Gandhi And Jesus

[Pete]

Do people think as I do that Ghandi and Jesus would have made good friends.

[JenellYB]

No, not really.

 

Jenell

[tariki]

I believe Gandhi "knew" Christ, the living word, through Whom all things are made, the light that lights all who come into the world. I think we can often see that light in Gandhi, in his words and in his actions.

 

Whether they would have got on together and been friends is for me a hypothetical question of which I have no real interest. Taking it literally, there would have been a language difficulty (!) and much else.

[Inthedark]

They both seem to have managed to control/supress their ego to the extent that they could draw people to them to hear what they had to say, which was often a very universal kind of wisdom, almost transcending religion....if that makes sense. To me they both seem to have had this gift. Mates or not, who knows, although Gandhi is reported to have said "I like your Jesus Christ but not so much your Christians" or something like that. Like I said, wisdom!

 

Regards

 

Paul.

[jonnyb]

i think the Gandhi quote is: 'i like your Christ, but not so much your Christians; they are not like your Christ.'

[Yvonne]

As a mental exercise, I think they were (are?) friends. I think Jesus is a friend to anyone who opposes violence and, to use Borg's phrase, "the dominace system".

[PaulS]

Do people think as I do that Ghandi and Jesus would have made good friends.

 

I don't see any reason why they wouldn't have made good friends, language barriers aside. They both seem to have desired change for the better and had much in common in peaceful protest against the dominance system as Yvonne (via Borg) mentions.

[John Ryan]

I love Barrington Moore's The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. In the chapter on India, he criticizes Ghandi for believing in an idyllic vision for India, based upon a subsistence agrarian life-style. As such, Moore faults Ghandi for consigning millions and millions of Indians to death by starvation, since subsistence farmers' lives hang on the fate of the weather. While Ghandi was a great man, he needed a stronger commitment to transformation, as opposed to a return to the past.