So I’m going to make this point just for educational purposes but Hinduism is quite sophisticated and you can be atheist / agnostic while still being Hindu ie. believing in concepts like karma, samsara, moksha, and advaita.
In fact India’s first prime minister who was a key figure in India’s independence movement and also key in establishing India as a secular nation with parliamentary democracy was a Hindu atheist. His name was Jawaharlal Nehru.
Now I know JD Vance doesnt know this when he describes her as agnostic and the Hindu rebutting him is a reasonable defense of her religious beliefs in total. But for those with the spiritual sophistication to understand it, it should be understood that Hinduism and Atheism/Agnosticism are not mutually exclusive.
I’m having a hard time understanding what’s so sophisticated about it.
Isn’t it the same with a lot of other religions?
I’ve met a lot of people who say they are culturally catholic and participate in the celebrations, etc but are atheists. The same happens with Jewish people.
Therefore, Samkhya maintained not only that the various cosmological, ontological and teleological arguments could not prove god, but that god as normally understood—an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator who is free from suffering—cannot exist.
In some ways people had got used to the idea that India was spiritual and religion-oriented. That gave a leg up to the religious interpretation of India, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than what exists in any other classical language. Madhava Acharya, the remarkable 14th century philosopher, wrote this rather great book called Sarvadarshansamgraha, which discussed all the religious schools of thought within the Indian structure. The first chapter is Atheism – a very strong presentation of the argument in favor of atheism and materialism
Aha. Good. This is atheism. But if you read the wiki article you’ll notice the first paragraph, that “Hindu atheism” is used to describe atheists, agnostics and non-theists, as well as spiritual belief that rejects the existence of the main god (bot not other shiet).
This is what OP calls atheism
Hinduism is quite sophisticated and you can be atheist / agnostic while still being Hindu ie. believing in concepts like karma, samsara, moksha, and advaita.
Reincarnation belief is not atheism. Karma & Samsara take the place of the deity and judgment of your life deeds according to divine moral compass, it’s just that they are not anthropomorphic.
I don’t know about Usha, but I’ve known a couple of atheist-Hindu-Christians that viewed the pantheon like a list of aspirational metaphorical figures, and they just added Jesus to the pantheon.
I’m butchering a 2 millennia story, but it illustrates how christianity fares in hinduism, and it even has some evidentiary support, so…
When the apostle Thomas was sent to India, he wound up in Cochin and began establishing a ministry or fellowship there.
He was frustrated by the lack of convincing required, or resistance to his ideas, without singular devotion.
The creator instantiating one more avatar is no stretch as Hinduism is pretty sophisticated in narratives, so Issa/Jesus just got added to the list that includes Krishna, and to this day you can buy hindu iconography with Jesus teaching compassion.
(Dude did succeed in forming a strictly Christian community though, and so arguably the oldest Christian sect is there.)
Indeed, most xtianity sub-sects tend to hold to being exclusionary of anything else. So, while agnosticism and Hinduism might be accommodating, xtianity tends not to be. I’m pretty sure the Kirk kind of xtianity would be.
You’re right that Christianity is exclusionary at the institutional level. Its a part of why the church has generally lost favor in society over time (in addition to rationalism etc.)
But individual Christians can be accommodating so in a universe where JD Vance isn’t trying to turn the US into a white nationalist “utopia” it could work.
One of the core tenets of Christianity is that the only path to salvation is through Christ. That means non Christians are going to hell. That must be hard to accept (that your spouse cannot be heaven bound) but I think many Christians individually try not to think about this too much as they meet good non Christian people while living in pluralistic societies.
There are theological frameworks within Catholicism that seek to be more inclusive (implicit faith, anonymous Christians) but they are not widely accepted within Christianity (or even within Catholicism for that matter).
Falsifiability is a methodological preference for many atheists but not a requirement since, at its core, atheism is the lack of belief in deities rather than a comprehensive epistemological doctrine.
The takeaway being you may define atheism in a more narrow sense but its not wrong to define it more broadly.
Karma and Samsara are indissociable from a higher power, regardless how anyone decides to portray it. That is incompatible with atheism. Agnosticism, totally, atheism, absolutely not.
If one believes in the supernatural (which I don’t) Karma and Samsara don’t stricly need agency. They could be emergent properties of underlying supernatural laws/processes.
They absolutely are incompatible with a rejection of the supernatural, but not with the simple rejection of the existence of a god (as in: a supernatural force with agency)
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. You can believe in these concepts without believing in a God.
You have your own definition of atheism and that’s fine but its just not broadly accepted. You seem to be following a specific sect or denomination of atheism that not only rejects god but all conceptualizations of spirituality or the soul. Which is totally fine but not the definition is broader than you portray it.
I think we can agree that this comes down to semantics but yours is a Western centric point of view. In Hindu philosophy one can believe in Karma and Samsara while ascribing to Advaita Vedanta which treats Brahman (the ultimate, infinite reality underlying everything) as impersonal and not tied to a deity. These individuals refer to themselves as Hindu Atheists and have so for thousands of years. You can No True Scotsman it as much as you’d like but atheism is defined as not believing in a deity and those that ascribe to this worldview do not believe in a deity.
I think the major semantic holdup here is due to a Western centric equivocation of higher power with God due Abrahamic monotheism. Does a higher power / laws of the universe have to be or come from a God? Several conceptualizations in Eastern religious philosophy would answer no to that question.
I think its best that we leave it at your perspective on atheism being specifically exclusivist/Western centric.
Dude. No. My atheism is a rejection of a proposition that god exists. Nothing more and nothing less.
My strong/gnostic atheism is a rejection of the concept that gods could exist, based on my rejection of the concept of the supernatural based on my conviction of the intellectual importance of methodological materialism and scepticism in everyday epistemology.
But atheism does not have to include ANY of the second paragraph, it is NOT identical with scepticism, nor with the rejection of everything supernatural, even if those often coincide.
And you are muddying and diminishing atheism by "no true scotsman"ing it here.
So I’m going to make this point just for educational purposes but Hinduism is quite sophisticated and you can be atheist / agnostic while still being Hindu ie. believing in concepts like karma, samsara, moksha, and advaita.
In fact India’s first prime minister who was a key figure in India’s independence movement and also key in establishing India as a secular nation with parliamentary democracy was a Hindu atheist. His name was Jawaharlal Nehru.
Now I know JD Vance doesnt know this when he describes her as agnostic and the Hindu rebutting him is a reasonable defense of her religious beliefs in total. But for those with the spiritual sophistication to understand it, it should be understood that Hinduism and Atheism/Agnosticism are not mutually exclusive.
I’m having a hard time understanding what’s so sophisticated about it. Isn’t it the same with a lot of other religions? I’ve met a lot of people who say they are culturally catholic and participate in the celebrations, etc but are atheists. The same happens with Jewish people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_atheism
This is a Hindi term to describe a pick-your-beliefs Hindu. It’s a proper term though, like a city name, so maybe that’s why you’re confused.
Did you read the article you linked?
Sounds pretty atheist to me.
Aha. Good. This is atheism. But if you read the wiki article you’ll notice the first paragraph, that “Hindu atheism” is used to describe atheists, agnostics and non-theists, as well as spiritual belief that rejects the existence of the main god (bot not other shiet).
This is what OP calls atheism
Reincarnation belief is not atheism. Karma & Samsara take the place of the deity and judgment of your life deeds according to divine moral compass, it’s just that they are not anthropomorphic.
Lol how does Christianity and Hindu/atheist combo fair?
I don’t know about Usha, but I’ve known a couple of atheist-Hindu-Christians that viewed the pantheon like a list of aspirational metaphorical figures, and they just added Jesus to the pantheon.
I’m butchering a 2 millennia story, but it illustrates how christianity fares in hinduism, and it even has some evidentiary support, so…
When the apostle Thomas was sent to India, he wound up in Cochin and began establishing a ministry or fellowship there.
He was frustrated by the lack of convincing required, or resistance to his ideas, without singular devotion.
The creator instantiating one more avatar is no stretch as Hinduism is pretty sophisticated in narratives, so Issa/Jesus just got added to the list that includes Krishna, and to this day you can buy hindu iconography with Jesus teaching compassion.
(Dude did succeed in forming a strictly Christian community though, and so arguably the oldest Christian sect is there.)
Isn’t the oldest Christian sect in Palestine?
Indeed, most xtianity sub-sects tend to hold to being exclusionary of anything else. So, while agnosticism and Hinduism might be accommodating, xtianity tends not to be. I’m pretty sure the Kirk kind of xtianity would be.
You’re right that Christianity is exclusionary at the institutional level. Its a part of why the church has generally lost favor in society over time (in addition to rationalism etc.)
But individual Christians can be accommodating so in a universe where JD Vance isn’t trying to turn the US into a white nationalist “utopia” it could work.
One of the core tenets of Christianity is that the only path to salvation is through Christ. That means non Christians are going to hell. That must be hard to accept (that your spouse cannot be heaven bound) but I think many Christians individually try not to think about this too much as they meet good non Christian people while living in pluralistic societies.
There are theological frameworks within Catholicism that seek to be more inclusive (implicit faith, anonymous Christians) but they are not widely accepted within Christianity (or even within Catholicism for that matter).
If you believe in Karma you are, per definition, not an atheist.
Karma isn’t a god
Only a theist thinks of atheism as strictly the rejection of god. Karma is non falsifiable thus incompatible with atheism.
Whatever man I’m not arguing with reddit atheism dogma, someday you’ll grow up
Falsifiability is a methodological preference for many atheists but not a requirement since, at its core, atheism is the lack of belief in deities rather than a comprehensive epistemological doctrine.
The takeaway being you may define atheism in a more narrow sense but its not wrong to define it more broadly.
Karma and Samsara are indissociable from a higher power, regardless how anyone decides to portray it. That is incompatible with atheism. Agnosticism, totally, atheism, absolutely not.
If one believes in the supernatural (which I don’t) Karma and Samsara don’t stricly need agency. They could be emergent properties of underlying supernatural laws/processes.
They absolutely are incompatible with a rejection of the supernatural, but not with the simple rejection of the existence of a god (as in: a supernatural force with agency)
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. You can believe in these concepts without believing in a God.
You have your own definition of atheism and that’s fine but its just not broadly accepted. You seem to be following a specific sect or denomination of atheism that not only rejects god but all conceptualizations of spirituality or the soul. Which is totally fine but not the definition is broader than you portray it.
This is false. It’s precisely my point. A god like power is indistinguishable from the concept of god, the rest is semantics.
I think we can agree that this comes down to semantics but yours is a Western centric point of view. In Hindu philosophy one can believe in Karma and Samsara while ascribing to Advaita Vedanta which treats Brahman (the ultimate, infinite reality underlying everything) as impersonal and not tied to a deity. These individuals refer to themselves as Hindu Atheists and have so for thousands of years. You can No True Scotsman it as much as you’d like but atheism is defined as not believing in a deity and those that ascribe to this worldview do not believe in a deity.
I think the major semantic holdup here is due to a Western centric equivocation of higher power with God due Abrahamic monotheism. Does a higher power / laws of the universe have to be or come from a God? Several conceptualizations in Eastern religious philosophy would answer no to that question.
I think its best that we leave it at your perspective on atheism being specifically exclusivist/Western centric.
Dude. No. My atheism is a rejection of a proposition that god exists. Nothing more and nothing less.
My strong/gnostic atheism is a rejection of the concept that gods could exist, based on my rejection of the concept of the supernatural based on my conviction of the intellectual importance of methodological materialism and scepticism in everyday epistemology.
But atheism does not have to include ANY of the second paragraph, it is NOT identical with scepticism, nor with the rejection of everything supernatural, even if those often coincide.
And you are muddying and diminishing atheism by "no true scotsman"ing it here.