A Brief Primer on Hinduism

Rambo: What are some of the beliefs of Hinduism? The partition of India that created Pakistan (a country that Christopher Hitchens used to say was not a country at all but an hypocrisy) is seen by most as basically a Hindu vs. Islamic schism. Just what is Hinduism at it’s core?

Of course it was a Hindu versus Muslim split that yet reverberates to our own present day.

Let’s just say that Hinduism is a very primitive religion and primitive religions were largely amoral. Look at how many of them require human and animal sacrifices. Which brings us to the essential feature of a primitive religion: that an insecure and unstable Man is at the mercy of a capricious, sometimes warmly nurturing and other times brutally cruel Gods that no one can see, hear, or understand.

So insecure and unstable man must make prayers and give offerings to get good things from the Gods and to keep the Gods from getting angry and sending bad things our way.

These prayers are often to the Gods of Elements, who held the sword of life or death swinging over the heads of primitive man. The Elements were not understood, and few things are as capricious as the weather and other elements of Nature.

In a primitive religion, sacrifices or offerings are made to either appease God or to, frankly, get stuff. Get things, as in material things. You make an offering to the heathen God, and you are rewarded with riches at some point in the future, morality be damned! It’s all about getting the stuff and it doesn’t matter how you go about getting it.

These religions have little to nothing to say about human morality at all except to sometimes mandate unspeakably cruel and immoral behaviors! Like the Book of Manu for instance, one of the most important books in the Hindu religion. And an utterly, brutally, diabolically, cruel and immoral book, too. But that doesn’t matter, you see. Primitive religions are morals-free or even perversely mandate immoral behavior as the just and the good.

Strict morals-based religions are a pretty new thing. Even the primitive Jewish religion, a step forward for being monotheistic (Let’s give the Jews credit where it is due) relied on an insane level of animal sacrifice at its ridiculous temple. On sacrifice days, the line of Jews with the animals they were going to sacrifice to the Gods (or to their one God?) stretched far away from the temple.

The air was a cacophony of bleating and other animal noises along with the brutal screams of animals having their throats slit. The blood ran out of the temple and down the dirt path where the twisting line of sacrificial worshipers stretched into the distance. I’m not sure what was done with the meat of the dead animal. Was it eaten? No idea.

But this clearly was animal sacrifice run amok, and more than anything else, it was idiotic. Idiotically cruel, yes, but more stupid and ridiculous than anything else.

Well, there you have a primitive religion. Primitive religions are stupid because primitive man was uncultured and uncouth, more of a lower mammal than a human.

Morality in those days was taken care of presumably by tribal codes which, along the lines of Judaism, after all a primitive tribal religion, mandated that one should obey strict moral rules with the tribe or in-group, whereas all morality was thrown to the dogs when dealing with the out-group.

Why religion changed into a strictly morals-based belief system designed to force man into a decent and well-behaved life which he is constitutionally disinclined to follow is uncertain, but we on the Left see History as forward motion in all areas and that includes forward motion in morals and behavior.

Presumably as man became agricultural and more settled, increased civilized behavior become more important or even essential, so strict rules had to be put on people.

Tribes in the Amazon follow few rules with regard to other tribes, and they are in the habit of massacring or even genociding each other. It doesn’t matter much as the group that gets genocided numbers maybe 50-100 people, so there’s no great effect on the general scheme of things. But we can’t have groups of humans in our modern societies who decide to go genocide 50-100 people of some opposing group. It’s not going to work. Increased civilization demands more strict morality.

What I am saying here is that Hinduism is an “offering-based religion.”

Hinduism has something like 700 million Gods including a God for everything under the sun. Some of these Gods are Gods of pure evil, which makes sense theologically because this exists in humans, not that these entities should be worshiped!

But in Hinduism one can choose as a perfectly matter of fact and justifiable Hindu choice to follow one of the Gods of destruction. Thuggee culture in 1800’s India was based on theologically-sanctioned vicious criminals who roamed around preying on other humans. In Hinduism this is just a choice some people can make, as valid as any other. It’s probably not best for everyone to follow the thugee Gods, but the behavior of the thugees was definitely theologically sanctioned.

In Hinduism, one makes a morals-free offering to crooked priests who run shakedown enterprises called Hindu temples. You shower the temple with money or valuables or whatever, and then the Hindu priest, like some fortune telling charlatan bent over a crystal ball, tells that you that some Hindu God will send you great riches in the future. I suppose you can pray for anything you want though, not just money. But I’m not so clear on this.

Probably no religion treats women worse than Hinduism, and this is once again in line with its being a primitive religion, as such religions typically didn’t afford women much in the way of rights.

Hinduism also features caste, and caste sadly seems to be a hallmark of primitive human religion. Perhaps the earliest modern religion yet extant, Yezidism, has a strict caste system with serious rules about intermingling. I believe  the related Zoroastrianism also has caste.

It stands to reason that in Hinduism, being a very primitive religion like these two, caste also figures as a prominent feature. We can argue about this, about why caste was so prominent in early religions, about whether this indicates a basic caste-like value system of more primitive societies and perhaps a built-in natural tendency of primitive man towards cruel caste-based societies that man outgrows as his civilization and hence his morals become more developed, as each appears to need to the other to fully flower.

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6 thoughts on “A Brief Primer on Hinduism”

  1. Robert,

    I came to realize recently that most of Indian history consists of hagiographies.

    For example, right-wing Hindus love to quote the example of Chattrapati Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire, who (supposedly) came from a lower caste background and resisted the Mughal Empire that ruled much of South Asia.

    The real history of South Asia tells an entirely different story. For much of its history, the majority religion in the Indian subcontinent was Buddhism, which served as a refuge for lower caste Hindus wanting to escape from discrimination by the upper castes.

    When Islam arrived in the Indian subcontinent, two separate trends started happening:

    1) Large numbers of lower caste Hindus embraced Islam, which promised to accept them as brothers.

    2) Buddhism went extinct since the Muslim rulers of South Asia largely continued to policies of their Hindu predecessors.

    The loss of the Buddhist sangha caused many lower caste Hindu groups such as the Marathas to rebel against Muslim rule. This effort to protect the sangha also resulted in the rise of devotional Hinduism.

  2. The Indus Valley Civilization, generally regarded as the predecessor to Vedic culture, was believed by many to be a monotheistic society focused on the worship of Shiva, who is depicted in several seals from the Indus Valley Civilization. The Aryans who conquered the Harappans circa 1500 BCE replaced this with a polytheistic religion focused on the worship of nature.

    1. Historians have noted that the Indus Valley Civilization had a standardized set of weights and measures which they used to build their cities. The subsequent Vedic culture used measurements for the construction of fire altars.

  3. Robert,

    When European scholars began studying Hinduism in the 19th century, they classified the various sub-sects of the religion based on the (then popular) belief in Social Darwinian theory.

    Sir Monier Monier-Williams described a hierarchy in his book Hinduism and Brahmanism with Vaishnavism at the top being considered roughly equivalent with Christianity, Shaktism at the bottom being considered a form of crude superstition, and Shaivism in between being considered similar to other historical polytheistic religions.

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