Why Hindus should reject Jesus

[Adhvagat]

Riverworlf, chill. Let the rajas float away.

It's always nice to have discussions on these matters with different points of view.

Om Tat Sat

[sanjaya]

That's still a logical fallacy: broad generalization.

Just to be clear, are you disagreeing with my claim that the person who practices a religion should conform himself to the religion, instead of conforming the religion to himself? Surely you see the problem here. Prime example: I feel like eating at McDonalds, I can just decide to ignore the rules about beefeating. I don't mean to offend you at all, but I think you may be trivializing the Hindu religion. One of the most significant social barriers to being raised Hindu in America is the strict vegetarianism. From my early years until today, people ask why I am so stubborn as to not eat meat, and my explanation that I am Hindu only confuses them even more. This, and the many other inconveniences of being Hindu are what make our religion ultimately so valuable to us. When you alter the rules as you go along, it cheapens the religion. In the end, your primary concern should not even be that you may be offending Hindus, but that you are robbing yourself of the experience of being Hindu by picking and choosing what parts of the faith you accept.

If there's one thing I've learned about Sri Bhagavan, it's that He's not so petty as to be offended. The Bhagavad Gita itself says that it doesn't matter what you do for worship, so long as it's done with a full heart.

Careful now, this is a slippery slope. I would ask if Nazism offends God, but I think there's an Internet joke about how all online conversations will ultimately devolve into this. However, are you so sure that the Lord is never offended by anything? Is God offended when we kill and eat animals? Is Goddess Saraswati offended when we step on books? Or is Bhagavan offended when we sit for pooja without having bathed, and with our feet facing the images of God? Maybe God asks us to observe these rituals for our benefit and not his, and maybe nothing truly offends him.

...or maybe not. For as long as I've been able to read, I have read the Satyanarayana Katha every month on the full moon day as part of pooja to Lord Narayana. And if ever there was a doubt in my mind that we can do things to offend God, one passage from the text clarifies this. It is part of the story of the Sadhu who promised to God that he would observer the Satyanarayana Vratha if the Lord would bless him with children, but ignored his vow once the child was born. This is what it says:

In the meantime, Kalavati blossomed into a lovely maiden and Sadhu sent a messenger in search of a suitable groom. The messenger found a good-natured, handsome, and able boy in a merchant family from Kanchana Nagar. Sadhu found the boy as a suitable match for Kalavati. He celebrated his daughter's marriage with great pomp and ceremony. Engrossed in the festivities, he forgot to perform Satyanarayana Puja. This angered Lord Satyanarayana.

I've never read this in the original language. Maybe the exact wording suggests something other than anger. I do know that what follows is a series of events in which God curses the Sadhu with misfortune, he acknowledges his error and asks for forgiveness, God restores his good fortunes, and he returns to his neglectful ways. Now the Hindu conception of God isn't like the Abrahamic one; I don't know that God would kill people for bringing strange fire before an altar (actually God does kill two people in this story, but they are brought back to life fairly quickly).

Call this what you will; perhaps it's corrective discipline rather than human-like emotion. Whatever the case, there is a right way to worship God and a wrong way. The wrong way leads to suffering. Combining Hinduism with other religions may perhaps be frivolous. And I think it's worth taking some time to reflect on whether your religious practices are a good idea or not. I'm not trying to scare you into submission. It's not like you'll go to eternal hell or anything. I'm just saying that some forms of spirituality are objectively better than others. Things are not relative in this matter.

GAHCK! Even after a post saying I'm not going to argue anymore, I'm still arguing!

Sorry for making you break your vow.

If it's any consolation, I don't see this as a heated argument. As Pietro said, just a different point of view.

[BryonMorrigan]

Jews are the same way, and over the past two thousand years in Europe, they've pretty much stuck to themselves. That leads me to believe that Jews today look much as they did in Jesus' time. Christians would have us believe that Jesus was from the Far East. In fact he was basically as European as most Christians are.

Interestingly enough, there are two different major ethnic groups that make up modern Jews. The Sephardic people are the Jews who are more closely related to Arabs, and the Ashkenazim are the "Russian" or European Jews, many of whom are the descendants of the Khazars, an Eastern European tribe that converted to Judaism in the 8th century CE. (If you are interested in this, Arthur Koestler wrote a book about it, entitled, "The Thirteenth Tribe.")

This is why many Jews, particularly in America (where most Jewish people are immigrants from Europe) are indistinguishable from other Europeans, while in the Middle East, the Jews there have a tendency to look more "Middle-Eastern." Of course, since the Jewish rules about marriage are based on religion, rather than race, there has been a lot of inter-marriage between Ashkenazim and Sephardim over the years, but the same could also be said of many different people of Indian ethnicity.

Basically, there's one easy way to picture the differences between how Ashkenazim and Sephardim look:

Captain Kirk (William Shatner): Ashkenazi Jew
Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy): Sephardic Jew



I know this is totally unimportant to the discussion, but I find these issues to be fascinating...

[sm78]

LOL! That is exactly why you will never be a Hindu.

I don't think such personal attacks and broad brush opinions is going to help anybody. It is very difficult to completely deny ancestry for an westerner, so a soft corner for Christ or re-interpretation of his teachings in the light of new found eastern philosophy can be expected, and can be treated with more compassion and humility.

Yes, those who have completely over Abrahamism dependece by analyzing the facts and redundancies of the so called goodness of these religions. Or by realizing that western people were never originally christians or muslims, having being forced to adopt the religion over a short span when their kings adopted them, can be more complete Hindus.


Unless riverwolf starts to believe that Hindus need to worship christ or starts preaching Christ to hindus, I don't see why he should be attacked for selective interpretation of religion and christ, which still forms essential form of his culture and his ancestory.

Its saints like Ramakrishna, sai baba and most of modern Hindu interpretors who have given the impression that all religions are basically different paths to God. Very few modern saints in known history have categorically denied this fact. So before attacking riverwolf we need to clean our own house and attack & dethrone these saints. We are generally unwilling to do that because of some reason or other. Then why are we attacking riverwolf or similar personalities - who even if not complete Hindu as per my or your understanding, can nonetheless only be beneficial to the community. If nothing else, it counter balances the fundamentalism and evangelicism in Christians. If Christians adopt such universalists beliefs, its only a good thing for everybody.

[mohanty]

I don't even understand why Hindus should even have to have this discussion. I understand the necessity of pointing out info like this, as too many Hindus seem to be falling for the Christian propaganda...but I mean, do other religions ever have to have these discussions?

Do Christians sit around discussing whether or not Hanuman is "appropriate" for Christianity?

Do Jews sit around discussing whether or not Zeus is "appropriate" for Judaism?

Do Muslims sit around discussing whether or not the Buddha is "appropriate" for Islam?

Frankly, "Jesus" is as relevant to Hinduism as Maa Kali is to Christianity.

Allowing Hinduism to be altered or defined by Christianity, or even considering it, shows that one's mind already feels that Christianity is "superior" to Hinduism. You can see this kind of thinking echoed in some of the writings of Rammohan Roy and Keshub Chunder Sen. They were so eager to be "accepted" by their oppressors and seen as "modern," that they couldn't stop fawning over the aggressive hatred of Christian proselytism.

In fact, I cannot think of many religions as fundamentally INCOMPATIBLE as Hinduism and Christianity. It's like trying to be both an observant Jew and a Jihadist Muslim at the same time.

I understand and appreciate where BryonMorrigan is coming from. One frequently gets asked questions like 'Why do Hindus worship so many gods?'. The opposite of this "Why do Christians worship only one god?" would be laughed upon.

This is because the dominant paradigm inside which such discourse happens is Judeo-Christian. One god is taken to be a self-evident truth. It is "many gods" that must be explained. The Hindu, therefore, is always on the defensive.

He must explain his ways. He must defend his ways. He must justify his belief in his ways and if he can't, he must agree that the "one god" peddler is right.

By asking questions about whether Jesus has a place in Hinduism, we play into this trap.

[Sahasranama]

I am glad to see you joining the discussion Tattvamasi!

@sm78 You make a good point, a Christian Universalist is better than a Christian fundamentalist. If we add Universalism to Hinduism, we are just watering it down, but if we add it to Christianity, we are improving it.