Oh, LOL!
Let me just quote your pasta-logic from your previous post, to set a frame of reference. You implied that witch-burnings in Europe were a Pagan practise. Oh, my, who knew that the pagans were a powerful force in 17th-century Europe?
Or for that matter, the Salem Witch Trials. Did pagans swim across the Atlantic to America, too?
Sati was a statistical aberration and not a norm of Hindu society- not a shred of it is even mentioned in the Gita. Likewise with the witch-burnings in Europe. You have repeatedly failed to convince anyone otherwise, your irrelevant ramblings, notwithstanding.
As for the Indian President, let’s look at his own words:
“That the nation has found a consensus for its highest office in someone who has sprung from the grass-roots of our society and grown up in the dust and heat of this sacred land is symbolic of the fact that the concerns of the common man have now moved to the centre stage of our social and political life. It is this larger significance of my election rather than any personal sense of honour that makes me rejoice on this occasion.”
- President K. R Narayanan, on his inaugural address, with Chief Justice J. S. Verma in the Central Hall of Parliament.
Your contention that “noble Talmudic knowledge” requires hereditary transmission is laughably silly- stupid, in fact. You merely keep going around in endless loops, instead of validating how hereditary transmission is superior to the non-hereditary kind.
About relative time scales in history, are you implying that were you to be born and living merely 300-400 years ago, you would have criticised Christianity with the same fervour, as you do, a non-organised religion like Hinduism, today? Please detail your answer.
The “graphic cartoon” by the way, was the burning of Joan of Arc. Want an account of the entire event? I didn’t think so.
PS: It wasn’t the pagans that burnt her alive.
As for Bobby Jindal, who has clearly acknowledged the spiritual side of the Gita in your own excerpt, perhaps he escaped reading the Old Testament:
1 Samuel 15:2-3
“Thus saith the LORD of hosts, go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
Infant and suckling? For what fault?!
When weakness in intellect confronts hard truths what we have is a nervous LOL!. Perhaps that’s all you could do. Never mind the historical truths that it was the Christian Emperor Charlemagne who outlawed the pagan practice of witch burnings. Nor do we need the Joan of Arc example, as one among many, in pre-Renaissance times. Of course all this, is either to explain away or worse justify an overt and central ritual of a barbaric religious practice of Hindu casteism. So too was wife burning which has its roots in vile Hindu traditions where widows are dragged against their wish onto a lighted pyre.
The first woman known as Sati was the consort of Lord Shiva. She burnt herself in fire as protest against her father who did not give her consort Shiva the respect she thought he deserved, while burning herself she prayed to be reborn again as the new consort of Shiva, which she became and her name in the new incarnation was Parvati.
This is the stuff of Hinduism as conveyed from one generation to another.
As for a Dalit Indian’s President address, this is supposed to float a sea-change in entrenched Hindu rituals by the sheer force of such lofty rhetoric about concerns for the common man. What happened to Robespierre? This would be news to the speakers of the Indian literary panel that formed the subject of this thread.
What keeps you from continually failing to comprehend the point about Jewish clergy being hereditary? You insist that I “validat(e) how hereditary transmission is superior to the non-hereditary kind” This is a straw argument. It was never raised. Go back and check the earlier posts. What was offered was a rationale not a justification? Do you understand the difference between the two? Accusations like “laughable” “stupid” etc gets you nowhere except suggest an infantile mind at work.
Finally, you quote from Samuel 1 :15:2-3 as a riposte to Gov. Bobby Jindal view of Hindu deity violence. This is a classic case of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. Interpretation of scripture is not like reading a book for kindergartners. In Jewish tradition, the Amalekites came to represent the archetypal enemy of the Jews and this passage you cite as been the subject of intense discussion and interpretation from Maimonides down to present times.
All in all, you must concede that Hinduism encompasses a system of beliefs and rituals that are anathema to civil society and cannot withstand the rigors of serious intellectual inquiry and human experientce which explains why it is thankfully confined to a geographical swath of millions of illiterates and their clerics, otherwise known as Hindu India.