Posted on 07/28/2009 7:37:17 PM PDT by Willie Green
Festivities in a new temple dedicated to the Indian monkey god Hanuman in Frisco, Texas, earlier this month remind us that a minority of religions exists within the shores of the United States that is relatively silent. The faith that is the subject here, of course, is Hinduism, which in that North Texas town, at least, is enjoying an "expanding population," according to the Dallas Morning News. Despite the fact that Indians have been quietly enriching the American melting pot for decades to centuries, few non-Indians know much about the colorful religion of Hinduism.
In actuality, the term "Hinduism" represents not a monolithic faith but a conglomeration of more or less varied religions, sects and cults largely originating on the Indian subcontinent and often incorporating beliefs, doctrines and traditions dating back several thousand years. What we perceive of as "Hinduism," then, encompasses and embraces a wide variety of beliefs, to the extent that even recent icons such as Elvis Presley, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa have reputedly made it into the extensive Hindu pantheon of a traditional "333 million" deities, demigods and saints, etc.
According to his hairdresser-cum-spiritual advisor Larry Geller, the "King of Rock and Roll" Presley, who was raised a Christian, was fond of reading books about Eastern spiritual traditions. The affection for Indian philosophy by members of the music group the Beatles is legendary, especially in the case of George Harrison. Many Indian gurus and yogis have found welcome on this side of the Atlantic and Pacific, and the ancient physical and spiritual exercise of yoga in a myriad of forms is practiced by up to 20 million Americans.
Yet, Hinduism remains a mystery to most Americans, both at times intriguing and bizarre with its sundry gods and goddesses. Part of the reason for this oversight is because Hinduism in its fullness seems so alien to cultures largely dominated by either the Abrahamic faiths with their aloof monotheistic God or the "New Atheism," which has a tendency to ridicule and dismiss such lively piety.
Hinduism plays nice in the U.S.
Another reason Americans as whole are largely oblivious to Hinduism is because its practitioners in general do not rabblerouse, set up terrorist camps, call for the destruction of the U.S. Constitution, bilk the American public for millions, establish bogus "charities," engage in unethical and seedy "televangelism," lobby Congress for special favors and consideration, challenge constantly the principle of separation of church and state, abuse the First Amendment and all of the fun stuff (sarcasm) we are used to seeing from fervent religionists in our country and elsewhere.
This lack of aggression by Hindus in America does not reflect that they do not take their faith very seriously, as they certainly do. Like Christians who proclaim that Jesus Christ is real because they have had visions of him, devout Hindus often feel as if their deities have made their very real presence known, as in the case of Cheeni Rao, author of In Hanuman's Hands, who while going down the destructive path of drug abuse was "saved" by the monkey-headed god. Rao's experience was every bit as life changing as that of Christians in a similar position—and this instance illustrates that the form of a profound spiritual presence purportedly experienced is largely if not entirely dependent upon one's cultural conditioning, not upon any "ultimate reality" or "absolute truth."
"Hinduism" as a monolith has its flaws—and non-Hindus both religious and secular will no doubt point them out—including taking itself too seriously to the point where, in its native land, a certain amount of strife and atrocity can be traced to Indian beliefs, such as the rare but ongoing practice of widow-burning or sati in various districts, as well as other sexism, prejudices—such as the caste system—and violence committed by its fanatical minority. Yet, while some "enlightened gurus" have been opportunists preying on a gullible American public with enticing stories of metaphysical and supernatural wonders, so far traditional Hinduism's practitioners generally have not brought unsavory and violent "traditions" along with them to their new homelands and demanded they be allowed to break the law of the land in practicing them, unlike members of other faiths.
We can only hope that other religionists in the United States and elsewhere will follow suit and behave in a similar, more spiritually mature manner as the American Hindu population, rather than bullying and elbowing their way in, exploiting the system and creating enmity. Rarely if ever do we hear complaints or derogatory news items about Hindus in America, while members of other groups such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam often make it into the news for unethical and illegal behavior. Does this frequent broadcasting of these three faiths result because they are under a bigger microscope, or could there be a problem with the Abrahamic monotheism itself, whereby it insists on its own way, to compel and force itself upon people against their will, with dire threats of eternal punishment for rejecting it?
Concerning the fanatical monotheism depicted in the Old Testament, from which the Abrahamic faiths arose, in Pagan Christs (17-18) John M. Robertson remarked:
Monotheism of this type is in any case morally lower than polytheism since those who held it lacked sympathy for their neighbors. Most of the Jewish kings were polytheists. What I am concerned to challenge is the assumption—due to the influence of Christianity—that Jewish monotheism is essentially higher than polytheism, and constitutes a great advance in religion.... If the mere affirmation of a Supreme Creator God is taken to be a mark of superiority, certain primitive tribes who hold this doctrine and yet practice human sacrifice must be considered to have a 'higher' religion than the late Greeks and Romans."Monotheism in America will simply need to become accustomed to the fact that this country is inhabited by polytheists such as the Hindus as well as atheists, humanists and secularists, and to stop being so aggressive and insistent upon its own way. That's America under the U.S. Constitution, a fact that freedom lovers everywhere will appreciate.
This would come as a surprise (nay, shock) to Hinduism’s clerical classes and it’s millions of followers in the sub-continent.
You write: “Hinduism doesn’t even HAVE a basic dogma or rules. What you’ve specified can all be removed and hinduism would be unchanged.”
If by this you mean that just about anyone can claim to be a Hindu including those who do and do not believe in gods incarnated as monkeys, baboons and reptiles, and who believe that an immersion in the Ganges can be regarded as an attempt at toxic suicide, then we have a belief system that is as evanescent and shifting as the desert winds and sands.
Well, at the time there were several editorials in the Times of India and many commission reports that document how Hindu mobs went on the rampage butchering the Sikhs. Of course, like our own Rodney King riots, one can evaluate and review the causes that led to this but that does not detract from the core issue of religiously targeted slaughtering of Hindus against the Sikhs.
Hinduism in all its forms is myth that has survived the long bygone era of paganism only because the the vast swath of illiterate Indian masses. Its beliefs, practices, rituals and customs can only charitably be described as barbaric and unfit for accommodation in western societies whose civilization was founded in Catholicism.
Actual proof of the theater arson or actual proof of the NLFT terrorists? Which ones? I’ve posted the article regarding arson by those against filming of the Dan Brown movie, right on top. Perhaps you should make an effort to read...
As for the NLFT Christian terrorists, ask and I shall flood this place with information on them. From verifiable sources such as GlobalSecurity, SATP, BBC, among others.
Show this from the Gita, Sir.
I can also post pictures of Catholics kissing pieces of encapsulated dead flesh, worshiping statues of impaled creatures on crosses, raising dead men into gods they call "saints", and the like.
I can also quote Jefferson, Adams, Martin Luther on their opinion of the Catholic Church as a beast that must die.
I can also quote the laws and enactments of this very Nation against Catholics.
I can quote the effects illegal, criminal alien Catholics on this country.
I can quote the desperate state of entire populations of Catholics in places like Brazil, Mexico, and the rest of South America.
Where do you want me to begin?
OK give us just one incident of proven Christian arson over the Da Vinci Code in India as reported by a reputable source of the caliber of the Times of India, or London Times or Telegraph or such other mainstream publication, not inundate us with the “flood” of useless propaganda stuff you keep downloading by the buckets here.
The rise of Hinduism in America doesn’t bother me. The fact that there are two mosques within five miles of me DOES bother me.
Er, you couln’t look above?
Fine.
Here it is, again:
Violence halts Da Vinci Code screening in Hyderabad
IANS 23 June 2006, 09:52pm IST
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/India/articleshow/msid-1674892,curpg-2.cms
HYDERABAD: The screening of controversial Hollywood movie “Da Vinci Code” was suspended at a theatre here after a group of Christians,
protesting against the release of the film, ransacked the theatre.
The movie was to be released at Prasad Imax following a direction by the Andhra Pradesh High Court, quashing the state government’s order to ban its screening.
However, dozens of activists under the banner of the Christian United Front raided the theatre and damaged the property extensively forcing the management to suspend the film’s screening.
The protesters, who were carrying banners and placards describing the film as “Devil’s Code”, barged in to the theatre located near the Hussain Sagar lake in the heart of the city even as hundreds of people eager to watch the movie were standing in queues for the tickets of the first show of the movie.
Police said the mob shattered the glass panes and damaged furniture and ticket counters. The protesters also raised slogans against the court’s order lifting the ban imposed by the state government on the film.
Prasad Imax was the only theatre in the state, where the film was scheduled to be released on Friday.
The court, on petitions by the film’s distributors, Wednesday quashed the June 1 government order banning the screening of the movie in the state. The movie was to be released in the state on June 2.
The government move came following protests by various Christian and Muslim groups that said the movie would hurt religious sentiments. The government, in its order, contended that the film might lead to law and order problems.
Following the court order, the distributors had announced plans to release the English and Hindi versions of the movie next week.
The movie, based on Dan Brown’s bestseller with the same title, remains banned in several Indian states.
_____________________________________________________________
Will you eat crow, now?
PS: Look at the URL carefully.
Show me even one incident of “propaganda” that I have posted here. If you can’t, please apologise for making baseless allegations.
I thought you said “arson” (not damage to interior furniture- pretty low order damage by Hindu standards where the slightest perceived insults to mythical Hindu gods lead to mass throat-slitting and butchering: would’t you say?)
Ahh, mobbing, rioting and damaging public and private property by Christians is so condonable, ay?
B-B-But but but, it’s not arson! That makes all the rioting legit! Did you check if breaking one of those couple of dozen display panels didn’t cause an electric spark?
[/sarcasm]
Talk about double standards, LOL!
It’s hilarious that you can overlook the mindless violence to start an argument over terminology. It’s SO typical of petty people, with severe, debilitating ego issues.
Remember the other incident where a magazine in Andhra Pradesh published images of Jesus with a beer? The mob ransacked the publication’s office and set fire to the prints. Shall I post that here, or will you look it up, yourself?
Throat-slitting? That’s a favorite of the Jesus-freak NLFT cadres and their likes.
Later, when you’ve had your fill of crow digested, we can talk, strictly as per the standards you apply on Hindus, to discuss the Catholic drug lords of Mexico and Colombia, among other hell-holes packed to the gills with people of the same affiliation, on their campaign of violence there this year, prompting some to equate it to the violence in Iraq, if not to worser things.
Apparently you cannot tell the difference between drug lords who happen to be baptised Catholic and Catholic drug lords. And this is the kind of utterly illiterate discussion you engage in that perhaps accounts for why you cling to Hinduism as your last haven of refuge.
Exceptional scholars like Gov. Bobby Jindal toileted these beliefs a long time ago and joined the tens of thousands of other brilliant minds from Faraday to Pasteur to Keppler to Chesterton while you and your ilk try to make a mockery of these beliefs, deny our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and exploit the benefits of western civilization as founded by the Catholic Church.
And yet you wonder now why for many polytheistic Hinduism with all of its rituals is no different from Moslem behavior that is fundamentally incompatible with the culture and traditions of this Nation. All of Europe and the US now have their ghettoized Indian enclaves speaking a language, wearing a dress, and mangling the English language.
It’s no small wonder then that writers like Pat Buchanan (”Death of the West”) have called for restricting Moslem and Hindu immigration to this nation.
What you describe is a worship-centric, accretionary historical process which is actually peripheral to the Sanatan Dharma philosophy that makes up the core of what is called "Hinduism" today.
The Sanatan Dharma is the philosophy not only that everything is God, but also that God has become everything and everyone, and so the process of "salvation" consists in "realizing" that one's own, personal, essential Self is none other than God. This essential Self is not the egoic, limited self that identifies with a particular body, mind and personal history. The sun and it's rays, the ocean and it's waves, and similiar examples are given to illustrate how a center disburses itself into the illusion of separateness.
Thus what is called "worship," from pre-vedic, through vedic and up to modern times, is seen as nothing other than an aide to focus the mind on deeper and more profound aspects of God with which one is already a part, yet disconnected from in experience. On the other hand, Hinduism teaches that when the mind takes an incarnation of God as a focal point, that incarnation has the power to bring a person to the full realization of God. Which is why, when a Christian tells a Hindu that they focus on Jesus Christ alone, the Hindu sees no problem with that - in fact, from a Hindu point of view, it is very efficient.
So when you describe a historical accretion of apparent influences on Hinduism, you are not describing any change whatever in the core Sanatan Dharma. You are merely describing historical influences on the interpretation of various manifestations of God, and descriptions of divine behaviors that Hinduism already accepted as the "normal" behavior of an infinitely creative Divine. That's why Hinduism could accept Jesus Christ so completely - He was seen as another world-manifestation Divine expression of the Lord, within a framework where such world-manifestations of the Lord are necessary to change world history. In Hinduism, examples of such other manifestations are Krishna and Rama, and there are many others as well.
In addition, something so fundamental as the Trinity is hardly new to Hinduism. Even before Brahma, Vishnu & Shiva, the concepts of God's powers of creation, protection and destruction/rebirth were fundamental, because of their requirement for rational thought about the universe across time.
"Toileted"? My, aren't we respectful of other multi-thousand year old traditions.
Ancient Hindu science and technology doctrines were vast. They covered the theory, development and application of the scientific method itself, as well as particular investigations of atomic theory, chemical theory, conceptions of molecular motion (Parispanda), the creation of empirical recipes of chemical technology, physics ideas on mechanics (kinetics) and acoustics, biological treatises on plants and plant-life, a scientific classification of animals with associated studies of physiology and biology, a very advanced and developed medical system (ayurveda), and extensive mathematical and astronomical investigations.
Oh yeah - and a Hindu mathemetician named Aryabhatta invented the zero.
And that's the Cliff notes version that doesn't even begin to touch the profound depth and detail of Hindu philosophy, which provided the underlying support of all of these scientific and mathematical investigations.
As well, the fact that all of this was already accomplished before Mary and Joseph were born should give you pause for thought.
I don’t think scientific doctrines are the exclusive province of Catholics, Jews, Hindus, or Atheists. Nor was this my point.
Those renowned inventors, scholars, discoverers, philosophers, jurists, writers, essayists, poets, painters, sculptors, astronomers, and mathematicians who lived in the A.D. period (Newton, Pasteur, Faraday, Keppler to name a few examples) had a choice of religious beliefs from which to choose from including Hinduism and Buddhism that long predated Christianity.
Indeed, many of them were well versed in Greek and Roman mythology that influenced and was influenced by an assortment of religious beliefs and a whole strain of cults at the time.
Yet despite this menu of choices they chose Catholicism and literary giants like T.S. Eliot, Hillaire Belloc, and G.K. Chesterton whose writings are all standard fare in English Literature were avid and indefatigable Catholics/Christians.
There are several “multi-thousand year old traditions” like the Aztec and Maya cultures that involved human sacrifices as a weekly ritual, this does not mean that one must be respectful of either such beliefs or rituals because of a tradition that was barbaric unless one wants to be considered politically correct. In the modern era “honor killings” in the context of Hindu/Moslem culture is barbaric.
So to turn around your premise that fact that these individuals of science and literature chose to reject pre-existing beliefs “before Mary and Joseph were born should give you pause for thought.”
LOL, I am an Atheist, and I am pretty sure you would have realised it by now. All religions are false. Catholicism, even more so, with all its idolatry and rituals, and the papal office, more like the inherited continuation of the Roman emperor’s reign.
You seem to have a deep, ingrained problem with understanding that none of the nonsense you keep spouting about Hindus happens to be present in the Gita. Is it too hard for you to understand that? As for the drug lords, many of them are Catholics and they believe themselves to be so, too. They are not Atheists, for example, and they do know what their faith is. The only reason I mentioned them is because you apply the same standards to Hindus.
As for Bobby Jindal and the others, they are talented people but I don’t consider their faith to be the sign of their talent or intelligence. You are too stupid to realise that both don’t go hand-in-hand. Bobby Jindal, for example, indulged in an exorcism ritual, one time ago, and that is perceived as a negative thing in this very non-Catholic country.
“Judeo-Christian” is a myth. Jews don’t believe in Jesus as their Messiah, nor do they believe in a Hell. Their god is not the Christian god- theirs hasn’t yet sent their “savior”. These concepts were borrowed from the Persians and other cultures, and incorporated into what was invented as Christianity.
You would be the last person to look upto for “literate” and logical arguments, with your recorded history of willful arrogance, ignorance and goal-post shifting, on this very thread.
Pat Buchanan is a loon. If you know what he has to say about the influx of the purile seas of criminal-alien Catholics (by your standards) into the US, write it here.
The Bhagavad-Gita was first translated into a European languagein 1890.
Newton et all couldn’t possibly have had a clue of its contents.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.