Why I am a Hindu – Part 2

The title of this series of posts, “Why I am a Hindu”, is a nod to Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am Not a Christian”, a pamphlet published in 1927, based on a talk he gave earlier that year. About him, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says —

 . . . Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of modern analytic philosophy. His famous paradox, theory of types and work with A.N. Whitehead on Principia Mathematica invigorated the study of logic throughout the twentieth century . In the public mind, he was famous as much for his evangelical atheism as for his contributions to technical philosophy.

We all are idiots compared to him. No offense to the geniuses (none) who are reading this post.

I feel a strong kinship with Russell. In the brains department I’m of course a minnow compared to the whale that he was. The kinship is purely in our emotional makeup. He could have been describing me when he wrote in his biography —

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

So Russell explained why he was not a Christian though he was brought up in the Christian tradition. A lot of lesser human beings have written pieces titled “Why I Am Not an X” where  X ∈ {Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Atheist, Secularist, Scientist, Communist, Property Dualist, Austrian Economist}

An interesting aside. In Nov 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali declared “Why I Am Now a Christian” in an article in the Free Press that her atheist friends and colleagues found absolutely shocking. She knows which side her bread is buttered.

OK, getting back to the subject. The core subject matter I want to express is that I reject religion, god, monotheism and explain why I do so; and then argue why I like the dharmas.

I got to know quite a bit about Christianity growing up in Nagpur. I went to a missionary school (St. Francis De Sales School) for 11 years. Some of my friends and classmates were Christians — Catholic and protestant. Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Muslims made up the rest.

My classmates’ monotheistic religions seemed weird to me, just as I suspect that they may have considered my “worshiping of idols” weird. As I grew up, I realized that there was something not very wholesome in the idea of monotheism.

It was beset with epistemological and ontological problems. And to top it all there were deeply disturbing moral and ethical problems. I will go into them later.

By nature, I am an ideas person. I like to learn new ideas and figure out stuff. Philosophy has been my first love although I never studied it formally.  I only read a lot of books and thought a lot. And only later did I became a qualified “worldly philosopher.”

Science is full of ideas — thermodynamics, relativity, natural selection, etc. Engineering, the application of technology, is also interesting. Heat engines and thermodynamics, and the rest. Computer science has a lot of ideas such as the theory of computation, discrete math, complexity, etc. Economics is bursting with ideas like spontaneous order, game theory. I spent many years in formal and informal study of those disciplines.

Ideas float my boat, as we say in the US.

Naturally I was intensely interested in the dharmas and the major religions. At one level, they are all ideologies, a collection of related ideas. I realized that I did not know much about the dharma that I was born into. But the Christians did not know much about their faith either.

I have asked dozens of Christians in the US this question: “Whose birth does ‘the immaculate conception’ refer to?” All of them said Jesus. Wrong. It refers to his mother’s birth — that she was born without original sin. Of course the concept of original sin violates all notions of justice and fairness. But whatever.

However in the end, I am no expert on monotheism or dharma. And therefore I have to lean on those who know what they are talking about, the authorities. What do the brightest minds say about monotheism? Nothing very complimentary things, I learned.

Did the greatest philosophers like monotheism? Nope. Did the most celebrated scientists? Nope, and practically none in the  post-enlightenment modern era. Richard Dawkins is a good example. How about the great polemicist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens? No, he argued why “God is not Great” — a clear reference to the Islamic “God is Great” proclamation made before terror is unleashed.

How about celebrated authors and intellectuals? No. Gore Vidal put it thusly at the Lowell Lecture, Harvard University, April 20, 1992:

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the Omnipotent Father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family home.

I agree. The great unmentionable evil at the center of the world is monotheism. Islam is the apotheosis of monotheism and we all know how good Islam is.

Was Einstein religious? No. He definitely did not believe in any sky-god. He was a cultural Jew but did not believe in the monotheist god. His god was Spinoza’s god — which ultimately is the “god” of the Upanishads. How about Arthur Schopenhauer? He revered the Upanishads.

Hey, those are ancient people. What about the moderns? J. Robert Oppenheimer was a dedicated student of the dharmas — which is why he learned Sanskrit.

Let’s talk about Matthieu Ricard. He is the son of one of France’s great philosophers, Jean Ravel. Matthieu got a PhD in biology and then went to India and became a Buddhist monk. He didn’t think that Christianity got it right though he was raised a Christian.

Here’s one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century CE, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg. He says he dislikes the monotheist god — and clarifies that his dislike of a non-existent being is akin to the dislike he has for other villains of literature.

“The god of traditional Judaism, Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He’s a god who is obsessed with the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don’t worship him in the right way. … He’s a terrible character. I don’t like him.”

Weinberg coined the word quarks (the bits that make up some of the fundamental particles) certainly didn’t like the monotheist god. I too don’t like him even though I am about 1,000th as smart as Weinberg.

Point I’m making is that these people were born in the monotheist tradition and rejected it after understanding what was wrong with it.

Ah, but you’d say, perhaps they did not quite fully understand what it was all about. They are not experts in what Christianity is all about. You are justified in asking what do the experts in Christianity think about monotheism. Fair enough.

In the next bit I will  bring in people who are experts in Christianity, people who formally studied it for decades, were committed Christians, some who preached the doctrine for decades and then realized that it did not make any sense.

Thank you, good night and may your god go with you.

{Continue to read Part 3.}