Pulikeshi wrote:
John Locke, in his "
The Reasonableness of Christianity clearly says, in not these exact words, Jesus Christ had to knowingly mislead people, for if he had not done so, he would have been killed even sooner by the authorities. It is very critical that we understand, that both Christianity and Islam, has founders that suffered some duress under the prevalent powers under which they operated with some unease.
This also means that from the origins, the unacceptable was made acceptable as long as souls get harvested. Therefore, both force and coercion have been acceptable from the very beginning for these religions. Not understanding this key point is fatal to the others! As the zeal and ideological passion were taken over by the military/political and economic empires that usurped these beliefs, they themselves got tainted by this 'original sin.' Rome was never found wanting in sin, but the switch to the Christian one came easily...
Therefore, in a sense nation-states that consider themselves the protectors or representatives of exclusivist ideologies have this 'original sin' meme established as a keystone of their DNA. The desire to subjugate others, convert them and resource extract by keeping them diminished is really the propagation of this 'original sin.' If and when Hinduism and its adherents conquered regions outside India, in general there was no subjugation, but an assimilation of the local ideas, given the lack of this 'original sin' meme. These ideas can be explored in depth, I have merely presented some brief original thoughts on this subject.
So, before we present optimistic solutions and provide false sense of security, it is imperative that we understand that of the top three religions that will remain for sometime to come, the top two have shared memes of this 'original sin' (not the Eve eating the apple kind, but even more insidious one) that the third (Hinduism) does not understand and even want to. This is even more harder for Indians to understand, as many have been educated in parochial educational institutions that seemed to have imparted them with immunity to understanding of uncomfortable facts.
Let me take a leaf out of Protestant Christianity, which itself borrowed from Plato and others and argue for "what is believable by a human" in terms of his every day experience. That is to say that any stated fact or doctrine should fall within the realms of credibility based on human experience. For example a cat that you are holding on your lap cannot vanish and suddenly reappear of top your dining table.
Based on this sort of logic, did the Vedas arise before human societies or after them?
I am setting aside the argument that the content of the Vedas transcends human experience. That may be so - but as acquired by humans, the Vedas are in a form that can be transmitted from human to human. This means that human societies either existed before humans acquired the Vedas, or the Vedas were developed
pari passu with human societies. The content of the Vedas, as interpreted and expounded in the Upanishads and Vedanta are well known to us and put simply they are guidelines for human behaviour based on a theory of the origin of all existence from a unitary source.
Curiously, even in the absence of a source such as the Vedas and Upanishads, many tribal societies around the world have come up with ways of viewing the world that are similar to the Hindu view. And these views, in summary do not posit a single God or a single Prophet who gave them laws. These societies already have developed laws and morality. They have Gods as well. Morality and social behaviour are not placed as a hierarchical system that has God at the apex, sitting above everything else and handing down a code of behaviour to humans that the God need not follow. The code of human and social behaviour exists separate from and parallel to God. In this way Hindu-ism is similar to ancient tribal belief systems and vice versa. In Hindu tradition this code of behaviour as expounded in the Vedas is called "Dharma". Someone mentioned the Vedas as saying "Ahimsa paramo dharma". This is an example of a moral code for humans that is absolute and not claimed to be coming from God or a holy book dictated by God. Ultimately Gods are expected to uphold these moral codes, but I digress.
In contrast to Hindu theory and the beliefs of tribal religions (many of which have been wiped out in Europe and Africa by Christianity and Islam but have been allowed to survive untouched in North East India), both Christianity and Islam are political systems. They seek to organize society under laws that are purportedly handed down by a God who is above those laws and created those laws for humans. In terms of rationality and human experience this is laughable nonsense. Who or where is this God fellow who excuses himself from the laws he lays down for others. Sounds like a corrupt politician to me - and that is exactly where the system comes from.
Christianity (and Islam, but the latter is OT for this thread) starts with the assumption that there is a God. That is the first law. Questioning this law can cause you to be put to death (by a human) because it is termed "blasphemy". The first rule starts with coercion and coercion means that the person who enforces the rule needs to have physical power over the person upon whom the rule is imposed. Once the existence of this God is forced down you throat - all laws that purportedly come from this God can then be pushed through using the same system of coercion. This system is given the name "religion" but that is actually a political organization - using a religious oligarchy who claim to implement orders of a mythical monarch called "God"
Now here is where the beautiful paragraph you wrote above comes into play:
You wrote:
Pulikeshi wrote:..says, in not these exact words, Jesus Christ had to knowingly mislead people, for if he had not done so, he would have been killed even sooner by the authorities. It is very critical that we understand, that both Christianity and Islam, has founders that suffered some duress under the prevalent powers under which they operated with some unease.
The problem expressed by this paragraph is exactly the same pressure that was faced by Hindu thinkers after the Islamic and Christian colonial invasions. As you wrote "the unacceptable has been made acceptable". Hindus as prominent as Vivekananda have been forced to admit more similarities between Hindu-ism "the religion" than there actually exist. Hindus have been forced to admit that there is an equivalence between the Christian and Islamic concept of "God" and the Hindu concept of "Brahman". Hindus have been forced to accept that their beliefs come from some Holy book or a set of Holy books that lay down the law. That is not true. There is no single Hindu law book. Hindus have moral principles (dharma) to be followed by humans. Hindus have no law-book handed by god (like the Bible) to be implemented by punishment and coercion by a clergy called "brahmins". Hindus have been forced to admit that they have a priestly class like Mullahs and Padres called Brahmins who make take rules from their god and give it to others. Nothing could be a worse corruption of the Hindu system than this, but even top Hindu thinkers have been forced by the circumstances of subjugation to draw all these fake parallels between Hindu-ism and the religions.
So we find now that the vast mass of Hindus think that they have a monolithic "religion", a single God just like the christian God, a set of Holy books and a corrupt clergy who need to be dismissed and Hindu society needing reform to be like the benevolent Christians.
Hindu practice in the past always revolved around dharma. Dharma is a set of ethics and recommendations of human behavior to hold society together with or without God. The principles of dharma are expounded in the Vedas, explained in the Upanishads and in the Hindu epics. But we have discarded that. We have forgotten that there is a Hindu system for holding society based on family and environment. Hinduism has already been made into a copycat version of Christianity - but it lacks the purity and goodness of Christianity because Hindus have convinced themselves that their "religion" has bad bad caste unlike the egalitarian religions. Hindus are not smart enough to realize that there is no "caste" in the "Hindu religion". There is no Hindu religion. There is only Hindu dharma. There is no written book that must be followed that set ideas like caste or sati or child marriage in stone and "Hindu laws"
Hindus don't even know this - that is how far Hindus have sunk. From this level the only way out is to use coercion and violence because Hindu dharma requires too much intelligence and the Twitter generation will not understand philosophy. But they will understand coercion. Like everyone else.
Why do we need to define "Secularism"? Throw it into the trash it belongs.