My family and extended family are high caste Hindu and coincidentally terrible human beings (narrator: It’s not coincidental). As such I am atheistic and have kept my distance from Hindu stuff because from what I have seen so far no good comes out of it ever. The way I see it, in a post-colonial India, Hinduism is a religion of the oppressors. The little that I know it is full of red flags and there no emancipatory value to it which is a bit shocking considering India’s colonial past. For example, in the Hindu epic called Ramayana, Hanuman flies to Sri Lanka. He does this to check up on Sita, the wife of Lord Rama (the incarnation of Krishna who is one of the most important Hindu gods). Sita had been kidnapped by Ravana, the king of Sri Lanka. After Hanuman checks up on her, he commits arson basically setting civilian infrastructure on fire which I am sure is against the Geneva Convention or its equivalent mapped to this mythical universe. This is something that is celebrated which I never understood really.
Either way, I don’t fuck with Hinduism for mostly personal reasons. This got me thinking if there are people here who are interested in it. The only other Indian person I know here is trapped in the cycle of getting banned for going off the handle and creating alt accounts which is kinda ironic considering the Hindu belief in karma and rebirth.
I know that the Rev Left Radio guy is interested in Buddhism which also originated in India/Nepal but is extremely less problematic. So it got me wondering if there are non-Indian people here interested in Hinduism. That’s all.
I read the Bhagavid Gita, the Upanishads, and a couple of different Buddhist texts. I think there’s a lot of very interesting things there, but I’m very very distanced from it both culturally and as an atheist. It might as well be Greek mythology to me.
I got introduced to it through white-people yoga, and tried to back-fill the real details with my own research. I’m very interested in ancient cultures and writing, and there’s a lot of that there.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your perspective! From my view, Christianity has a pretty oppressive institutional function currently. I think there are interesting cultural/historical bits there, but I similarly don’t fuck with it.