The following is a response to a friend I sent today, describing progressively more detailed and varied ways to understand cosmic entities. One-Line Version The Moon we see is a reflection of the real Moon within the Earth, quite like a picture of an apple in the mind. Short Paragraph Version When someone stands next …
Buddhism had four successive goals—(a) reject deities as representations of the ultimate truth, (b) end all rituals and sacrifices performed for these deities, (c) dethrone the status position of the Brahmanas who were performing these rituals, and (d) reject all Vedic texts as sources of knowledge of the truth. Shankaracharya is revered as one who …
Standards For Different Religions My criticisms of other religions are sometimes dismissed not by a counterargument but simply by calling it an outsider’s opinion, different from the believer’s viewpoint. The critic says: Believers have an orthodox view of their religion while academics have a heterodox view of the same religion. The divergence between the orthodox …
A few months ago, I was participating in a live discussion where I could see a stream of user comments. One such comment was that people in India lead miserable lives. The implication was that Western thinking is better because the West is more prosperous. People today see poverty in India and don’t know about …
