What the Hindus Think About Other Religions
Hindus like Religions Which are Close to their Own
Disclaimers: a) There are more than 1 billion Hindus in 2022. b) There are many different sects of Hinduism. c) The Sonoma Sage does not know everything and he knows less about Hinduism than he knows about Buddhism.
Mainstream Hindus accept the following propositions:
Everyone will be reincarnated following their death.
Depending on your actions in this life, your next life will be start out better or worse. The supernatural laws of karma requires this.
People who are born into a family with a specific caste are born into that family because of their actions over many previous lifetimes.
The highest goal is to be reborn with the Gods, and to no longer live life as a human on Earth. Only members of the Brahmin caste can hope to achieve this. However - over many lifetimes - it is an achievable goal for all people.
The Gods have lived among humans in the past. These were avatars of the Gods and while they had some human limitations, they knew the ultimate truths of reality. Krishna, is the most famous example of such an avatar, but he is not the only God to have lived among humans.
Hindus believe all other religions are mistaken - obviously. The question is: how far away from the truth are the other religions? Or: how easy is it to get along with people who don’t believe in Hinduism?
Buddhism
Buddhism is pretty easy for Hindus to get along with. Buddhists believe in reincarnation and the laws of Karma. They also believe in many of the same Gods (the older ones such as Agni, and the Lokapalas). The Hindus feel a bit guilty at their persecution of Buddhists and their burning down Buddhist temples and slaughter of Buddhist monks. Admittedly this happened a long time ago but still, they shouldn’t have done it. The Hindus now claim the Buddha was actually an avatar of Vishnu so… its really just one of the many sects of Hinduism. The Buddhists fervently disagree.
100 years ago a very influential Dalit leader convinced his followers to adopt Buddhism instead of continuing to follow a religion which considered them to be nearly sub-human. Even so, there are few Buddhists in India today.
Sikhism
Hindus get along well with Sikhs. There is a great deal of commonality between the religions in that the Sikhs believe in reincarnation, the importance of gurus, the need for weekly rituals throughout life, and more. The Sage believes the Hindus consider Sikhs to be essentially a modern sect of Hinduism but Sikhs get angry when you tell them this.
Christianity
Christians have lived in Malabar, southern India for more than 1,700 years (see the St. Thomas Christians for details about one of the earliest Christians sects). By and large, the relations with the Hindus of Malabar were good. Historically, the south Indians tend to be far more relaxed about matters of religion than the Hindus of Central and Northern India.
Christianity started to make inroads in northern India as a result of increasing British control over India, starting with Clive of India in 1750 AD. At first, the British East India company was not interested in supporting any missionary work in any of it’s commercial operations. However, beginning in 1815 missionaries did go to India and actively sought to convert Hindus to Christianity.
Most Christians don’t believe in reincarnation and all of European culture is built around the concept that each person has only one life to live - a core value which is fundamentally in opposition to Hindu belief. When Kipling wrote East is east, and west is west, and the twain shall never meet - he was expressing a deep truth. Belief in reincarnation is one of the greatest divisions in humanity. There is no bridging this gap, reincarnation is either true, or it’s false - there is no middle ground. Consequently, Hindus find many Christian doctrines to be insane (and visa versa).
That said, in matters of day-to-day life, Christians are OK. Christian missionaries didn’t destroy many temple other than the elimination of the Thuggees - who, if Hindus are being honest, they will admit the Thuggees were bastards and deserved to be destroyed. The British Raj also ended the practice of Suttee, which also was not really the ideal way to handle the problem of widows in Hindu society.
Hindus today like to beat up the evil British in films - and let’s be honest, the British do make good bad-guys - pompous, arrogant, and so very very annoying. Christianity gets unfairly tarred by association with the British Raj. For outsiders, this is rather funny because the British Raj saved Hinduism. If the British hadn’t taken over India starting in 1750, there would be very few Hindus north of the Deccan plateau. The reason is because of the religion the Hindus hate above all others: Islam.
Islam
The hatred Hindus feel for Islam is born out of more than 1,000 years of unprovoked Islamic aggression against Hindus in India. Moslems hate all religions other than Islam, and they hate all sects of Islam except for the one they follow (As most people know today, Shias hate Sunnis, while the Sunnis hate not just the Shia, but also Suffis, and the Druze).
However, the Moslems have a special hatred for Hinduism. Moslems think there is nothing good about Hinduism. Hindus worship statutes of Gods - an anathema for all Moslems. Hindus worship multiple gods - again, utterly revolting to Moslems who daily proclaim: there is no God other than Allah, and Mohamed is his messenger. Hindus believe in reincarnation which Moslems reject. Hindus definitely do not believe all people are equal. Though, to be brutally honest, Moslems don’t believe it either. For the Moslems, all members of the Ummah are equal, but Moslems from Arabia are more equal than everyone else.
Staring around 720, the Umayyad Caliphate - having crushed Persian resistance and incorporated its people into their vast empire, began attacking the Indus river region, as well as the kingdoms of Central Asia. By 750, they were making their first raids into the Hindu kingdoms of the Ganges plain. For 300 years, the Hindu Ganges kingdoms successfully fought off Moslem attacks.
The genocide of the Hindus in northern India was started by Mahmud of Ghazni who - from his base in Afghanistan - raided and despoiled Gujarat and the great Somnath Temple in 1025 CE. For the next 700 years, Islamic armies conquered Hindu India, with devastating effect. Tens of thousands of Hindu temples were destroyed, and Mosques were built on top of their ruins. Millions of Hindus were slaughtered. Millions of Hindu women who weren’t killed were raped and taken as slaves by Moslems waging Jihad against the infidels. Hindu kingdoms were defeated in campaign after campaign.
The Hindus, despite their vast numbers, and their potential military power, were beaten - by Muhammad of Ghor in the late 1100s, by the various rulers of the Delhi Sultanate (1200 to 1300), by the mass murderer Timur (1370-1405), and by the Mughal rulers Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb (from 1530 to 1700). The Hindus failed to unite in the face of the Islamic invaders and they were reduced to second class peoples in their own land, lorded over by the Moslems.
When the British East India Company showed up in 1750, there were only a few tiny Hindu states left in all of India. The British East India company saved the last Hindu kingdoms, and when they took over Mughal states, they required the governments there to treat all people equally, Hindus, Moslems, and Sikhs.
When India gained independence from Great Britain in 1947, millions of Moslems left India for West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). However, ~50 million Moslems remained in India, and today the 175 million Moslems comprise 15% of India’s total population.
Consequently, in India, talking about the history of the Islamic conquest of India is fraught with real danger. Mohandas Gandhi’s hope that India could be a place for people of all religions to live in peace and harmony has not been fully realized, although things have worked out better than most experts predicted in the 1940s.
Jains and Parsis
The Sonoma Sage does not understand Jainism at all. He has never met a Jain and has not studied the religion. There are about 4 million Jains living in India today.
As for the Parsis, there are less 80,000 of these ancient Zoroastrians in India. In the past, Paris were respected by Hindus for being scrupulously honest. One of the most famous men in the world in the 1980s was a Parsi, Freddie Mercury (born: Farrokh Bulsara) the lead singer of the rock band Queen.