Khrishna and Arjuna 


To continue our brief essays on the values taught by some of the world's major religions, and the behaviors that the values foster in the religion's adherents, let's now consider Hinduism. 

I have read the Gita in a couple of translations, but I admit right off that my understanding of Hinduism is pretty elementary. Still, there are values in it that I like. 

God is in all living things, and we should be striving to re-establish contact with that awesome consciousness. That belief ought to enjoin us to a reverence for life, meaning, hopefully, a reverence for this Earth and her ecosystems. There is something there for the whole world to learn and practice, if we aspire to being good people. And a society that lived in harmony with its environment, if we could form one in India or anywhere else that truly lived by this prime value, would have a much better chance of surviving the next hundred years of our species' history on this planet. We, as a species (and the Hindus are guilty here too), in our greed, are cooking this Earth. As the scientists keep telling us, this can't go on. Or rather it can, but if it does, we are going to begin to suffer consequences, for sure serious and perhaps horrible, all over and soon. 

Vegetarianism and even veganism seem to me to be excellent ideas as you will know if you have read around on my blog. Our respecting higher life forms and not killing them for food is a spiritual practice, but it is also replete with health benefits, and benefits for the whole planet. It takes twenty times as much land, for example, to produce a kilo of potatoes as it does to produce a kilo of beef, The China study also demonstrated, conclusively I think, that eating animal protein is a major factor in the risk of one's getting all kinds of diseases, including heart-attack, stroke, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, and many others. A society that stopped eating animal protein would be a healthier society, on average, than any of its competitors, gaining in productivity and reducing its health care budget by orders of magnitude. 

On the other hand, the ideas of karma and reincarnation scare me. If you are working out your karma over many lifetimes, then the conclusion to be drawn and that is drawn, is that some of your fellow citizens are worse off than you are because they are paying for past sins. They were born into the untouchable class because on the grand scale, this time around in life, that's what they deserve. That one may make rationalizations that justify ignoring the poor around one easy, but it is not right. Deep inside it is very offensive to me. Some people suffer through no fault of their own because they were born into poverty and any explanation that excuses us from acknowledging that is, to me, cosmically wrong. This way of thinking may have granted a degree of stability to Hindu society for eons ("Hang in there through your misery. If you bear suffering well, you will get promoted next time around"). But in modern times, it is beginning to sound more and more like rationalization and bafflegab. We have simply seen too often in history all over the world that most suffering is unnecessary. So many diseases have been cured that once were considered simply part of the human condition. So many practices in farming have made food production rise dramatically and made the suffering that had happened in the world because of malnutrition seem like nothing more than pointless waste.

Then there are all the hazards of polytheism, but those I've already discussed so I'll leave it to you if you want to go back a few posts and check out what was said about the dangers of polytheism hidden in Christianity.

And there are many more aspects to Hinduism, that have both good and bad effects on the long time survival odds that a society gets from living the Hindu way. Too many for me to do more than touch on here. It's enough just to say that Hinduism, like all of the others, has it graces and its faults. As does each one of us. The biggest thing to learn is that we must not stop trying. We can learn from each of them and each other, and we can still build a better world.