Philosophy: Communications-fu Book

In short, an apology-focused FAQ. I've been planning to make one for our site. Imho, our wiki/resources would be the best for gathering these questions and responses. I'll upload there what I have.

who is prabhupada?
how do you get enough proteins if you dont eat meat?
are you hindu?
why are things going so badly in india if they have such knowledge as you say?
do you help the poor?
are you sectarian?

why is krishna blue?

Abhiram, these FAQ are answered on many sites but I guess Sitapati meant attacks on the Vedic/Vaishnava philosophy and practice of the dissident, anticult or fanatical type. E.g. Dalit sites have those.

it would be nice to compile popular answers to popular questions though

go ahead: http://wiki.pariprashnena.com/index.php?title=Popular_Questions

The impetus for this came from two things that happened to me while in South America.

The first was that I did a lot of television and radio appearances. With these you have to give a snappy answer that translates into a soundbite. 7 seconds is too long to make your case - so you have to have a mantra that encapsulates the siddhanta.

The second was that I attended the temple for a couple of years and answered the questions of all the school kids on their comparative religion projects. In the end I made up a photo book to answer their questions, which were remarkably similar. I showed them weddings, children, initiations, harinam, temples, farms, etc...

I thought, this would be a good resource for the people on my staff. I get one of these new devotees, give him this book, he reads it, then he can nicely answer all these questions, and I can do something else.

What sparked me back onto this today is that a godbrother was lamenting that at his job guys were discussing religion and then asked him what religion he was. There were three of them, and they were coming at him from all angles. He said to me: "Prabhu, you can refute any argument," (personally i'm more into explaining things, but I can refute too), "but I don't know what to say."

He's not a brahmana, so he can't read through so many books to collate all the answers himself, easily.

So I wanted to make this book for him and devotees like him.

but please make this a wiki!!!

no "usurping", Prabhu, we did put the wiki as a service for devotees.
Any venue will be OK if something is done (?).
But to give someone a headstart, not knowing what is going to happen, I do not buy that.
"Working" for others doesn't work.
My humble advice:
Whoever has the idea, do it yourself, get help and help others that are already doing something worthy and deserve it.
Sorry to be so straightforward, but so far probably we are the only ones that put some substantial time on it, apart from talking."

I tend to believe that one-theme-service sites do better. Nowadays there is no shortage of disk-space/bandwidth. And we are a click away anyway.

In the midtime I suggest to use the wiki,

http://wiki.pariprashnena.com/index.php?title=Popular_Questions

later on everything can be cut/pasted anywhere easily.

i'm not too happy with some of the anwers provided, but how to discuss this? starting a different topic (question) for each item in this forum seems like creating too many questions here, making this forum confusing.

the discussion pages in the wiki aren't too great, either, just plain, empty pages. it's possible to use them, though.

but since we're already using different types of wiki, i got another idea: did you ever try "tikiwiki"? i had it installed once, and like it a lot. it allows you to lock pages and comes with an in-built discussion forum. you can set the default to open a forum topic for each page created, per example. it also comes with a RSS module and mailing-list synchronization. i think it's the wiki with the most options around. that makes it a little more tricky to set up and administer, but, IMO, it beats media- or pm-wiki.

This whole idea is great. -> and as a wiki even better. Then at some point we could cull the answers and publish a very stylish printed version. (My kind of thing to put together.)

What would we call it?

"The Beginners Guide to Kung-fu Preaching"


nah. that sucks. but the idea is a start....

Dummies guide to preaching

it's a bit rude isn't it? But I like it

it's probably copyright anyway or trademarked

What about .....

I don't know I'll try later

Yeah, it's easier to _talk_ about doing something than to actually do it. Therefore there is so little input in our wiki so far.

which wiki to what forum? he he, merry.go-rounding, feels nice the air in the face.

I agree with Sitapati: "floating each question from the Wiki to the forum is a good idea. Then we get everyone's input, including whatever heavy duty quotes they can find from others then collate and distill the answers and move them to the Wiki."

ready it's an oldie but a goodie: Why aren't i GOD... like Krsna??
:-)
or put more aptly: why is it even grossly obvious that by using the oldest religious/scientific/social knowledge against the reciter/speaker/know-er???