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Congratulations to all the contributors, especially LordSurya, for making this article a featured article.
The quotation "Ekam sat.." from the Rig Veda is said to perhaps best capture the Hindu spirit. Well, I consider it to be of relatively minor importance. Personally, I consider the Upanishadic insights like "Aham Brahmaasmi" or "Tat twam asi" to best capture the Hindu spirit. There are problems with the interpretation of the quotation too - "Essentially, any kind of spiritual practice followed with faith, love and persistence will lead to the same ultimate state of self-realization." - Is that so? Saying that there could be many possible paths to a goal and saying all paths lead to the same goal are two very different statements, and the leap from the first to the second simply cannot be made.I remember bringing this up earlier, and I was asked to give references.
link1
link2 Section 'Can all “Religions” lead to God?'
'The Hindu proclamation that “different paths lead to God” certainly does not mean that any and every crass act can lead to God simply by calling it “religion”. Sanãtana Dharma makes ample distinction between dharma and adharma, between spiritual elevation and spiritual degradation.'
'To suggest that adharma leads to God as much as dharma would indeed be a negation of the entire Hindu spiritual thought.'
link3
Also, "...since temporal systems cannot claim sole understanding of the one transcendental Truth", is there no point in meditation? :) --
SV 02:36, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)
("Perhaps the Hindu spirit,...., is best captured in")
Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni and so on are not "sundry names". They are there as representatives and upholders of Dharma. You can't replace those names with Tom, Dick and Harry.
The other 3/4th is important because it refers to the "One Truth" and not some general truth. A person may say a glass is half full and another may say it is half empty. It does not take a genius to figure out there can be such situations and that both points of view can be correct; this is NOT what the verse is talking about.
And because the other 3/4th refers to Dharma, the 1/4th is complete in itself, but ambiguous, and it does not mean that we can insert random adharmas of our choice to go along with the 1/4th.
You say (or support the line) in the article, talking about the Ekam Sat phrase, that "Essentially, any kind of spiritual practice followed with faith, love and persistence will lead to the same ultimate state of self-realization", and in the discussion that "The Ekam sat phrase is talking about general conceptions of truth, which may or may not be dharma". It will be easier for me to argue if you are consistent. And if you stick to the second version, refer to the first two paragraphs of my current response. And by the way, can you point me to any Christian or Islamic scripture which talks about self-realization? For these religions, God is something external, and the question of self-realization simply does not arise.
Part of your argument consists of projection of Hindu ideas onto other religions. As an example, "God is one, though everyone sees him as different, whether Allah, Yahweh or Ishwara." is just a projection of Hindu ideas onto other religions. (But at the same time,you also say "most Hindus scoff at the identification of Krishna with Christ").
Christianity and Islam are just a set of beliefs. Jesus, the one and only true God's only begotten Son died for everybody's sins; Mohammad is the seal of Prophets and Koran was dictated to him by the one and only true God. You buy the package, and you buy a ticket to heaven. If you don't, you go to hell. There is no searching, no travelling. You either accept the whole package of beliefs or not. You cannot pick and choose what you like. It is like a house of cards, one falls, and the whole house collapses. That is why otherwise reasonable people end up denying the theory of evolution. They are not paths leading anywhere, more like tickets to an exclusive club. And this is the origin of believers and non-believers, and hatred. Can you show me anything in Hinduism or Buddhism which preaches hatred to people of other faiths? And would a SINGLE Christian priest or Muslim mullah even acknowledge the possibility of paths to the truth other than their own? NO. And therein lies the crux of the problem.
And I would like to take up your point about differentiating between a religion and its adherents, and turn it around completely. People are the same everywhere, it is religions like Christianity and Islam which are responsible for preaching hatred towards unbelievers, responsible for inquisitions and jihads. Take the religions away, and the adherents are just as good or bad as anybody else.
And since you personally have no problems with Indians becoming Christians, do you have no problems with Indians becoming Muslim either? (Christianity and Islam are sister religions with similar theologies.)
"Thus, we see Hinduism accepting of Christianity,...". No, it is some Hindus who are accepting of Christianity, by wrong understanding of Hindu philosophy.
Coming to the "faith, love and persistence", can you tell me what you mean by Truth with a capital T, if not Dharma, or self-realization? I am not asking if a path is ethical or not, I am asking if it is right or not. And I ask again, is there anything verifiable in Christianity or Islam? -- SV 02:20, 9 May 2004 (UTC)
"They call him Zoroaster, Yahweh, God, Allah, and the soaring fleet-footed
Hermes. to that Truth which is One, sages give many a name: they call it
Allah, Hades, Devi".
To use a crude and colorful analogy, if you think of Hindu philosophy as a
man, this statement is like hitting his head with a sledgehammer.
As a minor aside, Zoroaster was a teacher, and should not be in the list. The name you were looking for is Ahura Mazda. There is an interesting theory that the Mazdeans were originally Vedic Aryans who moved to Iran due to differences.
I have said what I could to convince you, and I don't think I can say much more.
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa did not find Jesus or Allah. Ramakrishna-Muslim (6.2-6.4) "But is the story true? Ram Swarup finds that it is absent in the earliest recordings of Ramakrishna’s own talks. It first appears in a biography written 25 years after Ramakrishna’s death by Swami Saradananda (Sri Ramakrishna, the Great Master), who had known the Master only in the last two years of his life. Even then, mention (on just one page in a 1050-page volume) is only made of a vision of a luminous figure. The next biographer, Swami Nikhilananda, ventures to guess that the figure was “perhaps Mohammed”.6 In subsequent versions, this guess became a dead certainty, and that “vision of Mohammed” became the basis of the doctrine that he spent some time as a Muslim, and likewise as a Christian, and that he “proved the truth” of those religions by attaining the highest yogic state on those occasions."
The different Hindu schools of philososphy talk about admitting various sources of knowledge(only perception and inference; perception, inference and scripture, etc.) and rest on a solid foundation of logic. Do you see any logical basis in Christianity or Islam? To emphasise my point, a quote from Purva Mimamsa (Wiki stub) "Its adherents believed that revelation must be proved by reasoning, that it should not be accepted blindly as dogma."
I advocate questioning all religions, including Hinduism. But Hinduism and
Buddhism have an experimental part, yoga/meditation which at least gives
an avenue to people to verify those theories.
I am keeping an open mind by questioning the validity of every path, and
it is you who is being dogmatic by assuming the validity of many paths.
I think you are not looking at religions like Islam and Christianity correctly, you are making the religions into what you think they should be.
I think you would benefit by studying other religions better. If I may
venture to suggest some books:
Arun Shourie, Harvesting our souls : missionaries, their design, their
claims
Ram Swarup, Hindu view of Christianity and Islam
Ram Swarup, Hinduism vis-à-vis Christianity and Islam
Ibn Warraq, Why I am not a Muslim
Arun Shourie, The world of fatwas, or, The shariah in action
Ram Swarup, Understanding Islam through Hadis
(I have not read, or read only parts of, some of these books.)
Bharatvani is a site I love, you should check it out sometime.
An article of interest, Article "The Hindu, unfortunately, interprets Muslim behaviour through his own value system or frame of reference." Though the context of this remark is slightly different (replace "Muslim behaviour" with "Islam"), I think it is very relevant.
We seem to have come to an end of this discussion, and as the cliche goes, we can agree to disagree.
Coming to sacerdotalism, I seemed to detect an anti-Brahmin bias in the older, longer version of the article, but let us keep that discussion for some other day. :) -- SV 03:02, 13 May 2004 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | → | Archive 10 |
Congratulations to all the contributors, especially LordSurya, for making this article a featured article.
The quotation "Ekam sat.." from the Rig Veda is said to perhaps best capture the Hindu spirit. Well, I consider it to be of relatively minor importance. Personally, I consider the Upanishadic insights like "Aham Brahmaasmi" or "Tat twam asi" to best capture the Hindu spirit. There are problems with the interpretation of the quotation too - "Essentially, any kind of spiritual practice followed with faith, love and persistence will lead to the same ultimate state of self-realization." - Is that so? Saying that there could be many possible paths to a goal and saying all paths lead to the same goal are two very different statements, and the leap from the first to the second simply cannot be made.I remember bringing this up earlier, and I was asked to give references.
link1
link2 Section 'Can all “Religions” lead to God?'
'The Hindu proclamation that “different paths lead to God” certainly does not mean that any and every crass act can lead to God simply by calling it “religion”. Sanãtana Dharma makes ample distinction between dharma and adharma, between spiritual elevation and spiritual degradation.'
'To suggest that adharma leads to God as much as dharma would indeed be a negation of the entire Hindu spiritual thought.'
link3
Also, "...since temporal systems cannot claim sole understanding of the one transcendental Truth", is there no point in meditation? :) --
SV 02:36, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)
("Perhaps the Hindu spirit,...., is best captured in")
Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni and so on are not "sundry names". They are there as representatives and upholders of Dharma. You can't replace those names with Tom, Dick and Harry.
The other 3/4th is important because it refers to the "One Truth" and not some general truth. A person may say a glass is half full and another may say it is half empty. It does not take a genius to figure out there can be such situations and that both points of view can be correct; this is NOT what the verse is talking about.
And because the other 3/4th refers to Dharma, the 1/4th is complete in itself, but ambiguous, and it does not mean that we can insert random adharmas of our choice to go along with the 1/4th.
You say (or support the line) in the article, talking about the Ekam Sat phrase, that "Essentially, any kind of spiritual practice followed with faith, love and persistence will lead to the same ultimate state of self-realization", and in the discussion that "The Ekam sat phrase is talking about general conceptions of truth, which may or may not be dharma". It will be easier for me to argue if you are consistent. And if you stick to the second version, refer to the first two paragraphs of my current response. And by the way, can you point me to any Christian or Islamic scripture which talks about self-realization? For these religions, God is something external, and the question of self-realization simply does not arise.
Part of your argument consists of projection of Hindu ideas onto other religions. As an example, "God is one, though everyone sees him as different, whether Allah, Yahweh or Ishwara." is just a projection of Hindu ideas onto other religions. (But at the same time,you also say "most Hindus scoff at the identification of Krishna with Christ").
Christianity and Islam are just a set of beliefs. Jesus, the one and only true God's only begotten Son died for everybody's sins; Mohammad is the seal of Prophets and Koran was dictated to him by the one and only true God. You buy the package, and you buy a ticket to heaven. If you don't, you go to hell. There is no searching, no travelling. You either accept the whole package of beliefs or not. You cannot pick and choose what you like. It is like a house of cards, one falls, and the whole house collapses. That is why otherwise reasonable people end up denying the theory of evolution. They are not paths leading anywhere, more like tickets to an exclusive club. And this is the origin of believers and non-believers, and hatred. Can you show me anything in Hinduism or Buddhism which preaches hatred to people of other faiths? And would a SINGLE Christian priest or Muslim mullah even acknowledge the possibility of paths to the truth other than their own? NO. And therein lies the crux of the problem.
And I would like to take up your point about differentiating between a religion and its adherents, and turn it around completely. People are the same everywhere, it is religions like Christianity and Islam which are responsible for preaching hatred towards unbelievers, responsible for inquisitions and jihads. Take the religions away, and the adherents are just as good or bad as anybody else.
And since you personally have no problems with Indians becoming Christians, do you have no problems with Indians becoming Muslim either? (Christianity and Islam are sister religions with similar theologies.)
"Thus, we see Hinduism accepting of Christianity,...". No, it is some Hindus who are accepting of Christianity, by wrong understanding of Hindu philosophy.
Coming to the "faith, love and persistence", can you tell me what you mean by Truth with a capital T, if not Dharma, or self-realization? I am not asking if a path is ethical or not, I am asking if it is right or not. And I ask again, is there anything verifiable in Christianity or Islam? -- SV 02:20, 9 May 2004 (UTC)
"They call him Zoroaster, Yahweh, God, Allah, and the soaring fleet-footed
Hermes. to that Truth which is One, sages give many a name: they call it
Allah, Hades, Devi".
To use a crude and colorful analogy, if you think of Hindu philosophy as a
man, this statement is like hitting his head with a sledgehammer.
As a minor aside, Zoroaster was a teacher, and should not be in the list. The name you were looking for is Ahura Mazda. There is an interesting theory that the Mazdeans were originally Vedic Aryans who moved to Iran due to differences.
I have said what I could to convince you, and I don't think I can say much more.
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa did not find Jesus or Allah. Ramakrishna-Muslim (6.2-6.4) "But is the story true? Ram Swarup finds that it is absent in the earliest recordings of Ramakrishna’s own talks. It first appears in a biography written 25 years after Ramakrishna’s death by Swami Saradananda (Sri Ramakrishna, the Great Master), who had known the Master only in the last two years of his life. Even then, mention (on just one page in a 1050-page volume) is only made of a vision of a luminous figure. The next biographer, Swami Nikhilananda, ventures to guess that the figure was “perhaps Mohammed”.6 In subsequent versions, this guess became a dead certainty, and that “vision of Mohammed” became the basis of the doctrine that he spent some time as a Muslim, and likewise as a Christian, and that he “proved the truth” of those religions by attaining the highest yogic state on those occasions."
The different Hindu schools of philososphy talk about admitting various sources of knowledge(only perception and inference; perception, inference and scripture, etc.) and rest on a solid foundation of logic. Do you see any logical basis in Christianity or Islam? To emphasise my point, a quote from Purva Mimamsa (Wiki stub) "Its adherents believed that revelation must be proved by reasoning, that it should not be accepted blindly as dogma."
I advocate questioning all religions, including Hinduism. But Hinduism and
Buddhism have an experimental part, yoga/meditation which at least gives
an avenue to people to verify those theories.
I am keeping an open mind by questioning the validity of every path, and
it is you who is being dogmatic by assuming the validity of many paths.
I think you are not looking at religions like Islam and Christianity correctly, you are making the religions into what you think they should be.
I think you would benefit by studying other religions better. If I may
venture to suggest some books:
Arun Shourie, Harvesting our souls : missionaries, their design, their
claims
Ram Swarup, Hindu view of Christianity and Islam
Ram Swarup, Hinduism vis-à-vis Christianity and Islam
Ibn Warraq, Why I am not a Muslim
Arun Shourie, The world of fatwas, or, The shariah in action
Ram Swarup, Understanding Islam through Hadis
(I have not read, or read only parts of, some of these books.)
Bharatvani is a site I love, you should check it out sometime.
An article of interest, Article "The Hindu, unfortunately, interprets Muslim behaviour through his own value system or frame of reference." Though the context of this remark is slightly different (replace "Muslim behaviour" with "Islam"), I think it is very relevant.
We seem to have come to an end of this discussion, and as the cliche goes, we can agree to disagree.
Coming to sacerdotalism, I seemed to detect an anti-Brahmin bias in the older, longer version of the article, but let us keep that discussion for some other day. :) -- SV 03:02, 13 May 2004 (UTC)