Re: 'caste' discrimination is part of equality bill in UK
Originally Posted by
Eastern Mind
Vannakkam: Frankly, I don't care. It's historical or intellectual trivia to me. All I want to be able to do is go to my temple, sit, and worship Ganesha. Who runs the temple, or who is allowed into the moolasthanam doesn't concern me. If it helped me get calmer, or live a more dharmic lifestyle, I would care. But it is largely irrelevant to me, and I suspect, the vast majority of Hindus.
It's a scholarly debate, and I'm no scholar at all. I'm just a simple bhaktar trying to become closer to God. If sitting in a pile of sewage helped, I suppose I'd go do that.
With that, I'll bow out of this conversation, since I'm one of the evil people, or a modern innovator, or both, I don't know.
Aum Namasivaya
Pranams.
You don't care because it's a subject with which you are uncomfortable. That is fine, but it is hardly a trivial or academic subject. The Hindu viewpoint on caste is a huge issue that inspires a great deal of anti-Hindu attitude among non-Hindu scholars. Now those ivory-tower attitudes have filtered down to the lowest of the low, the democratically-elected politicians, who are going to push forward legislation which will punish Hindus for "caste discrmination."
Where in the UK are people being discriminated against based on caste? In fact, caste is a non-issue for the majority of Hindus in their ordinary, day-to-day, secular lives, both in the UK and in India. The ONLY area where caste is a persistent issue is in the area of temple employment. While you may not care about the caste of your temple priest, you cannot deny that millions of Hindus do care, and that the vast majority of Hindu temples preferentially employ brahmins as priests. This is the essence of "caste discrmination," but it happens to be religiously sanctioned in the Hindu scriptural tradition. Now, can you really tell me that you don't care that politicians are about to empower themselves to repeatedly punish an entire religious group for following practices that are intrinsic to their religion? Seriously?
You don't have to be a Hindu, or even a scholar, to recognize the evil inherent in this sort of legislation. When you empower the State to intervene in the internal affairs of private organizations based on some preconceived notion of morality, you are giving them carte blanche to attack entire religious groups whose views are not approved of by the majority. This is itself the essence of discrimination, and every thoughtful person should be opposed to it on that basis alone.
Sadly, this thread shows that many Hindus will be perfectly happy with this legislation, as they have bought into Western, egalitarian conceptions of caste, and aren't going to be worried that the government which supports their views will be aggressing against religious institutions in the name of enforcing Western morality.
Philosoraptor
"Wise men speak because they have something to say. Fools speak because they have to say something." - Plato
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