Man-made and hence a fairy-tale?!

Does the substance of what is called Pythagoras' Theorem remain true whether or not humans are aware of it? If yes, this is something not-found-in-Nature but not-a-fairy-tale; man-made but transcending man. There is thus no real problem with religious compositions having been created by man, apart from the claim that they were god-given, which by itself is not a problem (e.g., Ramanujan thought that his results in mathemetics came from Namagiri Devi). The real question is do they embody knowledge? The claim of knowledge cannot be simply because "it is god-given"; our usual methods of validating knowledge must be applied. Exactly like Ramanujan's results in mathematics have to be validated by the methods of mathematics even if the results originated with the Devi.

India in Medieval Jewish Literature

The search for the sources of Judah Halevi's opinion led me to a publication by The Jewish People Policy Institute, titled India, Israel and the Jewish People, (2017), by Shalom Salomon Wald and Arielle Kandel.

 

They write as follows (the relevant end-notes are copied at the end of the excerpts):

 

From the 9th or 10th century on, India appears in the books of several of the most important Jewish writers – rabbis, philosophers, historians, and travel writers. India is not a central issue but it is a part of the intellectual inventory of the Jews of the Middle Ages, as it had been in Hellenistic times. 

 

The historian of religion R. G. Marks counted at least 19 Jewish texts written between the 10th and 14th centuries that speak of India.⁶⁵ His collection is heterogeneous. It includes the most important works of the period as well as some long-forgotten books. During this period many Arab travelers visited India and some wrote travelogues that mention the presence of Jews in the country. In contrast, only one of the Jewish authors writing about India, the Karaite scholar Jacob al-Qirqisani (10th century), is believed to have visited the country himself. His Book of Lights and Watchtowers describes Hindu customs and compares them to Jewish religious practices and those of other nations. 

A reply to the Ode to Joy

 

 The last few days, I've been listening to Beethoven again, and finally, paid some attention to the actual words of the Ode to Joy. Per here, the last five lines:

Brüder, über'm Sternenzelt Muß ein lieber Vater wohnen. Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt? Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt! Über Sternen muß er wohnen.

translate to:

Brothers, above the starry canopy There must dwell a loving father. Do you fall in worship, you millions? World, do you know your creator? Seek Him in the heavens; Above the stars must he dwell.

The lyrics also refer to "Joy, daughter of Elysium". The Hindu answer to that is - Ananda, as in "Sat-chit-ananda", is a fundamental attribute the experience of Reality; and while not in the same musical league, wiser and just-as-good poetry tells where to seek Him/Her/It:

 

India has no native religions - a summary

From Dr Pingali Gopal's book summary of Europe, India and the Limits of Secularism by Jakob de Roover.


The two important properties of religion are: first, it must make a claim about the origin and purpose of the world (the how and why of the Cosmos); and secondly, this message must be true This is the ‘metaphysical’ position of any religion.

Based on the metaphysical conditions, Indian traditions are not possibly religions. They do not properly raise the issue of origin of the Cosmos. Vedas, Upanishads, Brahmanas, Puranas, Itihaasas have multiple stories of creation and purposes of Cosmos. The ideas in the multiple stories say just about everything and everything. Depending on the context, an individual in the multiple narratives may call the question of Cosmos origin illegitimate; or consider it pure speculation lacking any truth value; or say that all claims are true; or even suggest that Cosmos has no origin and is always present. The Buddhists and the Jains have no conception of a God in the first place! Strangely, in Indian tradition and culture, a person can equally believe all the stories and may equally reject all of them. Finally, it looks almost as if the ‘origin’ question and the place of God are irrelevant.

Religion is thus impossible in a culture where the questions of origins can be an illegitimate one. The Western world is always in a grip of historicity trying to find the truth value of its scriptures. The Biblical history is right in the center of investigation with advocates and opponents on either side of the battle line trying to prove or disprove. This attitude hardly excites or disturbs their counterparts in India. It is the attitude of a culture towards the holy books that generates questions or fails to do so. Literature investigating the truth claims made by ‘religious texts’ is absent in India. To ask whether they are true or false is to exhibit a profound ignorance of the culture whose stories they are.
As another component, there must be certain sociological conditions absolutely required for guaranteeing the identity of religions. These are:

• a world-view codified in a textual source called a ‘holy-book’ and must be widely known
•  a standard world-view with clear boundaries and which cannot undergo changes across generations
• an authority to settle disputes in transmission and interpretation of stories and legends (thus having a hierarchy of texts)
• a source of excommunication when two interpretations collide (say Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Buddhism)
• an organization to transmit and propagate its world-views.

These five sociological conditions are necessary to allow the transmission of the world-views across space and time so that they may preserve their identity over generations. None of these conditions fulfil in India with respect to Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, and so on. Hence, in metaphysical and sociological terms, it is an impossibility that Indian culture knows of religions or its secularized version-a world view.

Stanislaus versus State of Madhya Pradesh - Historical Context

{Wiki}

Rev Stanislaus vs Madhya Pradesh, 1977 SCR (2) 611, is a matter where the Supreme Court of India considered the issue whether the fundamental right to practise and propagate religion includes the right to convert, held that the right to propagate does not include the right to convert and therefore upheld the constitutional validity of the laws enacted by Madhya Pradesh and Orissa legislatures prohibiting conversion by force, fraud or allurement.

Here is a timeline.

Religious Freedom and the Limits of Propagation: Conversion in the Constituent Assembly of India

Article: link (PDF)
Religious Freedom and the Limits of Propagation: Conversion in the Constituent Assembly of India
Sarah Claerhout and Jakob De Roover

Abstract:

In discussions about religious freedom in India, the country’s conflict regarding conversion plays a central role. The Constitution’s freedom of religion clause, Article 25, grants the right “freely to profess, practise and propagate religion,” but this has generated a dispute about the meaning of the right ‘to propagate’ and its relation to the freedom to convert. The recognition of this right is said to be the result of a key debate in the Constituent Assembly of India. To find out which ideas and arguments gave shape to this debate and the resulting religious freedom clause, we turn to the Assembly’s deliberations and come to a surprising conclusion: indeed, there was disagreement about conversion among the Assembly members, but this never took the form of a debate. Instead, there was a disconnect between the member’s concerns, objections, and comments concerning the draft article on the one hand, and the Assembly’s decision about the religious freedom clause on the other. If a key ‘debate’ took this form, what then could the ongoing dispute concerning conversion in India be about? We first examine some recent historiographical accounts of the Indian conflicts about conversion and proselytization. Then we develop a hypothesis that aims to make sense of this enduring conflict by identifying a blindness at its core: people reasoning against the background of Indian traditions see ‘propagation of religion’ as the human dissemination of tradition; this is incompatible with a religious conception where conversion and propagation of faith are seen in terms of God’s intervention. These two ways of seeing ‘propagation’ generate two conflicting experiences of the Indian dispute about religious freedom and conversion.

-----

If for nothing else,  the glimpses of actual debates in the Indian Constituent Assembly are a reason to read this paper.

More on Indian secularism

Readers here should have noticed a peculiar situation.  Here I am, advocating SNB's position that India never produced a religion, and on the other hand, I do talk about Indian secularism, secularism and its failures in the Indian Constitution, etc., as though there is a Hindu religion. 

The problem is that we must hold two inconsistent sets of ideas in our mind - one to deal with India as it is today, with the language of "religion" and the current set of Constitutional laws; and the other to deal with India as it should be, if SNB's intellectual revolution ever catches fire.  In that mode, there is no Hinduism religion that needs to be accorded any freedom of religion, but something quite different; and we have to invent the mechanism that this collection of entities that goes under the name of Hinduism lives with the imported religions in India.

Of course, it may be true that too much water has flowed down the Ganga, and that Hindus can't now ever overthrow their religion and be this something else.

Anyway, SNB and Jakob de Roover spell out the consequences of the Hindu traditions being interpreted as a religion in this long, but don't tl;dr read.

Dark Hour of Secularism: Hindu Fundamentalism and Colonial Liberalism in India
http://www.hipkapi.com/2015/07/07/dark-hour-of-secularism-hindu-fundamentalism-colonial-liberalism-in-india/
 

Quote on the "secular" Indian Constitution

“In crucial respects the Constitution is a charter for the reform of Hinduism.”

Law and Society in Modern India by Marc Galanter (1989)

जो हिंदुस्तान का भविष्य है, वही मुसलमानों का भविष्य है: आरिफ़ मोहम्मद ख़ान

Arfa Khanum interviews Arif Muhammad Khan.

PS: OpIndia has provided a translation of some of the salient exchanges.

Disambiguations

Disambiguations, Polly Hazarika's Ph.D. thesis, should be accessible below.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12gcs6o34l8X8gEzglseT1z78G04pF_Gz/view?usp=sharing

She provided it to me in response to my question,  "how does one jump from "such and such are problems with Hindus" to "the cause of these problems is lack of monotheism"?"

She writes: "The thesis is a bit dated, I would perhaps make the same arguments in a more measured way now. But the core of the problem with reform discourse and the problem in general of 19th century social reform in India has been looked at in a fairly consistent, systematic and coherent way."

---
Some observations, might whet your appetite for what is not an easy read.

Heathen, via Q&A

As R. put it:
 A sort of FAQ and very condensed overview of the content of SN Balagangadhara's "The Heathen In His Blindness": itself a brilliant but very long and dense tome.



"Chapter-wise Questions and Answers to understand “The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion"

The Mosaic Distinction

Jaideep Prabhu in firstpost.com:

Theo Sundermeier, professor of theology at Heidelberg University, makes an insightful distinction in his Was ist Religion? Religionswissenschaft im theologischen Kontext between primary and secondary religions. The former, Sundermeier explains, developed over hundreds, if not thousands, of years, usually within a single culture, society and language with which the religion is inextricably intertwined. These would include the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian religions as easily as Hinduism. The latter category of religions are those that originate from an act of revelation or foundation and are monotheistic, universal, and of the Book. Secondary religions denounce primary religions as paganism, a collection of superstitions, and idolatry. The three Abrahamic faiths fit this description well.

Note the Primary and Secondary Religions.

This seemingly obvious categorisation holds an evolution of great import. From primary to secondary, religion changes from being a system that is irrevocably embedded in the institutional, linguistic, and cultural conditions of a society to become an autonomous system that can transcend political, ethnic, and other boundaries and transplant itself into any alien culture. As Jan Assmann, an Egyptologist at the University of Konstanz, describes in his Die Mosaische Unterscheidung: oder der Preis des Monotheismus, this change, which he calls the Mosaic distinction, is hardly about whether there is one god or there are many gods, but about truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance.

Note Jan Assmann (thanks to a friend!)

Assmann argues that the Mosaic distinction created an entirely new category of truth - faith - and draws an interesting parallel with a scientific development that Werner Jäger, a 20th century classicist at Harvard University, described as the Parmenidian distinction in Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture.

 .....

Before the Mosaic distinction, there were four kinds of fundamental truths: experiential (water is wet), mathematical (two plus two is four), historical (the life of Mokshagundam Visveswaraya), and truths conducive to life (ethics). The Mosaic distinction cleaved faith from knowledge and installed the former as a fifth truth that claimed knowledge of the highest authority even if it could not be verified on scientific grounds.

Read the whole essay, please. Here's another key passage.

For the first time in history, justice, law, and freedom are declared to be the central themes of religion and the sole prerogative of god. Though technically true, this is a misleading statement. The monotheistic point of view is that since god is the true authority, only he can be the final arbiter of justice; the temporal laws of man are inferior to the divine. The story of the exodus from Egypt ties in well with ideas of liberation of the Jewish people from slavery. Furthermore, their escape, divinely sanctioned, also took the power to sit in judgment over them away from the pharaoh and invested it in god. The Shemot, or the Book of Exodus, is thus more concerned with political theology than with idolatry (the story of the golden calf). Thus, in monotheism, the political role of justice was given to religion. The authority of the king was superseded by that of the high clergy, god's representatives on earth, as papal power well into the Early Modern era demonstrated. This fusion of the political with the religious in secondary religions, but not primary belief systems, is exactly what makes secularism a requirement solely of the former in the modern era.

In pagan religions, justice was of this world for even the gods were of this world. A Roman or an Egyptian who had been wronged could appeal to the local magistrate for justice for its own sake without reference to the gods. Indeed, in Hinduism, dharma is not only properly a function of kaala, desha, and paristhiti but the chaturanga purusharthas mention it along with artha and kama as one of the three goals of mortal life. The ultimate goal, moksha, is beyond short-term earthly consideration. As Hindi novelist Gurudutt explains in Dharma tatha samajwad and Dharma, sanskriti, aur rajya, the individual is free to interact with the divine in a manner of his choosing but wherever he must interact with another, their conduct must be guided by the precepts of dharma, artha, and kama. Ethics and the law were intrinsically this-worldy and had no business to be under divine purview. Thus, justice, or ethics at least, existed much before secondary religions came on the scene but were not truly a part of the religious system.

 kaala = era;  desha = country, place,  paristhiti = circumstances (e.g., historical/social/political circumstances); chaturanga = four-fold; purushartha = object of human pursuit, goal of life;  artha = material prosperity; kama = pleasure; dharma = right way of living, human behaviors considered to be necessary to maintain right order in the universe,  duty, etc. (difficult to translate); samajwad = socialism; sanskriti = civilization, rajya ~= politics.

If you've come this far, here's a bonus for you:
(PDF file) Jan Assman, The Mosaic Distinction, Israel, Egypt and the Invention of Paganism.

The space "severed or cloven" by the Mosaic distinction was not simply the space of religion in general then, but that of a very specific kind of religion. We may call this a "counterreligion" because it not only constructed but rejected and repudiated everything that went before and everything outside itself as "paganism".  It no longer functioned as a means of intercultural translation; on the contrary, it functioned as a means of intercultural estrangement.  Whereas polytheism or rather, "cosmotheism" rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counterreligion blocked intercultural translatability.  False gods cannot be translated.

Primary and secondary religion; religion and counterreligion!  Where does it end?  

An attempt at clarity about religion

I start with a quote from "Introduction to Modern Set Theory" by Judith Roitman.

".... 'x is a unicorn in Africa' describes exactly the same set of animals as 'x is a winged horse in Europe'. Both sets are empty.  But the descriptions are quite different."

"In philosophy, descriptions are related to a notion called intensionality, which has to do with how the mind gives meaning to language.   The actual thing described is related to a notion called extensionality.  In mathematics we care only about extensionality.  We don't care about intensionality".

Koenraad Elst on "The Founder of My Religion"

While remaining within the "Hinduism is some type of religion" idea, Koenraad Elst describes the nature of religious authority in Hinduism, in this transcript of a talk that he gave in 2009, on the theme "The Founder of My Religion".

In Hinduism, authority rests with a vast array of scriptures: the Veda-s and the Bhagavad-Gita most famously, but also in the Agama-s or doctrinal scriptures of all the various sects, such as the Nanak Panth (= Sikhism)'s Guru Granth. But more importantly, it rests with every enlightened master, everyone who visibly embodies the sacred. It rests with your parents and personal teachers, and ultimately also with yourself. Your own common sense and intuition are the most important guide in your life's choices, informed by the plethora of Hindu sources of light, and not excluding even the non-Hindu sources. Living Hinduism is an application to the religious sphere of "the wisdom of crowds", the principle the combined insights of many provide a more accurate guide than the insights of an individual, be he prophet or messiah. I note with satisfaction that the Ahmadiya movement has incorporated a bit of this Hindu attitude by acknowledging Krishna and the Buddha as legitimate religious teachers.

May all beings in the Universe be happy.

A book on my reading list: The Impossibility of Religious Freedom

As a reminder to self:
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (2007), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom
Introduction (PDF file)
Blurb (emphasis added):

The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground.

Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains.

A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is associate professor of law and director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo Law School. She is also the author of Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Divya Jhingran on Shashi Tharoor's "Why I am a Hindu"

Shashi Tharoor published a book recently, "Why I am a Hindu". (As of this blog post, I haven't read it.)

Divya Jhingran, co-author with Balangangadhara of Do All Roads Lead to Jerusalem?: The Making of Indian Religions, has some reflections on Shashi Tharoor's book.  She argues that "a more apt title for Tharoor’s book would have been “Why I am a Protestant”.

As S.N. Balagangadhara notes, if you take away the Bible and you take away Jesus, there will be nothing left that would be recognizable as a religion called Christianity. Similarly, if you take away the Quran and take away Mohammad, there will be nothing left that would be recognizable as a religion called Islam. Religions stand or fall based upon these two factors. If these two factors are necessary components of religion, it obviously means that the Indian traditions are phenomena of a different kind. You cannot use different standards of determination in judging this matter. Even Buddhism does not need a Buddha, nor does Jainism need a Mahavira. The Indian traditions will still exist, each as a distinct entity and each distinguishable from the other without any such props. They are human discoveries that can be communicated in any number of ways, not a belief system handed down from God.

Jakob de Roover: "Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism"

In this hour-long talk, Professor Jakob de Roover, a PhD student of Balagangadhara, gently explains why ideas that work in Europe don't work in India.  IMO, it is well worth the time spent.

Synopsis of The Heathen in His Blindness

Kausik Gangopadhyay has a synopsis of Balagangadhara's "The Heathen..." in Pragyata.

Abrahamic-centrism

Yuval Noah Harari has an article at Bloomberg: Humankind: The Post-Truth Species.  He indulges in an Abrahamic-religion centrism when he writes:

"We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively."

The wars in the great epics - the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and I think in the Illiad, are all among people who "believe in the same fictions".

In The Heathen in His Blindness, Balu points out:

The Roman empire was made up of about 1200 city units, plus a considerable number of ethnic groupings which we label `tribes’ and/or ‘client kingdoms’.The divine forces worshipped in each of these units might be seen as similar, analogous, or parallel; one obvious example is the Juno, the cohesive force which gives life to any social unit, whether a family or a city-state. The Romans worshipped not only the Juno who had once belonged to their own kings – Juno Regina – but also the Junones of other states whom the Romans had invited to abandon their original communities and settle at Rome...These Junones were parallel, but not identical, in the same way as the many Jupiters and Zeuses worshipped throughout the empire were parallel but not identical. Each cult honoured its own god. (Wiedemann 1990: 69.)

( Menucius Felix, a Christian writer from around 210 C.E., has Caecilius – the pagan protagonist in The Octavius - )

[The Romans adore all divinities]...in the city of an enemy, when taken while still in the fury of victory, they venerate the conquered deities...in all directions they seek for the gods of the strangers, and make them their own...they build altars even to unknown deities...Thus, in that they acknowledge the sacred institutions of all nations, they have also deserved their dominion. (The Octavius, in Roberts and Donaldson, Eds., n.d.,Vol. IV: 177.)

Indian cultural unity and that thing called "Hinduism" arises similarly.

It is the Abrahamic religions that have made myths into truth-claims - supposedly objective statements about reality - and have slaughtered millions and destroyed entire cultures.  And Harari turns these Abrahamism into those of all of humanity. 

The Mayor of Londonistan

The just-elected Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan is reported to have said:

"This isn't just about me - it's about my friends, my family and everyone who comes from a background similar to mine, anywhere in the world," he said.

Mr Khan added: "Donald Trump's ignorant view of Islam could make both of our countries less safe - it risks alienating mainstream Muslims around the world and plays into the hands of extremists.

"Donald Trump and those around him think that Western liberal values are incompatible with mainstream Islam - London has proved him wrong."

The second sentence is quite infelicitous.  He seems to be saying -- "If you offend mainstream Muslims, then Muslim extremists will attack you".  "Or you alienate us, and we will dump Western liberal values."

If you look around, that is how it is being interpreted by some: The Daily Caller headline is "London’s New Mayor Warns Trump: Let In Muslims Or They Will Attack America".

This is not going to build any bridges.