Why I am a Hindu – Part 3

I explained previously (see part 1 and part 2) that I’m a Hindu because I was born to the dharma and not to a religion. My starting off as a Hindu is an accident of birth, not something that I rationally decided on. But I have had ample opportunities to learn about the dharmas and the three major world religions — and rejected the religions only after rational consideration. I was born a Hindu but I continue to be follow dharma even after I know about the religions.

As an adherent of the dharmic traditions, I don’t believe in any god and I am not religious. Therefore I’m an atheist by the very definition of the term — one who does not believe in any god or gods. I am also an agnostic.

That I am both an atheist and an agnostic could be a bit confusing to some people. How can one be both an agnostic and an atheist? Yes one can. Moreover one can be agnostic if and only if one is an atheist.

(The short form for “if and only if” is iff. p⇒q ∧ q⇒p then p⇔q)

Atheism refers to non-belief in any god or gods. That’s an ontological matter. Meaning it is about the of existence of something. I don’t believe in the existence of god. Therefore I’m an atheist. I don’t believe that the entity they call god exists.

Being an agnostic, in contrast, refers to one’s epistemological stance. It is related to knowledge. Being an agnostic means that one does not claim to know something that has not been yet definitively proven to be true or false.

The amazing logician Raymond Smullyan beautifully demonstrated the distinction between the ontological and the epistemological. He wrote,

“I believe that either Jupiter has life or it doesn’t. But I neither believe that it does, nor do I believe that it doesn’t.”

Whether there is life on Jupiter or not is a matter of ontology (or existence); one’s belief that there is life on Jupiter or believing there’s no life on Jupiter is an epistemological matter.

I have belabored that enough. Atheism is a matter of ontology; agnosticism is a matter of epistemology. Enough said.

Previously I also claimed that the concept of god is related to religion; dharmas don’t have gods. And that there are only three major religions in the world — Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As it happens, they all are monotheistic religions. That’s not surprising given that they have a common descent.

Scholars claim that the idea of monotheism originated in the Zoroastrian religion of Persia. Jews got the idea from there, and then the Christians from the Jews and finally Islam got it from the Jews and Christians. Be that as it may, the concept of god or gods is entirely absent in the dharmic traditions. See the previous parts of this series for more on that.

In this part, my purpose is to introduce religious experts. In a previous part I brought in witnesses who testified that they don’t believe in religion or god. They were self-professed atheists. They were a varied bunch — philosophers, scholars of religion and scientists.

Most importantly they were non-believers and though they were experts in their respective disciplines, they had not studied the “holy” (as claimed by believers) texts as closely as true believers would have. Therefore it could be claimed that those non-believers did not know what they were talking about. Maybe so but we can’t be sure.

Therefore we ought to rely on the testimony of people who actually studied the sacred religious texts as their main preoccupation and listen to them. Richard Dawkins is a great evolutionary biologist for sure. We are justified in relying on his expert opinion on Darwinian evolution but he surely could not have spent decades studying the finer points of the Bible before he reached his conclusion that the monotheist god is a delusion.

Rather than rely on Christopher Hitchens, or Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, or Dan Dennett, and their ilk, we should give the floor to people who know what they are talking about: people who were not only deeply religious but also scholars and practitioners. They know what their religion was about because as true believers they studied the matter as scholars, and only then reluctantly rejected it. They wanted to believe but simply could not deal with the cognitive dissonance.

In this bit, to start off with, I present to you Prof. Bart D. Ehrman. Brief bio: born and raised a devout Episcopalian Christian; then in high school, had a “born again” experience, and committed his life to Christ, became an evangelical Christian, became interested in the Bible; then spent time in the most prestigious religious schools like the Moody Bible Institute; learned Greek so that he could read the New Testament in the original Greek; learned  Hebrew so he could read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew; got his PhD from the Princeton Theological Institute; taught the New Testament at Rutgers University (my alma mater).

He struggled with the problem of theodicy, which is “an argument that attempts to resolve the problem of evil that arises when all power and all goodness are simultaneously ascribed to God.” That and the numerous contradictions in the Bible led him to finally declare that he could no longer be a believer.

Dr Bart Ehrman is one who was not only a believer but was sincere enough to dedicate many years of his life to study his religion. But that deep dive into early Christianity, paradoxically, led him to disbelief. He is a credible witness to the proposition that Christianity as a belief system does not and can not withstand serious scholarly scrutiny.

There are many scores of hours of his talks and presentations on YouTube, and he has many best sellers to his name. An easy introduction to Bart Ehrman is a Sam Harris[1] podcast.

Ehrman has appeared on practically all major platforms in the US. He’s also appeared on Michael Shermers “Skeptics” podcasts: The Birth of Jesus in History & Legend and Bart Ehrman on What the Bible Really Says About the End

Ehrman is a historian and scholar of the New Testament. He’s also an ex-Christian. His rejection of Christianity is significant because, like his sincere acceptance of Christianity, it was not lightly arrived at. He was no “rice-bag Christian”, not a convert enticed to pretend that he believed for material rewards.

In the next bit, I will call a few more of the ex-Christians to tell their stories. All of them are heavy hitters that cannot be lightly dismissed.

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

{Continue on to read Part 4.}

NOTES:

[1] I used to like Sam Harris. Then came a podcast he did with David Benatar about five years ago. Sam blew that one. His ideological commitment made him incapable of understanding Benatar’s arguments.

Next blow came when he was on Triggernometry about a year ago where he displayed his full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome. He lost quite a bit of his credibility with that one. He essentially said that it was OK that the main stream media lied to the American public because those lies helped in electing Biden. He said that even if the media had covered up the fact that Hunter Biden had the bodies of children in his basement, it would have been justified to keep Trump from being re-elected.