptions. Several of his schools have been closed down, due to the reported sexual abuse of young boys involved and one major school was stopped in Denmark due to protests by the community involved.

The establishment of so-called Sai Educare schools and colleges – teaching the rather simplistic ‘Education in Human Values’ course – by Sathya Sai Baba and related agencies in any civilized country should be carefully monitored since they openly or covertly promote the personality cult of Sathya Sai Baba as God Incarnate. I accept some of the human value teaching ideals that motivate these activities, yet I have serious reservations about their various serious shortcomings and also as to the way in which they become interpreted in practice in terms of the repressive and out-dated aspects of Sai Baba’s religious doctrines and are affected by the primitive levels of proper duty and care typical in many Indian schools, where physical and mental punishment are still widespread and go unchallenged. (see INDIAN GOVERNMENT REPORT ON CHILD SEX ABUSE IN INDIA)

The Sai Baba doctrine claims to be a form of ‘universal spirituality’which respects all religions. However, the demonstrable ignorance of Sathya Sai Baba about other religions casts much doubt on this (see here). Most of the hindrances in the Sai Org. to developing a healthy teaching environment were – and still are – doctrinally based. The main problem is that the largely traditional religious teaching of Sai Baba is a mixture of fundamentalist Hinduism drawing upon various Indian traditions and only most superficially on more modern ideas. There is a most notable shortage of universal educational concepts and contents, total avoidance of all modern educations science and pedagogy and complete absence of any debate of the principles involved, since Sathya Sai Baba’s word is taken as gospel and more, the word of God Incarnate Himself! Many of the restrictions that affected the voluntary and amateur educational ‘curriculum’ known as EHV (Education in Human Values) stem from the highly conservative and traditional culture expressed by Sathya Sai Baba, which is carried over in no small measure into Sai Educare.

Faith Schools and their consequences: Induction into a religious faith at a tender age is indoctrination. While physical abuse is now at last forbidden in the most civilized countries, mental abuse is still allowed, and this includes inculcating defenseless children with superstitious folklore and false conceptions.

It should be a human right not to be subjected to an environment where environmental pressures and ‘group effect’ acts to make any child accept a religion. Richard Dawkins has led the way in courageously speaking out to this effect. Bringing up children under a system of education which contain non educative elements (i.e. proselytizing) is contrary to education, which means the learning of real facts about the real world and imbibing the human values (not divine commandments) upon which civilized society and international agreements rest. Faith schools differ from secular schools in that they are really belief-inducing schools. The increasing isolation and unwillingness of “faith” communities to integrate is a threat to future social harmony and world peace, where terrorism is the new kind of war.

All religions are actually ideologies, and their core beliefs are unsupported by any substantive facts or science. They differ as to values and consequently in many parts of the world they are at loggerheads and often in direct violent conflict with one another. To contribute to this disruption, this battle of the sects, however much one talks of peace and goodness, is a blind policy. Socially divisive ‘brainwashing’ – of whatever type and however mild – is unacceptable and to endorse it through an educational system should be made illegal. Divisiveness arises from the pretense that this or that faith has superior access to ‘the truth’, and often that truth will include claims about the unity of mankind… yet which only leads to hypocrisy in action. The consequences are already exploding on the streets of Europe and the USA, not to mention in the developing world where divisions are extreme.

Education deserving the name should develop the autonomy of people, enlightening them as to how to make their own choices in a reasonable way and with knowledge of possible consequences. Obscurantist scriptures should be banned from schools, which would mean the exclusion of large parts of most of them.

Often, faith schools are popular with parents because they impose more discipline on pupils than secular schools, not least because of the absolutism of the moral codes enshrined in their religions (the Ten Commandments for example). Though often effective, this is absolutely not the best way to achieve integration of pupils into harmonious working groups and communities. Understanding, communication and help in socialization (through special needs assistance and counseling) is the way to go instead. But selection of pupils on religious and other (often bogus) criteria excludes the problem children and avoids the social problems that such schools should bear and face up to, rather than avoiding them. Since their chief aim is religious indoctrination, however, they manipulate so as to avoid those who will be ‘difficult’ and especially potentially critical children and parents.

One commentator (protogodzilla) wrote in the Daily Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8204399/Faith-schools-are-a-beacon-of-excellence.html)
“I attended an RC school in London in the ‘fifties. We were indoctrinated into believing protestants were the spawn of the devil. When I mentioned to the priest that we were all Christians I was caned. We were brain washed into believing that our religion was the most important matter of our lives. I abandoned my religion on the day I left school – there was too much hatred in it for my taste. As a recipe for division, mankind has never devised a better stick than religion to destroy itself. Muslims hold to their brand of bigotry as savagely as the RCs of my youth. If there is a God would He/She be happy with this state of affairs? Faith schools segregate rather than integrate and should be outlawed to encourage social cohesion.”

On such a background one can understand the horrendous events that have terrorized Northern Ireland, and which are yet worse in the Middle East, Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

See An Open Letter to the Followers of Sathya Sai Baba by Frank Morales, M.A. International Sanatana Dharma Society

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Human Values – Sai Baba’s truncated ideas

The values according to [or against which] we act are unavoidable and essential links that tie together personal perceptions and judgements, motives and actions into the sphere of common cultural values.
They are central to grasping the motivations of our social and political life. Sai Baba promotes his own brand of ‘five human values’, which is a simple and often all too vague recipe. His biographer Kasturi writes that Sai Baba scribbled the 5 values down on the back of an envelope when Kasturi asked him to define them.  Grabbed as if out of thin air without any deeper thought, it is quite evident how shallow, rigid and incomplete they are when examined carefully and critically. They can only function at a most elementary level of teaching children, at best, for the doctrine is flawed and is badly out of step with modern thought and educational standards (outside developing nations) .

My view of what human values are (as opposed to divinely-instated values masquerading as ‘human’ values) is to be found in my analyses of the many and serious failings of Sai Baba’s ideas about them here (links)

 

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Ignorance is bliss in Sai Baba’s ‘teaching’

If he knows so much, why does Sai Baba not clear all doubts?  Why does the self-professed omniscient Avatar not make known fully and clearly everything about his mission and answer every type of valid question and doubt that arises?

Sathya Sai Baba gives various reasons for his not engaging publicly in explanations about his claimed wisdom and powers. He disdains arguments that appeal to and satisfy the logical and scientific mind.  He looks down on all scientific understanding as an expression of intellectual pride or gross materialism and derides all but religious scholars as ‘learned fools’.

He claims to minister primarily to those who have humility, this being one reason for the birthplace of the avatar he claims to be being in India. He claims to know the very secrets of all creation, of birth, life and death but is unwilling to adopt the premises of reason and logic to explain them and make them clear enough to be more than speculative talk.

He makes evident that he does not wish or intend to stimulate ‘worldly’  intelligence, which he puts down as mere desires of the “restless” and curious mind. Sathya Sai Baba is no philosopher in any sense that makes sense, for he is a proselytizer of faith versus knowledge on all occasions, primarily faith in God – and not least in himself as such. He does not teach but preaches. He propounds the glories of  “mindless divine consciousness” which he holds is superior in every way to mental activity, scientific and intellectual understanding. Yet he also insists that it is achievable only by a tiny handful among the billions of humanity!  This ideal has been held up by numerous mystics, gurus and claimants to divinity in the past, overwhelmingly in India, where a vast under-educated mass of the population is brought up to believe in these miasmas from the cradle.

He has repeatedly insisted that he has not come in order to institute a new religion or set of beliefs. though he has also admitted to a ‘Sai religion’ and permitted the use of this term. He has announced repeatedly that his alleged ‘divine task’ is the regeneration of the first and most perennial philosophy, the Vedas. In regenerating them, he aims for the recreation on a huge scale of the practices and the way of life that would embody the alleged “Vedic truths”. In this and his constant harping on the past glories of a lost age of ‘Bharat’ – one for which there is no scrap of historical evidence – he literally wishes to put the clock back to a deeply superstitious and unknowledgeable era where democracy, human rights, equality before the law, social  justice,  and freedom from oppression were unknown. He speaks about ‘human values’ as God-given absolutes set in stone by, which is an oxymoron. He does not explain where the anti-values which correspond to the good ones came from except from the ‘evil’ in so many human hearts. That is the level of education he expresses.

Sathya Sai Organization National President – disaffected

Boogaards

Wet ash from Sathya Sai Baba’s mouth?

A Dutch friend of mine, now deceased, was Leo Boogaard (formerly National Coordinator of the SSO in the Netherlands,). Once he received vibuthi from the hand of Sathya Sai Baba at darshan at Puttaparthi when I was with him. However, this so-called ‘holy ash’ was literally wet. It slopped into his palm. Her was very surprised by this and showed it to me after darshan (i.e. where the guru shows himself in public). This tends strongly to support the claim made by some magicians who have studied Sathya Sai Baba’s methods, that he also sometimes conceals pellets in his mouth! No follower would even THINK such a thought as ‘blasphemous’ as  vibuthi being concealed in his mouth by Sathya Sai Baba, for delivery wet with saliva to a devotee at darshan. I did not even think this until a long while after I had become disaffected and had begun to realise that Sai Baba often uses many techniques that illusionists do.

Leo Boogaard  was the Chairman of the Dutch Sathya Sai Organization in 1984, but he was sacked by the Central Coordinator Thorbjorn Meyer because he refused to exclude certain groups of Indian and Sri Lankan devotees from the organization who did not follow Meyer’s strict rules. Meyer replaced him with one of his cronies. Later, when re-election for the post was eventually arranged, Leo was voted in by a large majority against Thorbjørn  Meyer’s opposition by Dutch devotees.

Failed Education in Sathya Sai Human Values in Europe

Leo told me on several occasions in the 1990s of the Dutch Organization’s attempts to get a more sensible set of guidelines and teaching methods accepted on Education in Human Values in the Sathya Sai Organization. Meyer wanted to determine everything himself (a man who had no pedagogical qualifications and was a tough manipulator of people), so the self-defeating policy he pursued was retained. Among Meyer’s “achievements” was the signal failure of a projected Sathya Sai College and ‘Educare’ programme under his leadership which was to be at Arresødal Castle in Copenhagen was rejected by a public protest movement! The US financed 6 million dollar project had to be abandoned! Leo Boogaard left the Sathya Sai Organization and later renounced Sathya Sai Baba too.

Some Details of Leo’s life (see also Wikipedia):
Leonardus Eliza Christiaan (Leo) Boogaard Sr. (The Hague, April 22, 1928 – The Hague, July 12, 1999) was a Dutch politician. Boogaard was one from the business (BPM and Shell) derived Ouderenvertegenwoordiger, who as manager also spent years abroad, not least as Personell Officer for Shell in Willemstad, Curacao. He retired in 1984 and in 1994 he was Second Chamber for the General Elderly Association. He chose in 1995 the part of Jet Nijpels when a break in the AOV group came. In the Court he was concerned with foreign affairs, social affairs, agriculture and justice. He had remarkable interest in Eastern philosophy. He left the House in 1996 because of his health.

The failures of Sathya Sai Education in Northern Europe and the reasons are also discussed here.

The Arresdødal School fiasco was reported in the Danish National TV documentary ‘Seduced’, which can be viewed here
See also report on the behaviour of the Danish Sathya Sai Organization leaders, like T. Meyer at the time.