Dear Maharajas and Prabhus, Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada! I am pleased to bring to your attention, two scholarly events that recently took place, in which Rasaraja Prabhu presented the Gaudiya Vaishnava Vedanta (GVV) view of God. One is a panel discussion, and the other is an one-on-one interview for an hour. Both events took place recently, as part of a Global Philosophy of Religion (GPR) Project at the University of Birmingham, in collaboration with “Closer To Truth” (CTT) Channel, which is on both YouTube and PBS. The link for the video of the panel discussion is given below. The GPR project is supported by funding from the John Templeton Foundation (a Christian Organization). The panel scheduled four professors representing Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hindu tradition (represented by Rasaraja prabhu aka Ravi Gomatam) to be participants. The panel dealt with fundamental questions about the nature of ultimate reality, existence of God, nature of time and space, causality, freewill, and consciousness. Often times, the work of Rasaraja prabhu in quantum mechanics has been thought to be not directly relevant to ISKCON “preaching”, but you will find in the panel discussion that it is his work in science that makes his presentation of our theology shine particularly. You will find scholars from the other religions agreeing more than once with his presentations on a Personal God from the viewpoint of their own religions. This is the first time Hinduism was represented as a monotheistic religion, through GVV in their program. The Closer to Truth channel in which you will find the above video has nearly 350,0000 subscribers on Youtube, who are interested in scholarly presentations. CTT videos have had 16 million plus views so far, worldwide. This particular video is currently unlisted on the CTT channel because the organizers of the channel told us that they are releasing videos from the GPR project for public viewing one at a time. So, eventually this video will also be released for public and will get a lot of views from subscribers and others. The panel moderator/interviewer is himself a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and a former ambassador of USA. He is planning a further one-on-one interview of Rasaraja Prabhu purely on his scientific work for his channel, titled Closer to Truth. It features 150 plus videos of personal interviews with renowned scholars from different fields. The interviewer appreciated the contribution of Rasaraja Prabhu to the panel and the 1-hour interview in the following words: Dear Ravi: Your interview / our discussion was truly superb. It had just the right combination of scholarly expertise, engaging public appeal (wonderful analogies), science-religion insights, and personal warmth. We will advise when both will be posted to our YouTube Channel. I do appreciate your science-based work, and it too is interesting and relevant for our channel, actually foundations of quantum mechanics is a theme for our channel. Peter and I look forward to a thorough, in-person Channel interview when circumstances permit. All best and warm regards, Robert ********* Please view this panel discussion at the following link: Metaphysics and Religion | The Global Philosophy of Religion Project - YouTube (https://youtu.be/1_MmXmZpXlQ) The one-on-one interview is also completed and will be available in the same channel soon. We will let you know at that time. Any feedback you can give after viewing the above video will be greatly appreciated. Your servant, Grantharaja dasa Bhaktivedanta Institute Institute of Semantic Information Sciences & technology 2334 Stuart St, Berkeley CA 94705 |
