My family and extended family are high caste Hindu and coincidentally terrible human beings (narrator: It’s not coincidental). As such I am atheistic and have kept my distance from Hindu stuff because from what I have seen so far no good comes out of it ever. The way I see it, in a post-colonial India, Hinduism is a religion of the oppressors. The little that I know it is full of red flags and there no emancipatory value to it which is a bit shocking considering India’s colonial past. For example, in the Hindu epic called Ramayana, Hanuman flies to Sri Lanka. He does this to check up on Sita, the wife of Lord Rama (the incarnation of Krishna who is one of the most important Hindu gods). Sita had been kidnapped by Ravana, the king of Sri Lanka. After Hanuman checks up on her, he commits arson basically setting civilian infrastructure on fire which I am sure is against the Geneva Convention or its equivalent mapped to this mythical universe. This is something that is celebrated which I never understood really.
Either way, I don’t fuck with Hinduism for mostly personal reasons. This got me thinking if there are people here who are interested in it. The only other Indian person I know here is trapped in the cycle of getting banned for going off the handle and creating alt accounts which is kinda ironic considering the Hindu belief in karma and rebirth.
I know that the Rev Left Radio guy is interested in Buddhism which also originated in India/Nepal but is extremely less problematic. So it got me wondering if there are non-Indian people here interested in Hinduism. That’s all.
I’m not Indian and I am indeed very interested in Hinduism. I’m interested in religions in general, but mostly ancient religions. So I’m not all familiar with modern Hinduism.
Hinduism is the oldest continuously practiced religion in the world. The first schools of Hinduism, like Nyāya, Yoga and Vedanta, were extremely advanced. They had epistemological and metaphysical concepts and developments that only showed up in the west in the Renaissance. Like realism, atomism etc. Vedanta and Yoga (both likely the oldest schools) even developed a monistic consciousness-first metaphysics and that’s something being studied seriously by science only now, like cutting edge metaphysics and studies of consciousness.
I see the early schools of Hinduism as way ahead of their times. And studying them and the developments that came from sages after them, up until the medieval age, really breaks your brain to see how freaking modern and scientific they were even 3000 years ago.
In any case, for those same reasons I’m fascinated by ancient Egyptian religion, Ancient Greek philosophy, Buddhism Jainism etc.
Those people figured shit out thousands of years ago using only their minds and meditation that took us hundreds of years of applied scientific method and crazy scientific tool developments to find out.
Reading about it made me realize how much we don’t know shit. We think we’re the epitome of scientific and philosophical development. But we’re just repeating what a bunch of old ass people were saying thousands of years ago, and they figured that shit out just by sitting quiet and thinking right lol