Prabhupāda: Still, he is leader?
Karandhara: Yes.
Puṣṭa-kṛṣṇa: The impersonalists, Lord Caitanya said that they are the greatest offenders to Lord Kṛṣṇa. So most of the so-called religious people of the world today, if they have a conception of God, it is that God is impersonal spirit. Does that mean they are to be classified, at least in terms of this understanding, amongst the demons and asuras?
Karandhara: No, in this instance this man is... It's not as much that he's an impersonalist as that he has no clear idea one way or the other. He's ignorant. An impersonalist is someone in the classic sense who has... He's aware of the Vaiṣṇava philosophy, but he rejects that, that God is definitely not a person, and he takes that as being a lower conception.
Bhagavān: In ignorance, though, even though he's in ignorance, he is hurting people due to his ignorance by... He's claiming to be a teacher, and even though he may be innocent or ignorant, because he's in that position of leader, he's actually hurting people, wasting their life.
French Devotee: He left, Śrīla Prabhupāda, because he was very afraid that we were right.
Bhagavān: He said he had another engagement.
Paramahaṁsa: In the world today it seems as if, just like men take advantage of women and make them topless and bottomless, also they try and encourage people like this to be leaders of religion. That way the mass of people don't take any real interest. They do this in Russia too. They kill the sincere religious leaders, and they put their own men as religious leader, and it just sort of undermines the whole purity and the importance in the instruction, and then no one repeats it.
Karandhara: In the West also, in the past ten years there's been a resurgence of what's called fundamentalism. For so long the Christian liturgy, the Christian doctrine, got so hodge-podge and so wishy-washy that people were leaving because there was simply nothing there solid for them to grasp onto. Now fundamentalism, or the very basic principles that God is the Almighty and that we are sinners and if we don't repent, God's going to strike us down with wrath and anger, that basic principle of fear of God, that is receiving new support. Many people are coming back to that because even though it's a very vague thing, still it's something definite. "God is there, and if I do something wrong, He's going to cut me down," rather than, "Well, nothing's wrong, nothing's right," it's all hodge-podge, wish wash. People can't grasp onto that. There's nothing for them to...
Prabhupāda: That is Māyāvāda, "nothing wrong, nothing right. Everything is all right," Vivekananda's philosophy.